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Mary Worth, 7/5/26

For years, one action item has popped up repeatedly in Charterstone condo association meetings: replacing the doors on the apartments, because they’re cheap and thin and easy to hear through. “Anyone walking by can snoop on your conversations!” residents complain. “Well, we’re going to have the improvements subcommittee look into that,” Association President Mary Worth says. “We’ll need to research new doors that can offer more privacy, but won’t cost too much — after all, a big expenditure like this could cause your association fees to skyrocket! And then we need to find a reliable contractor, of course.” In reality, there is no “improvements subcommittee,” and Mary has no intention of taking away one of her prime tools for assessing when her meddling intervention might be required. And now poor Tommy is paying the price, hearing something that nobody should ever have to hear: Wilbur Weston, of all people, shit-talking him.

Crankshaft, 7/5/26

I referred to the Starlight Ballroom (in Chippewa Lake Park) as “bombed out” the other day, and was mostly joking, but, uh. This panel pretty much makes it look like a bit of loredumping background detail in a post-apocalyptic movie, a monument to a dead but once-great civilization (ours) tagged with some of the most depressing lyrics penned by the Kinks (people living in post-apocalyptic ages love doing pointed, arch graffiti that caters to Boomer cultural knowledge, this is just science).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/5/26

Boy, wow, Rex and June both seem real intense about the twins’ extremely low-level “scam,” huh? Almost like they’ve been fleeced by more ambitious scams before and are very bitter about it. Well, have they considered that if they provided goods and services worthy of repeat business, they wouldn’t have been grifted in the first place? The twins are happy to hand over hard-earned (via scamming) money to Jordan in exchange for his delicious food, so maybe the Morgans just aren’t operating at a don’t-get-scammed level.

Dick Tracy, 7/5/26

So the mysterious hacker gang members are named “Wallhack,” “Lootbox,” and “Widescreen”? Come on. Come on. I’m a 51-year-old man and the last video game I was fixated on was Civilization II and even I can immediately tell how incredibly cringe this all is. And Widescreen should have a big wide flat head, to match his name. Come on! This is Dick Tracy, have some self-respect.

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Mary Worth, 7/2/26

Obviously, as a long-running, hidebound artform, comic strips are remarkably static when it comes to depicting the details of everyday life — Dagwood still wears his tuxedo to work, even if he changes into a polo shirt for the weekend. Still, it seems like some strips are finally visually acknowledging one of the most important facts of modern life, namely that most of us spend most of it dicking around on our phones, even when we’re ostensibly hanging out with other people. If Martha Wilson is doing it, surely we can’t be surprised to see Dawn staring slack-jawed at TikTok while her father is ranting about how no daughter of his is going to be friends with an ex junkie.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/2/26

I was going to make a joke about how as a warrior, Hagar would be disgusted if his daughter married a low-status farmer, but then I remembered that Norse chieftains all owned farms worked primarily by enslaved laborers, and then this strip just got a whole lot darker.

Pluggers, 7/2/26

I can’t believe it, but I’m definitely arriving at a place in my life where I increasingly feel like pluggers are being done dirty by their own comic strip, which by rights ought to be a celebration of the gumption and folkways of the American working class but instead is more and more often just stuff like “You know you’re a plugger if you’ve got a big fat ass.”

Dick Tracy, 7/2/26

“Is it a sex thing? The two Xes in the name make me think it’s a sex thing. You ever have sex in a chair, Sam?”

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Dennis the Menace, 6/30/26

I’m pretty sure Dennis is the one being menaced here, as he stares dumbly at Mrs. Wilson, who is half-watching what used to be her favorite show while simultaneously scrolling through a Facebook feed on her phone that’s increasingly dominated by bottom-tier brand posts and AI slop. Is it really true that “her stories” have degraded in quality? Or is it just that age, and the transformation of the media landscape, have rendered her less capable of enjoying the genre’s ludicrous twists and emotional highs and lows? Overall a real grim lesson for Dennis to take away from this visit, honestly. Still, I suppose he might be adding this pun to his own arsenal to unleash in a semi-menacing fashion on someone else. And let’s not neglect the fact that he’s drooling on himself. Engendering disgust in other people is a kind of menacing, I guess.

Dick Tracy, 6/30/26

The latest Dick Tracy storyline involves FBI Agent Fritz Ann Dietrich, who I guess I haven’t mentioned before but she’s a very occasional character whose main thing is that she’s always openly hitting on Sam Catchem (DIVERSITY WIN: this sex pest cop is also a lady!). Anyway, you might think that this box of “gaming machines” will be something interesting, but given that this is new-look nostalgia-obsessed Dick Tracy, it’s probably full of mechanical accessories for classic board games or something.