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Mary Worth, 10/7/25

This polite jockeying about who should climb down from the balloon first is getting to “a farmer needs to get a chicken, a fox, and a bag of grain across the river in as few trips as possible” levels of complexity, but it seems like they’re failing Logic 101 very badly by ending up with a scenario where the lightest passenger is left in the balloon by herself in the final step, at which point the balloon will lift off from the tree and float away. Honestly this seems like the sort of thing that would be covered at balloonivation school and is another strike against Stanley’s skills. Anyway, presumably Olive will eventually land in some sort of magical realm on the other side of the rainbow, where she’ll seize power and rule behind a veil of trickery, so she won’t be our problem anymore.

Six Chix, 10/7/25

Remember, the Tuesday Chixiverse is the sandwich-fucking one, so it’s not clear if the pumpkin is saying “it’s our time” because the mysterious figures in the background are planning on taking them home to have sex with them, or to carve them up and/or eat them, which the pumpkins’ facial expressions make clear is regarded as a sexually-charged act. Either way, welcome to Six Chix spooky season, everybody!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/7/25

Look, fellas, when your wife tells you to put the toilet seat down, it’s not because she’s a shrew who likes nagging for nagging’s sake; it’s because she doesn’t want to accidentally sit down on the porcelain rim of the toilet bowl. If you, for instance, are a mythical dwarf, and your spouse isn’t, and you have your own specialized tiny toilet sized for your miniature hindquarters, she probably doesn’t care about the seat on that one. I guess it’s possible that the implication here is that the Seven Dwarfs only have a tiny toilet in their home, which would be reasonable given that they’re all tiny, and Snow White, who has moved in with them, resents this and brings it up at every opportunity. Either way, welcome to Mother Goose and Grimm scat joke season, everybody!

Flash Gordon, 10/7/25

I definitely enjoy the fact that Flash Gordon is, canonically, a Yale man, which adds flavor to today’s strip, in which he claims he’ll do well fighting in gladiatorial combat in the arena because he used to win “matches” back in college. Did you play tennis, Flash? Did you win a few tennis matches, back when you were in school, “in New Haven”?

Dick Tracy, 10/7/25

“Dr. Faust, is it? And you thought you could make some sort of deal to your advantage with an evil figure, did you? Not really much for classic literature, are you?”

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Dick Tracy, 10/5/25

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have a lot of favorite etymological facts. One of those favorites is that the word “electrocute” was coined in 1889 by combining “electricity” and “execute,” and was originally meant to market the then-new electric chair; its use for being killed by electricity in non-judicial contexts only came later. That’s why I’m excited to see that Diet Smith Enterprises has an “Electrothanasia Room,” which I assume involves painless, voluntary death via electricity. Over the past few years in this strip, there have been hints that Diet Smith has shifted from playing the role for Dick Tracy that Q plays for James Bond to something darker, where he has his own shadowy agenda not always aligned with the MCU. Anyway, that seems to be confirmed today, when Dick is about to get electrothanized, or maybe electrocuted, or I guess just zapped, by a lady Diet Smith Enterprises was trying to sign on to its Superweapon Incubator program.

Pluggers, 10/5/25

Pluggers’ own failing bodies deny them even their most keenly anticipated pleasures! The thing about this strip is that in general it makes being a plugger sound frankly awful.

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Mary Worth, 9/22/25

As promised/threatened, Mary has taken Olive to the Santa Royale Hot Air Balloon Festival! You know, hot air ballooning, the classic California Central Coast activity we all know and love. You’d think Stanley would be a trustworthy and experienced balloonivator (?), based on his old-timey turtleneck/suspenders combo, but he’s too set in his ways to handle Santa Royale’s increasingly erratic weather patterns, and is forgetting the old balloonivation adage: “Pink skies at night, balloonivator’s delight; pink skies at morning, balloonivator take warning.” I actually don’t know what time of day it’s supposed to be but feel free to swap those around to get the correct answer, which is that we are clearly about to see a tragic balloon accident that Olive’s powers, attuned as they are to New York City-specific dangers like air conditioning units falling from the sky, were simply unable to predict.

Dick Tracy, 9/22/25

Sorry I haven’t really covered the Dick Tracy plotline about the two lesbian scientists using their ray gun to kill various dubious men (cartoonish loan sharks, sexually predatory venture capitalists) who stand in their way, and probably some nice guys too. Still, today’s strip is important, in that we get to see some masterful and highly technical investigative work in action. “Hmm, this woman who seems to be at the center of our investigation … what if I looked her up … in the newspaper … on the computer?” Once Dick finds out that you can use the website “google dot com” to look up someone’s name on all publications simultaneously, it will truly be curtains for the villains of Neo-Chicago!

Crankshaft, 9/22/25

Crankshaft experiencing shame? No, I don’t accept or believe this. Crankshaft looking in the mirror and feeling the dull blade of despair? Yes, now we’re talking.