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Dick Tracy, 10/17/25

So Dick Tracy wrapped up the case of the lady scientist with the glowing green zap gun by merely arresting her, not shooting her in the back while she was “resisting arrest.” And this turned out to be a terrible idea, because mysterious, powerful forces, possibly related to Diet Smith’s company’s desire to own the intellectual property behind said zap gun, have gotten the charges against her dropped! Mostly I’m showing you today’s strip because I think the thumb placement in panel three is very funny. How much hush money exactly is Edgar being illegally given via an easily traceable paper check? Three million and how many dollars? I guess that’s a mystery we’re not meant to know the answer to.

Wizard of Id, 10/17/25

A thing that always bugged me as a young comics-obsessed child was that the Perfesser, not Shoe, clearly seemed like the main character in Shoe, just based on how often the two of them were in the strip, and that Les Moore, not Funky Winkerbean, was clearly the main character in Funky Winkerbean, and that the King, not the Wizard, was clearly the main character in Wizard of Id. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize how the interest of comics creators in their own various characters can wax and wane over the years, but unless you’re Snuffy Smith, it’s unlikely you’ll completely overturn the order of your reality and get your name added to the strip’s title. Still, since I’ve started reading the Wizard of Id more often lately, I feel like the Wiz is in it much more than he once was, and today it appears that he’s trying to violently ensure that his return to glory is permanent.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/17/25

“A teacher and an author? How many non-lucrative jobs can one guy have? Is he in an improv group too?”

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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.