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Dustin, 4/12/26

To misquote Mystery Science Theater 3000, you should never reference a good comic in your shitty comic, and say what you will about Garfield but it’s a relentlessly efficient machine for amusing 8-year-olds, whereas Dustin has never amused anyone ever. Today’s strip makes it clear that Dustin requires three separate characters to achieve what Garfield does with one. This is not something you want to draw attention to!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/12/26

I don’t like this one because Ma Goose’s uninhabited shirt in the mirror looks exactly the same in both panels, and that makes it clear that she’s turned her head 180 degrees without any other part of her body moving. It’s uncanny. Is that something birds can do in real life? I don’t really care, honestly, they don’t as a rule wear shirts in real life so I don’t think that’s actually relevant.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/12/26

Oh, wow, this is actually a good bait and switch: we thought Mae Mae’s cover was going to be blown by the suspicious mustachio’d non-Mud customer at the diner, when in fact her cover’s going to be blown by Mud, because he absolutely cannot keep a secret or even have a thought without immediately verbalizing it. Not sure if he’s relapsing or if the Mirakle Method simply didn’t cover this situation, but either way, it’s more than Mae Mae’s feet that are in danger!

Hi and Lois, 4/12/26

I guess in theory I’m all for Hi and Lois updating itself for modern suburban life, but I gotta say “the Flagstons and Thurstons take their cuck stuff to the golf course” is a little bit more than I can handle.

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/15/26

You’d think I’d be happy to see a strip that eschews “someone wants to defy the laws of nature and have sex with a half-fish being” for “someone wants to obey the laws of nature and eat a half-fish being,” but sorry, I just don’t find it likely. Why would Atilla become fish-mad in the (literal) face of a being who is, in terms of the bits you usually interact with, mostly human, and yet ignore Ma Goose, who is 100% bird, albeit an anthropomorphized one? And sure, in real life a cat is far too small and a goose far too ornery for that conflict to go well for the cat, but these characters are roughly the same size so the power dynamic is different. You can make your silly fantasy comic setting increasingly convoluted and I will fight it every step of the way!

Luann, 2/15/26

Meanwhile, in Luann, everyone is fully human, yet nobody is acting like a normal human being. “I’m going to give my husband a gift card to a lingerie shop for Valentine’s Day, in the expectation that he will immediately become horny, rush off to purchase some erotic underwear for me, and then come back so I can put it on and then we can have sex. The ideal time to initiate this process? When our college-age daughter is standing inches away from us. She’ll be impressed!”

Dustin, 2/15/26

The thing about Dustin’s mom is that she exists in a reality where the comic strip Dustin is not in the newspaper. Unlike her, we unfortunately will read through the day’s news, feeling terror, anger, jealousy, and encroaching old age in turn, only to get to the comics section, encounter Dustin, and feel mingled contempt and disgust.

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Dustin, 1/15/26

Remember Dustin’s dad from the comic strip Dustin, who’s notoriously kind of an asshole? Well, it turns out he’s also an alcoholic.

Dennis the Menace, 1/15/26

Remember Dennis Mitchell from the comic strip Dennis the Menace, who’s notoriously kind of an asshole? Well, it turns out he was a little too much of an asshole and some other kid punched him in the face. (I’m positing that it’s another kid for this post’s purposes because otherwise my joke is significantly less funny. Well, I guess the strip’s joke is significantly less funny too, but that’s their problem.)

Pluggers, 1/15/26

Remember pluggers, the aging lower-middle-class man-beasts from the comic strip Pluggers, who notoriously are in less than robust health? Well, it turns out they’re falling asleep on the toilet in the middle of the night, which probably isn’t a great sign of how things are going for them.

B.C., 1/15/26

Remember the ant couple in B.C.? Probably not, there’s nothing really notorious about them. I guess you could say they were notoriously like a normal middle-class couple with kids except they were ants. Anyway, they got divorced, and then the husband was killed by an anteater immediately afterwards. RIP male half of the B.C. ant couple, 1958 (?)-2026, you taught me that it was OK to be weird.