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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/21/26

The Comics Curmudgeon has been, in one sense, an experiment to see what writing a blog about newspaper comic strips for 20-plus years does to the human brain, and I’m here to testify that the results are … let’s say, mixed? Like, for instance, last night I literally had a dream that the end of the scam twins storyline in Rex Morgan, M.D., was revealed to be the swan song for the strip as a whole, and I woke up quite bereft! But thank goodness this was just a product of my fevered mind, and instead we’ve got a new adventure brewing, involving … a retired cartoonist working on some commissions? Pass. Hard pass. Glad it’s still happening, but we’ll be skipping this one.

Dick Tracy, 9/21/26

I thought this fellow was holding up his index finger in panel two in a “So you see…” sense, indicating impending exposition in which he would explain at length how Vio routed the money he stole from Ubusoft. But I guess he’s just pointing at that floating, indecipherable text (?) box on his monitor because it contains the explanation, somehow, which is honestly a real relief to me because now I don’t have to even briefly pretend I’m going to try to understand how it all worked.

Garfield, 9/21/26

Not to speak ill of another representative of the mid-to-late ’00s newspaper comics blog milieu from which I myself emerged, but I always thought the idea behind Garfield Minus Garfield was a little off. To me, the funny twist is not imagining that Garfield doesn’t exist, but that to Jon he’s an ordinary cat whose thought balloons are outside of his ability to experience. That really works with today’s strip, where as a cat owner he might be thinking, “Huh, my cat, who obviously does not speak or think in complete English sentences, does seem to be unusually dramatic and despondent on Mondays. Weird! Also not sure where he got that coffee mug from.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/21/26

Sorry, this strip doesn’t work for me at all. Nobody in Hootin’ Holler knows what a “citrus fruit” is, and if you tried to explain it to them they’d have you executed for witchcraft.

Intelligent Life, 9/21/26

Jesus Christ, you two, the Borg aren’t “AI,” they’re cybernetically enhanced biological intelligence, and Picard famously defended the citizenship rights of his AI friend in court, how are you such incredible losers but also not even good at being sci-fi geeks

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/15/26

I genuinely love that Mae Mae and this lady from “the media” are having a respectful argument by making statements that are as close as possible to flat, unadorned statements of fact. There’s no big secret here: Mae Mae quit Hollywood years ago. She’s just working in a cafe now. But consider: She’s famous, and her disappearance was a mystery. Well, she was famous, but now she’s just a regular person — albeit, as one cannot deny, a person who was once the top box-office draw in the world. It really lets us quickly and efficiently see that the dispute has arisen over the question of what constitutes a “mystery” — must there be some inherently complex or surprising “solution” for something to qualify? or is a mystery simply a thing that many people want to know, but do not? — and whether “famous” is a permanent or temporary quality. Looking forward to everyone getting epistemological closure on this by Thursday at the latest!

Garfield, 6/15/26

Look, Garfield hates Mondays. Fundamentally, bone-deep, he hates them. And that’s not just because he needs coffee to pep him up after the relaxing weekend — it’s because Monday is a truly cursed 24-hour period, and nothing should bring him joy on this, the worst day of the week. That big smile in panel three is a betrayal of everything that the Garfield brand should stand for, and it makes me sick.

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Slylock Fox, 1/21/26

One of the things that truly sets people apart from animals is that our enormous brains are too large when fully formed to pass through a human birth canal, which means that much of that brain formation happens after birth and we’re basically helpless for the first few years of life, unlike newborns of most species. A baby chicken would indeed “instinctively step upwards as the sand rises,” whereas a baby human would simply cry pathetically as the sand buried them. This may have been a particular advantage to the non-humans in their great rise during the Animalpocalypse, as even their very young could participate in their war of extermination against H. sapiens. The mechanism by which they gained sapience despite their tiny skulls is still unknown, and Count Weirdly should probably be putting his scientific acumen towards answering that question rather than trying to sell fake honey-making machines or whatever.

Intelligent Life, 1/21/26

Say what you will about Intelligent Life, the strip where a character will say in all seriousness that “2026 is going to be huge for movies,” and then use as a data point the upcoming release of the most bottom-dwelling “who on Earth is this for” garbage you can imagine, but at least it got me to research a little and learn that Skeletor will be played by box-office poison Jared Leto, which I have to say brightened my day a little.

Garfield, 1/21/26

Garfield’s contempt for Jon, Odie, and indeed most other characters in the Garfiverse is an integral part of his whole vibe. But is his contempt justified? That’s a whole different question. Today we learn that, within his own reality, an objective third-party source (an app, clearly the best determinant of truth) confirms his opinions on his superiority over others. Will this reinforcement of his beliefs unleash a wave of “cattitude” the likes of which the funny pages have never seen, to the delight of eight-year-olds everywhere?