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Dustin, 1/12/26

I don’t know that I’ve really commented on the “Dustin (the character)’s second-best friend is an eight-year-old child” aspect of Dustin (the comic strip), but it’s not one I particularly enjoy, mostly because the kid himself is not very interesting as a character. I guess he’s fine when he gives Dustin someone to riff off of, or as fine as any of the other Dustin nobodies, but he doesn’t merit his own individual strips where he’s the focus, and he definitely shouldn’t be doing “I hate Mondays” jokes. That is Garfield territory, Kid Whose Name I Don’t Know And Have Run Out Of Ways To Avoid Mentioning That Fact, and while Garfield’s legal team may be currently distracted, they’re not going to take this kind of thing lying down.

Gil Thorp, 1/12/26

Lest you think that Gil’s ex is motivated by anti-heterosexual sentiment, today’s strip reveals that Coach Gerards is also seething with rage over Gil’s happy relationship. This union is going to roil the Valley Conference into levels of feverish competition that haven’t been seen in decades, to the extent that I suspect that maybe Gil is doing it to boost the athletic department’s budget.

Wizard of Id, 1/12/26

With jokes like “the King has ADHD” and “hey, how about that emo music,” someone is clearly trying to drag the Wizard of Id kicking and screaming into, if not the present, then at least the ’00s. I’m not sure this is a particularly good idea, honestly, and I’d like to think that the setup line is just emerging anonymously from the left side of panel one because all the regular characters refused to deliver it.

Dennis the Menace, 1/12/26

Man, look at Margaret’s face! She does know it, she knows it’s an aspect of her personality that people find off-putting and that’s why she has a hard time making real friends, but she just can’t help it and it’s eating her up inside!

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Gil Thorp, 1/9/26

Oh, you thought Gil got engaged because he was “in love” or “haunted by the specter of his mortality and eager to recapture a fleeting taste of youth” or whatever? Wrong! Like all great coaches, Gil is intensely competitive, and since his ex-wife is now a rival Valley Conference coach, he’s competing with her at all levels and at all times. Now, a less enlightened man would see getting engaged as a way to defeat his ex because she can no longer have him; but to Gil, getting married while Mimi strings along her current girlfriend would be the sweetest victory of all because it proves he’s better than her at getting married. In your face, Mimi! Who’s extremely divorced now?

Blondie, 1/9/26

Do you think that the Blondie writing staff gets burned out from churning out weird food verbiage like “holiday eating season” and “eating it forward” week after week? Or do they love it, constantly pushing the envelope with off-putting phrases like “one fat patty at a time,” because their relationship with food is profoundly disordered, just like the beloved comic strip character Dagwood Bumstead?

Intelligent Life, 1/9/26

I gotta disagree here; if my choices are seeing the unpleasant nerds of Intelligent Life discuss franchise movie box office numbers or watching them being hunted for sport, I will take the latter choice every day of the week.

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Pluggers, 1/7/26

Pluggers has been doing a string of “Classic Pluggers winter fun!” panels this week, and while most of them have in fact been mildly fun, at least for the characters involved (what if we fired up the barbecue grill … when there was still snow on the ground?) I have some questions about this one. When you stare at the TV, expressionless, thinking “Hmm, things today sure are different than they were in the past, and I’m not sure how I feel about it,” is that fun? Do pluggers enjoy doing that? The fact that this is a submission from a Florida-based plugger adds an extra layer of ennui here. “Well, I guess that’s how they do things up north now. Not the choices I would make, but it’s none of my business, I suppose.”

Gil Thorp, 1/7/26

If you had asked me, I would’ve pegged Gil as the kind of guy who has a church he belongs to and occasionally attends, but he doesn’t really spend a lot of time dwelling on religious matters. But we live in a post-sectarian age, so it makes sense that when it comes to finding someone to preside over his nuptials, he turns to his most spiritual friend (“spiritual” here means “has attempted to contact the spirit of Gil’s dead mentor in a supply closet with a Ouija board“).

Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/7/26

Not to sound sadistic or anything, but shouldn’t all these people be dead? Shouldn’t they have suffered horribly as their living flesh was transformed to stone? Because of Medusa? And her powers?