Post Content

Mary Worth, 12/25/25

Why hello, faithful readers! Did you have an enjoyable holiday? Did you spend Christmas Day with your “friends,” or exactly one friend, your ostensible “boyfriend,” and the two of you took the time to contemplate the glory and majesty of your Christmas tree while simultaneously side-hugging each other?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/26/25

Or did you spend it like Rex, eagerly awaiting the moment (12:01 a.m., December 26th) when you could definitively put all the decorative holiday crap directly into the trash and get things back to normal?

Dick Tracy, 12/27/25

Anyway, lots of fun stuff happened in the comics over the past week and a half! Like, remember Ghost Cat, the cat with the powers of a ghost, or possibly the ghost with the powers of a cat? Well, he can shoot a flashlight beam out of his chest, which is definitely not a cat ability but I’m also pretty sure not a ghost ability, so I guess it’s a secret third thing.

Gil Thorp, 12/27/25

In other news, Gil Thorp got engaged! Congrats to Gil on going from “extremely divorced” to “engaged to his significantly younger rebound girlfriend,” which, between you and me, is just another more specific kind of extremely divorced.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/29/25

Oh, also, Rex Morgan is going blind or whatever. This is what happens when you take down the Christmas decorations too early! Santa takes away your eyesight! They don’t have any little Christmas carols about that one specifically, but it’s true, that’s one of his powers, he will make you blind, so you better watch out.

Mark Trail, 12/30/25

Mark Trail is wearing a union suit dealing with some Texas flooding (ripped from the headlines of six months ago) while accompanying an expedition of ladies hunting feral hogs (ripped from a 2019 viral tweet). This gives one of the ladies the opportunity to say “Oh no! All our hogs washed away!” which I think is funny! I just think it’s a fun thing to say!

Gil Thorp, 1/2/26

“I have several, father … any plans to have more children?” is also a fun one! I guess my only problem with it is that it really is just one more question, though maybe Jami is waiting for the hubbub he’s unleashed to die down before moving on to the next subject.

Mary Worth, 12/30/25 and 1/4/26

Meanwhile, over in the wildly dysfunctional Cameron household, Ian decided to deploy a neighbor’s cat … for evil! But unlike Mary, who managed to use a cat to successfully keep Jeff out of her apartment for weeks, Ian was foiled in his evil plotting, discovering that both these creatures have been infected by the woke mind virus of domestication and have decided to become best friends rather than trying to kill one another. Look forward to more of this action in the coming days, unless Ian dies abruptly of a rage-stroke!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/4/26

In other medical news, Rex has cataracts, it turns out, and he has to go under someone else’s knife in order to be rid of them. He’s just going to have to let go and trust his surgeon — but should he, really? Are ophthalmologists even real doctors? Should he do it himself, maybe? Could he pull it off, because of what a great doctor he is?

You’ll find out the answers to all these questions and more in 2026! It’s a new year but the same Comics Curmudgeon, which is to say the world’s great internet blog, bringing you comics jokes every day. Thank you as ever for your readership, which you are required by law and prevailing honor codes to maintain. Happy New Year, everybody!

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 12/15/25

It’s often unclear to me how old anyone in a comic strip is supposed to be, and Gil Thorp in particular has historically had a quirky implementation of comic book time where the kids get older but Gil and the adults seem to stay more or less the same age, but I’ve always assumed that Gil is in his mid-to-late 40s while Beth is somewhat younger? Anyway, I get the feeling that most of my readers, like me, are or are rapidly approaching A Certain Age, so you probably won’t like being informed that the Golden Girls actresses were all in their 50s in the early seasons of the show. What I’m trying to get at is that Beth thinks what’s going on here is “cute” but in fact Gil is slurping ramen and, through a feverish haze, getting hornt up in an age-appropriate way over Rue McClanahan rather than her.

Slylock Fox, 12/15/25

Slylock faces the dilemma familiar to any more-or-less honest cop working within an authoritarian regime: you get into the game to protect small businesses from thieves or stop sideshows from defrauding innocent customers, but you do have to spend a certain amount of time humoring an absolute dictator sitting on a gold throne about their extremely specific problems, which have no real-world impact on anyone’s lives. I’m sure that Slylock figured out the answer to this riddle as soon as the situation was described to him, but I appreciate that he’s humoring Max by taking the magnifying glass from him momentarily before calling for the royal scales. What do you think happened to the thief who came up with this botched scheme, by the way? Probably being tortured to death in the palace prison, right?

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 12/8/25

Let’s forget for a moment the incomprehensible/not funny punchline of this one and try to understand the lead-up to it. Why is Chip telling his father, who is watching exactly the same movie that he is, that there’s a parental warning on it? Shouldn’t Hi be just as capable of reading it as Chip is? Is it written in some format that only teens can read, like, uh, Minecraft font? Is there a Minecraft font? Is Minecraft still a thing that teens like, in the year 2025?

Zits, 12/8/25

Honestly, while I’m fine with the Zits parents (who were my boomer parents’ age when the strip debuted in the ’90s) staying the same age but becoming Gen Xers, I’m a little unsettled by Jeremy (who was just a few years younger than me when the strip debuted in the ’90s) staying the same age but being into things that contemporary teens are into, like Minecraft. I mean, Minecraft is still a thing that teens like, in the year 2025, right? “Watching” Minecraft? Surely the syndicated newspaper comic strip Zits wouldn’t steer me wrong about teens!

Gil Thorp, 12/8/25

In 1966, Gay Talese transformed the art of magazine writing with “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold,” a profile that turned Sinatra’s refusal to give an interview into a central part of its structure. Will Gil Thorp do the same for the newspaper comics with “Gil Thorp Has A Serious Respiratory Illness Of Some Kind”? I mean, maybe? Or maybe Gil will just sweat a lot, who knows.

B.C., 12/8/25

The characters in B.C. live with a strange mix of stone age technology and modern conveniences and attitudes. This is not a criticism! I get that this is, in fact, the central joke of the strip! However, today’s installment does make me wonder if one of the modern things they have access to is the rabies vaccine. I worry!