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Bizarro, 7/23/26

They say only humans live with knowledge of their own mortality. And it’s not all downside! A little “memento mori” buzzing in the background makes the colors seem brighter, the steaks juicier, the booze boozier, and reminds us all to enjoy every sandwich. But this guy doesn’t need reminders—he goes face‑to‑face with morte every working day. I bet his Friday nights are awesome.

Rhymes with Orange, 7/23/26

Tomorrow morning, Keith Richards will rise from the rubble and ask “Eh, wot’s fer breakfast?”

Pluggers, 7/23/26

Pluggers have evolved prehensile bellies, to stay fat without all the hard work of eating.

Hägar the Horrible, 7/23/26

Vikings sure had some weird kinks.

—Uncle Lumpy

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/13/26

In The City of God, St. Augustine famously tells a story of a pirate who had been captured by Alexander the Great: “When that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What do you mean by seizing the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.’” Now, Augustine’s point is that a king who rules without virtue is simply a brigand on a larger scale; but Hagar, whose opinions on the new religion from the south are mixed at best, takes the harder-headed view, more common among modern commentators, that recognizes the similarities between states and criminal enterprises without necessarily applying moral valence to it. The king is stronger than Hagar, so he must submit to his cruelties, but he also looks forward to passing them down the line to his own victims.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/13/26

So Lyle Ollman, the inventor of the Mirakle Method, is the grandfather of the scam twins Jean and Jane, and Rene/Jimmy is their uncle, but Lyle is also Rene’s uncle and … I don’t think that really works? I guess it works if whichever of Lyle’s children is a parent to the twins married someone whose sibling married Rene in a weird sibling/cousin double marriage situation, but Rene doesn’t seem like the marrying kind; it could also be that one of Rene’s siblings married his or her own first cousin to produce these two kids. It’s also possible that this whole family suffers from intense, multigenerational nephewism and nobody has any parents at all: it’s just uncles as far back as anyone can remember.

Andy Capp, 7/13/26

“Yeah I’m trying to lose some ugly excess weight … by which I mean my spouse, whom I hate!” is a classic and beloved joke format of course, and I suppose it was inevitable that it would get a GLP-1 spin eventually, but I don’t think anyone expected it to happen in Andy Capp first.

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Mary Worth, 7/2/26

Obviously, as a long-running, hidebound artform, comic strips are remarkably static when it comes to depicting the details of everyday life — Dagwood still wears his tuxedo to work, even if he changes into a polo shirt for the weekend. Still, it seems like some strips are finally visually acknowledging one of the most important facts of modern life, namely that most of us spend most of it dicking around on our phones, even when we’re ostensibly hanging out with other people. If Martha Wilson is doing it, surely we can’t be surprised to see Dawn staring slack-jawed at TikTok while her father is ranting about how no daughter of his is going to be friends with an ex junkie.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/2/26

I was going to make a joke about how as a warrior, Hagar would be disgusted if his daughter married a low-status farmer, but then I remembered that Norse chieftains all owned farms worked primarily by enslaved laborers, and then this strip just got a whole lot darker.

Pluggers, 7/2/26

I can’t believe it, but I’m definitely arriving at a place in my life where I increasingly feel like pluggers are being done dirty by their own comic strip, which by rights ought to be a celebration of the gumption and folkways of the American working class but instead is more and more often just stuff like “You know you’re a plugger if you’ve got a big fat ass.”

Dick Tracy, 7/2/26

“Is it a sex thing? The two Xes in the name make me think it’s a sex thing. You ever have sex in a chair, Sam?”