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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?”

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Hi and Lois, 6/26/26

I dunno, maybe there’s something to this whole “boys are falling behind” thing, because it seems like Chip’s girlfriend of the moment has secured some kind of high-paying girlboss email job for the summer while he’s just standing there staring at her like an idiot.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/26/26

Before today it never even occurred to me that I might have to contemplate the question “How would I feel about Hagar expressing even the slightest hint of sexual desire?” because the idea that he might ever be horny just didn’t seem like something that was on the table. This is what happens when you let Brad and Toni fuck in the shower! The answer to the question is “uncomfortable,” for the record.

Beetle Bailey, 6/26/26

At least I don’t ever have to worry about General Halftrack expressing erotic feelings for his wife. He loathes her and can only bear being her husband by drinking heavily!

Crankshaft, 6/26/26

Speaking of drunk and depressing, Harry Dinkle has been learning about his long-dead and distant father by reading a diary he found in that storage unit. Yesterday’s strip was about how Dinkle Senior, a bandleader, once wandered past a TV store where they were showing Elvis on the display units and he realized that the world was passing him by before he ever managed to become a big deal, and it was pretty grim, but I decided not to post it here because I thought “You know what, we can do better.” And boy was I right!

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Pluggers, 6/14/26

I’m beginning to suspect that some of my sense that Pluggers is increasingly all over the place on explaining plugger identity is that the strips have gradually shifted from out-group messaging (pluggers explaining to non-pluggers what pluggers are like) to in-group messaging (pluggers talking with other pluggers about the plugger experience, anticipating a good amount of background knowledge and sympathy in advance). Take this panel, for instance: I am reasonably sure that the thrust of it is “We’re all pluggers here, and as pluggers we love to garden but we know how hard it can be, right? Plants always growing in the wrong places, haha!” But from an outside perspective, what it looks like it’s saying is “Pluggers are terrible gardeners. Just awful at it. Grass growing where it shouldn’t, but their attempts to coax it into growing elsewhere fail miserably. Pathetic.”

Hagar the Horrible, 6/14/26

I realize that the main character in this strip is specifically called “the Horrible,” and not to be all like “Things are meaner and baser now than they used to be,” but I kind of feel like Hagar the Horrible used to be less explicit about “the main character in this strip, Hagar the Horrible, is a cold-blooded killer who hunts his fellow human beings both for profit and for sport.” I mean, I laughed at this, so I guess I’m part of the problem, but still!