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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/18/25

The chronology of this Rex Morgan storyline flashback has now looped back around to the point where the beat cop who’s been summoned to deal with this inconvenient corpse is like, “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice if I could successfully pin this on literally the first person I talk to, even if it is the guy who called it in to begin with,” and The Stalker Strangler: The Man Who Only Strangles Stalkers doesn’t like what he’s hearing. This was probably his first strangle, and he’s only now coming face-to-face with the dilemma of performing high-profile acts of righteous but legally unsanctioned vengeance: on the one hand, you don’t want to get caught, because you want to have more strangling opportunities, but on the other, you put all the work into strangling a stalker and then some other guy is going to get credit for it? Doesn’t seem fair, really.

Heathcliff, 4/18/25

I refer to our cats, who are both well into cat middle age, as “babies,” but that’s because they are not bipedal sapient comic strip cats but rather real-life cats who, like human babies, are tiny and cuddly and pretty stupid. The question of “is Heathcliff an adult” is complex, but the fact that he has a steady girlfriend and needs ED drugs in order to have sex with her is a good sign that he should be thought of as one, and thus today’s strip, in which his human companions have dressed him as a baby, taken him in an old-timey pram to the city dump and its vast open field piled high with undifferentiated brownish slurry, and declared that “it’s baby’s feeding time” while he eagerly licks his lips, is what we in the biz call “real sicko shit.”

Crankshaft, 4/18/25

Not much to say here about yet another Crankshaft word-mangling bit, though I do enjoy learning that Ed finds the daily grind of his existence disappointing. Mostly I want to point out the very purposeful way the waitress is striding away from the gang in panel two, probably because one of them said something really off-putting.

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Gil Thorp, 4/14/24

Look, my mission is as always to read the comics so you don’t have to, but sometimes with the continuity strips you really do need to read them daily, because the seemingly insignificant ones are there to set up the highlights. For instance, today’s strip, in which Marty is doing Step 9 of the twelve AA steps at the lady who took over his job and his beloved wooden crate press box, is much funnier if you had read Saturday’s strip, which establishes that he’s doing this in the middle of a game, probably in the hopes that some of his apology goes out on-air and people feel sorry for him and proud of the hard work he’s doing and give him his job back.

Heathcliff, 4/14/25

I’ve always assumed that Team Heathcliff resents Garfield at some level because, even though Heathcliff was the first orange cat comic on the block by several years, it never became the multimillion dollar marketing and merchandising juggernaut that Garfield evolved into. But then I see strips like today’s and realize that Heathcliff clings fiercely to its punk rock ethos. “You hate Mondays because you’re pandering to some sub-Dilbert level workaday everyman relatable feeling,” you can imagine Heathcliff saying here. “I love Mondays because I get to make other people hate them by ripping their face off and stealing their milk. We are not the same.”

Slylock Fox, 4/14/25

Wow, the post animalpocalypse society really is becoming more and more like ours every day, as Slylock (who I assume works for the Forestville Bureau of Investigations) becomes increasingly focused in getting one up in the bureaucratic war against the FSA (“they rely too much on high-tech gadgets and refuse to do the real legwork of law enforcement!”) and kind of forgets to do anything about Weirdly and the current giant robot situation.

Pardon My Planet, 4/14/25

Hey, man, uh, what do you think is in the milk you buy in the store. Like, for real. Because I don’t think milk works the way you think it works, like, at all?

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Hi and Lois, 3/23/25

Look, you know I’m a genuine fan of Hi and Lois’s new melancholy, punchline-free vibe, but I’m sorry, “spring is here, time to ramp up our loathing of our aging bodies” is too dark and I’m going to need them to ratchet things back a bit.

Mary Worth, 3/23/25

OK, we all knew from the get-go that Wilbur’s vacation fling with funny hair was going to show up at his condo from the get-go, but I don’t think any of us could’ve predicted that she would arrive just as Wilbur was sorting through his surprisingly diverse shoe collection as part of his plan to strike the perfect balance between aesthetics and endurance for his upcoming karaoke outing. Will Belle be into Wilbur’s whole shoe deal, will she be repulsed by it as somehow unmasculine, or will she not find anything noteworthy about a bedroom with shoes strewn randomly around the floor and bed? The answer will tell us all a lot about this lady.

Heathcliff, 3/23/25

Heathcliff! You probably shouldn’t be putting forth the effort to communicate with the dog community in their own language at all, and if you’re going to stoop to that level, it should be to make them quake in fear, not chortle at your wit. You’re letting down all your dogcatcher fans!

Luann, 3/23/25

“I guess you know you’re old when you used to live in a civilization with a strong literary culture but now you need drastic pharmaceutical intervention just to stay alive.” “Ha! Under no circumstances should you put that on a t-shirt, it’s way too depressing.”