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Herb and Jamaal, 12/3/25

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Pluggers was insanely on the cutting edge of doing a 6-7 meme joke in the syndicated newspaper comics, the joke being that a child-plugger says “6-7” and an adult plugger says “How did you know?” and the caption says “For many pluggers, 6-7 is the year they graduated high school.” Which is, you know, fine, although it continues to center boomer pluggers and not the vibrant, rising Gen X plugger community. Anyway, I guess we should be taking bets on the order in which other comics will tackle this important cultural phenomenon and in what fashion they handle it. I’m not sure if any of us would’ve answered the first question for Herb and Jamaal with “right after Pluggers,” but for the second one many of us would’ve correctly guessed “incomprehensibly.”

Alice, 12/3/25

I’ve spent literally decades angrily telling comics artists that you can’t just have your characters look directly at the readers and make complaints that you personally have about the world with no other joke or wordplay, but you know what? It happens all the time so clearly I’m wrong and they’re right. Anyway, cars are just too expensive! The manufacturers forgot that the purpose of a car is to get you from point A to point B. Does every new car need all that stuff?

Dick Tracy, 12/3/25

Oh, yeah, remember how Silver Nitrate is having a hard time in prison? You might think it’s because America’s carceral system is inherently dehumanizing, but maybe it’s because he’s being kept away from his true passion: driving around town in a souped-up funny car with his barefoot sister spraying machine gun fire at random.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/3/25

It’s easy to forget when you read it every day for years, but the title of Mother Goose and Grimm reminds you that the strip was originally situated as being at least kind of a spoof of fairy tale/nursery rhyme stuff, sometimes it makes a half-hearted attempt to go back to its roots. I like how the cow knows in advance how bad this joke is going to be and clearly doesn’t want to be there. Hey, buddy, none of us want to be here, OK?

The Wizard of Id, 12/3/25

Hey, everyone, they did a My Chemical Romance joke in the Wizard of Id, right here in the year 2025! I guess we don’t have to worry about a 6-7 joke from this crew for several decades.

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Herb and Jamaal, 12/2/25

Usually when Herb and Jamaal does its “hilariously nonspecific” bit, it’s taking an actually quite specific scenario but changing proper nouns to generic ones for some reason. Today, though, they’re going actually nonspecific, in the sense that this could be about literally anything, as long as it’s intense and happens over the course of a Monday and the early part of a Tuesday, and I for one respect it.

Blondie, 12/2/25

Dagwood looks awfully shocked in panel three here, but I guess it makes sense that he’s unable to distinguish between “Thanksgiving leftovers, which many people end up with in their capacity as private individuals after the big holiday meal” and “food prepared by a restaurant and sold to paying customers.” After all, all comestables in his field of vision merely exist to be sucked down into his gullet so as to feed his infinite appetite, and he rarely makes distinctions among their economic origins or any of their other qualities, really.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/2/25

Oh, yeah, I haven’t been updating you on Rex Morgan, M.D.! It turns out Summer was really hurt that Auggie based the protagonist in his book on her without telling her, but then she finally finished the book and realized that said protagonist is actually super cool. Problem solved!

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Pluggers, 11/14/25

I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the “come out here” formulation. This isn’t a plugger who has walked into the living room and forgotten what task he was pursuing; this is a dog-man who has gone somewhere, for some purpose now mysterious to him. “Let’s see … was I supposed to sell my soul to the devil? No, it’s sunset, and that’s more of a ‘midnight at the crossroads’ thing. Maybe I challenged someone to a gunfight as the sun went down? But wouldn’t I have brought my gun? I’m pretty sure I would’ve brought my gun.”

Crock, 11/14/25

Man, you read Crock every day for 20 years and you assume you know all the stupid lore but then you read a strip and learn that the shirtless guy in the fez is named “Pretty Boy”. This is pretty dumb, but in a strip where the cowardly guy is named “Captain Poulet” and the woman who’s supposed to be ugly is named “Grossie” and the evil commandant is named “Vermin P. Crock,” having a character with a sarcastic name represents a quantum leap in semantic complexity. Unless this guy is actually meant to be read as attractive? Possible, I guess. Anyway, one of his soldiers has to pee, which has foiled his attempt to capture the Legion’s fort and kill everyone inside.

Herb and Jamaal, 11/14/25

Hey now, the whole point of Herb and Jamaal is to be non-specific and, occasionally, quite confusing. I don’t need Herb smiling wryly while he contemplates his mortality! I have the entire archives of Funky Winkerbean for that!