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Archive: Intelligent Life

131

A marriage plot

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Gil Thorp, 1/9/26

Oh, you thought Gil got engaged because he was “in love” or “haunted by the specter of his mortality and eager to recapture a fleeting taste of youth” or whatever? Wrong! Like all great coaches, Gil is intensely competitive, and since his ex-wife is now a rival Valley Conference coach, he’s competing with her at all levels and at all times. Now, a less enlightened man would see getting engaged as a way to defeat his ex because she can no longer have him; but to Gil, getting married while Mimi strings along her current girlfriend would be the sweetest victory of all because it proves he’s better than her at getting married. In your face, Mimi! Who’s extremely divorced now?

Blondie, 1/9/26

Do you think that the Blondie writing staff gets burned out from churning out weird food verbiage like “holiday eating season” and “eating it forward” week after week? Or do they love it, constantly pushing the envelope with off-putting phrases like “one fat patty at a time,” because their relationship with food is profoundly disordered, just like the beloved comic strip character Dagwood Bumstead?

Intelligent Life, 1/9/26

I gotta disagree here; if my choices are seeing the unpleasant nerds of Intelligent Life discuss franchise movie box office numbers or watching them being hunted for sport, I will take the latter choice every day of the week.

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Mmm … quality pellet food

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Intelligent Life, 11/19/25

For my sins, I have come to be able to recognize the various recurring characters in Intelligent Life, even if I often forget their names, and I can tell you that the guy in the background in panel three is not one of them. I think it would be good if more nameless background characters showed up to roll their eyes at the terrible punchlines in this strip, though. Maybe it would inspire enough shame to grind this whole enterprise to a halt!

Mary Worth, 11/19/25

A thousand miles away, at a boozy conference dinner, a disgruntled waiter was hovering over a tableful of academics, who in turn were trying not to stare at Ian Cameron as he stood facing away from them just out of earshot. “But that card has a $10,000 limit!” he hissed. “What do you mean it’s overdrawn? We heart pets? I don’t have any pets and I definitely don’t heart them! This has to be some kind of mistake! Please, I’m going to lose face in front of the people from Oberlin! I’m begging you!”

Dick Tracy, 11/19/25

“In our case, it was the opposite. Ozob was short here by now. He did the vacation and slowly entered the same province!”

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Casual cruelty

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Blondie, 8/20/25

Blondie generally has its finger on the pulse of what old people are doing on the computer, which is why I’m a little disappointed to see that they’re fobbing off AI psychosis onto the kids today. Are the kids today forming unhealthy relationships with ChatGPT and its ilk? Sure, but it turns out that old people are also getting into the “convincing myself the robot is a pretty lady and she wants to have sex with me” game, with tragic results. Anyway, Cookie’s statement that not only do she and her friends talk to chatbots but that “it also talks back to them” is aggressively uncanny, it makes me feel like someone is trying too hard to convince us about their ignorance of this subject. “Ha ha, the chatbot talks back to you? What will they think of next? Will it be a sexy anime girl AI? Uh, I mean, that’s what I heard, from other kids.”

Dennis the Menace, 8/20/25

Gotta love how depressed both Henry and his guest look here. “Huh,” Mr. Holt is thinking in panel one, “I thought Henry liked me. I thought inviting me over here was the start of us becoming real friends, but he’s shit-talking me to his kid so I guess not.” Meanwhile, Henry in panel two is wracked by self-loathing. “Why did I say that? I never meant to hurt his feelings. Now he thinks I’m a petty gossip. I’m a fool!” Menace fucking accomplished, is what I’m saying.

Intelligent Life, 8/20/25

The syndicated newspaper comic strip Intelligent Life is usually about incredibly surface-level takes on geek media and culture. But what if instead it did the most generic jokes possible about office politics and “sales” or whatever? Would that be even less interesting? “Yes,” says everyone who’s read today’s strip.