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Soapy Thursday

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Judge Parker, 10/23/25

I don’t know if I’ve actually spelled out the current Judge Parker situation, but it goes like this: April vanished after her Norwegian spy encounter and Randy vanished after going off in search of her, leaving their daughter Charlotte in the care of her increasingly drunk and depressed grandparents and, once they got too drunk and depressed, Neddy. Charlotte has been rather shy and withdrawn under her semi-competent care, until she got wind that Neddy and Sophie had a pet squirrel at one point in their youth (possibly in their foundling days before Sam and Abbey took them in, this is deep lore from before my time) and went absolutely berserk. You never know what’s going to trigger a child who’s experienced significant emotional trauma, but that face in panel two is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in the comics. I assume that Neddy is holding onto her temple because Charlotte’s shrieks are growing so intense that she’s afraid her skull is going to shatter like an eggshell.

Mary Worth, 10/23/25

Speaking of terrifying children and their mental powers, I am dying at Jeff’s dialogue here. You have to imagine that “Did that really happen, Mary?” was put in a painfully neutral tone, and then, when he had to come back with “I agree with you. I’ve been around enough to have seen things in life that cannot easily be explained!” he took it to the next level of neutrality, because he knows he needs to be very careful if he wants to get back to shore alive.

Dick Tracy, 10/23/25

Hey, remember Silver Nitrate, who last we saw a year and change ago was having a hard time in prison? Well, he’s still having a hard time, and now he’s got to decide if he trusts the prison infirmary to dispense psychopharmaceuticals that will actually soothe his mind instead of potentially making things worse. It’s a real downer! I think this strip should go back to violent gangsters with weird shaped heads shooting tommy guns at people, personally!

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They teach you the tip o’ the helmet in firefighter school

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Mary Worth, 10/10/25

Mary’s looking pretty frazzled in panel two, and who can blame her, what with her having just been in a freak balloon accident and then brushed off by a fireman who didn’t want to make small talk while he was in the middle of a complex rescue operation. Still, she has to realize that the scenario she’s describing makes no sense, right? Why would Saul and Eve send dogs to find her, when they didn’t even know she was missing? Soon enough she’s going to put two and two together, and then either set up a full-on cult that worships Olive, or sell her to a lab where her brain can be studied and possibly profited from.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/10/25

I guess I don’t know for sure that there’s no such thing as a physical drone store, though if I were buying a drone, I’d probably just get one online, like a normal person. But if there are such retail establishments, I feel confident in saying that the staff there does not wear tuxedos to work. I wish we lived in that glorious and classy world, but unfortunately we do not.

Judge Parker, 10/10/25

“She needs someplace where she can be just a kid again … you know, like a vast estate owned by the richest lady in town, where she can ride horses all day. Normal, relatable kid stuff. Will there be other children there for her to play with? Ha ha, goodness no.”

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Generation gaps

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Judge Parker, 9/27/25

Look, we’re all young and hip here [laughs nervously], but the truth is that the soap opera strips are a very traditional medium and it’s fine when they rely on very traditional visual tropes. For instance, “This guy is having a hard time and we need an efficient way to convey that visually. How about we just have him pour himself a big honkin’ glass of brown liquor, in mid-conversation? We’ve got two panels and I think that’ll do it.”

Mary Worth, 9/27/25

Oh, it turns out Mary and Olive and Stanley crashed outside of cell phone range, actually, but fortunately Olive’s psychic powers aren’t constrained by physical distance. So she’s going to use them to summon Max and Greta to her aid, and, look, I fully endorse the overall Mary Worth message that dogs are good, but, like, climbing trees isn’t exactly one of their strengths, right? Shouldn’t she have befriended Estelle and Ed’s cats instead?

The Lockhorns, 9/27/25

Guys, I don’t know how much more obvious they can make it: THE LOCKHORNS. ARE. MILLENNIALS.