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The Phantom, 11/7/25

The Jungle Patrol, like most military and paramilitary outfits, is mostly composed of young people, but the nature of those young people of course changes as we drift through comic book time. Back in the ’00s, their recruits were mostly spunky, idealistic millennial lady cops and waitresses. But today, the zoomer junior officers of the Patrol have no experience talking on the phone and cannot overcome their social anxiety enough to build professional rapport with their Unknown Commander. Sad!

Blondie, 11/7/25

Kudos to the local news for not actually showing the grotesque imagery of magnified fast food and instead merely playing audio of the scientists’ horrified reaction. With Dagwood in town, they clearly know that they need to tread carefully when it comes to food-related news. On the other hand, the news team apparently lacks advanced studio equipment like “teleprompters,” forcing their anchors to simply read the news off a visible piece of paper, so it may be that they simply did not have the capacity to transmit other video content to their viewers.

Mary Worth, 11/7/25

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what’s been happening in Mary Worth, so I’ll recap: Toby met a parrot and then spent 72 hours trying to think of a name for it. This is the best she could come up with.

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Mary Worth, 11/4/25

Sorry to be a “liberal coastal elitist” who “has a basic understanding of how academia works,” but a “teachers conference” isn’t really a thing that a tenured PhD English prof at a large state university like Ian would go to; there are plenty of academic conferences where he’d make the rounds, of course, but those tend to run the length of a long weekend, not “a few weeks.” What I’m trying to say is that Toby has no real idea where her husband actually is right now, maybe because he never told her, or maybe because he did tell her and she forgot. When he does finally get home, in a few days or weeks or months or whatever, he will presumably find her on this park bench, her face having been viciously pecked off after she fought a parrot for control of a bag of sunflower seeds and lost.

Pardon My Planet, 11/4/25

I concede that there’s the core of a halfway funny joke about “runway models” here. But building a superstructure around it where you’ve got a dumpy old man grousing that someone misrepresented their attractiveness on a dating app, and also somehow a sex-with-twins fantasy is involved? That’s the misogynist pervert vibe that Pardon My Planet does best.

Marvin, 11/4/25

Glad to see we’re moving past “fire hydrants: they’re toilets, for dogs” to “fire hydrants: they’re the center of a dog’s social life, because they piss there, but for once we’re not dwelling on that part.” Anyway, what’s the most weird and off-putting way to describe someone using color to mask the fact that they’re going grey? It’s probably “has fake brown hair,” right?

Archie, 11/4/25

Hey, teens! It’s Archie! The comic strip about teens, full of jokes that are relatable … to teens!

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Alice, 11/3/25

Today’s Alice will I think be particularly inscrutable to non-Alice regulars, but in my late blog era I have myself become an Alice regular and am here to read Alice so you don’t have to! [scans through comic again] OK, fine, actually, this one is inscrutable to me too. I guess the little scene in the inset panel is supposed to be taking place simultaneous to the main action, but it’s not clear to me why it looks like a painting or maybe a window in the room where Alice and her boyfriend are sitting, why the alien guy is being debriefed by a human, or whether it’s supposed to be ironic somehow that the alien says humans are “too emotional” when Alice and her boyfriend are just staring off blankly into the middle distance together. At least one thing’s settled, though: Spock was a fictional half human/half Vulcan character from the Star Trek series in the 1960s.

Mary Worth, 11/3/25

At last, the saga of Olive the dog psychic has reached a triumphant conclusion sort of petered out, and now we’re getting … a Toby story? Oh, hell yeah. Toby, abandoned once again by her elderly husband (getting drunk at some academic conference) and her middle-aged best friend (nattering on to her not-boyfriend about a tween psychic), leaving her to ramble internally about her bag of sunflower seeds? Hell yeah. “It’s just me, myself, and my snack!” thinks a woman who probably once thought of herself as a “trophy wife” for an older high-prestige man and is now the saddest person alive. This week’s gonna be great.

Zits, 11/3/25

Definitely one of my pet peeves is when comics artists get older but their characters stay the same age, and yet also maintain the same set of cultural touchstones, and one thing I’ve always respected about Zits is that it leans into comic strip time, shifting the middle-aged parent of its teen main character from Boomer to Gen Xer over the decades. Not sure if I’m comfortable with “Walt got naked at Burning Man” now becoming part of the lore, but I admire the strip’s dedication and consistency.

Judge Parker, 11/3/25

“Anyway, the horses didn’t have anywhere to live so they just kind of … wandered off, I guess? I’m sure they’re fine.”