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The Phantom, 5/4/26

President Goranda is, according to the extremely detailed Phantom wiki I just discovered, the leader of Ivory Lana, the country that was the setting of the storyline that just wrapped up, and, look, I get that it’s fun to be like, “Wow! There’s our friend! He’s on TV!” but if your friend is literally a president, he’s going to be on the news a fair amount. That’s like one of a president’s main jobs! So no need to get all worked up about it, is what I’m saying.

Mary Worth, 5/4/26

Oh hell yes it’s a Tommy storyline, everybody! A storyline where Tommy is sad! I don’t think we have to ask why he’s sad — the main driver of negative emotions in the Mary Worth universe is romantic failure, so I assume his onion ring fiancee just dumped him. The more fun question is how he’ll react. Will he turn to weed? Pills? Crack cocaine?
Our lord and savior Jesus Christ? I am very excited to find out!

Herb and Jamaal, 5/4/26

If you’re wondering “Which comics did a ‘May The Fourth Be With You’ joke today,” one of the answers is obviously that the dork-ass nerds over at Intelligent Life did it, which I’m not even going to bother showing you because you could’ve guessed that in advance. But if you’re wondering “Which comics did a ‘May The Fourth Be With You’ joke today and somehow managed to completely fuck up the phrasing in baffling ways,” then the possibly also not surprising answer is Herb and Jamaal, apparently.

Beetle Bailey, 5/4/26

OK, fine, newspaper comics are fundamentally an art form by and for old people at this point, but I still think that doing a strip whose punchline is “Everyone younger than 45 is literally an alien to me” is a little on the nose.

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Dick Tracy, 5/3/26

There’s no such thing as the “J. Duveen Art Gallery” (though Joseph Duveen was a famous early 20th century art dealer), but the fictional building so named in this strip appears to be a Frank Gehry design. I’d like to believe that in the Dick Tracy universe, Gehry worked extensively in Neo-Chicago, taking inspiration from the dramatic and abstract skull shapes of the various members of Tracy’s rogues gallery.

Mary Worth, 5/3/26

Not a lot of new stuff in this Sunday recap of the recap, but I do like how languorous Mary and Toby look in that hot tub. Mary is so relaxed she can’t even bring herself to lift her hands out of the water to make air quotes around “relationship” and “girlfriend”! Anyway, I admit this plot has been fun but I’m hoping that the Sunday quote from martial arts master Jet Li presages an upcoming storyline that’s a bit more dynamic.

Crankshaft, 5/3/26

Crankshaft did a strip about hot flashes, and it didn’t make a pun or wordplay of any kind about them, and you can tell from Ed’s picture here that he’s absolutely furious about it. “If I had been there, it wouldn’t have went down like it did,” he’s thinking. “I would’ve malaproped ‘menopause’ so intensely that people would be talking about it for years.”

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The Phantom, 5/1/26

Look, I’ll admit it: I’ve taken something of a shine to this sailor in his service whites, who’s mildly bonking the Nomad on his head with a nightstick and has decided that he’s got way too much dignity to say “Ignis Vindicta” aloud so he’s just going to call the dude “Mr. Freaky.” I mean, he’s a guard at Guantanamo Bay, so I’m very much not going to look into his opinions about human rights, but I am enjoying his vibes today.

Andy Capp, 5/1/26

I think it’s very funny that Andy Capp, a guy who’s usually badgering his friends and acquaintances for enough money to buy exactly one beer, has apparently also been doing the same thing at the local bank for who knows how long. I think the fact that he hasn’t been hit with an ASBO banning him from getting closer than 100 meters of the bank entrance says a lot about why the UK isn’t the financial industry behemoth it once was.

Shoe, 5/1/26

When you start in on this one, you think, “Uh oh, are we going to learn about the Shoeniverse’s bird-person BDSM scene?” But then you get to the second panel and realize that this is just a joke that was built backwards from an extremely thin bit of wordplay, which comes as something of a relief. Anyway, this guy only likes being emotionally abused!

Mary Worth, 5/1/26

“Mary Worth thinks loneliness and horniness are the same emotion” feels like it’s the key to unlocking a lot of stuff. Not quite sure of all the implications but I’ll be meditating on it all weekend, that’s for sure!