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Mary Worth, 9/7/25

I myself am not a parent and don’t presume to fully understand how they have to balance between fiercely protecting their children and also allowing them autonomy to follow their own goals and desires. Would I let my tween daughter travel across the country with some nice old lady who used to be my neighbor? I could see good reasons for going either way, but I’ll tell you one thing: I would definitely nail down whether this trip is one week or two before I signed off on it. That’s just common sense! Especially since her mother and I would be using her absence as an opportunity to have sex more often, I’d want to know when she’s coming back. She probably has a key and could just let herself in the apartment!

Beetle Bailey, 9/7/25

Joshreads dot com oldheads remember that years ago Lt. Fuzz turning blue was a coloring error and a sign of declining standards at the syndicate. Today, Sgt. Snorkel turning blue is a joke about how he’d rather suffer self-induced hypoxia and the resulting brain damage than simply deal with his commanding officer in a mature and respectful manner, and a sign of an entirely different kind of declining standards at the syndicate.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/7/25

There are tons of Lockhorns jokes about Leroy drunkenly flirting with blondes twice as tall as he is, so I’m glad the strip is finally acknowledging that Loretta, too, is sometimes horny. Her little quip doesn’t exactly make sense — is she saying that she’s going to commit this man’s rippling, muscular bod to memory so she can revisit it over and over again in her mind palace? — but it’s a good first step.

Marvin, 9/7/25

Wait, this robot yearns to play with Marvin and is overjoyed at the prospect of it? The AI haters are right, this is an evil technology that must be stopped now.

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/5/25

Real Hagar heads know that Hagar is illiterate, and while Lucky Eddie also was at one point, he later learned to read and write. I suppose it’s possible that he was inspired to learn languages beyond his native Norse — Greek, for instance, which would be useful for reading the scriptures of the new religion from the south, and which he could pick up from Swedish kinsmen who served in the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. This knowledge may have led him to see that streak of light in the sky and dub it asteroeidēs, or “star-like.” Unfortunately, 18th century astronomer William Herschel will ultimately get the credit for coining the term, because the only person to hear Eddie say it was Hagar, and he said it right before they were both vaporized.

Six Chix, 9/5/25

OK, fine, I’ve said my piece about how most comics really lay too hard on the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but to their credit, at least they know what that relationship is (it’s pissing). Today’s Six Chix, on the other hand … have they watched Doctor Who? I guess you don’t draw this detailed a version of the 11th Doctor in dog form, and of his TARDIS in fire hydrant form, without having watched some Doctor Who. I myself have watched quite a bit of Doctor Who, and before today I would’ve said that the Doctor did not as a rule piss on his TARDIS, but now I admit I’m starting to doubt myself.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/5/25

Really loving Cody’s facial expression in the last panel here. “Hey, man, you can say that, but I know I was just kind of pushing on his chest imitating what I’ve seen on TV, probably inaccurately. The paramedics saved him, it’s OK to say so. No need to be condescending.”

Mary Worth, 9/5/25

“I learned that John Singer Sargent was part of a cosmopolitan milieu, traveling between the great world capitals and painting society’s elite! I want a comparable experience, which is why I want to go with this old lady to her ghastly mid-century condo complex in exurban Southern California for a week.”

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25

Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you’re not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don’t do it on a tree or your neighbor’s house or whatever, and it’s weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, “Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found,” but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we’re supposed to contemplate whether Grimm’s biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?

Mary Worth, 9/3/25

“Or are you thinking about mummifying your father and I after our deaths in the Egyptian fashion, removing our brains through our noses; then making an incision along our flanks with an Ethiopian stone blade so you can remove our organs and place them in canopic jars before rinsing our abdominal cavities with palm oil and filling them with spices; and then finally placing our preserved corpses in a massive pyramid built along the Hudson on the Upper West Side? Because that would be nice, actually.”

Pardon My Planet, 9/3/25

Pardon My Planet’s takes on women tend to be in the ballpark of “women love to demand expensive consumer goods from men,” so before today I would’ve encouraged an attempt to dig into women’s real thoughts and desires to find out what they actually want. But after seeing this panel, I gotta say: never try to do that again, because, Jesus Christ. Have you heard they like to shop? Maybe do some strips on that.