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The Phantom, 3/20/25

The Phantom, it is my task to occasionally remind you, is actually a 22-generation long chain of fathers and sons who each take the role of the Ghost Who Walks in turn, who arrived in southern Africa from Europe back in [waves hands vaguely] the pirate era, and who have perpetuated themselves by continually sending away for European or European-descended brides. But one of the very long- and slow-running ongoing storylines in the strip is about how the current Phantom’s son Kit will probably be the first to break this chain of racial purity. He’s not going to marry one of the Bangallans that his family has lived among for centuries — let’s not go nuts — but will probably end up either with the local girl who’s mooning over him as he studies Phantom stuff (?) at a monastery in the Himalayas, or with Kadia Sahara, born the daughter of one of the Phantom’s longtime nemeses but now a foster daughter of the weird Walker clan. Anyway, the thing I like most about today’s strip is that container ship cruising by in the background as Kit’s sister Heloise, a Kadia partisan, boasts to her mother (via some kind of bespoke video messaging app, the screen branded with the Phantom’s famous skull mark) about the beach-based meet-cute she’s just arranged. The huge vessel reminds us that, despite all these superheroic breeding machinations, the quiet miracle of global commerce soldiers on.

Mary Worth, 3/20/25

Check out the contemplative way Dawn is regarding that apple in the second panel. Sure, she missed her musical duets with her dad while he was away; but now that she’s eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she realizes that inflicting Weston karaoke stylings on an innocent and unsuspecting public is wrong, and must be stopped for the good of mankind.

Pluggers, 3/20/25

Hi is experiencing a plugger-like loss of sex drive in middle age, but as his huge grin in panel two makes clear, he’s not mad about it at all! Remember when he was younger and got distracted by erotic feelings all the time? That ate up valuable time in which he could’ve been working on improving his short game! Thank god those days are behind him.

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Six Chix, 3/14/25

Happy Pi Day, everybody! Today, 3/14, is used as a tongue-in-cheek opportunity to celebrate pi, the mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and that is approximately 3.14 (though as an irrational number its digits continue on infinitely and unpredictably). Let’s celebrate by enjoying this cartoon, which features a lady baking a pie and also the world being destroyed by various means (nuclear explosion, alien attack, fires, bees, and so forth). It’s perfect! 100% great. No notes on this one.

Blondie, 3/14/25

Dagwood, if your boss is walking around the office on the Ides of March raving about being Julius Caesar and you didn’t organize a group of subordinates to stab him to death, you have failed as a man and an employee. He’s basically begging to be stabbed! Put him out of his misery, for Pete’s sake!

Gil Thorp, 3/14/25

Rodney Barnes is a great player but his previous attempts to get recruited to the next level didn’t pan out, and now we know why: he loudly yells every move he makes before he makes it. “SWIPE!” “PASS!” Can you imagine a big-time D1 or NBA player shouting this stuff on the court? Embarrassing.

Mary Worth, 3/14/25

If Wilbur has no idea whether or not Belle has kids, that means Belle DEFINITELY has never heard of Dawn. And you know what? Good for her.

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Herb and Jamaal, 3/13/25

Ha, no, see, Herb’s mother-in-law, “doomscrolling” just means when you keep going through your social media feeds on your phone, hoping for a little glimmer of something positive but instead only finding bad news that makes you increasingly gloomy. It does not mean the thing where you’re on your phone and you suddenly get a vivid and detailed vision of your own future death, but then just as quickly that awful omen vanishes from sight. I mean, I can see why you’d think that’s what doomscrolling might mean, what with it offering you premonitions of your own doom and all! But it doesn’t really happen often enough for people to give it a name, I don’t think. Does it, uh, often happen to you?

Mary Worth, 3/13/25

Dawn, there’s no need to be condescending to your old dad, he is not “pen pals” with a nice lady he met on a tour of a collectable spoon factory or something, he met a woman at an all-inclusive resort and they fucked for two weeks and now he’s messaging her using his computer or phone, both devices that have cameras built in just in case the light and friendly banter takes a turn towards the naked, and if you choose to continue to live in this house you will have to get used to that idea.

Gearhead Gertie, 3/13/25

“She’s actually just pretty much unhappy all the time, and quite frankly it’s difficult to live with.”