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Crock, 12/21/25

I kind of like the worldbuilding in today’s Crock, which implies that Magi simply spontaneously generate in desert climes, and can be instinctively attracted to your location by any large star-shaped object. I feel less affection for the final panel, though. Look at those faces: our heroes from the legion are definitely going to kill the Magi, right? Kill them, and possibly eat them?

Dennis the Menace, 12/21/25

This young woman’s “What are you doing here?” is a wholly appropriate expression of surprise. If Dennis’s parents allow him to just roam the neighborhood unsupervised, why do they bother to hire babysitters at all?

Mary Worth, 12/21/25

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And I will definitely set a woman’s parrot against her husband. I cannot emphasize enough that I did not come to bring peace to the households of woman-man-parrot triads. Please do not use the occasion of my birth to give others false hope that parrots and husbands can live in harmony with one another, because they very much cannot.”

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Hi and Lois, 12/20/25

Now, if you were an ordinary, casual comics enjoyer, you’d read this strip and think “Ha, it’s funny because Hi thinks so little of his children that he’s glad they got parts without dialogue,” or, if you’re more theologically inclined, “Ha, it’s funny because Hi is ignorant of the Bible, in which both the shepherds and the angels very much have lines.” If you’re the Comics Curmudgeon, though, you have access to a deep archive of Hi and Lois content and know that just a year ago Ditto was actively trying to abandon the speaking part he managed to land in the nativity play, so actually Hi is being supportive of his children’s ambitions, or, in this case, their lack thereof.

Mary Worth, 12/20/25

Now, obviously, the main attraction here is Mary’s “Oh dear” thought balloon as her gal pal confesses that she can’t choose between her husband of several decades and a parrot she found in a park less than a month ago, but I’m kind of fixated on the weird brown color of the carrot that Toby is hungrily staring at. Seems like the sort of fading vegetable you’d feed to a bird, honestly. Is Toby having trouble determining where her loyalties lie because she’s slowly being transformed into a parrot herself?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/20/25

Sure, Summer is a receptionist and not medical staff, but it still must be kind of embarrassing to be the only person working at a health clinic who doesn’t know where babies come from.

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Crock, 12/19/25

The sentence that most bothers me here is “It’s me again,” implying that we’re seeing another installment in a long-running drama between Crock and the … guy? … who’s calling him on the phone. At first I thought this was the same salesperson who annoyed him at dinner last month by calling during dinner and trying to sell him a banking credit card; but while on the surface the dialogue in panel one seems like it could be from someone hawking storm windows, it’s a wildly unprofessional sales pitch, and frankly sounds more like someone who’s only heard about sex second- or even third-hand initiating an obscene phone call. Anyway, Crock’s comeback is not as withering as he seems to think it is, and certainly doesn’t merit an entire panel dedicated to the triumphant slamming down of the phone in its wake.

Mary Worth, 12/19/25

This is honestly a fascinating exchange: Ian has gone fully mad, convinced that Sunny is no mere mechanical repeater of sounds but rather a fully fluent user of the English language, which makes the question of where he learned specific terms irrelevant, and that’s good for Toby, whose “Uh, maybe he heard it from [tries desperately to think of TV shows that have swear words] PBS” gambit is truly one of the least plausible things I’ve ever seen someone in this strip come up with, which is really saying something.