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Crock, 11/9/25

Now, obviously part of the whole deal of Crock is that it takes what’s objectively a pretty grim situation — a remote outpost of an army engaged in a grinding colonial war that we know with the hindsight of history that they’re going to lose — and uses it as a setting for a mostly light-hearted and zany series of comical vignettes. Still, sometimes the grim seeps through more than others, and you gotta admit that “angry troops attempt to lynch their commanding officer, only for him to trick them into falling to their deaths in turn, leaving him alone to wander the desert” is one of those times.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/25

Now, you may wonder why Hagar, who seems well aware that his years as a notorious pillager have created a very lucrative brand, doesn’t simply cut out the middleman: instead of letting the Duke of York profit by association and then stealing said profits, why doesn’t Hagar simply charge visitors to his own village, go on a highly paid speaking tour, and publish Horrible, and Profitable: What Today’s Leaders Can Learn From My Years Of Terror Around The North Sea Littoral, which will be bought by CEOs at airport bookstores everywhere and handed over to their assistants to summarize? But Hagar is savvy enough to understand that his brand wouldn’t survive any such attempt to “go legit,” so any profit he’d gain from such a move would be fleeting. Plus he can’t read, so the book thing probably hasn’t even occurred to him.

Mary Worth, 11/9/25

No offense to David Attenborough, but I’ve never really cared for birds. Like, I guess I don’t dislike them, and of course they’re beautiful to look at, but I’ve always found them off-putting up close — they just seem clearly further away from us, evolution-wise, than cats and dogs, and looking into their eyes they always feel kind of alien to me. The fact that they’re actually quite intelligent just adds to my unease. So, no shade on the many fine people who are bird lovers out there, but I’m just saying that for me personally, if a parrot I had encountered outside had figured out where I lived and begun rapping on the windows demanding to be let in, I would not be quite as enthusiastic about it as Toby is here.

Hi and Lois, 11/9/25

I really love Hi’s quick three-panel transition from triumph to anxiety to crushing depression. Honestly, the final panel with the “punchline” is completely unnecessary and even detracts from things a little bit.

Crankshaft, 11/9/25

The name of this painting is of course a Crankshaft-level bit of awful wordplay, which is why it’s great that he looks so horrified. “Oh god, I talk like this, don’t I? Why haven’t they murdered me in my sleep?”

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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!