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Gearhead Gertie, 10/2/25

I was actually visiting a friend in Durham on the day Dale Earnhardt died, a date that I will always think of as “North Carolina’s 9/11,” so I know the strong feelings that his life and death elicit, and hopefully I’m not about to step out of line in this post, but: Dale Earnhardt died in a car crash during the Daytona 500? Because he ran into a wall at 160 miles an hour? And had previously complained about some rules that NASCAR had changed that slowed down races, and so NASCAR tweaked the rules again for the “aerodynamic package” allowed for cars, in order to (in the words of the remarkably detailed Wikipedia article on the subject) “keep cars bunched up close together and to allow more frequent passing at high speed”? Anyway, Gearhead Gertie has been a lot of business about her petty gripes with her husband lately, so I’m pretty excited that today’s panel is about Dale Earnhardt’s ghost or soul or whatever, which has been trapped in a photo on Gertie’s end table, saying, “Learn no lessons from my death. Go faster. Ever faster. Never slower. If they tell you to slow down, tell ’em to go to hell and leave them in your dust.”

Mary Worth, 10/2/25

Santa Royale is a bucolic California seaside college town, a fairly transparent stand-in for Santa Barbara, so it’s very funny that we suddenly have introduced into canon the idea that it’s immediately adjacent to a vast, dense forest, with no cell reception. I assume that Saul is terrified because he knows it’s full of … brigands? Wolves? Fae folk? Looking forward to finding out!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/2/25

Look, I’ve talked a lot of shit about the roots country Americana Ameripolitan scene on this blog, but I’m not such a hater that I won’t admit that a wedding full of musicians who are all playing for one another would be extremely fun and interesting! Not Rex and June, though. They need to go home and go to bed. They’re very boring people!

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Dennis the Menace, 10/1/25

I was thinking the other day about how Dagwood Bumstead and Hi Flagston have extremely generic jobs. Technically Dagwood is an “office manager” and Hi is the “head of the eastern sales team,” but we literally never see them doing anything at work that might match up with those descriptions; instead, we just get “office” hijinks that could involve anyone in any white collar professional setting. Lois and Blondie, meanwhile, who got jobs in the ’80s and ’90s, respectively, got the much more specific (and female-coded) jobs of realtor and caterer, respectively, and while I wouldn’t say the strips about them are exactly gold mines of laffs, I do in general think specific settings are funnier than bland and generic ones.

Some comics dads do get pretty specific jobs, mind you: Calvin’s dad was, like Bill Watterson’s, a patent attorney, Walt in Zits is an orthodontist, and Henry Mitchell, at least in some character iterations, has been an aerospace engineer. I’m not sure if this version of Henry is still in that line of work, but if so he should be absolutely embarrassed about trying to program his smart TV, a task that any idiot could tell you is achieved by use of the remote control and on-screen menus, with a wrench. He should also be embarrassed by even joking about putting Dennis to work on this, as his son is notoriously pretty stupid.

Mary Worth, 10/1/25

I wasn’t sure how exactly Olive’s psychic summoning was going to work, but I don’t think I ever would have guessed that the answer would be “the dogs will run along the side of the road while Saul and Eve fail to overtake them in their puce Buick.” I think it’s very funny that Mary and the gang are in a remote enough area that their phones don’t work but close enough to civilization that two dogs could run to them without dropping dead from exhaustion.

The Phantom, 10/1/25

The Phantom is in the midst of a storyline where our hero is breaking up a forced labor camp in Ivory Lana that’s been perfectly serviceable if not interesting enough to comment on here. But today’s panel put the phrase “SHADOW CROTCH — STRIPEY ASS” into my brain on repeat and if I have to think about it, now you do too!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/28/25

Well, I guess Truck’s not-son Cody did in fact come out ahead of beloved (?) tween neo-vaudeville novelty act “Shorty and the Beanpole,” because not only did he score an invite to Truck’s wedding but he was also allowed and/or required to perform. Obviously he was only paid in “exposure” and “the chance that he might feel the slightest amount of paternal affection for once in his life,” but now it’s all worked out … for him, anyway. Too bad about his band, but the lucrative world of younger people doing covers of country classics doesn’t have room for anything more than the one guy and one guitar that the nostalgics crave.

Mary Worth, 9/28/25

It’s only appropriate that in Mary Worth, interspecies psychic communication takes the form of a human projecting their own floating head into an animal’s mind, though I have to say that Greta and Max’s expressions look less like “We are receiving a message from our friend” and more like Olive has simply overridden their consciousness and will take control of their zombie-like bodies, for rescue purposes. Funnier to me, though, is Mary fretting “what if they forgot about us?” Like, as I age, I definitely have learned more and more that the people “in charge” in any given situation are just folks like me and often have things less in hand than I assumed all adults did as a kid, but I do sincerely believe that the people running a hot air balloon festival would in fact notice if one or more of the balloons went missing. Surely somebody involved has, like, a clipboard, right? A clipboard with a list of balloons on it?

Pickles, 9/28/25

It’s true, Grandpa Pickles walking into an oil change place and thinking it’s his optometrist’s office, which is almost certainly in an entirely different location, is not necessarily a sign that his vision is failing. He should probably take a comprehensive cognitive functions test, however.

Crankshaft, 9/28/25

This one … this one seems even more serious, to be honest. But Crankshaft is pretty sanguine about it. Let’s just take all these pills at random times and let the miracle of the human body take its course. See what happens. He’ll be behind the wheel of a schoolbus full of children when it all goes down, by the way.