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Crock, 9/24/25

In my freshman year of college, there was an outbreak of E. coli at various Jack in the Boxes that killed four children, and a friend of mine who had worked at McDonald’s told me something I have never forgotten, which was that (at the time, anyway) they never taught fast food workers how to tell if a burger was cooked properly, but instead just taught them to put it on a bun when the timer rang. “If that timer went haywire and started ringing early, I would have definitely been serving people raw hamburgers,” he said. It was enough to keep me off fast food hamburgers for life, though for some entirely fake reason the flash-fried breaded chicken products seem safe to me. Anyway, my point is, I was using this news peg to play my fun “what year is this Crock rerun from?” game and was going to triumphantly announce that it was 1993, but then I saw that it actually had a 1997 copyright date, which means that even upon its original publication it was four years out of date.

Luann, 9/24/25

So Gunther and his girlfriend Bets are doing some sort of fundraiser for animal adoption with their cosplay group and are of course cosplaying appropriately. At first I was going to come in hot and absolutely furious at how much more work she had put into her costume than he did, but then I remembered the last time Gunther engaged in sexy, elaborate cosplay it was fucking horrifying, so I think he should actually be discouraged from applying any more effort to this whole thing than he’s doing now.

Rhymes With Orange, 9/24/25

Have you guys seen how much mortuary services cost? If my funeral were botched in such a disgraceful fashion, I would certainly hope that one of my loved ones would speak up on behalf of my dignity and the dignity of those gathered to mourn, rather than just cracking wise.

Mary Worth, 9/24/25

If there’s one thing I hope to have established in 20 years of blogging, it’s that joshreads dot com is your number one website for finding out if today’s comics pages feature Mary Worth, a psychic child, and a guy dressed sort of like an old lighthouse keeper screaming in terror as their hot air balloon crashes into a pine forest. If you’re wondering, today is, at long last, that day.

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Mary Worth, 9/22/25

As promised/threatened, Mary has taken Olive to the Santa Royale Hot Air Balloon Festival! You know, hot air ballooning, the classic California Central Coast activity we all know and love. You’d think Stanley would be a trustworthy and experienced balloonivator (?), based on his old-timey turtleneck/suspenders combo, but he’s too set in his ways to handle Santa Royale’s increasingly erratic weather patterns, and is forgetting the old balloonivation adage: “Pink skies at night, balloonivator’s delight; pink skies at morning, balloonivator take warning.” I actually don’t know what time of day it’s supposed to be but feel free to swap those around to get the correct answer, which is that we are clearly about to see a tragic balloon accident that Olive’s powers, attuned as they are to New York City-specific dangers like air conditioning units falling from the sky, were simply unable to predict.

Dick Tracy, 9/22/25

Sorry I haven’t really covered the Dick Tracy plotline about the two lesbian scientists using their ray gun to kill various dubious men (cartoonish loan sharks, sexually predatory venture capitalists) who stand in their way, and probably some nice guys too. Still, today’s strip is important, in that we get to see some masterful and highly technical investigative work in action. “Hmm, this woman who seems to be at the center of our investigation … what if I looked her up … in the newspaper … on the computer?” Once Dick finds out that you can use the website “google dot com” to look up someone’s name on all publications simultaneously, it will truly be curtains for the villains of Neo-Chicago!

Crankshaft, 9/22/25

Crankshaft experiencing shame? No, I don’t accept or believe this. Crankshaft looking in the mirror and feeling the dull blade of despair? Yes, now we’re talking.

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Mary Worth, 9/16/25

It’s not exactly clear how much time in-strip is supposed to have elapsed between the current storyline and Olive’s original appearance in the strip; presumably it’s not the 11 years that have passed in real time, but probably like … five or six, I’m guessing? And one of the oddnesses of childhood is that five or six years wouldn’t seem so long to someone Mary’s age, but a kid in that scenario really would say “I remember” like it happened in another era. So, so far, so normal, except that Olive also says “remember” when she talks about her spooky visions of the life she and Mary lived in Ancient Egypt, so I think that adds a different valence to it. Anyway, I guess if you were a naive child, you might think that being able to talk to animals would make you a good vet, but hopefully she’ll get a chance to talk to Dr. Ed and learn that that job is just one dead pomeranian after another, and the only thing that would make it worse would be if you could hear the pomeranians speak in complete sentences.

Hi and Lois, 9/16/25

Lois is desperate to see some evidence that two people really can stay happily married to each other for any length of time, and she is not finding it today.

Family Circus, 9/16/25

Sure, Jeffy is being an idiot as usual, but don’t be so grotesquely smug about it, Billy. You didn’t arrange things so that time only flows in one direction, at the same rate for everyone in the same inertial referential frame! What if you were shot into space at relativistic speeds for an extended space voyage and Jeffy stayed on Earth and you came back and he was older? Who’d be smug then, huh, Billy? I mean, probably you, I guess, you’d be a worldwide celebrity and hero of exploration, and he’d still just be some guy, and an old guy to boot.

Garfield, 9/16/25

Wait, do you expect me to believe that notorious dog-hater Garfield is watching some kind of TV show starring a talking dog, and complimenting the talking dog character? Sorry, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at all. #notmygarfield #garfieldcanonicallyhasnothingbutcontemptfordogs