“They may have gotten the font wrong, but at least they still used a banner headline, which is what newspapers do for stories of mildly passing interest.” –Missal

“Marvin’s recent shift to speaking instead of just thought-bubbling was weird, but developmentally made sense. But narratively this means everyone has to talk now, including the animals, and I don’t really like the implications of this. It takes things from ‘Magical realist whimsy about the inner lives of children and animals’ to ‘Cats are intelligent and have declared economic war on mankind with their only weapon: shitting.’” –Schroduck

“Mary, meanwhile, pays her respects by mournfully grabbing Jeff’s ass. Considering that she hooked up with one of her many suitors at his mother’s passing, it’s clear that funerals really get the ol’ gal going. No wonder she was so eager to arrange all this dead fish silliness: If she can spice up her stagnant love life with the deathly pallor of eroticism, she’ll happily put up with Wilbur’s blathering about ‘closure’ or whatever.” –2+2=7

“You’d think given how much newspaper cartoonists love golf at least one of them would put in the effort to work out what hands look like when holding a golf club.” –Veronica

“There are a lot of extremely nasty and unhealthy relationships in the comics, some of which are even noticed by the cartoonists who make them. The Halftracks’ marriage has always been in the mix, but this vaults them from the low-boiling comfortable contempt of the Lockhorns up to just south of the outright substance abuse and domestic violence of the Thurstons and Capps. Sure, Mrs. Halftrack hasn’t taken to ‘humorously’ beating her husband yet, but she has reached the point of abject hatred where every single thing her husband does infuriates her and prompts her to aggressively impose her will over him. Grim stuff. Almost as grim as a cartoon that thinks a drawing of a putting green makes for a serviceable comedic punchline.” –jroggs

“Hi and Lois having another strip about golf: Stop this, no one but cartoonist cares about golf! Hi and Lois having a strip where they are having a mental breakdown and need to be held: Stop this, I don’t want this to be relatable!” –Ettore Costa, on Bluesky

“[Stellan floating head approaches] Mary: [shakes head] [Stellan floating head recedes]” –Kevin on Earth

“3/15/2024: The National Association of Realtors announces a settlement ending their standard 6% commission. 7/1/2024: Lois experiences a very bad day. Coincidence? Probably. Grim? Oh my, yes. [Chortles darkly]” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Nice of this strip to show the perils of making a phone call while on the can.” –taig

“The print media pool has shrunk so much in Milford that the newspaper doesn’t even bother putting their name on the banner. Which newspaper? The news paper. You know the one.” –pugfuggly

“It’s nice to see Gil worrying if he held his ex-wife back as he sits there comfortably reading the newspaper while his new girlfriend cooks his breakfast for him.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Clover Wins First Championship, Sedge Takes Second, Moss a Distant Third, Grass a Surprising Last in National Groundcover Competition” –Voshkod

“My sympathies lie with the Dad in the background who clearly doesn’t want to be there and who’s about to get an earful from his wife as he hands his kid a stick of cotton-candy by the spun sugar end.” –Hibbleton

“I would not call slipping into a deep depression after the loss of a goldfish a quirk.” –Liam

“Dolly stares with cool curiosity. ‘These humans experience violent distress,’ she thinks. ‘I can turn this to my advantage.’ She’s packed more menace into this look than Dennis has accomplished in seventy-plus years.” –matt w

“Walt is canonically 124 years old and still both mentally sharp and able to stand on his own. He should be making millions from all the scientists studying him for the secrets to immortality. $7,000 is a pittance compared to that.” –The Ghost of Jarrod

“Mr. Huff? Glenwood Police Department here. We want to let you know that we’ve recovered the missing sleeves from your undershirt, as well as the missing ‘g’ from the word ‘calling’ whose elision by you, together with the undershirt you’re wearing, identify you unmistakably as a cartoon member of the Exposition Lower Classes.” –Bob Tice

“So Randy’s problems are environmental AND hereditary: a brutish father and a genetic predisposition to crew cuts.” –MKay

“The first guy here appears to be drinking a shark smoothie, which he blended up in his Bass-o-Matic. Meanwhile, the other guy is sipping pure shark’s blood through a straw, which is how you know he’s a rage-aholic weirdo. We can only hope a shark attacks both of them out of pure revenge, but it’s more likely we’ll just get three more months of two-person dialogue scenes, which are far easier to draw.” –BigTed

“The right way to celebrate our independence was to ditch Wilbur.” –Little Blue Bicycle

“I want to hear the rest of this kid’s tight five. How many more questions does he have in that chamber? ‘Which one was funnier — Lewis or Clark? What was Jamestown really like? Were you a bigger fan of the Angles, Saxons, or Jutes? What are your thoughts on people who sell bad copper?’” –els

“In the world of Hagar the Horrible, they have window glass and chef’s costuming (kerchief, spatula, chef’s hat), but nobody can hem a goddamn shirt sleeve.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Pretty much anybody who actually read the Bible will tell you that Adam ate the forbidden fruit too with little convincing and thus has no place to be making passive aggressive cracks about Eve eating it, so I can only presume this midrash has made the decision to depict Adam as some kind of gaslighter. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t know what good and evil are. I didn’t eat the fruit. What? You sound crazy.'” –ectojazzmage

“‘The Futon in the Rec Room at Camp Swampy,’ one of the Mountain Goats’ saddest songs.” –Rex Thrillho, on Twitter

“‘Does the metric system like the number ten?’ is such a dumb question. It would be like ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ except maybe the Keane Kompound has been sedevacantist since Vatican II.” –Ettore Costa, on Bluesky

“Turns out our ‘fingers’ are covered with stiff, insensitive feathers that make braille all but impossible to read, rendering the format completely unworkable. We’re birds!” –pugfuggly

“Holy shit! His mother and father, his aunt and her boyfriend, and the dog are all Marvin’s ‘staff’?! Like, they’re in his employ, to fire at will, there only to help him accomplish … the delivery of a, we’ll call it, a joke? Is Tom Armstrong on Marvin’s staff? As a reader, am I?” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Jenny? Good news, bad news time. Bad news: Marvin is tracking a mysterious purple mess through the house. Good news: we’re finally free of the Grimace.” –Blackdrazon

“Years later, a few days after Grandma Keane is laid to rest, Bil and Thel are cleaning out her house when Bil hears Thel screaming from the bedroom. There, huddled in the corner of the closet, sits the desiccated corpse of their missing son. They will finally have closure of sorts, but never any answers.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Purple. The traditional color of royalty. A chair, reserved for only one person, like a throne. Marvin, suspiciously close to Merovingian. I wasn’t expecting today to be the the day that Marvin declared its titular toddler to be Emperor of France and blood heir to Christ, but I can’t say I was surprised it happened.” –Voshkod

“Oh goody, it’s time for another one of my ‘what age is Marvin supposed to be, anyway?’ headaches. In today’s strip he is a) walking upright, b) speaking in clear, complete sentences, and c) taking the initiative to clean up a mess that he made. And yet, he is still not toilet trained. Maybe he’s like Peter Pan or the kid in The Tin Drum, caught in a state of permanently arrested development as an open rebellion against the social order, or maybe Big Plumbing.” –TheDiva

“As if manual labor and the pain of childbirth weren’t bad enough, now we gotta do math!?” –Hibbleton

“Theologians have argued for centuries about whether or not Adam had a belly button, but maybe they should have been arguing whether he had male-pattern baldness.” –Schroduck

“The characters in Marvin are so loathsome that I could easily imagine ‘Jeff and Pam dump demented Grandpa at an abandoned Sears with Marvin, who tries to form a feral bond with a half-melted mannequin’ as a 2024 story arc.” –Quiggle

“I’m intrigued that the ghost alien has tentacle eyes that have lashes and a flirtatious vibe in direct contrast to the bland face eyes. Wait, no, not ‘intrigued.’ What’s the word .. ah, yes: mortified.” –Vice President John Adams

“The mark of a good bartender is not only remembering people’s drink orders, but remembering whatever stupid pop culture references they toss out as well. Beth is a good bartender.” –Weaselboy

“I’d like to think that ‘Don’t get him wet’ is a well-understood unspoken rule about Gil. I certainly don’t want to hear anyone utter it again.” –nescio

“We all know that sand is coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere. What this strip presupposes is … maybe that’s sexy?” –Stop Motion Cyclops

“The lack of Euclidean geometry or even a track or any distinguishing features beyond a vast white plain that drivers could go any direction in made the R’lyeh 500 one of the more challenging NASCAR races.” –Old Man Shadow

“‘I think you need a pit stop’ is how Gertie’s husband begs her to take her meds. He knows full well how dangerous she can be when an unmedicated Gertie doesn’t fulfill her obsessive need for twisted metal and burning flesh. The authorities currently suspect the Spike Strip Bandit of causing eight fatalities, and he’s got the latest wanted poster to prove it.” –MasterMahan

“Oh, great, the punkinheads are playing in unfinished building sites! I guess parents really did allow ‘free-range kids’ back in the 1970s, or whenever this panel was originally published. (Hint: That house will sell for $15,000.)” –BigTed

“A superyacht? We see the true nature of the Charterstone world: Jeff is actually a billionaire who pays Mary to carry out mind games on the residents, who are all just playthings in the couple’s diabolical world. They deliberately engineered the death of Wilbur’s fish as a wager to see what it would take to break him.” –Tonio

“Here’s hoping Jeff bills Wilbur for fuel and crew overtime costs. Should run into several thousand dollars.” –SabeHombre

“Okay, like you say, that’s not Jeff’s boat, so there’s still a slim possibility that the fish funeral is an elaborate front, a conspiracy in which every character in Mary Worth agrees to get Wilbur down to the docks, clock him in the back of the head, and two days later he wakes up on the deck of a merchant vessel bound for another country. The captain throws him a mop, and that’s the last we ever see of Wilbur. When Dawn gets back, everyone simply agrees that she never had a father. ‘Oh!’ says Dawn, confused but agreeable.” –Dan

“I like imagining Ian looming over the much shorter Wilbur with a belly laugh, ‘Ho ho ho, a funeral for a goldfish, what wild they think of next?’ like the Jolly Puce Giant.” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“I’m glad that we have those throwaway panels, because with them we know the exact moment the edibles kicked in.” –pugfuggly

“I like how Saul brought his dog, just to taunt Wilbur that his pet is still alive. This is the kind of cruelty Wlbur so richly deserves.” –astroboy

“School cafeterias have got so dangerous that the kids aren’t even allowed to use knives any more. Sure, it’s hard to cut your fishsticks with your finger, but at least it stops vicious hair-tousling incidents like these from escalating.” –Schroduck

“It’s not real, General Halftrack thought to himself. Remember what your therapist said. Slow, deep breaths. It’s not real. You’re not seeing your soldiers as naked garbage, boiling in their own juices, smelling of decay … no! Keep it together, soldier. Breathe in. You’re not in the camp anymore. It’s not real!” –MasterMahan

“‘Keri Thorp — the catcher — has had a terrific season.’ Come on, everybody know that sports announcers set off appositive phrases with commas!” –Weaselboy

“How would his wife know? Is he wearing a wire?” –MKay

“Amazing that Snuffy Smith first touched the third rail of comics art, the high price of comic books ($6/issue?), before comics-obsessed standby Crankshaft aka Funky Winkerbean II. You go get ’em, semi-anonymous clip art legacy comic producer!” –Bad wolf

“Is there a petition I can sign in support of the colorists’ demand for a pay raise before they’ll resume coloring Dagwood’s chair and the TV table?” –Peanut Gallery

“Hooten’ Holler has a summer reading program? Somewhere there is a traveling librarian transporting books via pack mule with a lot of initiative, if somewhat unrealistic expectations.” –TheDiva

“If ‘Cherry Bimm’ is a punning reference to the late-19th century song ‘Ciribiribin,’ then Dick Tracy is having to go further afield for character names. I miss the days when they could just spell ‘Murder’ or ‘Short’ backwards and call it a day.” –Pozzo

“You’re a plugger if you wake up in pain most mornings because you’re too cheap to shell out for a thicker mattress.” –BigTed

“If you are a comics artist looking for ways to convey horniness using only facial expressions, I recommend every panel of today’s Dick Tracy.’ –lorne

“I’m joking, of course. Obviously our isolated Neo-Pagan compound didn’t impose pandemic restrictions. Now, which outsider do you want to lure in for this year’s wicker man?” –MasterMahan

“Sure, go ahead and talk in Latin or whatever the hell that is. As if your facial hair isn’t alienating enough, Mr No Fun at Parties.” –made of wince

“Points to Helga for creatively skewering an extra box on the horns of her helmet! Fewer points to Hagar for jamming a box all the way down over his head and asphyxiating.” –matt w

“The problem for this Viking is that, outside of mediaeval craft guilds, worker organization hasn’t come up yet. Even if it did come, the general illiteracy makes punny picket signs like ‘Give us a raise or we raze!’ useless to get their point across to the general public.” –Philip

“You know who else doesn’t have to buy clothes? Children, because their mothers buy them! Check your privilege, Jeff!” –Ettorre