The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Archive: Mother Goose and Grimm

Comments are closed

I guess you really have to … hand it to them [everyone starts yelling at me]

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/12/25

Say what you will about Rex Morgan, M.D., but it is straight-up killing it in the “characters make interestingly exaggerated hand gestures” department. Nobody is even close! I expect the strip to once again sweep the Handy Awards this year. (People keep telling the Academy of Hand Gesture Artistry that “handy” sounds like a sex thing and they should change the name, but they just go on and on about “tradition” while gesticulating wildly.)

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/12/25

Ha ha, yes, The Handmaid’s Tale certainly is a cultural touchstone with striking visuals and production design elements that we can see on various billboards and commercials! Quick question for the Mother Goose and Grimm creative team, though: you know the show is about a society facing an existential fertility crisis that becomes a cult where the few remaining fertile women are enslaved and ritually raped by high-status men, right? Oh, you don’t? You don’t read my blog, huh? I know I’m mean to you sometimes, but I think reading my blog would help you out in situations like this.

Archie, 9/12/25

The Millennials are addicted to Instagram, and Zoomers have already had their brains rotted by TikTok, but what means of cybercommunication will the rising Gen Alpha embrace? Well, according to today’s Archie, which is definitely an informed commentary on contemporary teens and not a rerun from more than 20 years ago, it’s email. That’s right, folks, check your spam filter, because if you cross a teen in the year 2025 you will soon be roasted in absolutely devastating fashion in a message from lakyn13@juno.com!

Comments are closed

She’s flying AWAY from New York, she should be singing “California” by Phantom Planet

Post Content

Mary Worth, 9/9/25

Mary Worth’s use of bold font is … let’s say, unconventional, but I do think that Olive’s word balloon in the second panel being entirely boldfaced strongly suggests that she’s started belting out “New York, New York” at the top of her lungs, right? Fun fact: the song she’s singing here, which is performed in the 1944 musical On The Town by Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin, and Frank Sinatra, is called “New York, New York,” while the “start spreading the news” song is technically called “Theme from New York, New York,” and was originally sung by Liza Minelli in Martin Scorsese’s 1977 musical before Sinatra did a cover version that became iconic. Kinda weird, right? Where was I going with this? Oh, right: if I were on a plane and a child started loudly singing “New York, New York” (either of the two, frankly), I would attempt to open the emergency exit mid-flight so I could jump out and plummet to my blessed death.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/9/25

So, uh, Mother Goose is just kind of … standing around in the middle of the Y and, uh, swinging her interlocked fists around while wearing a bikini? And she’s judging the people doing yoga, who are, to be fair, three people standing so close as to be touching one another doing downward dog (?) without any kind of mats or anything? Not sure if anyone involved in the production of this comic has seen someone do yoga, or ever been to a gym, or watched videos of anyone exercising. I guess that “Twister” zinger was too hard to resist, though!

Archie, 9/9/25

Damn, I never had Dilton pegged as an Archie hater. Is he just doing it to appease Reggie? It’s sad when you see a man of science succumb to peer pressure like this.

Comments are closed

What about women’s driving ability, relative to men? Some delightful material there, I’m sure!

Post Content

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25

Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you’re not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don’t do it on a tree or your neighbor’s house or whatever, and it’s weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, “Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found,” but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we’re supposed to contemplate whether Grimm’s biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?

Mary Worth, 9/3/25

“Or are you thinking about mummifying your father and I after our deaths in the Egyptian fashion, removing our brains through our noses; then making an incision along our flanks with an Ethiopian stone blade so you can remove our organs and place them in canopic jars before rinsing our abdominal cavities with palm oil and filling them with spices; and then finally placing our preserved corpses in a massive pyramid built along the Hudson on the Upper West Side? Because that would be nice, actually.”

Pardon My Planet, 9/3/25

Pardon My Planet’s takes on women tend to be in the ballpark of “women love to demand expensive consumer goods from men,” so before today I would’ve encouraged an attempt to dig into women’s real thoughts and desires to find out what they actually want. But after seeing this panel, I gotta say: never try to do that again, because, Jesus Christ. Have you heard they like to shop? Maybe do some strips on that.