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Alice, 10/6/25

We all know of course about the various beloved characters in Alice, the normal comic strip we all read every day and fully understand: Alice, Alice’s friend, Alice’s boyfriend, Alice’s niece, and the late Kurt Vonnegut, who is both Alice’s doctor and her vet. Today’s strip features a couple of our more outlandish favorites, Alice’s robot antagonist and the space alien who’s in love with her, but also … someone new! A glowing orb of some sort who judges the living and the dead, or maybe just asks you where you’re from. Frankly there’s getting to be more of these guys than I would ideally like to keep track of! Yet I persist, for my faithful blog readers, for whom I read Alice and other comics so they don’t have to.

Hi and Lois, 10/6/25

Look, Hi, I think we all know that Ditto was saying “I wish you were a different sort of person than you actually are.” You don’t have to drop this philosophical bombshell on him about how he’s trying to wish himself into the void or whatever. He’s a child and not a particularly smart one. You’ve tricked him into being on hugging terms with you again at the end here, but you aren’t really playing fair.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/6/25

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m now nostalgic for the time when syndicated newspaper comics scat content was confined to Marvin, where you could at least argue that he was a baby and so it was normal for him to poop into his diaper. I get that Grimm is a talking dog, but I still think it crosses some kind of line to have a newspaper comics strip character yelling “I don’t get it, why don’t these big, manly football players start shitting in the middle of the field on live TV so we can all watch it the way I know we all want to????”

Mary Worth, 10/6/25

I’m honestly not comfortable with how pleased Stanley looks in panel two here. Sure, this could’ve ended in total disaster, but look at all these people who are now paying attention to Stanley, and concerned about his well being! Ha ha, Mary, ladies first, Stanley’s all right! Stanley’s as right as rain! There’s no such thing as a bad way to get attention, is what Stanley’s learning!

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/30/25

Hagar is the protagonist of this strip, so we usually see things from his perspective, and I have to admit I never really tried to figure out what his crew might think of him. Indeed, his warriors do most of the fighting and dying in their various raids, but Hagar (perhaps already relatively well-off, as minor gentry?) gets the lion’s share of the booty and uses it to take his wife and favorite lieutenant to white tablecloth restaurants while they settle for scraps. Anyway, the way the guy in the back answers Hagar’s question implies that he’s contemplating the choice between asking Hagar for more money and spending that money on fancy food, or skipping several steps and simply eating Hagar directly.

Beetle Bailey, 9/30/25

I guess the point of this strip is that the U.S. Army isn’t just an office job, but rather a calling, and even the least of our brave warfighters might find themselves deployed at a moment’s notice wherever necessary to protect America’s people and interests. Unfortunately, by taking a phone call from his mother, Beetle has violated every opsec rule and revealed the location of his unit to the enemy, and will be killed by a drone-launched missile in approximately seven to nine minutes.

Pluggers, 9/30/25

I’m genuinely digging this plugger’s facial expression here. It’s not “Ah, another way in which my body is failing as I slowly decline towards death,” as you might expect. No, it’s sharp and genuine alarm. “Tennis elbow? But … I don’t even play tennis. Who’s been playing tennis with my elbow?”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/30/25

Mother Goose and Grimm: this is clearly a single-panel joke. You are 100% allowed to do single-panel jokes! You do them all the time! It’s also a very bad joke, but if you kept the proper structure, it would at least take up less of our time and cognitive energy.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/17/25

I am really enjoying the quiet desperation of Yvonne’s facial expression as she tries to convey to Rex and June how crazy-making her Hanks-Harwood-dominated living situation is. “He’s always saying crap like this. ‘I’m planning a Ritz Brothers marathon!’ I don’t know if those are the cracker guys or a vaudeville act that somehow has a YouTube. Maybe they aren’t even real, but even if that were the case, it could be that he’s doing a bit or it could be that he has advanced dementia and we can’t even tell because all of his cultural references are so baffling. And he’ll be asleep when we get back! I won’t even be able to ask him about it! And tomorrow it’ll be some other bullshit!”

Shoe, 9/17/25

I like that they’ve given the Perfesser a little bit of business to do here, knotting his tie as they talk — the implication being that he’s putting himself back together after getting naked for an exam, and in so doing is beginning to feel dignified enough again to push back on this advice. “Oh, is that your diagnosis, doctor? Are you saying that the good product designers at the Frigidaire Appliance Company would lead me down the wrong path?”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/17/25

You all know Grimm, the lovable dog who’s one of the title characters of the syndicated newspaper comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm. But what if I told you that he was about to go to jail, possibly for years, as a punishment for his various crimes?