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Crankshaft, 10/26/25

Mr. Crankshaft, I know Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood Bumstead is a friend of mine. He puts together comically large foodstuffs that no ordinary human could even get their mouth around, let alone chew. Those are just normal-ass pastries you bought at a gas station. Mr. Crankshaft, you’re no Dagwood Bumstead.

Pardon My Planet, 10/26/25

I love the contrast between the blond guy at the bar and the bartender as this strip’s beloved (?) Bitter Late-Middle-Aged Man unloads a monologue that’s dark even by Pardon My Planet standards. The young man sees how grim this is and is genuinely disturbed; the bartender, who spends his existence serving up brain-numbing hooch to the hateful drunks who populate the PMPiverse, has long ago become numb to this sort of thing.

Marvin, 10/26/25

“Hello neighbors! I want to offer you nothing but love and compassion. Anyway, it’s come to my attention that some of you are leaving the hallways smeared with feces.” Perfect Marvin strip, no notes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/26/25

Writing a syndicated newspaper comic strip is of course a great way to write off the cost of a cruise on your taxes as “research,” but remember, you don’t always have to aim so high. Do you want to draw an almost perfectly realistic plate of delicious pad thai? Well then, you’d have to order some delicious pad thai, wouldn’t you? You know, for professional reasons! It sure does look great, doesn’t it, Augie? Just like the real thing!

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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.

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Beetle Bailey, 7/25/25

This strip is a pretty good demonstration of the fact that comic characters even within the same universe each have their own distinctive design, and, unlike actual humans, the wide variations in their head shapes means that you can’t just slap glasses on someone who doesn’t usually wear them and expect it to look not insane. But no matter how uncanny Sarge looks in this final panel, it’s all worth it to deliver this joke about wearing eyeglasses in order to disguise the fact that you’re crying, the normal and relatable thing that we all do and that would definitely work.

Blondie, 7/25/25

Hate to be churlish, but today’s Blondie doesn’t include what we in the biz call a “joke,” and while I’ve given the ennuimeisters at Hi and Lois permission to explore this discursive mode, I do not grant the same dispensation to Blondie. The last panel here should definitely have included a thought balloon in which Dagwood imagines himself winning a sandwich-eating competition in front of thousands of cheering fans, if only to distract us from his increasingly inexplicable relationship with Elmo.

Wizard of Id, 7/25/25

Oh, hey, the Wizard is still on his kick of forcing animals of different species to mate with each other, I guess. “But Josh,” you’re probably saying, “this is some kind of fantasy setting, and maybe that sort of thing is normal there.” Wrong: this random knight (?) is clearly horribly burned in the final panel, but his moral disgust at the unnatural act that produced this fire-breathing dog is so profound that he says “ew” instead of “ow.”

Pardon My Planet, 7/25/25

This lady straight-up murdered her husband! And she’s bragging about it! Right here at his funeral!