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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!

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Heathcliff, 7/20/25

I’m a little obsessed with the tiny fish saying “Welcome to the club!” to Jaws. (Side note: Do we agree that the shark from Jaws is named “Jaws”? I hadn’t really thought about it until I started writing this post but now I feel very strongly about it.) I guess the fish is the representative of the entire Heathcliff universe, which itself turned 50 a couple years ago, and is acknowledging on behalf of his mostly land-based comrades that a fellow aquatic character has hit the same milestone. That said, it feels a little off because the Heathcliff characters are perpetually alive and keeping up their wacky antics and you can imagine them knowing at some level that they’ve existed for 50 years, whereas Jaws dies at the end of Jaws (sorry for the spoiler, but as noted this movie is 50 years old now, c’mon). I know there are more Jaws movies but those have different sharks in them. Are those sharks also named “Jaws”? I gotta think about that one, I’ll get back to you on it.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/20/25

Some really harrowing throwaway panels here: they transform a simple strip about Hagar inventing the movie theater freestyle machine so he can get super blotto into one that informs us that (a) somehow beat generation genius/weirdo William S. Burroughs had his strangest novel adapted into a play more than 1,000 years before he wrote it and (b) the canonically illiterate Hagar can’t parse out the word “naked”, but he can read “lunch.”

Pardon My Planet, 7/20/25

Gotta say that I’m impressed that this panel carefully avoided showing us whether or not Adam and Eve had navels, thus avoiding theological controversy, but dared to ask the question “What would Adam’s whole body hair situation have been?” and came up with an answer that’s more fucked up than any of us could’ve dreamed of.

Dustin, 7/20/25

Ha ha, just a couple of Gen Z dudes talking about mailing physical letters, a process they know a lot about from long experience! This strip, which is literally about the differences between young people and old people, demonstrates once again that it has its finger on the pulse of what young people know and do.

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Gearhead Gertie, 7/17/25

Oh, man, the domestic drama in the Gearhead household just gets more fraught! Gertie’s husband Harold, in a desperate attempt to introduce a new topic of conversation into his life, has dragged his wife to an art show, and you have to imagine that there was a brief moment where he really believed he had pulled it off, believed that he had managed to awaken something in Gertie’s soul when he brought her face to face with the greatest examples of human creativity. Sadly, what she actually took away from the experience was “What if we got more NASCAR shit, for people to look at, in our house?” Gertie may not know much about art, but she knows what she likes, and what she likes is having Dale Earnhardt’s death car, acquired and restored at great expense, hanging on the wall of her living room.

Pardon My Planet, 7/17/25

Man, what the hell, do you think vampires would ever in a million years wear cross necklaces? Of course not! They would burn their skin upon touching it! These are just goths! Goths with deep respect for Madonna’s iconic cone bra!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/17/25

I gotta say, we’re all pretty used to nothing really exciting happening in Rex Morgan these days, and so when this plot about Truck’s maybe-son started out, I don’t think any of us would’ve pegged “Truck finds out he got cucked by his own drummer” as the dramatic conclusion. I’m trying to parse out what his facial expression in the first panel is conveying … excitement? Respect? I hope we dive ever more deeply into his psychosexual landscape over the rest of the week.