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Andy Capp, 12/13/25

Hartlepool is part of the Tees Valley Combined Authority, a conurbation of 700,000 people in the far northeast of England, and it’s frankly sad that brain surgeons are so thin on the ground there that this young (?) woman would call the profession “exotic.” Ditto for pilots, especially given the poor state of the British rail system! Anyway, I used to read Andy Capp as a kid and one of the strip’s running bits that puzzled and disturbed me the most was when women at the pub would flirt with Andy. How old were they supposed to be? Were we supposed to read them as attractive? Didn’t they know he’s married? These questions still haunt me today, but not as much as this woman’s unnaturally located and shaped breasts, which I think is a 21st century addition to the strip.

The Phantom, 12/13/25

Hey, kids, were you wondering what the Phantom was up to? Well, there’s a lot of plot I haven’t gotten into over the past few months, but frankly you don’t have to know about any of it to enjoy this drawing of him just firing two pistols down a hallway at nobody in particular. The Phantom: The Superhero Whose Superpower Is Guns™!

Dick Tracy, 12/13/25

Speaking of guns, were you wondering what clown-criminal Rojo Ozob was up to? Well, it seems that rather than “playing it cool” when a potential adversary is parked out front of his hideout, he instead orders his underlings to charge out with whatever weapons they have at hand, which can lead to unpleasant results if the potential adversary turns out to be the cops. I guess this guy really is a clown, ha ha! (I’m using “clown” here in the metaphorical sense, so as to highlight his incompetence.)

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The Phantom, 11/7/25

The Jungle Patrol, like most military and paramilitary outfits, is mostly composed of young people, but the nature of those young people of course changes as we drift through comic book time. Back in the ’00s, their recruits were mostly spunky, idealistic millennial lady cops and waitresses. But today, the zoomer junior officers of the Patrol have no experience talking on the phone and cannot overcome their social anxiety enough to build professional rapport with their Unknown Commander. Sad!

Blondie, 11/7/25

Kudos to the local news for not actually showing the grotesque imagery of magnified fast food and instead merely playing audio of the scientists’ horrified reaction. With Dagwood in town, they clearly know that they need to tread carefully when it comes to food-related news. On the other hand, the news team apparently lacks advanced studio equipment like “teleprompters,” forcing their anchors to simply read the news off a visible piece of paper, so it may be that they simply did not have the capacity to transmit other video content to their viewers.

Mary Worth, 11/7/25

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what’s been happening in Mary Worth, so I’ll recap: Toby met a parrot and then spent 72 hours trying to think of a name for it. This is the best she could come up with.

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Dennis the Menace, 10/1/25

I was thinking the other day about how Dagwood Bumstead and Hi Flagston have extremely generic jobs. Technically Dagwood is an “office manager” and Hi is the “head of the eastern sales team,” but we literally never see them doing anything at work that might match up with those descriptions; instead, we just get “office” hijinks that could involve anyone in any white collar professional setting. Lois and Blondie, meanwhile, who got jobs in the ’80s and ’90s, respectively, got the much more specific (and female-coded) jobs of realtor and caterer, respectively, and while I wouldn’t say the strips about them are exactly gold mines of laffs, I do in general think specific settings are funnier than bland and generic ones.

Some comics dads do get pretty specific jobs, mind you: Calvin’s dad was, like Bill Watterson’s, a patent attorney, Walt in Zits is an orthodontist, and Henry Mitchell, at least in some character iterations, has been an aerospace engineer. I’m not sure if this version of Henry is still in that line of work, but if so he should be absolutely embarrassed about trying to program his smart TV, a task that any idiot could tell you is achieved by use of the remote control and on-screen menus, with a wrench. He should also be embarrassed by even joking about putting Dennis to work on this, as his son is notoriously pretty stupid.

Mary Worth, 10/1/25

I wasn’t sure how exactly Olive’s psychic summoning was going to work, but I don’t think I ever would have guessed that the answer would be “the dogs will run along the side of the road while Saul and Eve fail to overtake them in their puce Buick.” I think it’s very funny that Mary and the gang are in a remote enough area that their phones don’t work but close enough to civilization that two dogs could run to them without dropping dead from exhaustion.

The Phantom, 10/1/25

The Phantom is in the midst of a storyline where our hero is breaking up a forced labor camp in Ivory Lana that’s been perfectly serviceable if not interesting enough to comment on here. But today’s panel put the phrase “SHADOW CROTCH — STRIPEY ASS” into my brain on repeat and if I have to think about it, now you do too!