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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/14/25

Back in the days when Woody Wilson was writing Judge Parker and Rex Morgan, M.D., one of the running bits was that the characters would reap significant financial rewards and social prestige extremely easily, like when Alan Parker’s unreadable potboiler The Chambers Affair became an international best-seller beloved worldwide, even by murderous black-market arms merchants. But in the post-Wilson world of both strips things have been, uh, different, and now Auggie is shopping around a novel and his hopes have maxed out at getting an advance large enough to afford one (1) nice dinner for him and his girlfriend. I’m not gonna read way too much into some soap opera comic strips and say this trajectory nicely summarizes the collapse of the economic possibilities of creative work over the past decade, but … oh, who am I kidding, reading way too much into some soap opera comic strips is basically the whole shtick on this blog, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Mary Worth, 10/14/25

I know that trying to derive meaning from the bolded words in Mary Worth strips is a fool’s errand, but it is intriguing that she’s leaning on accident here. You know, Olive, the balloon accident, the event that was definitely unplanned and not at all arranged in advance as a means to test your powers to see if they could be exploited by the CIA. What have we learned from it? Uh, I mean, you, what have you learned about it, ha ha! Forget that little slip of the tongue!

Pluggers, 10/14/25

The degree to which pluggers are sedentary can honestly not be overstated.

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Dick Tracy, 10/5/25

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have a lot of favorite etymological facts. One of those favorites is that the word “electrocute” was coined in 1889 by combining “electricity” and “execute,” and was originally meant to market the then-new electric chair; its use for being killed by electricity in non-judicial contexts only came later. That’s why I’m excited to see that Diet Smith Enterprises has an “Electrothanasia Room,” which I assume involves painless, voluntary death via electricity. Over the past few years in this strip, there have been hints that Diet Smith has shifted from playing the role for Dick Tracy that Q plays for James Bond to something darker, where he has his own shadowy agenda not always aligned with the MCU. Anyway, that seems to be confirmed today, when Dick is about to get electrothanized, or maybe electrocuted, or I guess just zapped, by a lady Diet Smith Enterprises was trying to sign on to its Superweapon Incubator program.

Pluggers, 10/5/25

Pluggers’ own failing bodies deny them even their most keenly anticipated pleasures! The thing about this strip is that in general it makes being a plugger sound frankly awful.

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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.