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Slylock Fox, 7/24/25

I gotta say, it’s probably pretty annoying to have to write Slylock Fox at this point, because doing cute little animal mysteries attracts lots of “um, ACTUALLY”s of both the “um, ACTUALLY, the pedantic fact you used as the solution for this mystery is more nuanced than you’re implying” and “um, ACTUALLY, the animal you’re using as a character in this mystery doesn’t work like that” variety. Thus you get puzzles like today, where you’re preemptively anticipating this kind of feedback in the solution. “[heavy sigh] Besides telling us that the gloves were not worn by a snake [closing eyes, briefly resting thumb and forefinger on either side of bridge of nose] or other handless animal…” Honestly someone is probably penning a furious email about “um, ACTUALLY, some invertebrates aren’t bilaterally symmetrical and could have two right hands and maybe they also became sapient along with all the other animals? can you prove they didn’t???” as we speak.

Pluggers, 7/24/25

Feels like this one is based on seeing a “Don’t talk to me before I’ve had my coffee!” mug and trying to work backwards from there to someone cheerfully claiming to be a criminal right up until the moment that first sip passes their lips, when in fact the appropriate cartoon would be a bleary-eyed plugger saying just the most casually cruel thing you’ve ever heard to his wife for no reason.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/24/25

Well it looks like I got my wish on this situation allowing us to delve into Truck’s psyche, because he’s really doubling down on “Please, living genetic evidence of the fact that I got cheated on, please let me pretend to be your dad!” Meanwhile, his not-son is just increasingly upset and unresponsive. “How can I feel anything for someone with whom I don’t share any genetic material?” he’s thinking. “This man has nothing to tell me about my phenotype! What’s the point?”

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Hi and Lois, 7/16/25

Hmm, if you have to apply, it isn’t really Trixie’s pre-school yet, is it, Hi? Really makes you think (about how modern child-rearing is an agonizing treadmill of chasing status that starts at birth and has no end in sight).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/25

“Whoever he is, tell him to meet me at the crossroads and I’ll beat him in a guitar-pickin’ contest! Then I’ll be your dad!”

Pluggers, 7/16/25

Ha ha, you can’t fool me, Pluggers! “Go home” implies that pluggers are going someplace else in the first place and you know I don’t buy that.

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Crock, 7/6/25

I like the fact that Crock reruns are keeping their publication year in the strip now because you can tell exactly the era that created the dated and terrible joke you’re reading. Like, I guess in [squints] 1997, if you were 67-year-old cartoonist, the valence of “computer virus” would be “a thing that might happen to a nerd, which I take to be meaningless as a setback (since nothing that happens on a computer is real) and therefore proof of how soft these dorks are and how ludicrous the thought of one of them joining the Legion would be.” Today, of course, having your PC or phone infected with malware could result in major financial damage or identity theft on the sort of life-ruining level that would make joining the Legion seem like your only option, so this strip definitely hits different today.

Pluggers, 7/6/25

I assume that all of you faithful readers have different long-ago bits of Deep Lore about joshreads dot com ready for quick recall; personally, one of my favorites is how in the summer of 2006 four comics did jokes about how WILD it was that people would PAY EXTRA for jeans that were ALREADY TORN??? Anyway, one of those comics was Pluggers, obviously, and it was a defiant, contemptuous panel of a plugger throwing a pair of torn-up jeans in the garbage to show what he thought of the kids today and their depraved values. Today’s panel instead shows a plugger being humiliated by his own thrift and/or giant ass, with the fact that young people like the torn jeans look mentioned in a value-neutral way, as a comparison by which pluggers frankly suffer. Perhaps it makes me a plugger to feel slightly sad that it’s come to this!

Shoe, 7/6/25

Not thrilled about how Roz seems to be openly leering in the first panel here. It’s not just me, right? That’s the face of a woman who hopes to be treated to a story about how this lady and the Shoe had sex at the opera, in front of God and the tenor and everybody?

Blondie, 7/6/25

You know that I rely on Blondie to keep me up to date on what the old people are up to these days, and today’s strip confirms what I’m hearing from other sources: what the old people are into these days is pickleball.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 7/6/25

The Lockhorns aren’t into pickleball, though! Just more proof that they are, in fact, millennials.