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Gearhead Gertie, 7/3/25

I am if nothing mercurial, and do you know what I’ve decided? I like the Gearhead Gerties where the focus is on Gertie’s perpetually put-upon husband. I’m done feeling bad for him. He had to have known what he signed up for. His wife is Gearhead Gertie, for Pete’s sake! I like his grumpy little face in the second panel as he endures this latest NASCAR-related indignity. Ha ha, he has to watch TV sticking way up in the air, for NASCAR reasons that I don’t fully understand!

Pluggers, 7/3/25

Over the past several years, I reached an age at which some of my parents and in-laws have reached ages at which stairs, and the need to accommodate their lives minimizing the number of times they go up and down them, became an important thing we all had to think about. Stairs, man! You think you’ll be able to use them forever with ease, but I’m here to tell you: that’s probably not true. Anyway, today’s featured plugger is not yet at the stage where he can’t use the stairs, but it’s a lot harder to use them than it used to be, and he knows in his bones it won’t ever get any easier, and every time he goes up, the little pep talk he gives himself needs to go a little harder in order to do its job. In its quiet way, this is the most genuinely harrowing Pluggers panel since Rhino-man hocked his TV.

Hi and Lois, 7/3/25

You know I’m on the record as being in favor of Hi and Lois depicting “Thirsty” Thurston as a lovable drunk, but I think it’s a little too on the nose for him to just be blurting out his various disorders like this. “I’m getting addicted to online gambling!” “I let my lawn and my hair get so unkempt because I’m very depressed!” “My wife doesn’t love me and I don’t think she has for a long time!” C’mon, let us use our imagination a little here.

Mary Worth, 7/3/25

“Remember the last time they took a father-daughter vacation together, and they almost died in a cruise ship disaster? I think this one will finish them off for good.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/1/25

On the topic of bad viewing angles of cartoon heads, the characters in soap opera strips have more or less normally shaped noggins, but Truck’s facial hair really is quite absurd, as panel two makes very clear. Carefully tailoring your sideburns so that each has a distinct right angle and the two almost but not quite meet at your chin? I guess the “roots” in “roots country” refers to follicles of hair you grow in ever more ostentatious patterns across your face.

Pluggers, 7/1/25

You’re a plugger if your only tattoos aren’t tattoos at all! Pluggers do not like tattoos, or people who have them.

Luann, 7/1/25

Luann is a syndicated newspaper comic strip that has followed its title character from junior high through college. This summer, it will end abruptly after more than 40 years of publication when Luann somehow manages to accidentally shoot herself in the face with a bow and arrow. Congratulations to the whole creative team on a great run!

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The Lockhorns, 6/30/25

You all know that I hold the Lockhorns in a great deal of affection, but I am not blind to the truth, which is that they are squat, gnome-like people whose skulls are — let’s be real — lumpy and misshapen. We allow for this because they are, of course, cartoons, but it’s also true that stylized cartoons of the Lockhorns’ ilk are only meant to be viewed from a limited set of angles: in a very real sense, they do not exist in a complete three-dimensional space like you or me. Leroy and Loretta specifically should not be viewed from what appears to be an in-store security camera pointing down from the ceiling of whatever sad local drug store they’ve stopped by in order to browse the get well cards. This point of view really makes quite clear the aforementioned misshapenness of their skulls, in a way that I don’t think any of us asked for.

Marvin, 6/30/25

Two beings trapped together in a miniature world just big enough for them, yet still participating in an economic system where one must be indebted to the other? This is a grim scenario that no water-themed pun can cover up!

Pluggers, 6/30/25

Before today I would’ve said the bar for “What constitutes a joke or bit of wordplay in Pluggers” was so low that no installment of the strip could possibly fail to clear it, but that was before today, when I was confronted with “Pluggers stop at all the neighborhood kids’ lemonade stands,” accompanied by a drawing of a plugger stopping at a lemonade stand. This maybe could’ve been salvaged by showing that the plugger in question was precariously holding multiple cups to emphasize the scope of his generosity and/or thirst, but real heads know that Rhino-Man absolutely cannot afford to do that.

Mary Worth, 6/30/25

Ha ha, can you imagine being as ignorant of all the twists and turns of Wilbur’s love life as Dr. Jeff? Probably feels great! Sure, Mary’s about to tell him about it in vivid detail, but he can just open up the throttle on his powerboat until the engine is loud enough to drown her out.