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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/22/26

OK, fine, just a day after my haughty pronouncement that I was too good for a storyline about “Horrible” Hank Harwood Senior doing some commissions, Rex Morgan, M.D., proves that it’s “still got it” and sucks me back in with a philosophical conundrum. Yes, it is true that not performing labor is enjoyable. But have you considered that labor can be exchanged for money, which serves as a store of value and can be exchanged in turn for other goods and services, many of which also spark enjoyment? Much to consider! Plus you don’t want Buck getting on your case! Ideally you’d like to spend as little time interacting with Buck as possible!

Crankshaft, 9/22/26

Now, call me a bleeding heart, but I don’t think making sidewalks less accessible represents a good use of the limited money available for streetscape improvements. I can sort of see the logic of doing it in Crankshaft’s neighborhood specifically — he’s dangerous and must be contained but he’s also old — but we’ve seen no indication that he really has much by way of mobility issues and anyway they keep letting him drive against all common sense, so you’re just making things more difficult for the disabled and anyone pushing a stroller or shopping cart for no benefit. Also they are making lovably evil pizza robot Oni Crankshaft’s sidekick or whatever, troubling!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/21/26

The Comics Curmudgeon has been, in one sense, an experiment to see what writing a blog about newspaper comic strips for 20-plus years does to the human brain, and I’m here to testify that the results are … let’s say, mixed? Like, for instance, last night I literally had a dream that the end of the scam twins storyline in Rex Morgan, M.D., was revealed to be the swan song for the strip as a whole, and I woke up quite bereft! But thank goodness this was just a product of my fevered mind, and instead we’ve got a new adventure brewing, involving … a retired cartoonist working on some commissions? Pass. Hard pass. Glad it’s still happening, but we’ll be skipping this one.

Dick Tracy, 9/21/26

I thought this fellow was holding up his index finger in panel two in a “So you see…” sense, indicating impending exposition in which he would explain at length how Vio routed the money he stole from Ubusoft. But I guess he’s just pointing at that floating, indecipherable text (?) box on his monitor because it contains the explanation, somehow, which is honestly a real relief to me because now I don’t have to even briefly pretend I’m going to try to understand how it all worked.

Garfield, 9/21/26

Not to speak ill of another representative of the mid-to-late ’00s newspaper comics blog milieu from which I myself emerged, but I always thought the idea behind Garfield Minus Garfield was a little off. To me, the funny twist is not imagining that Garfield doesn’t exist, but that to Jon he’s an ordinary cat whose thought balloons are outside of his ability to experience. That really works with today’s strip, where as a cat owner he might be thinking, “Huh, my cat, who obviously does not speak or think in complete English sentences, does seem to be unusually dramatic and despondent on Mondays. Weird! Also not sure where he got that coffee mug from.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/21/26

Sorry, this strip doesn’t work for me at all. Nobody in Hootin’ Holler knows what a “citrus fruit” is, and if you tried to explain it to them they’d have you executed for witchcraft.

Intelligent Life, 9/21/26

Jesus Christ, you two, the Borg aren’t “AI,” they’re cybernetically enhanced biological intelligence, and Picard famously defended the citizenship rights of his AI friend in court, how are you such incredible losers but also not even good at being sci-fi geeks

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Judge Parker, 9/18/26

For many years now, Judge Parker fans have wondered: whither Sophie Spencer-Driver? The girl who was once a climate-data– and geopolitical-conflict-obsessed tween has spent most of her late teens and early twenties vaguely wandering from thing to thing, ending up in Norway to work for her boyfriend’s charitable foundation only to return home having learned nothing, either about herself and what she wants to do with her one wild and precious life or about what sort of scammy tax dodge or worse her now ex-boyfriend (she also returned home without a boyfriend) was running out of Norway as a “charitable foundation.” So now, it looks like she’s turning to the rich faildaughter’s last resort: clerking for a judge who’s a friend of the family as an inside track into the law. Of course, what with the declining fortunes of the whole Spencer-Driver-Parker nexus, she’s not so much “clerking” for a “judge” as she is “printing out the schedule” for a “judicial hearing officer” because he doesn’t know how to “use the calendar on his phone,” but we do what we must.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/18/26

Ah, whew, good news, everyone! The Morgan boys aren’t stupid after all — or, if they are, they’re the kind of stupid that doesn’t show up on standardized tests, so it probably doesn’t count.

Pluggers, 9/18/26

Pluggers have the stench of death about them, folks, you read it here first