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Rhymes with Orange, 7/20/26

Lady lets herself be intimidated by inanimate objects. Gonna be a long day.

Six Chix, 7/20/26

Unhealthy, infected, diseased, rotting, morbid, disgusting meat. How to say you’re vegan without saying you’re vegan.

Dustin, 7/20/26

The animosity between Ed Kudlick and his son Dustin is well-established, but doesn’t it seem lately that their barbs are getting sharper? I mean, today’s exchange is basically, “You’re lazy and doomed to failure!” / “You’re stupid and can’t speak English!” It won’t be long before these breakfast chats devolve into cursing and flinging coffee and cereal.

Phantom, 7/20/26

The Phantom’s very first nemeses—the pirates of the Singh Brotherhood—were in it for the loot. But the motivations of the current crop are harder to parse:

• Leopold Braga, Admiral in the navy of landlocked Rhodia, says he serves its ruling junta by serving Ignis Vindicta, but how? Is there some bribe, contract, alliance, or other alignment of interests between the parties, and if so to what end?
• Chatu “The Python”, Wambesi terrorist, used his native Bangalla as a safe haven to carry out attacks in Rhodia. So why does Rhodia, through Vindicta and Braga, want him on the team?
• Eric Sahara started out a billionaire playboy, then took up recreational lone-wolf terrorism as “The Nomad”, taking over Chatu’s gang when he thought the Phantom had killed its leader. Why? Don’t know!
• Elon Musk Ian Mollusk Ignis Vindicta (tr. “Fire of Vengeance”) is a wealthy motormouth nutjob who wants to rule the world from space. He surrendered all control of his Nomad/Chatu project to an AI programmed on his own bullshit, and constantly brags about how he has no influence over what it does. Why? Got me.

Beyond “bad guys do bad things,” these villains are united only in their hatred of the Phantom, which kinda seems like a side quest, and hasn’t worked out well for any of them in the past.

—Uncle Lumpy

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Heathcliff, 6/11/26

It’s true that California has higher gas prices than the rest of the country, but I guarantee that every time you’ve seen a viral picture on social media of a station with shockingly high gas prices with a caption of “OMG Cali gas is crazy,” it’s one of two specific stations in Los Angeles where the prices are $2 or even $3 higher than they are everywhere else in the city for various odd reasons. One of these is in Chinatown, close to where I used to live, and once I was walking past it and saw a dark purple Bentley and there was something odd about it and I said to myself, “Wait, is that thing covered in velour?” so I went up to touch it and … reader, it was, or at least a thin layer of some vaguely fuzzy-feeling velour-like substance. No idea what the owner did when it rained, but I am 100% sure that that’s what’s going on with Heathcliff’s car.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/11/26

Look, I know that being hilariously nonspecific is one of Herb and Jamaal’s beloved running bits, but … Rev. Croom is clearly talking about hell, and all the people who are going there. He’s a Christian clergyman, he believes in hell and that’s what he’s talking about! Don’t give us this “inferno abyss” business, I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to say “hell” in the newspaper these days.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/11/26

It honestly bothers me so much that Ma Goose is delivering this extremely tepid joke to an unknown interlocutor over the phone. There are multiple named characters in this strip that she lives with that she could’ve bounced this off of! Then we could’ve seen their reaction! You know, because the comics are … a visual medium?

Crankshaft, 6/11/26

Like, for instance, it’s important that we can see Harry Dinkle’s face so we know how completely unenthusiastic he is about all this. If you just had the dialogue, you might think he was excited to go on a little adventure, rummage through his old memories, and help out his friends, but in fact he doesn’t look like he’s feeling much of anything at all. “Didn’t the strip I was in end?” he’s thinking. “Why am I in this one? Why am I here? Why can’t I die?”

Rhymes With Orange, 6/11/26

Folks, do you ever look up in the sky at clouds and wonder if they get horny? Well, they do … in the whimsical world of the comics.

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Rhymes With Orange, 4/9/26

I assume the intended joke here is that George forgot his glasses somewhere else — at his home, maybe, or maybe just in the other room — but I can’t stop imagining a truly nightmarish scenario where when you die you become a spirit cursed to haunt the world of the living but not be perceived by them, and if you had bad vision when you were alive you still do, but you can’t wear glasses because you’re a spectre without physical form and/or you don’t have a nose. Anyway, that ghost is gonna fuck that cabinet, right? That’s definitely what’s on the menu here?

Archie, 4/9/26

Jughead, sad that his conversations with his best friend aren’t as sparkling as they once were, has hired this high-tech young woman to, in his words, “Cyrano” for him, monitoring Archie’s mood on a tablet and relaying instructions into a hidden bluetooth earpiece. Unfortunately, it turns out she may have overrepresented her talents.

Hi and Lois, 4/9/26

Don’t have much to say about the Flagston twins’ specific conundrum here but I do like the expression on the bus driver’s face. That’s someone who’s extremely sick of these kids’ shit. Not sure if it’s about Dot and Ditto specifically or just children in general, but either way I’m enjoying it.

Crankshaft and Shoe, 4/9/26

Hey, uh. Um. How to put this delicately. I think if you’re involved in the process of churning out a legacy comic strip, maybe you … shouldn’t … do jokes that are like, “You know what’s better than a hack writer? AI! Ha ha!” Just, like … don’t give people ideas, you know? About your job?