Archive: Wizard of Id

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Hi and Lois, 4/24/25

I love that Hi has absolute faith that Ditto, despite not having shown any great baseball prowess in this strip to date, will eventually become an elite athlete capable of competing at the highest level of his chosen sport, but he’s still deeply worried that he’ll be one of those big leaguers who drinks most of their salary and loses the rest of it in ill-advised investments promoted by their buddies and has to do the county fair autograph circuit well into their old age to survive.

Six Chix, 4/24/25

Big news, everyone: It’s the year 2025, and Six Chix finally did a comic about getting high! I mean, I guess a lot of Six Chix strips are subtextually about getting high. Like remember the series of strips about the gal who had sex with a giant sandwich, then got got cucked by the sandwich, then went to a pizza orgy? In retrospect, that sequence was almost certainly getting-high-adjacent, at the very least. But I feel like this is the first one where they come right out and say it.

Wizard of Id, 4/24/25

Hey, kids, are you familiar with the King in the Wizard of Id, whose main defining character design feature is that he has a comically large nose? Well, apparently his nose is (was?) big because he’s … old? Which makes your nose big? You learn something new every day, I guess.

Mary Worth, 4/24/25

“I guess if she doesn’t come around, it means you weren’t so terrific after all, ha ha! Anyway, let’s meet up this weekend for some absurdly large salads, if your dad’s girlfriend hasn’t killed you yet.”

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Dick Tracy, 4/10/25

So the guy in the suit is lead detective in the case of the almost-stolen corpse, and I guess he figured out who the corpse used to be and was looking at his social media accounts and … bingo! Our favorite idiot nephews! I suppose the detective is using clipped, manly noir talk when he just says “nephews” instead of “his nephews,” but, you know, maybe not. Maybe he’s just saying they have the vibe of nephews about them. They seem real nephewy. They’re somebody’s sibling’s sons, if you follow me.

Wizard of Id, 4/10/25

The main thrust of this strip, which is about the Wizard of Id’s wife having a horny hallucination, is fine, even though I’m not sure why she heard the frog talk before she touched its hallucinogenic skin to her mouth …. maybe it’s magical but also induces hallucinations in a normal, scientific way? Whatever. My favorite part is actually the fact that the Wizard is casually enjoying a martini in his armchair. The guy has a tough job, his wife is horny for a frog, he deserves to unwind! And he’s doing it in a sophisticated way.

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Crock, 3/18/25

I kind of admire the thought process that went into constructing the current installment of “The Men Of Outpost 5 Read Letters From One Of The Men’s Hillbilly Hometown.” Obviously, you have this great joke about how the one guy is a dumb hillbilly who may have mastered the mechanical art of tying a shoe but doesn’t understand how the process fits into the larger context, where you generally tie both your shoes at once. But what gets me is how they decided to set that punchline up. What if he’s prompted to reminisce on this subject because his beloved friend and mentor died? What if he’s in mourning? That sure adds a fun little twist to the gag!

Marvin, 3/18/25

Marvin, the comic strip, debuted in 1982, so if time flowed normally for its cursèd inhabitants, then Marvin, the character, would be in his early 40s, and his parents would have long ago forgotten his awful infancy, which only lasted a couple of years, after all, or at least they would have sanded down the edges in constant retelling into a “we can laugh about it now” situation. But time doesn’t flow normally, and Marvin will remain a baby forever, and his parents will neither know the escape of him growing up nor ever truly get used to the horror. Thus the exclamation points in the second panel here: while this is the sort of bad behavior we expect from this terrible child, his parents are forever shocked anew, each psychic wound inflicted never healing into protective scar tissue.

Pluggers, 3/18/25

Pluggers long ago lost the ability to feel sexual arousal. But products? Well, pluggers sure do love a good product — looking at them, assessing them, trying to figure out how much they cost, then either nodding their head at a good price or shaking their heads at how expensive things are these days. They still have those pleasures, at least, even though others have long passed them by.

B.C. and Wizard of Id, 3/18/25

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the courting mores of modern times were mapped onto a previous era — the Stone Age, say, or a vaguely medieval period that also had magic in it? Well, today’s B.C. and Wizard of Id have the answers for you, my friends!