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Luann, 7/7/25

Hey kids, we all love Wilbur, the sad loser who has an off-putting relationship with his fish. But did you know there’s another such person in the comics — and she’s a lady? That’s right, it’s Bernice, Luann’s friend from Luann! Unlike Wilbur, who named his fish after himself and his ex, Bernice has given hers the whimsical name “Mr. Monstro.” Also unlike Wilbur, Bernice is capable of introspection, as the final panel makes clear, not that it’s really doing her any good.

Marvin, 7/7/25

Marvin is usually a light-hearted strip about a baby who won’t stop shitting himself and the parents and classmates who hate him, but real heads remember that there was a plotline in 2008 when Jenny’s parents lost their retirement savings in the Great Financial Crisis and had to move in with the Millers to escape destitution. I guess they ultimately got back on their feet again, though the fact that Marvin’s grandfather is excited to be hired for what I assume is a fairly low-paying and thankless job where you’re pretty much always on call in your own home tells me their finances never fully recovered. Obviously going back to their daughter’s house is not an option, though, not least because their son-in-law still won’t let them forget the last time they had to do it.

Wizard of Id, 7/7/25

I’m sorry, man, it’d be one thing if the Wiz were using his mystical powers to create chimeric combinations of natural beasts. But throw the word “breeding” in there and there’s really no other way to interpret this as “the Wizard of Id is somehow getting a whole bunch of different kinds of animals to have sex with horses.” There may not even be any magic involved.

Alice, 7/7/25

Big news, everybody: Alice is finally gonna get laid! And good for her.

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Wizard of Id, 6/4/25

As far as I know, the Wizard of Id has never added any vaguely medieval monk/priest type characters to its vaguely medieval setting, so that leaves as an open question what “sweet lord” the Wizard is addressing in panel two. Is it the dark lord of magic, from whom he receives his eldritch power but whom he finds terrifying and repellent, like this hideous fish? Or is he merely addressing his sovereign the King of Id, from whom all sovereignty flows and who has the right of first refusal to every fish caught in his realm’s rivers and lakes, even the ugly ones?

Flash Gordon, 6/4/25

The new Flash Gordon strip is still doing its thing — which is to say, having great art and fun stories that I don’t talk about very much on my blog but rest assured, they’re there. Today I mostly wanted to draw your attention to the “NEXT:” narration box in panel four, which is possibly the greatest narration box of all time.

Intelligent Life, 6/4/25

Ha ha, remember two days ago, when I complained about how vague and nonspecific Mike’s dialogue was? “He should actually name the geek media franchises he’s talking about,” I said. “He definitely wouldn’t use that as an opportunity to talk about which fictional blue creatures he would or would not have sex with,” I added, like a fool.

Alice, 6/4/25

Alice’s friend, that’s not what that means at all! This is very bad advice!

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Dennis the Menace, 5/28/25

When you have a long-running strip like Dennis the Menace, where one of the main characters is a child who never grows up and another is an old man who never dies, it does force you to contemplate how comic strip time operates for the two of them. Are we meant to understand that they are locked in an eternal, changeless struggle? Or is Dennis just a kid who’s only started wandering over and annoying his neighbor in the past few months? Mr. Wilson’s reaction today points towards the latter: clearly he’s never even thought about the fact that Dennis will have his days free during the summer, much less experienced it. “Ah shit! Ah fuck!” is his immediate, visceral reaction.

Wizard of Id, 5/28/25

The idea of this joke — “two armies must fill out paperwork with the owner of the battlefield before they hack each other to bits” — is solid enough, but I have a quibble with the execution. Specifically, we’re in a faux medieval setting, so you could just put this guy in vaguely medieval peasant garb or something and people would easily follow everything thanks to the dialogue. Instead, the logic seems to be “we’re saying field so it should be a recognizable farmer, let’s put him in overalls and a hat from the early to mid 20th century,” which doesn’t work at all, in my opinion. The fact that the colorist decided to make said overalls the exact same shade of brown as the ground doesn’t help.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/28/25

TIRED: Herb and Jamaal uses weird circumlocutions to avoid proper nouns so as to make the strips “timeless” and reusable in the future

WIRED: Herb and Jamaal takes place in an extremely specific alt-timeline where Star Wars-style droids are real and the subject of political controversy that elected officials need to field questions about at press conferences