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Comment of the Week

I know somebody probably just woke her up but I'd be more interested in her as a character if Neddy waited until she was nice and cozy in bed because it soothes her to get Randy all agitated and that makes for a pleasant, restful sleep.

—Tabby Lavalamp
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Spiral into madness

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Family Circus, 7/22/25

I frankly am not a fan of the smug looks on Jeffy and Big Daddy Keane’s faces here. Oh, you think it’s funny to contemplate how terrifying it might be to be trapped on a boat with your primary prey animals, and if you fail to keep clear of them you risk not just your death but the complete extermination of your species? I bet Noah’s family had some pretty comical encounters with wolves and grizzly bears and such, but I don’t see you laffing it up about those.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/22/25

There’s a debate to be had over whether it’s acceptable to use a joke you saw in an email forward or Facebook meme in the nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip you’re being paid to create, and whether the fact that the joke is bird-related is significant in a strip where many of the characters are themselves birds. However, we already had that debate four months ago, when Mother Goose and Grimm ran this exact same punchline. They redrew the art, which is … something, I guess?

Beetle Bailey, 7/22/25

Don’t worry, folks. If America is invaded, we’ll be quickly defended by our crack division of … bed troops? Oh dear.

Mary Worth, 7/22/25

Is Mary copping a feel in that first panel? Is Ed going in for a “soul handshake”? What on Earth is happening

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Monday outrages

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/21/25

You all know that “fire hydrants are like toilets, to a dog” is one of my pet peeves, but I frankly find it a million times less objectionable than I do “toilet water is like alcohol, to a dog, in that, among other things, it reduces their inhibitions and makes them more sexually aggressive.” People know the water in a toilet is just regular water, right? What do they think is in there to make Grimm here drunk? Is it piss? Do they think you can get drunk by drinking piss?

Intelligent Life, 7/21/25

Love to go to the movies with my pal, ask “So what did you think of [full movie title, including the colon]” as the credits roll, and then listen to him give some half-baked rambling metaphor that’s about box office numbers or maybe media coverage. That’s what the beautiful art of film is all about, to me!

Between Friends, 7/21/25

You know the old saying: “Show, don’t tell. And if you can’t show, tell in the form of showing a conversation between two people about the thing you’re trying to show. And if you can’t do that, show one of the two people summarizing the conversation in thought balloons as they’re having it.”

Family Circus, 7/21/25

“So how come you’re still talking instead of shutting up, dumbass?” –Sam, probably

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Old age, youth, the past, the present, etc.

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Heathcliff, 7/20/25

I’m a little obsessed with the tiny fish saying “Welcome to the club!” to Jaws. (Side note: Do we agree that the shark from Jaws is named “Jaws”? I hadn’t really thought about it until I started writing this post but now I feel very strongly about it.) I guess the fish is the representative of the entire Heathcliff universe, which itself turned 50 a couple years ago, and is acknowledging on behalf of his mostly land-based comrades that a fellow aquatic character has hit the same milestone. That said, it feels a little off because the Heathcliff characters are perpetually alive and keeping up their wacky antics and you can imagine them knowing at some level that they’ve existed for 50 years, whereas Jaws dies at the end of Jaws (sorry for the spoiler, but as noted this movie is 50 years old now, c’mon). I know there are more Jaws movies but those have different sharks in them. Are those sharks also named “Jaws”? I gotta think about that one, I’ll get back to you on it.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/20/25

Some really harrowing throwaway panels here: they transform a simple strip about Hagar inventing the movie theater freestyle machine so he can get super blotto into one that informs us that (a) somehow beat generation genius/weirdo William S. Burroughs had his strangest novel adapted into a play more than 1,000 years before he wrote it and (b) the canonically illiterate Hagar can’t parse out the word “naked”, but he can read “lunch.”

Pardon My Planet, 7/20/25

Gotta say that I’m impressed that this panel carefully avoided showing us whether or not Adam and Eve had navels, thus avoiding theological controversy, but dared to ask the question “What would Adam’s whole body hair situation have been?” and came up with an answer that’s more fucked up than any of us could’ve dreamed of.

Dustin, 7/20/25

Ha ha, just a couple of Gen Z dudes talking about mailing physical letters, a process they know a lot about from long experience! This strip, which is literally about the differences between young people and old people, demonstrates once again that it has its finger on the pulse of what young people know and do.