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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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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.

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Garfield, 7/19/25

True comics internet oldheads remember Garfield Minus Garfield, a webcomic that, as the title implied, took daily Garfield comics in which Jon and Garfield interacted and simply removed Garfield from them. This became a minor internet sensation back in 2008, and apparently tickled Jim Davis so much that it became an officially licensed book. That was many years ago, and I hope I don’t sound churlish when I say that the concept never really worked for me because it seemed slightly off. Surely the joke should not be that Jon is alone and talking to nobody; Garfield should remain in the frame but his thought balloons should be removed, to show us the “real” world where Jon is just a depressed and/or deranged man talking to his cat, who, like all cats, cannot understand him or talk back. Today’s strip is a great example of why that would work. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” says Jon, with absolutely no joy in his eyes, before staring at his cat for two panels in absolute silence.

Mary Worth, 7/19/25

21st century commercial air travel is, in terms of deaths or injuries per mile, the safest form of transportation humankind has ever produced. I guess it’s slightly more dangerous than simply staying at home and sitting absolutely still, so technically Mary isn’t wrong when she says it’s “a privilege and also a risk,” but she is being extremely overdramatic. She’s also referring to flying coach via Denver to New York City, a place she’s visited at least twice before, as “explor[ing] the unknown,” so she’s really on one today, I guess.

Dustin, 7/19/25

Helen is clearly used to Ed not specifying that he wants his bacon crispy and then complaining when he gets it and it’s not crispy, so she intervenes in panel one here, hoping that their waitress will not in fact hate them by the end of the meal. By panel three we can already see her effort was in vain.