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Pluggers, 9/19/25

Look, you know I can be a little spicy when it comes to pluggers and their culture and values, but I’m not made of stone. I don’t wish ill upon them, really, and the fact that so many recent Pluggers panels have been “jokes” about how pluggers are constantly suffering in physical pain and are almost certainly about to die has been fairly depressing to me. That’s why I really enjoy today’s panel, which reminds us about the “fun” aspects of pluggerdom, like walking around in public wearing clothes that are covered with filth of various types. That’s something we can all enjoy in good conscience!

Zits, 9/19/25

Hey, uh, do the Duncans (in-universe) and the Zits creative team (in real life) know how laptops work. Like, do they know that they come with a power cable that you can plug into the wall, and then the laptop will operate even if you’ve drained the battery. Have these people been using laptops until their batteries died, then throwing the laptops in the garbage, then buying new laptops, for years now. I feel like someone should tell them????

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Judge Parker, 9/18/25

I’m never exactly sure how old Sam and Abbey are supposed to be — yes, they’re the parents of two women who are both in their early to mid 20s, but they’re the adoptive parents of those two women and more to the point adopted them when those two women were tweens, so reproductive biology isn’t necessarily a factor and Sam and Abbey could be as young as their … early 40s, maybe? My point is that Abbey in panel two looks a lot like an elder millennial influencer with a lot of lip filler doing a front-facing camera reel about “My adopted daughter? Taking care of our friend’s granddaughter who’s been abandoned by her parents due to a series of espionage-related shenanigans? Let me stop you right there with a big ‘no’ — and that’s the tea, sis.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/18/25

Oh! How embarrassing for Yvonne! She didn’t know that roots, or possibly Americana, or maybe both of them, is/are called “Ameripolitan” now! Incredible social faux pas here, she won’t be able to show her face in public for weeks. If you want to avoid the inevitable social shunning that would follow on from such a mistake, be sure to write your newspaper and demand that they carry Rex Morgan, M.D., the only comic strip that gets into the minute gradations of various musical genres that nobody listens to and if they did listen to them they’d be like “this is all the same kind of music, why are you calling these songs different things.”

The Lockhorns, 9/18/25

I guess the joke here is that Leroy has insulted this supercilious French waiter and is now being challenged to a duel, but here is my preferred interpretation: after spending just a few minutes listening to Leroy and Loretta bicker, he returned to the table with those pistols and said, “My friends, in my country, I would suggest that you deal with your marital unhappiness with what the French call ‘an arrangement,’ but as we are in America, we shall come to an American solution. You must shoot each other, with guns.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/17/25

I am really enjoying the quiet desperation of Yvonne’s facial expression as she tries to convey to Rex and June how crazy-making her Hanks-Harwood-dominated living situation is. “He’s always saying crap like this. ‘I’m planning a Ritz Brothers marathon!’ I don’t know if those are the cracker guys or a vaudeville act that somehow has a YouTube. Maybe they aren’t even real, but even if that were the case, it could be that he’s doing a bit or it could be that he has advanced dementia and we can’t even tell because all of his cultural references are so baffling. And he’ll be asleep when we get back! I won’t even be able to ask him about it! And tomorrow it’ll be some other bullshit!”

Shoe, 9/17/25

I like that they’ve given the Perfesser a little bit of business to do here, knotting his tie as they talk — the implication being that he’s putting himself back together after getting naked for an exam, and in so doing is beginning to feel dignified enough again to push back on this advice. “Oh, is that your diagnosis, doctor? Are you saying that the good product designers at the Frigidaire Appliance Company would lead me down the wrong path?”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/17/25

You all know Grimm, the lovable dog who’s one of the title characters of the syndicated newspaper comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm. But what if I told you that he was about to go to jail, possibly for years, as a punishment for his various crimes?