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Blondie, 5/30/25

Here’s a joke for you: a guy with a master’s degree in ancient history and a guy with an MFA in poetry were coworkers once, back in the late ’90s. The punchline is that they were coworkers as office temps doing filing at a professional association for orthodontists. Obviously they chatted to occupy their overeducated brains while putting resumes in alphabetical order, and the guy with the ancient history degree (me) somehow got onto the topic of the Steve Miller song “Take The Money And Run,” and how it’s a crime that in one verse it rhymes “Texas,” “facts is,” “justice,” and “taxes.” The university-trained poet, to be contrary, insisted this was (in a phrase that is burned forever in my brain) “a slant rhyme, like Emily Dickinson would use.” I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now, so sorry, Elmo, it’s a good try but “screens” and “memes” don’t quite rhyme either. Also, are teachers actually showing angry memes to children? I was going to argue this point too, but you know what, a lot of teachers are pretty young, and as an old person, I have decided that any conflicts between Zoomers and Gen Alpha or whatever we’re calling the children now are none of my business. I’m holding the line on the rhyme thing, though.

Mary Worth, 5/30/25

After finally catching Belle in an act of total madness, Wilbur has now decided that she should leave, actually! How is he going to make that happen? Well, he’s not sure about that one. He’s mostly an “ideas guy.” Maybe Dawn can fill in the details.

Family Circus, 5/30/25

I love that we get a good look at the other kids outside, just vibing and enjoying the Jeffy-free lifestyle. Once Jeffy deliberately hid from their sight, this became the best day of their whole week!

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/29/25

Look, obviously I’m not asking that a comic strip that deliberately has fun with a character that’s in some ways like a person and in some ways like an animal be 100% realistic or even consistent. I’m just saying that we should acknowledge that a dog telling a dentist “Sometimes I have chunks of human flesh stuck between my teeth” is fairly menacing! Like not in a cute Dennis way, but in a genuine “I attack and seriously wound those who irritate me” way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/29/25

An aging roots country star wearing colorful western gear silently ruminates over his past failures as a husband while contemplating a beige-ish blob of fried (?) diner food he has speared on the end of his fork. Is this the perfectly representative Rex Morgan, M.D., strip? Well, it doesn’t have Rene Belluso trying to pull off some obvious scam, but it also doesn’t have Rex doing any doctor stuff, so it’s pretty close.

Dick Tracy, 5/29/25

“Remember, Sam. People with criminal histories? Criminals. People without criminal histories? Also probably criminals, and talented ones too. Now let’s go down to the courthouse and get arrest warrants for everyone in town, including ourselves.”

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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