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Gearhead Gertie, 7/3/25

I am if nothing mercurial, and do you know what I’ve decided? I like the Gearhead Gerties where the focus is on Gertie’s perpetually put-upon husband. I’m done feeling bad for him. He had to have known what he signed up for. His wife is Gearhead Gertie, for Pete’s sake! I like his grumpy little face in the second panel as he endures this latest NASCAR-related indignity. Ha ha, he has to watch TV sticking way up in the air, for NASCAR reasons that I don’t fully understand!

Pluggers, 7/3/25

Over the past several years, I reached an age at which some of my parents and in-laws have reached ages at which stairs, and the need to accommodate their lives minimizing the number of times they go up and down them, became an important thing we all had to think about. Stairs, man! You think you’ll be able to use them forever with ease, but I’m here to tell you: that’s probably not true. Anyway, today’s featured plugger is not yet at the stage where he can’t use the stairs, but it’s a lot harder to use them than it used to be, and he knows in his bones it won’t ever get any easier, and every time he goes up, the little pep talk he gives himself needs to go a little harder in order to do its job. In its quiet way, this is the most genuinely harrowing Pluggers panel since Rhino-man hocked his TV.

Hi and Lois, 7/3/25

You know I’m on the record as being in favor of Hi and Lois depicting “Thirsty” Thurston as a lovable drunk, but I think it’s a little too on the nose for him to just be blurting out his various disorders like this. “I’m getting addicted to online gambling!” “I let my lawn and my hair get so unkempt because I’m very depressed!” “My wife doesn’t love me and I don’t think she has for a long time!” C’mon, let us use our imagination a little here.

Mary Worth, 7/3/25

“Remember the last time they took a father-daughter vacation together, and they almost died in a cruise ship disaster? I think this one will finish them off for good.”

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Beetle Bailey, 7/2/25

Longtime readers know that one of my minor Beetle Bailey fixations is that Miss Buxley’s classic little black dress is actually a little red dress; it’s just that the daily strips depict black and white versions of underlying platonic forms that are in color, and red is depicted as black in that context, but then the strips are colored in by other hands later in the manufacturing chain, which screws up the whole system because the black apparently can’t be made red at that point. Or it least it couldn’t be made red, until today! Finally, Adobe Photoshop fill tool technology has advanced to the point where it can make the black area of a .tiff file red. Unfortunately it seems to screw up a bunch of other stuff, like make the text too small for the word bubbles and also kind of fuck up Miss Buxley’s face. It looks off, right? Is this AI? Will Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC be the first comics conglomerate to replace its human artists with AI? Anyway, I was going to do a riff here about the fact that “going pillow shopping” clearly seems like it should be a sex thing, but I got distracted by all this other stuff.

Bizarro, 7/2/25

Look, man, I love dogs. Huge fan of dogs. But the truth is, no dog, not even a highly trained one, would give even a moment’s thought to a beautiful sunset vista. This guy should be getting a phone call describing the incredible smells coming off a huge pile of turds that the dog found.

Hi and Lois, 7/2/25

Hey, Trixie, the Sun is an enormous ball of exploding hydrogen and helium more than 800,000 miles in diameter, and its motion is mostly determined by the gravitational forces of our galaxy, which contains millions of stars like it. You, on the other hand, are a baby with no job or anything else that imposes any kind of schedule on your days, so maybe you should be willing to accommodate your supposed “best friend.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/2/25

Aww, isn’t that nice? But seriously, insulin deliveries to Hootin’ Holler are intermittent at best, which is a big problem considering the community’s higher-than-average incidence of diabetes.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/1/25

On the topic of bad viewing angles of cartoon heads, the characters in soap opera strips have more or less normally shaped noggins, but Truck’s facial hair really is quite absurd, as panel two makes very clear. Carefully tailoring your sideburns so that each has a distinct right angle and the two almost but not quite meet at your chin? I guess the “roots” in “roots country” refers to follicles of hair you grow in ever more ostentatious patterns across your face.

Pluggers, 7/1/25

You’re a plugger if your only tattoos aren’t tattoos at all! Pluggers do not like tattoos, or people who have them.

Luann, 7/1/25

Luann is a syndicated newspaper comic strip that has followed its title character from junior high through college. This summer, it will end abruptly after more than 40 years of publication when Luann somehow manages to accidentally shoot herself in the face with a bow and arrow. Congratulations to the whole creative team on a great run!