Post Content

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.

Post Content

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!

Post Content

The Lockhorns, 6/30/25

You all know that I hold the Lockhorns in a great deal of affection, but I am not blind to the truth, which is that they are squat, gnome-like people whose skulls are — let’s be real — lumpy and misshapen. We allow for this because they are, of course, cartoons, but it’s also true that stylized cartoons of the Lockhorns’ ilk are only meant to be viewed from a limited set of angles: in a very real sense, they do not exist in a complete three-dimensional space like you or me. Leroy and Loretta specifically should not be viewed from what appears to be an in-store security camera pointing down from the ceiling of whatever sad local drug store they’ve stopped by in order to browse the get well cards. This point of view really makes quite clear the aforementioned misshapenness of their skulls, in a way that I don’t think any of us asked for.

Marvin, 6/30/25

Two beings trapped together in a miniature world just big enough for them, yet still participating in an economic system where one must be indebted to the other? This is a grim scenario that no water-themed pun can cover up!

Pluggers, 6/30/25

Before today I would’ve said the bar for “What constitutes a joke or bit of wordplay in Pluggers” was so low that no installment of the strip could possibly fail to clear it, but that was before today, when I was confronted with “Pluggers stop at all the neighborhood kids’ lemonade stands,” accompanied by a drawing of a plugger stopping at a lemonade stand. This maybe could’ve been salvaged by showing that the plugger in question was precariously holding multiple cups to emphasize the scope of his generosity and/or thirst, but real heads know that Rhino-Man absolutely cannot afford to do that.

Mary Worth, 6/30/25

Ha ha, can you imagine being as ignorant of all the twists and turns of Wilbur’s love life as Dr. Jeff? Probably feels great! Sure, Mary’s about to tell him about it in vivid detail, but he can just open up the throttle on his powerboat until the engine is loud enough to drown her out.