The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comment of the Week

Well, I must admit, I have never seen 'yikes' used in a cartoon that conveys so exactly and accurately the reader's impression of the panel in which it occurs. I mean, yikes.

—Chance
121

I guess you really have to … hand it to them [everyone starts yelling at me]

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/12/25

Say what you will about Rex Morgan, M.D., but it is straight-up killing it in the “characters make interestingly exaggerated hand gestures” department. Nobody is even close! I expect the strip to once again sweep the Handy Awards this year. (People keep telling the Academy of Hand Gesture Artistry that “handy” sounds like a sex thing and they should change the name, but they just go on and on about “tradition” while gesticulating wildly.)

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/12/25

Ha ha, yes, The Handmaid’s Tale certainly is a cultural touchstone with striking visuals and production design elements that we can see on various billboards and commercials! Quick question for the Mother Goose and Grimm creative team, though: you know the show is about a society facing an existential fertility crisis that becomes a cult where the few remaining fertile women are enslaved and ritually raped by high-status men, right? Oh, you don’t? You don’t read my blog, huh? I know I’m mean to you sometimes, but I think reading my blog would help you out in situations like this.

Archie, 9/12/25

The Millennials are addicted to Instagram, and Zoomers have already had their brains rotted by TikTok, but what means of cybercommunication will the rising Gen Alpha embrace? Well, according to today’s Archie, which is definitely an informed commentary on contemporary teens and not a rerun from more than 20 years ago, it’s email. That’s right, folks, check your spam filter, because if you cross a teen in the year 2025 you will soon be roasted in absolutely devastating fashion in a message from lakyn13@juno.com!

180

Tales out of school

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Luann, 9/11/25

Many years ago, when I was a TA in grad school, I had a very precocious undergraduate student who used to come to office hours to hang out and shoot the shit with me. The final exam was three essay questions, and I graded them blind without looking at the name on the front until I was done, and I was disappointed to see that he had completely biffed one of the questions, and it was enough to drag down the A+ he had going into the final to an A-. But if I was disappointed, he was enraged, and after grades came out, he tracked down my home phone number and yelled at me about this, telling me at one point that his father said sometimes teachers give a bad grade to students they felt intellectually intimidated by, and because I had at that point already quit grad school, I got to just laugh at him and hang up. Anyway, I don’t really have the energy to go into the dynamic here between Bernice and [squints] “Alan,” but mostly what I’m trying to say is that if any student of mine included an unsolicited 12-minute animated graphic as part of their assignment, they would not be getting five bonus points, and it wouldn’t be because of my intellectual envy, I tell you what.

Dustin, 9/11/25

Wait, is Dustin’s dad saying he’s good at sex, or not good at sex? Or is he saying that having kids despite not having had sex very often or for very long is evidence that he’s good at sex, because I do not think that claim holds up to scrutiny. In conclusion, I hate this strip a lot, because it’s difficult to parse and in the process of attempting to do so I have to think about Dustin’s parents having sex, which — and I’m sure you, being in the same boat as I am now, agree with me on this point — is a profoundly unpleasant experience, for me, and, I assume, for them.

Family Circus, 9/11/25

God, I love Jeffy’s facial expression here. His brain isn’t hungry at all! He doesn’t know anything, but the important thing is that he doesn’t want to know anything, and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t want to know anything. He is nothing but true to himself.

167

The fish skeleton I just accept. There’s always a fish skeleton in these

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Slylock Fox, 9/10/25

This is one of the most baffling Six Differences cartoons I’ve seen in quite a while. Why does the horse have a butt wound? Why does he look high as a kite? Why does the kid look so smug? Why does the cow look so sad? Where are the birds leading the horse and the kid? Are they leading them to their deaths? None of these questions are meant as criticisms, obviously, they’re a series of delightful unsolvable mysteries that I will enjoy contemplating, unlike the question of whether the clouds in the two panels actually look different from one another.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/10/25

How much of Jughaid’s flesh do you think Sukey would eat before she realized he wasn’t actually a giant carrot? Would it be little enough that the lad would survive the procedure?

Shoe, 9/10/25

“No, he has a gang that sells drugs and stolen property out of ice cream trucks. He killed six people by burning down their house once. It’s really quite grim and I’m not sure why you’re making light of it.”