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Mary Worth, 10/7/25

This polite jockeying about who should climb down from the balloon first is getting to “a farmer needs to get a chicken, a fox, and a bag of grain across the river in as few trips as possible” levels of complexity, but it seems like they’re failing Logic 101 very badly by ending up with a scenario where the lightest passenger is left in the balloon by herself in the final step, at which point the balloon will lift off from the tree and float away. Honestly this seems like the sort of thing that would be covered at balloonivation school and is another strike against Stanley’s skills. Anyway, presumably Olive will eventually land in some sort of magical realm on the other side of the rainbow, where she’ll seize power and rule behind a veil of trickery, so she won’t be our problem anymore.

Six Chix, 10/7/25

Remember, the Tuesday Chixiverse is the sandwich-fucking one, so it’s not clear if the pumpkin is saying “it’s our time” because the mysterious figures in the background are planning on taking them home to have sex with them, or to carve them up and/or eat them, which the pumpkins’ facial expressions make clear is regarded as a sexually-charged act. Either way, welcome to Six Chix spooky season, everybody!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/7/25

Look, fellas, when your wife tells you to put the toilet seat down, it’s not because she’s a shrew who likes nagging for nagging’s sake; it’s because she doesn’t want to accidentally sit down on the porcelain rim of the toilet bowl. If you, for instance, are a mythical dwarf, and your spouse isn’t, and you have your own specialized tiny toilet sized for your miniature hindquarters, she probably doesn’t care about the seat on that one. I guess it’s possible that the implication here is that the Seven Dwarfs only have a tiny toilet in their home, which would be reasonable given that they’re all tiny, and Snow White, who has moved in with them, resents this and brings it up at every opportunity. Either way, welcome to Mother Goose and Grimm scat joke season, everybody!

Flash Gordon, 10/7/25

I definitely enjoy the fact that Flash Gordon is, canonically, a Yale man, which adds flavor to today’s strip, in which he claims he’ll do well fighting in gladiatorial combat in the arena because he used to win “matches” back in college. Did you play tennis, Flash? Did you win a few tennis matches, back when you were in school, “in New Haven”?

Dick Tracy, 10/7/25

“Dr. Faust, is it? And you thought you could make some sort of deal to your advantage with an evil figure, did you? Not really much for classic literature, are you?”

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Alice, 10/6/25

We all know of course about the various beloved characters in Alice, the normal comic strip we all read every day and fully understand: Alice, Alice’s friend, Alice’s boyfriend, Alice’s niece, and the late Kurt Vonnegut, who is both Alice’s doctor and her vet. Today’s strip features a couple of our more outlandish favorites, Alice’s robot antagonist and the space alien who’s in love with her, but also … someone new! A glowing orb of some sort who judges the living and the dead, or maybe just asks you where you’re from. Frankly there’s getting to be more of these guys than I would ideally like to keep track of! Yet I persist, for my faithful blog readers, for whom I read Alice and other comics so they don’t have to.

Hi and Lois, 10/6/25

Look, Hi, I think we all know that Ditto was saying “I wish you were a different sort of person than you actually are.” You don’t have to drop this philosophical bombshell on him about how he’s trying to wish himself into the void or whatever. He’s a child and not a particularly smart one. You’ve tricked him into being on hugging terms with you again at the end here, but you aren’t really playing fair.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/6/25

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m now nostalgic for the time when syndicated newspaper comics scat content was confined to Marvin, where you could at least argue that he was a baby and so it was normal for him to poop into his diaper. I get that Grimm is a talking dog, but I still think it crosses some kind of line to have a newspaper comics strip character yelling “I don’t get it, why don’t these big, manly football players start shitting in the middle of the field on live TV so we can all watch it the way I know we all want to????”

Mary Worth, 10/6/25

I’m honestly not comfortable with how pleased Stanley looks in panel two here. Sure, this could’ve ended in total disaster, but look at all these people who are now paying attention to Stanley, and concerned about his well being! Ha ha, Mary, ladies first, Stanley’s all right! Stanley’s as right as rain! There’s no such thing as a bad way to get attention, is what Stanley’s learning!

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Dick Tracy, 10/5/25

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have a lot of favorite etymological facts. One of those favorites is that the word “electrocute” was coined in 1889 by combining “electricity” and “execute,” and was originally meant to market the then-new electric chair; its use for being killed by electricity in non-judicial contexts only came later. That’s why I’m excited to see that Diet Smith Enterprises has an “Electrothanasia Room,” which I assume involves painless, voluntary death via electricity. Over the past few years in this strip, there have been hints that Diet Smith has shifted from playing the role for Dick Tracy that Q plays for James Bond to something darker, where he has his own shadowy agenda not always aligned with the MCU. Anyway, that seems to be confirmed today, when Dick is about to get electrothanized, or maybe electrocuted, or I guess just zapped, by a lady Diet Smith Enterprises was trying to sign on to its Superweapon Incubator program.

Pluggers, 10/5/25

Pluggers’ own failing bodies deny them even their most keenly anticipated pleasures! The thing about this strip is that in general it makes being a plugger sound frankly awful.