Post Content

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25

Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you’re not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don’t do it on a tree or your neighbor’s house or whatever, and it’s weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, “Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found,” but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we’re supposed to contemplate whether Grimm’s biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?

Mary Worth, 9/3/25

“Or are you thinking about mummifying your father and I after our deaths in the Egyptian fashion, removing our brains through our noses; then making an incision along our flanks with an Ethiopian stone blade so you can remove our organs and place them in canopic jars before rinsing our abdominal cavities with palm oil and filling them with spices; and then finally placing our preserved corpses in a massive pyramid built along the Hudson on the Upper West Side? Because that would be nice, actually.”

Pardon My Planet, 9/3/25

Pardon My Planet’s takes on women tend to be in the ballpark of “women love to demand expensive consumer goods from men,” so before today I would’ve encouraged an attempt to dig into women’s real thoughts and desires to find out what they actually want. But after seeing this panel, I gotta say: never try to do that again, because, Jesus Christ. Have you heard they like to shop? Maybe do some strips on that.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 9/2/25

Now, I’m not a big shot syndicated newspaper comics artist, but I think that if you have a joke where a general tells a subordinate officer that his uniform cravat (?) isn’t regulation, and then the officer says “And that is?” because the general is wearing a ludicrous golf outfit, the general’s outfit should be a reveal in the second panel. The element of surprise seems key to making it a “joke,” in my opinion, and you’re probably saying, “But Josh, the comics are a visual medium, how are you going to have the general’s dialogue without showing him,” and sorry, that’s not my problem! You could’ve bailed on this joke at any time once you realized this! But you persevered, and here I am criticizing it on my blog, the Comics Curmudgeon. That’s just the way of the world, I guess.

Hi and Lois, 9/2/25

Speaking of surprises, I think if your garbageman tells you that he and his partner attended an awards banquet for some kind of sanitation worker professional association, and you ask how it went, and he tells you that his partner won an award, you shouldn’t look so surprised about it. This is, to be clear, a criticism of Hi, not of the writing of the strip. I’ve already accepted and embraced the fact that Hi and Lois has rejected punchlines for the most part, so I’m fine with that aspect.

B.C., 9/2/25

Ha ha, remember pop-up ads? Remember when they were an example of a new, high-tech annoyance in the world, but now here they are, being joked about as something in the past, in a comic strip where the characters are, literally, ancient cave-dwelling hominids? Does it make you feel like an ancient cave-dwelling hominid? Discuss.

Post Content

Crock, 9/1/25

Even if you hate Crock with a passion, you don’t read it every day for 20+ years without learning a little something about its character dynamics, though if you’re me and you’re notoriously terrible with names, you do manage to not learn some of the names of those characters. I wanna say this woman’s name is … Fatima? We’re going to go with that, although she doesn’t make the Wikipedia list of characters, and while I normally am quite dubious about the utility of Google’s AI answers, based on its “In the comic strip Crock, there is no ‘pretty girl’ character” response to me, I have to admit it may be getting better at parsing visual input. Anyway, the point of (let’s call her) Fatima here is that she’s supposed to be pretty, and also that she’s a foil for Grossie, who is supposed to not be pretty, and who she hangs out with a lot and routinely insults. You can tell that she’s not supposed to be pretty because they named her “Grossie,” and I think it’s telling that Fatima (?) abbreviates Maggot’s equally vile name to the cuter “Mag,” whereas Grossie gets no similarly softened nickname.

Anyway, speaking of character dynamics, I get that Fatima (??) has to be talking to some third party for this joke to work, but it’s kind of weird that she’s having drinks with Captain Poulet, right? It’s like running into your English teacher and your shop teacher hanging out together outside of work. Sure, it sort of makes sense that they know each other, but you’ve never seen them interact and it feels wrong, somehow.

Blondie, 9/1/25

As AI becomes integrated into every feature of human life and we begin to worry about who’s really calling the shots, a new question arises: Which of our fellow biological humans will go quisling when the clankers take over? Well, the team behind Blondie seems to be making tentative moves in that direction, and sad as it is, it makes a sort of sense: if anyone serves as a model for “humans don’t really desire autonomy and would be satisfied to simply have their needs met by industrially produced foods and material goods,” it’s the characters in this strip. Once a robot figures out how to make a giant sandwich, it’s curtains for the human race!

Slylock Fox, 9/1/25

Um, actually, we know that those are Reeky’s pants he left behind because a janky thrift store with magic eight balls and VHS tapes displayed on the floor would never sell torn-up jeans; those are fashionable garments that can only be found in high-end boutiques.