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.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 8/31/25

Yes, Olive, you “saw” that she was struggling in the water, with your “eyes,” as she was immediately in “front” of you as you stood on the beach just a few “yards” away from her. Note also that Olive is implying heavily that she had pity on Vicki, the least bad of the bully gang. If it had been Naomi, that girl would be smugly rolling her eyes on the ocean floor right now. You notice they’re quoting John 15:13 and not Matthew 5:44!

Heathcliff, 8/31/25

Much as I enjoy seeing Surf Mummy in action, I must be a pedant here and object to the way he apparently sinks into the earth. If he were the disembodied spirit of a dead Egyptian prince, then I would accept this depiction of his return to the Duat, the land of the dead. However, as a physical mummy, he should instead be shown returning to his sarcophagus, whether that’s inside a pyramid or in some rock-cut tomb in the Nile Valley, then drawing the lid closed behind him.