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The Phantom, 3/20/25

The Phantom, it is my task to occasionally remind you, is actually a 22-generation long chain of fathers and sons who each take the role of the Ghost Who Walks in turn, who arrived in southern Africa from Europe back in [waves hands vaguely] the pirate era, and who have perpetuated themselves by continually sending away for European or European-descended brides. But one of the very long- and slow-running ongoing storylines in the strip is about how the current Phantom’s son Kit will probably be the first to break this chain of racial purity. He’s not going to marry one of the Bangallans that his family has lived among for centuries — let’s not go nuts — but will probably end up either with the local girl who’s mooning over him as he studies Phantom stuff (?) at a monastery in the Himalayas, or with Kadia Sahara, born the daughter of one of the Phantom’s longtime nemeses but now a foster daughter of the weird Walker clan. Anyway, the thing I like most about today’s strip is that container ship cruising by in the background as Kit’s sister Heloise, a Kadia partisan, boasts to her mother (via some kind of bespoke video messaging app, the screen branded with the Phantom’s famous skull mark) about the beach-based meet-cute she’s just arranged. The huge vessel reminds us that, despite all these superheroic breeding machinations, the quiet miracle of global commerce soldiers on.

Mary Worth, 3/20/25

Check out the contemplative way Dawn is regarding that apple in the second panel. Sure, she missed her musical duets with her dad while he was away; but now that she’s eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she realizes that inflicting Weston karaoke stylings on an innocent and unsuspecting public is wrong, and must be stopped for the good of mankind.

Pluggers, 3/20/25

Hi is experiencing a plugger-like loss of sex drive in middle age, but as his huge grin in panel two makes clear, he’s not mad about it at all! Remember when he was younger and got distracted by erotic feelings all the time? That ate up valuable time in which he could’ve been working on improving his short game! Thank god those days are behind him.

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Luann, 3/19/25

Looks like Luann’s 40th anniversary celebration is going to roll on all week, or maybe for the rest of the month, who even knows at this point, but today anyway real Luann heads are urged see the Luann 40th vid at LuannFan dot com, your source for Luann content on the World Wide Web. Do you want to watch some Luann vids? Huh? Do you want to watch Luann and some guy named “Phil” or whatever smooch chastely behind a clipboard while Tiffany watches them and cracks wise? Do you? Do you want to watch that? Are you a sick freak and that’s the sort of thing that gets you off? Well I guess you should go on over to LuannFan dot com, then, but don’t say you weren’t warned.

Andy Capp, 3/19/25

I of course rely on Andy Capp for all my up-to-the-minute information about British culture, so I’m intrigued to learn that that accursèd island’s most hardened criminals have given up on their former pursuits — knifecrime or ASBOs or what have you — and have instead embraced pub trivia fraud. Truly Charles III’s depraved dominion never rests when it comes to developing new forms of malice!

Dennis the Menace, 3/19/25

I genuinely love the absolutely blank expressions Dennis and Margaret are giving Mr. Wilson here. Sorry, George, that insult absolutely did not land, you should probably workshop it some more. Good thing you’ve got nothing but time on your hands!

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Crock, 3/18/25

I kind of admire the thought process that went into constructing the current installment of “The Men Of Outpost 5 Read Letters From One Of The Men’s Hillbilly Hometown.” Obviously, you have this great joke about how the one guy is a dumb hillbilly who may have mastered the mechanical art of tying a shoe but doesn’t understand how the process fits into the larger context, where you generally tie both your shoes at once. But what gets me is how they decided to set that punchline up. What if he’s prompted to reminisce on this subject because his beloved friend and mentor died? What if he’s in mourning? That sure adds a fun little twist to the gag!

Marvin, 3/18/25

Marvin, the comic strip, debuted in 1982, so if time flowed normally for its cursèd inhabitants, then Marvin, the character, would be in his early 40s, and his parents would have long ago forgotten his awful infancy, which only lasted a couple of years, after all, or at least they would have sanded down the edges in constant retelling into a “we can laugh about it now” situation. But time doesn’t flow normally, and Marvin will remain a baby forever, and his parents will neither know the escape of him growing up nor ever truly get used to the horror. Thus the exclamation points in the second panel here: while this is the sort of bad behavior we expect from this terrible child, his parents are forever shocked anew, each psychic wound inflicted never healing into protective scar tissue.

Pluggers, 3/18/25

Pluggers long ago lost the ability to feel sexual arousal. But products? Well, pluggers sure do love a good product — looking at them, assessing them, trying to figure out how much they cost, then either nodding their head at a good price or shaking their heads at how expensive things are these days. They still have those pleasures, at least, even though others have long passed them by.

B.C. and Wizard of Id, 3/18/25

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the courting mores of modern times were mapped onto a previous era — the Stone Age, say, or a vaguely medieval period that also had magic in it? Well, today’s B.C. and Wizard of Id have the answers for you, my friends!