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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.

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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.

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Hagar the Horrible, 8/30/25

Look, despite the fun (“fun”) I have here detailing all the anachronisms in Hagar the Horrible, I do in fact get that the anachronisms are the point of the strip, that it’s not a realistic historical drama but rather a comedy where half of its whole deal is “What if these Vikings acted like modern middle-class people sometimes?” But I feel like to pull this off you do need to maintain a narrative unity just within an individual strip, whereas today’s installment is all over the map. Hagar napping in a hammock in his fenced suburban yard? Sure, why not. Hagar interacting with some culture that uses smoke signals for communication, like Native Americans or medieval Italians? Fine, Vikings actually encountered both groups. But put the two together and it’s a mess. A mess, I say! Are we to believe that Hagar lives in Newfoundland or Apulia now? I don’t buy it!

Mary Worth, 8/30/25

Wow, Mary spends weeks gushing about how unique Olive is and all the special gifts she has, and then the girl does one little reincarnation fantasy at the Met and all of the sudden Mary’s like “Damn, this kid is a weirdo. Those bullies were right!”