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Blondie, 7/27/25

The Blondie creative team has never met a young person that it didn’t want to call a lazy sack of shit, but … I kept waiting for this strip’s punchline to be “Napping and playing video games at work? This nepo baby is just like me for real!” but somehow it never happens. I guess the whole thing could be a subtle joke, but nothing about Blondie in general or today’s installment in particular, which includes the normal English phrase “urban expression,” has ever made it seem like the strip is capable of subtlety.

Mary Worth, 7/27/25

Some claim that New York is the so-called “Greatest City In The World,” but Mary, despite her professed love of the place, has on previous visits already encountered two of its greatest dangers: the criminals who lurk in the city parks and shove innocent bystandards with no warning, and the reckless drivers who speed into pedestrians as they innocently step into the street. Now we must add a third member to this unholy trinity: air conditioning units that simply rain down from the windows of New York’s famously tall buildings, killing dozens a year. Anyway, Olive is thinking about the challenges that come with her gifts, which is a weird setup to her using her gifts to save Mary from a certain bludgeoning death, seemingly without any challenges at all. Unless maybe this wasn’t a use of her psychic powers, but instead she just heard the classic Big Apple “Eyyyy! I’m droppin’ an air conditioning unit outta my window ovah here!” Only in New York, baybee! Amiright folks?

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Family Circus, 7/22/25

I frankly am not a fan of the smug looks on Jeffy and Big Daddy Keane’s faces here. Oh, you think it’s funny to contemplate how terrifying it might be to be trapped on a boat with your primary prey animals, and if you fail to keep clear of them you risk not just your death but the complete extermination of your species? I bet Noah’s family had some pretty comical encounters with wolves and grizzly bears and such, but I don’t see you laffing it up about those.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/22/25

There’s a debate to be had over whether it’s acceptable to use a joke you saw in an email forward or Facebook meme in the nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip you’re being paid to create, and whether the fact that the joke is bird-related is significant in a strip where many of the characters are themselves birds. However, we already had that debate four months ago, when Mother Goose and Grimm ran this exact same punchline. They redrew the art, which is … something, I guess?

Beetle Bailey, 7/22/25

Don’t worry, folks. If America is invaded, we’ll be quickly defended by our crack division of … bed troops? Oh dear.

Mary Worth, 7/22/25

Is Mary copping a feel in that first panel? Is Ed going in for a “soul handshake”? What on Earth is happening

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Garfield, 7/19/25

True comics internet oldheads remember Garfield Minus Garfield, a webcomic that, as the title implied, took daily Garfield comics in which Jon and Garfield interacted and simply removed Garfield from them. This became a minor internet sensation back in 2008, and apparently tickled Jim Davis so much that it became an officially licensed book. That was many years ago, and I hope I don’t sound churlish when I say that the concept never really worked for me because it seemed slightly off. Surely the joke should not be that Jon is alone and talking to nobody; Garfield should remain in the frame but his thought balloons should be removed, to show us the “real” world where Jon is just a depressed and/or deranged man talking to his cat, who, like all cats, cannot understand him or talk back. Today’s strip is a great example of why that would work. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” says Jon, with absolutely no joy in his eyes, before staring at his cat for two panels in absolute silence.

Mary Worth, 7/19/25

21st century commercial air travel is, in terms of deaths or injuries per mile, the safest form of transportation humankind has ever produced. I guess it’s slightly more dangerous than simply staying at home and sitting absolutely still, so technically Mary isn’t wrong when she says it’s “a privilege and also a risk,” but she is being extremely overdramatic. She’s also referring to flying coach via Denver to New York City, a place she’s visited at least twice before, as “explor[ing] the unknown,” so she’s really on one today, I guess.

Dustin, 7/19/25

Helen is clearly used to Ed not specifying that he wants his bacon crispy and then complaining when he gets it and it’s not crispy, so she intervenes in panel one here, hoping that their waitress will not in fact hate them by the end of the meal. By panel three we can already see her effort was in vain.