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Well, well, well … looks like it’s that time again … comment of the week time, that is:

“I, for one, always type my scam emails with my fingers held beyond the keyboard itself. Palm-typing, I call it. I make a lot of typos, but that’s unrelated.” –Lauralot

Also time for these hilarious runners up!

“They’re not removing their glasses for comfort. They want to be sure they don’t accidentally see each other.” –Nevin, on Patreon

“I was looking forward to Rustic Romance. But, depending on how desperate Lorna is to keep incognito, I could settle for Homespun Homicide.” –MKay

“I’m sorry, I’m not buying that ‘Fergus Murphy’ and ‘Mae Mae Clodfelter’ are from the same town or whatever. Pick a down-home, banjo-pluckin’ rural background and run with it, you can’t do Co. Kerry and West Virginia.” –Dan

“Henrietta. Get yourself to the best chicken doctor around. If your rhamphotheca is that rubbery, you’re at high risk of necrosis of the periosteum. Do you want to lose your upper and lower mandibles?” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“In happier times, Loretta used to joke that if she replaced the bread tag with a twist tie, then Leroy would starve to death. Yet now, years later, she can’t even find satisfaction in being proven right.” –Guts Dozier

“Anyway, it turns out fleas really like these big antique oak drawing boards and will pay top dollar. They use them for parade grounds, combat exercises, and basic training camps. Not sure why they’re readying themselves for conquest. Also not sure where they’re getting their dollars, but they spend just as good as any other blood-stained buck.” –Voshkod

“Power move of Thirsty to wait until they both got to the office to tell Hi this.” –matt w

“Head count? Complete heads or pieces as well?! Ha, I kid, but seriously, I think we just committed a war crime out there.” –pugfuggly

“Is this supposed to be an episode of sci-fi where we feel sympathy for a child who will never grow up because she realizes that there might be a more sinister aspect to what she perceives as a friendly beam of light from a sun in the early stages of going nova? That, or two dull suburbanites discussing setting the thermostat? I’m going with the former.” –Hibbleton

“I hate today’s strip for two reasons — first, for being so weird that I felt compelled to look back to work out what the hell is going on (Why is everyone writing on paper and talking about what type of animal they are? Why is R.E.A.R. stamped on the book cover? Are they playing some weird furry sex version of D&D?), and secondly for being a complete letdown when I actually went back to check. It’s so dull I’m not even going to bother explaining it, which is not how you should describe the set-up to the phrase ‘I’m a Neon-Cliff-Fox and I’m good at rappelling!’” –Schroduck

“‘That loud machine is interfering with my enjoyment of all the loud machines’ is certainly … what’s above a first-world problem?” –Vice President John Adams

“Where’s your leaf blower? I’ve got a better question: How come you have what appears to be a half-car garage?” –Weaselboy

“There’s no project. This dude just sets up that table and laptop and spouts vague work vernacular. It’s always encouraging, though. How did he know Alice’s name? Oh, he knows all the names. Like a muffin?” –A Grave Mind

“‘What turned you around?’ ‘Oh, that’s a long story. And it’s about to get even longer!’” –Bob Tice

“I’ve always assumed that, in keeping with its art style, Alice was always meant to be some sort of vague, unsettling, Eastern-European version of expressionist morality play. If we were to continue following this particular episode, we’d see Alice retreat into her office, with her name and a job title like ‘Happiness Injector’ on a plaque, only to find her inside vivisecting kittens while off-key circus music plays in the background. As the camera dollies closer to her, she’d pause, look at the audience, and say, ‘Well, where did you think marshmallows came from?’ as the image dissolves into a clip of an atomic bomb exploding.” –Glarryg

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/20/26

One of the special interest rabbit holes I’ve gone down in the past few years is the history of the composition of the Bible, and I’ve become particularly fascinated by the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, which is one theory (though by no means the only accepted one) about how the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) were put together. Joel Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch has what’s probably the most recently formulated version of it, which goes something like this: at some point after the Judean elite returned from the Babylonian exile, some scholar or scholars took four different source documents that told different versions of the stories of the creation of the universe and the early history of the Hebrews, and edited them together into a single narrative. This editing consisted of meticulously figuring out how the different episodes could be strung together chronologically without creating discrepancies like characters dying and then coming back to life, though as you would expect, it still creates a lot of puzzling results. (For instance, Baden demonstrates that the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is really difficult to follow because it’s actually three somewhat contradictory stories mashed together.)

Anyway, here’s what’s to me the funniest aspect of this. The first four books of the Torah, covering the creation of the world, the legendary arrival of Abraham’s family in Canaan, their descendants’ enslavement in Egypt, and their descendants’ escape and wandering in the desert, were created by interweaving three different sources, called J, E, and P by scholars, together. There’s a fourth source, D, that covers much of the same narrative territory. But D, as originally written, had a literary framing device: on the last day of the Exodus, just before the Hebrews cross into the Promised Land, Moses stands before the multitude and recaps for them the history of the Hebrews and the laws that they received. And because the editors are so single-minded on keeping things chronological, this recap (the book of Deuteronomy) is placed at the very end of the story, so the effect of reading the edited version is that you read the whole thing and then you get a retelling at the end, which differs in quite a few details from the earlier versions of it you’ve already read!

So, sorry for the long digression, but what I’m wondering here is: are we going to get a full-on retelling of the fake self-help Mirakle Method story, from Mud’s point of view? Will it differ in subtle but meaningful ways from the 2023-2024 strips that laid it out in the first place? Is Rex Morgan, M.D., being pieced together from ancient texts, and will this act of scholarship cause a worldwide religious transformation over the next few centuries? Stay tuned!

Family Circus, 3/20/26

That went, uh, very off the rails and I apologize to those who were bewildered by it. Hey, you know what I hope doesn’t serve as the beginning of a new religion any time soon? This Family Circus panel where Jeffy is ranting about how “shadows don’t have faces.” It’s creepy and I don’t like it! Stop talking about the faceless shadows, Jeffy!

Alice, 3/20/26

You know, I’ve never been really clear on what Alice’s job is, but this strip forces me to confront a harrowing question on that subject: whatever it is, is it possible that she’s good at it? I will be taking most of the weekend to dwell on this with increasing unease.

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Mary Worth, 3/19/26

Say what you will about the evil gangs that are keeping “Trixie” captive in a Cambodian compound, but you have to respect that they let their enslaved workers customize their laptop’s UI. Going to a no-distraction, all-text screen for chatting with a mark really helps you get into the zone, you know? Like you can get into your character’s headspace and try to figure out what she might say that will ring true and also separate your victim from his money. Unfortunately, “Trixie” seems to have botched it: Harvey’s facial expression looks less like “Oh no! I must hurry to the nearest Western Union, post-haste!” and more “Hmm … devastating injury … perhaps a lifetime of impaired mobility … this is not aligning with my acrobatic sex plans for when we meet up … who else is out there on this app, I wonder?”

Gearhead Gertie, 3/19/26

Look, I don’t want to say that there’s only so many jokes you can make in a recurring comic panel that is committed to only doing jokes about NASCAR. I’m just saying that today we got to “You know what can interfere with your enjoyment of NASCAR? Your neighbor’s leaf blower. What if there was someone who loved NASCAR so much … that she did something about it,” which, honestly, having typed that out, I actually think is pretty good. I hope we go further down this road. Gertie will stop at nothing to remove all distractions from her monomania! She will leave a trail of dead behind her, you must remain silent at all times