Comment of the Week

What I love about The Phantom is it will happily take a break from a storyline about an alien on a private jet from Guantanamo blowing up a warlord's brain with magic TikTok to give us a very specific kink scene where a shirtless man in a cage is taunted by a scantily-clad bongo player. I call this fetish 'bondage at Lilith Fair.’

Schroduck

Post Content

If you’re in the U.S., you’re heading into a three-day weekend, and how better to celebrate than the comments of the week?

“What I love about The Phantom is it will happily take a break from a storyline about an alien on a private jet from Guantanamo blowing up a warlord’s brain with magic TikTok to give us a very specific kink scene where a shirtless man in a cage is taunted by a scantily-clad bongo player. I call this fetish ‘bondage at Lilith Fair.’” –Schroduck

And your runners up? You’d better believe they’re hilarious.

The Tommy Beedie I know wouldn’t apologize for his actions — he must be on drugs or something!” –Bob Tice

“I’m intrigued by the sharp yellow isosceles triangles emanating from the cars in the final panel. What exactly do they signify? ‘Surprise and confusion at the sudden lack of power to the traffic lights,’ you might say, and perhaps you’re right. But I prefer my own theory, based on the similar shapes surrounding the conflagrations in the second panel of the middle row: without electricity supplying the powerful Morphogenic Field Generator that keeps the city population physically stable, the citizens of Neo-Chicago has started spontaneously exploding, caking the inside of their vehicles with gore and viscera. (You may not have known that such a machine was necessary, but Dick’s rogues’ gallery of grotesques is proof that the human shape is tenuous at best in this universe.)” –Vulpes

“The city’s experiment with intersections that have neither traffic lights nor stop signs isn’t looking so stupid now. See, even during a power outage it works exactly as well as normal!” –Peanut Gallery

“Tommy’s takeaway: chicks don’t dig the short hair. Starts wearing a wig. Busted as a suspected drug dealer as he steps out of the Eva Gabor shop on Santa Royale’s main strip.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“You know the Bald-Hairy theory of Russian leadership succession? The Mary Worth Hair theory seems to be that a man’s quantity and quality of hair correlates with his success in life, with the yacht-owning Dr. Jeff being the ideal. Too little hair, like Wilbur, and you’re a narcissistic needy schlub. Too much, like Tommy’s old hair, and you’re a drugged-out felon. With the latter‘s current hair length, he may have a tiny taste of success but might still sample weed once in a while. ‘Can you trim it just above the ears? I’m hoping to buy a Lexus.’” –Tonio

“There are five distinct stages of grief in coping with Heathcliff. Here, we see Anger and Acceptance. Trust me, you don’t want to see Bargaining.” –Joe Blevins

“Heathcliff is a criminal, so is his father, so is his sister. I wanted to play the edgelord and say we should reconsider eugenics, but then I remembered that sterilizing cats is not controversial at all.” –Ettorre

“Things finally break Lonnie’s way when he gets thrown out before he can pay his bill.” –Hibbleton

“The dialogue says ‘protective love interest spoiling for a fight’ and ‘cowardly antagonist trying to back out of a confrontation’ but the facial expressions say ‘informing someone their car is parked in a delivery zone and needs to be moved’ and ‘annoyed by latest in a string of minor inconveniences.’” –TheDiva

“A key skill for an extortionist is knowing when to quit. Glumly hanging around the scene of a failed extortion racket is a real rookie error.” –AndyL

“Well, no, Brandy didn’t technically break up with me. She just went on a trip. But she will break up with me once she learns I’ve told you all this!” –Nevin, on Patreon

“I like how Chicken Lady doesn’t seem sad or defeated, she’s concentrating on strategy. ‘If I make base camp on the landing I should be able to reach the bedroom by tomorrow afternoon.’” –pugfuggly

“Anthony screwed up so bad that his hairstyle changed. Also, he’s trying to drown himself.” –Lauralot

“What’s impressive about Chatu’s physique isn’t that he’s had the self-discipline to maintain it — I mean, what else are are you going to do when you’ve been extrajudicially imprisoned in an open-air, 8-foot by 8-foot cage, wearing the same pair of jeans for 17 years, except body-weight and isometric exercises — rather, what’s impressive is that the Wambesi have apparently been feeding him, what 3500, 3600 calories a day with at least 250 grams of protein?” –Charterstone: Dune

Foodify doesn’t play entire songs… Ha ha ha, no! That costs money! They just play the lyrics that are even vaguely food related, like ‘Yummy yummy yummy’ from the eponymous hit from The Archies. For songs with no lyrics? Don’t worry, the guy who is running the whole thing from his basement will pop in and announce the title because whoever is writing Blondie thinks Spotify works just like radio.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“The funny thing is that, for once, this comic accidentally came close to real relevancy, since Meta and their privacy-violating glasses have come back into the news again. ‘Uh-oh,’ the Intelligent Life editors said to one another, ‘Today’s strip is dangerously under threat of being actually topical, and the hedge fund that owns our syndicate isn’t going to allow that type of thought-provoking examination for their products. Better end it on a pop culture references so hoary that even the fucking Keane kids beat us to the punch on it to ease the tension.’” –2+2=7

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! You can get each day’s post ad-free via Patreon if that’s your style! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar! Thanks to all for your support and readership!

Post Content

Blondie, 5/22/26

The sad thing here is that Alexander and Cookie can’t actually hear what Dagwood is jamming out to. Sure, we readers are privy to the truly gross stuff he’s streaming, but they’re just assuming, and even though they’re right they shouldn’t jump to such a harsh conclusion. “Wow, Daddy’s really working his earbuds” seems particularly disrespectful for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.

Intelligent Life, 5/22/26

Gwen’s expression in the final panel here … is that a sex thing? Is “Pokemon Go” a euphemism for sex, among the dork-ass nerds of Intelligent Life? I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all!

Post Content

Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/21/26

OK, I guess I respect the Mother Goose and Grimm entries where the strip remembers that part of its remit is doing riffs on fairytales, and I guess I count the public domain monsters that Universal Studios has been intermittently trying to turn into a “Dark Universe” franchise for more than a decade as being in the same ballpark as fairytale characters, but nothing about this works. Like having Dracula (I mean that could be any vampire, I guess, but you get it) ask this question makes sense superficially but honestly I feel like it raises more questions than it answers. Is he mad about this or is that just his face? Why are they hanging out together in the first place? And his question is legitimate! And it doesn’t get a good answer! And is that just a regular human lady waitress, like does she work at a lunch counter specifically for monsters or does she just have blood on tap for the regulars? And why isn’t Frankenstein’s monster doing the “Me take cup blood!”-type diction? And why does Dracula say “why” when he clearly should be saying “vhy?”

Crankshaft, 5/21/26

Sorry I got so worked up there, but since I’m already worked up, I might as well break my silence on the fact that Crankshaft has descended into endless interviews with transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas.” Normally I’d let this indulgence slide without comment but now they’re showing “Batton’s” characters from his “Three O’Clock High” strip like Harry Dinkle, who has already migrated to the current iteration of Crankshaft! We’re in danger of tearing through the walls of the Funkyverse, and I think the time-travelling janitor who arranged for Summer Moore to save humanity needs to pop through a portal here and execute everyone involved Terminator-style before it’s too late.

The Phantom, 5/21/26

Hey, remember Chatu, the infamous Python, the Phantom’s other big antagonist, the one who isn’t Eric Sahara, the infamous Nomad? Well, Chatu has just been kind of chilling in this cage since 2009 or so but, like the Nomad, it seems like he’s about to re-enter the story. Maybe we’ll get a Nomad/Python teamup that will be strong enough to defeat the Phantom once and for all! Or maybe they’ll just realize that the Ghost Who Walks takes up way too much of their mental energy and they’ll simply go do some low-level crimes that won’t attract his attention and leave him be.

Curtis, 5/21/26

A thing that I really love about Curtis is that it’s a strip that’s not afraid to get a little weird with it. The kids gave their teacher a cake for the last day of school, but whoops, the box is full of rats! Lots and lots of rats! What an amusingly odd scenario.