The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comment of the Week

Pinocchio holds his own control bars aloft and finally earns his therapist's approval despite the obvious fact that the physics of the whole situation -- just like the original 'lifting oneself by one's bootstraps' -- are quite impossible. He is no Aristotelian unmoved mover. Pinocchio knows this; he has grimly resigned himself to a performative dance of supposed self-determination to avoid the smug nagging of those around him.

—hurricanenate
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Big news Friday

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Beetle Bailey, 8/21/26

Big news, everyone! The men of Camp Swampy have finally decided to murder Sarge!

Daddy Daze, 8/21/26

Big news, everyone! The Daddy Daze daddy and the Daddy Daze baby are going to die in some kind of fiery car disaster!

Dennis the Menace, 8/21/26

Lots of strips have managed to shift focus over the years, even minimizing their title character: Blondie is really more about Dagwood now, Funky Winkerbean became a second banana in his own strip to Les Moore of all people, and Barney Google famously became Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and then Barney Google vanished from it for a good chunk of the 20th century. And sure, the remaining comics all have decades more of nostalgia built into them now and are less malleable in the public mind, but Dennis the Menace definitely seems to be making a bid to be about unpleasant interactions between Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, like it’s a Lockhorns for seniors, or an edgier Pickles. Sure, for the time being, they have to have Dennis frolicking somewhere in the panel, but soon, well, here’s the big news, everyone: get ready for Hank Ketcham’s Legal Heirs Present: The Wilsons! Featuring Dennis “The Menace” Mitchell.

151

Good faces

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Pardon My Planet, 8/20/26

OK, here’s a sentence that I’m reasonably sure I’ve never written before, and probably nobody else has either: I’m actually enjoying the art in Pardon My Planet today. Specifically, I love how incredibly exhausted the girlfriend character (the Pardon My Planet gang may have names, but I steadfastly refuse to learn them) looks. How long has her boyfriend been nattering on with this nonsense? Hours? She doesn’t have to get ready for school either, but she does have to get up in the morning. She just wants to sleep, damn it! She just wants to sleep!

The Lockhorns, 8/20/26

Speaking of comic panel faces I’m enjoying, I’m enjoying Leroy’s boss’s face here. Specifically, I enjoy how mad he looks. He’s not one of those LinkedIn influencer execs bragging about replacing his workers with AI! No, he’s discovered that AI is slowly and silently replacing his workers one by one, right under his nose … and there’s nothing he can do about it. You can’t even test to see if someone’s a robot anymore, according to the killjoys in HR!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/20/26

No, Attila, it’s a joke! You’re a character in a comic strip, where ostensibly there’s a joke every day! I say “ostensibly” because the specific comic strip you’re in is Mother Goose and Grimm, but still, you should know this.

157

Ominous developments

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Crankshaft, 8/19/26

The last time Crankshaft and Harry Dinkle started an adventure together, Crankshaft looked real cherry but it ended up with Harry confronting the truly depressing circumstances of his father’s death. Now Ed has shown up at his place of work to drag him off on some other journey and he looks pissed, so maybe this time will turn out to be more fun for Harry, or maybe Crankshaft has just decided to murder him and put him out of his misery.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/19/26

At one point the scam twins were thinking about kidnapping a child, but then they realized that would not only get them in a lot of trouble, but also make this strip dangerously exciting, so now they’re trying to negotiate down to an acceptable level of plot development. I love the idea that squatting is too much of a commitment to bother doing. Like, most people squat just because that means they get to live someplace for free, but in the Twins’ conception, they’d be squatting for revenge, which means they’d have to stick around even if it turns out that the Morgan house has bad vibes or is unpleasant to be inside (it definitely does and is).

Beetle Bailey, 8/19/26

Hey, General, I just want to point out that the U.S. has fought in, like, several wars in the time that you’ve been an officer. Heck, there’s one going on right now! I know what you mean is that you want to have been in one of the cool ones, not the cringe wars we keep finding ourselves in lately, but still, I feel like you shouldn’t be quite so vocal on this point at the office if you don’t want to find yourself abruptly in the field.