How to check for changes on remote (origin) Git repository

Question

What are the Git commands to do the following workflow?

Scenario

I cloned from a repository and did some commits of my own to my local reposit

Answer 1

I simply use

git fetch origin

to fetch the remote changes, and then I view both local and pending remote commits (and their associated changes) with the nice gitk tool involving the --all argument like:

gitk --all