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Hi and Lois, 10/20/24

It’s a bold choice to have Hi and Lois make direct eye contact with you, the reader, in the final panel here. This isn’t just a cute domestic scene; it’s a polemical tract, tailored to urge all of us to not be so quick to “tidy” that we purge beloved memories of our past. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t read this before I spent a lot of time and energy reorganizing my closet a couple weekends ago, as I’d probably still have a bunch of shirts I never wear hanging up in there. “Let’s leave it! It’s a time capsule!” I’d tell my increasingly irritated wife.

Family Circus, 10/20/24

The Family Circus’ bread and butter is what I like to call “darndest thing saying,” which is the Keane Kids trying to explain some aspect of the world or talk like a smart adult but fucking it up very badly, due to idiocy. However, today’s installment makes a fatal misstep, because one of the darndest things they say is actually correct! We really do call autumn “fall” because of falling leaves — in fact, the original phrase was “fall of the leaf.” Does Billy, like me, spend his time entertaining himself exploring word origins on the Online Etymology Dictionary site? If so, he probably enjoyed learning that “autumn” comes to us from Latin but may ultimately have an Etruscan root, and that there is in fact no common Indo-European word for the period between summer and winter, which may imply that the steppe herders of the proto-Indo European urheimat did not perceive it as a distinct season.

Mary Worth, 10/20/24

I think Wilbur has finally hit his logical endpoint as a character: he has become the human embodiment of rock bottom. The prospect of marrying him is so vile and horrifying as to make literally any alternate scenario seem preferable. The middle panel in the bottom row comes from Estelle’s fictional dreamscape, but I assume it will haunt your very real nightmares tonight, as it will mine.