Friday consternation
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Garfield, 3/21/25
Not sure if the implication here is that flies go into some kind of suspended animation over the winter upon being frozen then reawaken in the spring (only to be eaten by spiders), or if this particular spider has been stashing fly corpses outside all winter and can now enjoy eating them after the spring thaw. Either one is honestly pretty distasteful, and also scientifically inaccurate!
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/21/25
Remember, while Tater is the Smifs’ biological child, Jughaid is their nephew, which makes it all the more disturbing that he refers to the family mule as “Aunt Sukey.” Are we to understand that he considers Sukey to be a sibling to one of his caregivers? Or, worse, do Sukey, Snuffy, and Loweezy constitute a throuple?
Curtis, 3/21/25
I’m sorry, Greg, but your tween son asking to use your credit card to buy an umbrella as a gift for his wealthy crush is a perfectly insane scenario! What child would even think of such a thing? The fact that it’s an expensive fancy English umbrella is the least of what’s going on here! I declare this whole situation to be not very reasonable at all, actually.
91 replies to “Friday consternation”
BGSS: The Smith Family Tree is one hell of a GMO between the inbreeding and whatever dark secret conspired between a man and a donkey.
MW: At least Kate Gosselin finds the Westoncest funny rather than nauseating.
SS&BG:
“Don’t let no one push you ‘roun’, Jughaid!!”
“Wait a minute. Don’t that double negative mean that I should let someone push me ‘roun’ ?”
Garfield /steps into blank beige space/ “Ah, spring, probably.”
BGSS “My strategy is to make myself so repulsive that no-one would want to push or even touch me!”
Curtis Ha, kids these days. Always buying expensive umbrellas for each other. I guess that Farnsworth Bentley aesthetic is back in..
BG&SS: A throuple? Mules are sterile. So no harm, no foul, I guess.
BG&SS:
“Say, when’s that Henry Higgins feller gonna come ‘roun’ here and teach us howta talk proper, Uncle Snuffy?”
“We’re gwin be runnin’ ‘roun’ when he shows up, Jughaid, ’cause he’s gwin be teachin’ us frenetics!”
@Hibbleton:
#4. A throuple is ok only if Aunt Sukey is aware of the offer and has the capacity to consent. (Impossible in real life, but maybe in comics)
MW: Anyone who saw Wilbur and Belle canoodling in Cancun had to conclude that Wilbur was one wealthy hombre.
RMMD: “There’s an unconscious Delivery Dash guy in the bushes, but that has nothing to do with us. Everything’s fine.”
CURTIS: Kids that age tramp through snow storms in shorts and sandals. An umbrella would be like a museum artifact.
@Activist: In Hootin’ Holler, I wouldn’t be surprised if Aunt Sukey was actually the town treasurer.
Pluggers: Pluggers will disfigure themselves to extend the life of something that costs 40 cents.
MW: I predicted that a woman named “Belle” would be 33 or younger. I did not predict that she would be a cousin of Beavis and Butt-Head.
CS: Even when he’s explicitly asked to talk about himself, “Batton Thomas” would rather talk about comic book covers.
SS: “Aunt Sukey” appears to have some Billy goat ancestry, which is just an everyday blasphemy in Hootin Holler, I suppose.
The real reason that Snuffy Smith refuses to fill out a form for the revenoo is that they don’t have a box under Marital Status for “It’s complicated”.
Between “Garfield” and “Curtis,” someone must have gotten the memo that this is Fly Day Friday
MW: Wow, Batts Belfrey is even more of a mess than she first appeared to be. Maybe this will be good!
Oh, right. Being that this is Mary Worth, it won’t be good.
@Banana Jr. 6000: She kinda would fit the part of Beavis’ mom…by which I mean she’s the kind of person who would get in bed with anyone who gives her $5. Or in her case, a box of wine and a pack of Virginia Slims.
I mused that this Garfield would make a perfect Garfield Minus Garfield, then realized it would be trivially easy to do myself. https://imgur.com/a/Fm83qww
@astroboy: What, you thought a woman who willingly knocked uglies with Wilbur would be normal? It also seems like she sobered up and is trying to laugh off what happened in Cancun because she’s this close to bursting into tears or projectile vomiting.
Apparently Jim Davis hates Fridays as much as Garfield hates Mondays. And by “Fridays,” I mean “his audience, his artistic creation, and presumably life itself.”
@Kevin Miller: I’d give it an 8/10. Gave me a good chuckle.
Snuffy thinks he’s setting a good example? That’s like three chapters in someone’s dissertation on the intergenerational perpetuation of Appalachian poverty.
MW: Is this plot going to be that Wilbur neglects spending time with Dawn to fool around with Kate Gosselin? Because you cannot expect me to believe that, even with all her many failings, Dawn would react to less Wilbur with anything other than elation.
Curtis: Gregg brings home an umbrella from the lost and found at his job and tells Curtis he ordered it from Harrods. Curtis makes a big production out of it when he gives Michelle the gift in front of her friends.
She opens the present and exclaims; “This is the umbrella my mom lost at the DMV! How did you find it? Thank you so much. (kisses him on the cheek)”
All’s well that ends well.
RMMD: “There he stood, between me and the couch. Augie, staring out at me with his yellow eyes. He had yellow eyes! So help me God, yellow eyes.”
Curtis: What look do you give someone who swallowed a fly? I can’t think of any look associated with that. You’re too busy finding a spider to catch the fly to waste time staring.
RMMD: Let me guess. The delivery driver will end up being Goatee McStalkerface.
Garfield: Does this strip look low resolution because I just woke up, or has everyone involved in its creation and posting simply stopped trying?
@Hibbleton: No fowl, either, except for the ones Snuffy steals.
@Lauralot: That is an artifact of whatever process Josh used to acquire the image. The original is much sharper.
MW – The Westons and their love lives are the new Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. We all know what is going to happen, but we can’t look away.
I’m not buying Greg replying “That sounds reasonable” after Curtis requests to borrow his credit card. The proper response is a panel of Greg moaning about kids today and high prices.
A fly? One of several common insects from the order Diptera?!
@Needless Exposition: Well, that would explain why she hooked up with Wilbur. He does have $5 to spare, and will spend it on floozies. Also, adult Beavis kinda looks like Belle and Wilbur could be his parents.
Garfield: Honestly, the most distasteful bit about this is the rhythm. A spondee followed by three thudding iambic pentameters? At least have the decency to create a complete decasyllabic verse, you hacks!
@Lauralot: I don’t think Moy knows whether Dawn is either a promiscuous college coed or a bratty fifteen year old.
@Banana Jr. 6000: You’re not wrong about that. Though Beavis somehow still has better hair than both of them and Dawn combined regardless of age.
Garfield – Does Garfield even go outside? I don’t read this strip regularly, but it feels like it 99% the characters standing behind the table and going through the dozen tired old bits about Mondays, lasagna, or whatever sells coffee mugs.
BGSS – The Smith’s don’t get pushed around, but Snuffy does get chased down plenty by Sheriff Tait.
Curtis – Cartoonist Ray Billingsley overspent when he was on vacation in London, but his savvy accountant said he could write some of it off as research expenses if he included specific examples in his strip. Expect more leading up to April 15th
Popeye:
“Dear freind Ms Oyl
Please let me introduct myself. I am a Nigerian king and I want to marrying you. Please send me $10000 so I can bribe officials to get you a visa and to buy a palace for us. Thank.”
Garfield, the cat and the strip (but not the president), has always had a regressive attitude toward spiders. Killing them is one of the only things that gives the titular orange feline joy. With this in mind, I’m guessing the strip was trying to be gross.
“Maggots are hatching” is the phrase they were groping for. Way grosser and more accurate.
Does today’s Pluggers fall under “Pluggers are cheap” or “Pluggers are morons”?
MW: The plot thins.
////
Bizarro and Iggy are pretty good today.
If you live with two jackasses, Jughaid, it’s understandable to assume they’re related. One would hope you’d think it’s by birth, but you do live in the world of Barney Google and Stereotype Smith.
***
Huh. On Harrods dot com they do sell umbrellas and they are unreasonably expensive. Maybe you should buy one anyway, Greg, then get another one from a regular store and tell your son he can give one as a gift if he can tell you which is the ridiculously priced item that will break just as easily as the other.
In the spring a young cat’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love;
Except for Garfield, in whose face lasagna is oft shove.
Garfield: I always enjoyed the spider-based installments of Garfield back when the comic was actually funny, so it hurts to see they’ve become just as toothless and lazy as the rest of the strip.
Snuffy Smith: The Smiths’ horses are drawn like cutesy cartoon critters while their mule is drawn like some kind of evil hellspawn version of them, which is extremely zoologically accurate in my experience.
Curtis: “Though I’m not sure if that was in reference to what I said or the aneurism.”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV:
I doff my hat to this, sirrah
MW: Look out Dawn! “Belle” (Kate Gosselin’s big comeback role) is a competitive karaoke singer! You’ve got Freudian competition!
More like Flyday Consternation, Josh, amirite?
MW: (Missing second panel, after Belle finds out Wilbur wants to see her again.) Hello, Pan Am? (Pan Am is still flying, in the Worthiverse) What’s the next flight to anywhere?
Garfield: Spiders can suspend themselves from their own thoughts? That’s … a lot to process, honestly.
Snuffy: I think Snuffy’s pose in panel three is modeled on a poster of Michael Jordan everyone had in the ’90s.
Curtis: Who are you talking to, Curtis? Me? I’m not even there. Don’t try to rope me into your nonsense.
@Needless Exposition: Now that I think of it, adult Butt-Head looks a lot more like the offspring of Belle and Wilbur than Beavis does. Adult Butt-Head is fat and balding. Beavis seems to have gotten more of Belle’s DNA. He has good hair, and slightly better people skills. But he’s actually dumber than Butt-Head, something I suspect we’ll find is true of Belle also.
During this story arc, I will be imagining all of Belle’s lines in Beavis’ voice. Heh heh, that would be cool.
JP: Sophie, you’re an heiress with computer hacking skills well beyond what your uni degree would point to, why do you care about the crap job market? You are perfectly positioned to take some unpaid/poorly-paid internship-esque job just to make hoity-toity connections to use in the future
Meanwhile, Curtis will get permission to buy one of those 35$ Harrods-print low-end-for-them umbrellas (but probably just as good as the 20-30$ Totes you’d find at the mall) only to have Michelle sneer at it as something a bumpkin would get as a souvenir
@Rube: #37: Both, plus you can probably add pluggers are poor.
MW: something is going to happen at the karaoke bar. I’m honestly not sure what but something bizarre will happen.
@Cleveland Mocks:
Bizarro gave me a chuckle. I’m looking forward to future albums like Whom’s Next, and Whom Are Thou
BGSS: “Aunt Sukey” implies that she’s Snuffy or Loweezy’s sibling, which implies that they have a horse and/or a donkey for a direct ancestor, which is probably par for the course in Hooten Holler, really.
C’shaft: Greg, parenting pro tip: any request from your elementary school age child that begins with “can I borrow your credit card” is by its nature not reasonable.
Curtis: I don’t know how Curtis would have swallowed a fly, considering he can apparently speak without opening his mouth.
Dustin: Shut up, Meg.
Luann: “Put the last in the past”? I have never heard that phrase in my life.
Luann: Or, as my life coach, Meat Loaf, told me, saying the same thing in different words,
Well, if life is just a highway,
Then the soul is just a car,
And objects in the rear view mirror,
May appear closer than they are.
MW: Butthead Batsfrey- “Uhhh…the pilot is sitting in the *cockpit.* Heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Heh-heh.”
Curtis – The gifted actor who portrays Curtis’s father got the gig through his talent for instant exposition.
“Can I go to an art exhibit?”
“That sounds reasonable”
“– at Burning Man”
“The week-long large-scale desert event held annually in the western United States, that derives its name from the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy on its penultimate night?!”
BG&SS: I’m a suburbanite through and through so I ask in all seriousness.
Are mules really shaded like that, or is this some in-joke about Aunt Sukey being threadbare and when she’s in tomorrow’s strip she’ll have a patch on her like everything else in Hootin’ Holler?
Snuffy – We finally know who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp. I wouldn’t have guessed it was a mule, but now that I know, it makes a lot of sense.
@Guillermo el chiclero: Hey, yeah! Then it could turn into one of the classic Droopy cartoons; whereever Ponytail Barbie and Augie Doggie go (up a tree, on a desert island, the North Pole, the spire of the Empire State Building), Goatee is there with a pithy phrase, or just a simple ‘Boo!’
@Philip: Once upon a time, Garfield had plots and story arcs that actually got the characters out of the house. But it seems somewhere around the late 90s/early 00s (around the time I stopped being interested) the strip just stopped doing that. I think the last real shake-up the strip had was Jon actually getting into a relationship with Liz the Vet, and that had to have been at least a decade ago.
Curtis – If you must swallow flies, Curtis, at least wait until they’ve thawed out.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Look at all the girls around your nephew!”
“Oh! They must be crazy about him!”
“Why are you so popular, Rodney? Can you give me the secret of your success?”
“Nothing simpler”
“Try out for the hockey team!”
Comicskingdom.com is acting up this morning.
C’shaft: Battom started drawing comics when he was eight, and his skills haven’t evolved since.
HotC: Are timed hall passes a thing? The Divalings have never encountered them to my knowledge, but it does sound like exactly the sort of arbitrarily rigid policy a school would implement.
MW: I know Belle is bound to disappoint, but for now I’m going to enjoy her sitting on her flight and internally chuckling over whatever malfeasance she has planned for Wilbur’s life. You gatekeep-gaslight-girlboss the HELL out of him, Belle!
be nice to catch up on my favorite strips once Comics Kingdom stops erroring out on me.
@TheDiva: Meant Curtis, not Crankshaft. Getting my cranky comic patriarchs mixed up.
Luann: Evans adds an automobile as a visual clue that these two are adults in lieu of depicting Luann with boobs.
@don:
You’re not alone
MW – I don’t think that’s a Beavis & Butt-Head “heh heh.” I think it’s a Nola Wolverton “heh heh.”
Garfield – All we need is Ethel Merman singing everything’s coming up insects….
BG&SS – The pusher is a monster – he’s not a natural man – he’s a plow horse….
Curtis – Oh me, oh my…I think he’ll die….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Curtis – wait, “looked at me like I swallowed a fly?” Is this a thing people actually say? And what is it supposed to express? Disappointment, disgust or pity?
In any case, a tween saying that is certainly more reasonable than an American tween getting the idea to buy something from Harrod’s.
@Peanut Gallery: Don’t go there!
@Peanut Gallery: Ominous!
@A Grave Mind: Thirty grand in debt to get an English major, damn well better be worth something.
This week’s Rex Morgan strips have been an amazing build up for suspense and conflict, which means it will be even more epic when absolutely nothing happens and they awake the next morning in separate rooms safe and sound.
@Ukranazi Stepan: I read this arc the last time it ran. While I won’t spoil anything, it makes me sad that Popeye has apparently run of out material and is now repeating.
I mean it’s only been in the comics for… 90(?) years?
HGH: “Rune A Bits”
MW
Every flier’s nightmare: sitting next to a woman gazing out the window muttering “heh heh”!
It could be quite harmless, but probably not…
Curtis: Harrod umbrella costs anywhere from $200 to over $1000. Michelle probably already has a couple.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV:
Me, too! Now I’m a cook. But a cook who can quote Faulkner!
BGSS: My mother, the ass…
MW-I think we all know what quality time means.
MW: i I find Belle absolutely terrifying.
RMMD: what are the odds Stalker is the delivery man for Uber Eats?
Bizzaro: I chuckled.
@Old School Allie Cat: There are few crimes against humanity greater than comparing Charlie Brown to anything in Mary Worth.
MW: Part of the “swell time” Wilbur and Belle had in Cancun was when he gave her a haircut. “Not too much off the back, ‘kay?”
Curtis: A well-made, expensive umbrella will not lose a rib or blow out in the wind. It WILL however be left behind in a restaurant or taxi.
AAGGGHHHH Spanish to English.
“Barney Google” gets political. This female donkey kicking a rural poor white from Appalachia is clearly meant to represent the Democratic Party!
Zits Spanish to English.
@Activist: Why does Aunt Sukey put me in mind of Nana in Peter Pan, the only adult in the room?
Garfield-They say that Spring is a season of renewal but the spider sees it as a season of death and feasting for it.
I don’t know why Curtis swallowed a fly. Perhaps he’ll die? Honestly, if you asked me which cartoon character would go out by ingesting successively larger animals, I would have guessed Dagwood.
The Family Circus Spanish to English.