What about women’s driving ability, relative to men? Some delightful material there, I’m sure!
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Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25
Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you’re not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don’t do it on a tree or your neighbor’s house or whatever, and it’s weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, “Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found,” but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we’re supposed to contemplate whether Grimm’s biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?
Mary Worth, 9/3/25
“Or are you thinking about mummifying your father and I after our deaths in the Egyptian fashion, removing our brains through our noses; then making an incision along our flanks with an Ethiopian stone blade so you can remove our organs and place them in canopic jars before rinsing our abdominal cavities with palm oil and filling them with spices; and then finally placing our preserved corpses in a massive pyramid built along the Hudson on the Upper West Side? Because that would be nice, actually.”
Pardon My Planet, 9/3/25
Pardon My Planet’s takes on women tend to be in the ballpark of “women love to demand expensive consumer goods from men,” so before today I would’ve encouraged an attempt to dig into women’s real thoughts and desires to find out what they actually want. But after seeing this panel, I gotta say: never try to do that again, because, Jesus Christ. Have you heard they like to shop? Maybe do some strips on that.
63 replies to “What about women’s driving ability, relative to men? Some delightful material there, I’m sure!”
MW:
“I lived a past life in Egypt. And you and Daddy were with me! — in fact, Daddy’s chosen profession was to be an expert on the meaning of the Egyptian symbol of life!”
“Nope. Don’t say it, Olive.”
“Yep. An ankhologist!”
MW:
“But I liked it best when one of the mummies ran into Brendan Fraser and chased him out of the museum!”
Pardon My Planet:
“With the kind of coy, arch male-bashing I do, I should be writing Judge Parker!”
MG and G:
“Commit a federal offense by feloniously damaging government property, or destroy my kidneys? — it’s a Hobson’s choice!”
MGG Sorry Folgers, but the best part of waking up for me now is seeing a cartoon dog grabbing his junk.
MW A girl with psychic powers goes to Egypt to visit ancient myatical temples? Doesn’t feel like the typical Mary Worth plot but I’m down for it!
PmP Weird animal sex play stuff aside, it’s his ass, girl. You’re smelling his ass.
RMMD: ‘Oh Cody… my husband’s going to snap your neck now, and I will be so happy when he does.’
SF: See Jules? THAT’s how you update Mark Trail’s design for the modern era!
PmP:
Answer: How to describe Furry cunnilingus without breaking character.
Question: Sorry I asked.
Maybe it’s just the MG&G team’s subtle way of saying they’re just mailing it in today.
MG and G: There’s a nice wall right there. I guess Grimm has never seen the album cover for “Who’s Next.”
JP: so what that April may be dead and Randy’s in prison. Just a year ago Alan, you were having a hissy fit that you missed your granddaughter and now you get to raise her (at least until her mom mysteriously reappears in the night as is the custom in that family.)
FG: Fria does not look like she wants to talk peace.
GT: don’t forget to sprinkle it with powdered sugar before handing it to the customer.
MW: uh oh. If Olive goes to Egyptian pyramid, shell surely come back with an evil Spirit.
PMP: Congratulations to Pardon My Planet, winner of this year’s “Most Graphic Description of Cunnilingus in the Funny Pages” award. Commiserations to the losers – sorry Blondie, your depictions of Dagwood’s fantasies of “eating” his wife’s “sandwich” just weren’t quite eroticised enough this time.
Grimm: Actiually, the joke is that his house is burning down, and if he can’t find a hydrant, Mother Goose will die. He also needs to urinate, but that’s unrelated to the joke.
Pardon My Planet:
“I’m going as anthropologist Margaret Mead for Halloween! — how about you two ladies?”
MW: How long is this Olive-fest going to continue? I don’t CARE what Olive did, or what she likes, or what she wants. I think Ed and Evy should talk about how they spent THEIR day. Maybe Olive would REALLY learn something…!
Beetle Bailey : …shouldn’t the MAIN CHARACTER be the one made the focus, with him going against the grain in opposition to the rest of the cast? …This is why, when your comic is about the main character being a dimwitted bumbler, you don’t introduce another character who’s stupider and more mistake-prone!
************
Between Friends : And blonde friend, having a negative attitude about the job, becomes an even bigger tyrant that DeClan ever was.
*************
Frazz : You broke your leg unicycling and spent the rest of the summer preparing for that race against Mrs Olsen. You definitely weren’t doing any work.
************
Moose & Molly :
a) this is the kind of stuff that jury selection, and alternate jurors that can be switched in, is supposed to prevent, right?
b) Shouldn’t he be addressed by “Juror Number [X]”? Like, don’t tell the defendant that’s Moose Miller, your honor, he probably knows him personally!
**********
Pardon my Planet : “Of course, sometimes we switch roles, except when *I* do it, I don’t bury my nose in the GROUND…. It’s somewhere very brown, yes, but it’s not dirt…”
Normally, I’d say “Too far?”, but today I have to say “Oversnarkpologies”***********
Slylock Fox : EXTRA DIFFERENCE : in the image on the left, the dog is voiced by Bill Farmer. A-HYUCK!
MW: “Mary, we’ll pay you to take a trip to Egypt with, um, what’s her name again…oh, yeah, OLIVE!”
DtM: OK, everyone, STOP FEEDING DENNIS. He’ll leave, starve or learn to make sandwiches.
RMMD: Cody should leave now. Anyone else would leave. But will Cody leave? No, Cody will not.
PMP: When homonym-based gags go WAY off the rail.
MW: Woah, calm down there and speak in complete sentences, Olive, you’re about to blow a pit.
MW:
“Listen, kid. If you want to engage in socially-acceptable thanatopsis, instead of obsessing about all of that, why don’t you just go listen to Eleanor Rigby?”
“I love Egyptian antiquities!”
“Would you like to visit Egypt? Because it is very expensive and I am not sure we can afford it”
“Fine, I’ll visit London”
“Hotels are incredibly expensive there, aim lower!”
“Paris?”
“Let’s settle on Turin
I mean, I guess I appreciate a take on “men are pigs” that I’ve never seen before, but on the other hand… no, no I don’t appreciate it, swing and a miss, Pardon my planet (or should I say, swine and a miss). (I shouldn’t. I’ll go now.)
Fire departments are usually a competence of local government, while the post service is a federal institution. Is being willing to piss on fire hydrants but not mailboxes a celebration of centralised power against the wishes of the framers or an indication that local government is more responsive to the natural needs of citizens? In this essay…
Editor: “Have you made that joke based on the fact that ‘smell’ can mean both ’emitting odours’ and ‘perceiving odours’?”
Cartoonist: “Sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked.”
Editor: “what”
PHANTOM: Sure, to a hammer every problem is a nail daring to be aise it’s head.
6CX: hope that sadsack appreciates his buddy!
MW: The corpses, mother. It is the corpses which draw me to the museum, day after day. Through my second sight, I can’t help but see everyone* decaying around me. But the mummies lie still, preserved, proof that even death beyond death can have its terminus.
*(except for Mary Worth, the Ageless One)
@Activist:
#22 correction. PHANTOM: daring to raise its head
“Maybe it’s the animal in me talking, but I am bacon”
Pardon My Planet: A coworker recently explained to me that her necklace was actually a “day collar” (you don’t have to know what it is to know what it is) and that she was in a dom-sub relationship with her longtime boyfriend. As she told us more about the relationship, I realized it was just another way of expressing a pretty normal arrangement with one strong partner and one who allowed herself to be led, plus some freaky shit in the bedroom. All of which is to say, you go girl, but maybe not in front of God, your unwilling friends, and the entire world of the comics page?
Mother Goose and Grimm: It costs 74 cents to mail a single letter these days! 74 cents! Curse you, inflation! Curse you, rising operational costs! Curse you, mandated pre-payment of pension costs! The dog would be right to pee on your boxes, U.S. Postal Ser—[PRN Haldol is administered, funny pages removed from room]
Big Ancient Egyptian theme, as Olive rhapsodizes about mummies, PmP woman wears an ankh pendant, and Grimm is an ancient Mut.
Mary Worth: “Yes, Mother, I would like to go to Egypt someday, and there bend an entire rich and productive national economy to my needs…” (glances at Mary, who nods) “…while subjugating an entire class of people and forcing them to fashion bricks. For my tummy brain.”
You know, if that lady’s husband is an actual dog, I say good for her, to each his own, who am I to judge? Just hope she cleans up after him when he shits on the sidewalk.
I was going to say “Turns out Pardon My Planet gets its ideas of what and how women think from Six Chix“, but Six Chix isn’t as big on bestiality as I thought. The Chix tend to be either sane enough to want at least some humanoid qualities or in one case, their tastes run much, much weirder.
JP Remember, this is the strip that had “estranged daughter hides out in basement for months and nobody even talks to her about whether she did or didn’t kill the guy she’s suspected of murdering”. Whatever they’re leading to will be much, much more stupid than “April is still missing and Randy is locked up for non-cooperation”. With the way they seem to want to run an action strip, we’ll probably segue to Randy completing his mystical Norwegian training and heading off to find April and then take down the Bad Guys. Including most of the CIA. (No, it will be dumber than even that.)
Pluggers need to make more bathroom visits as they get older. No one else can say that!
Queen Narcititi is bored with being praised in English and wishes to be praised in Arabic for a change.
PMP — Just Circe having Wednesday morning coffee with her girls. Or there’s a time shift and she’s Married to Marvin.
MW — Olive’s Mom blithely ignores the subtextual clues. A girl starved of human affection is fascinated by “Mummies” and fantasizes about burying her dead family members, and all blondie can say is “Would you like to go to Egypt?”
Circe, burned once too many times by cads like Odysseus, finally settles down with a good man and leaves the lonely shores of Aeaea for the brunches of New York City. Still, from time to time, and with her husband’s enthusiastic consent, she turns him into a pig, for old time’s sake.
MG&G: Forget the mailbox, there’s a perfectly good brick wall right there!
MW: “Of course! But I’ll settle for going to Santa Royale for some reason.”
PMP: This is an interesting take on Edda Burber.
MG&G – WtF – too good to piss on the USPS? Well, I’m not gonna sit here while you demean the USA like that….
MW – No…but I do have an urge to slip into your bedroom tonight, and fish your brain out of your nose with hooks and keep ‘em in a jar in my closet….
PMP – I can’t believe some women don’t verify their mates with an extensive butt sniffing….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: I called this a few days ago. Get ready for an eight-week arc of the past lives of Olive, Mary, and other Charterstone regulars in ancient Egypt. Though I don’t know how you’d get ready for that.
MW: Mary’s pyramid scheme takes a wrong turn when the folks take her literally.
Okay, now Mary Worth is getting interesting. The strip where Mary walks in on Olive practising ancient Egyptian burial techniques on her bullying classmates is going to be an all-timer.
FC: “OK, sure.” {two seconds later} “No! Don’t sit on it!”
Dustin: Josh, you should go to Dustin for your “Women be… ” material! Today, it’s “women be trying to force their asshole husbands to eat healthy to prolong their husbands’ lives for some horribly misguided reason.”
Blondie: My go-to excuse is “I’m sorry, I have to rearrange my sock drawer.”
Luann: When they eventually do an EEG for Luann, they’re going to find out she has a negative number of neurons.
CS: Later, his entire class disappears just because they didn’t want to be there. There were no supernatural shenanigans in that case.
9CL: If she spoke for God in that way, Amos definitely would have been smote by now.
PMP: IKEA’s hilarious “Chase the Piggie” commercial (it aired in Europe) seems to have been the inspiration for today’s panel.
IKEA did it better.
MW: Evy isn’t making eye contact with her unholy spawn for fear of imprinting on it. You can’t grow attached to something you refuse to acknowledge. That or she’s afraid of being sent to the cornfield or turned into some unholy abomination.
DT: So, it is not just business with LaKoyle, but personal! Watch out Dick!
JP: This situation reminds me of a joke. Golfer goes to the local Pro and asks about improving his game. Pro says, okay, let’s play 9 holes so I can see what you got. They play 9 holes and head back to the clubhouse. The Golfer eager to know what he needs to do to improve: “Is it my backswing? Do I need to keep my head down? Is it my follow through.” The Pro says, “you need to take 1 month off from playing -” Golfer, interrupting “- is that to clear my mind, and let my muscle memory reset?” The Pro continues “and then after a month off, you should quit completely”.
After two months, it is clear the creators just hope this whole spy thing would go away, and if they ignore it maybe the readership will as well.
MW: Mummification is a good concept. The plot is already well dessicated.
RMMD: Yes, Cody, you did a bad thing and you should feel bad.
GT: Please let the local food inspector close them down for selling food without a license, not having proper grease disposal and not wearing hair nets!
MW: Ed tries to explain to Mary the difference between schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia. “I know it’s confusing to the layman, Mary; but really, all you have to remember is Olive is nuts.”
Dog urine is very corrosive, and damaging a mail box can land you three years in prison in the U.S. Ain’t no way Grimmy is taking a 21 dog-year stint in the Federal penitentiary when he can look for a nice fire hydrant.
Plot twist: glasses woman is a chef and married an actual truffle-hunting pig for his truffle-hunting abilities. She’s saved so much money over the years!
Servants of early pharoahs were killed and entombed with their monarchs to continue serving them in the afterlife. When Mary dies, Olive will have the Charterstone residents build a necropolis in the parking lot for her, and then have them buried with her, so in eternity she will have no shortage of acolytes to advise. Except for Wilbur, of course – she has standards.
MW: For someone fascinated by mummies, Olive sure does seem sad to be talking about them with…her mummy.
GET IT. SEE WHAT I DID THERE.
Mother Goose and Grimm – Grimm is posing a vague threat to the Post Office in order to get put on the next edition of “Comic Strip Classics” stamps.
Mary Worth – With a great need to “prove” her psychic powers to the world, Olive will kill and mummify the mean girls that teased her in an accurate ceremony like the Ancient Egyptians (including her in a past life) did. Vicki will be spared, but will be racked with survivor’s guilt. When Olive is given multiple life sentences, she, in her homicidal narcissism, will take it literally and fall into despair.
Pardon My Planet – When the Animacalypse hits the rest of us will be losing our minds, while the blonde woman, her husband, and their shared kinks willl thrive.
MW: Olive thinks the sun rises and sets just for her, of course she’d feel a certain kinship with the pharaohs. Naomi’s smart to keep away from her; anyone in Olive’s circle is bound to wind up entombed with her to continue serving her in the afterlife.
MG&G: Never mind the mailbox, there’s a wall right there! I doubt Grimm would be the first dog to use it as a toilet. Hell, odds are pretty good that a few humans have used it for a toilet.
@Tonio:
Wilbur has established that he’s cursed with the inability to be killed, and the rest of Charterstone must deal with him as punishment for their own sins.
That’s not Olive’s mom. Mary is going the extra mile to encourage Olive’s interests, acting out the myth of Khonsu, aging and becoming young again with the phases of the moon.
CS: Instead of publishing this article that for some reason needs at least 3 separate interviews, what if Skip went rouge and ran a libelous story about how Batton is part of a cult, or is a flasher or something? Sure, he’d get sued and put out of business, but if this is the best his paper can do, how long will he stay in business, anyway? This way, at least someone might bother to read it.
Pardon My Planet-And by ground you mean your vagina?
RMMD-“If only I had left sooner instead of sitting around in my car.”
MW-Olive’s parents will send her to Egypt as cargo.
Archie-“I’ll give Moose a call.” A funny smile then crosses Midge’s face.
C’shaft: Now, I’m not a big time comic strip artist whose life story is obviously worth recounting in painstaking detail through a thinly disguised proxy character, but it seems to me that this would be a good place to employ the visual aspect of the medium by showing some humorous result of young Battom’s fatigue–falling asleep at his desk, perhaps, or rinsing his paintbrush in his coffee. But hey, I’m sure you know what you’re doing with settling on a vague, dazed look; it does reflect the reaction of the audience.
DT: Damn, do all the hot lesbian criminals know one another?
Dustin: Like Charles Dickens, I firmly believe that it’s good for adults to be children sometimes. Dress up for Halloween, take a turn on the swing set during your break, whatever; life is short and joy and wonder are hard to come by in this day and age. But there is something inherently pathetic about a middle-aged man who insists on eating chocolate cereal in the morning. You just know Dustdad hasn’t developed the skill to make waffles or even heat up a goddamn Pop-Tart on his own behalf.
FG: I may be jumping into this at the wrong time. There’s a lot of characters and backstory flying about.
Luann: “But to answer your question, yes.”
It’s always a little confusing and unsettling when an anthropomorphic cartoon animal keeps another creature as a pet, but the reveal that this fully sapient dog-man isn’t allowed to use the public bathrooms presumably available to his goose-woman owner is outright dystopian.
@Rover Berkeley:
When Skip brought back the Centerville Sentinel, he had that massive spiel about how he was doing REAL journalism that spoke truth to power… And this is what, his FIFTH lunch interview with Batton Thomas, and they STILL haven’t gotten past “here’s a funny anecdote from when I was just starting out”.
And this week is a particularly weak “They tell you ‘Don’t quit your dayjob’, but no one tells you that keeping your dayjob on top of your entertainer job means you’re working two jobs!” I (almost) long for “When I was a kid, I thought the printing mill in my hometown was literally a comic book factory”.
Phantom: Suddenly, I have a craving for some nice freshly-baked brattttaaattaa.