Thursday fast takes
Post Content
Marvin, 10/16/25
Lately, when I bring up Marvin as an example of a strip that loves talking about peeing and pooping, some people in the comments will try to gaslight me about it, claiming the strip really hasn’t done much by way of toilet humor since 2023 or so. Well, look at this! Bitsy the dog is like, “I love to defecate and I want to do more of it,” and that’s the punchline! Don’t try to deny what I can see with my own eyes!
Mary Worth, 10/16/25
Have you enjoyed the last 87 years of “Mary Worth meddles gently in the lives of her friends and acquaintances?” Well, that’s over now. Get ready for “Mary Worth has an unshakeable belief that many people are capable of ESP, and has a new mission to find them and Awaken the Gift inside them.”
Dustin, 10/16/25
Meg, this is no time to crack wise! Your brother has experienced a serious head injury and appears to be in some distress!
Archie, 10/16/25
Sorry, Dilton, I’m going to be straight with you: put the glasses back on. You don’t look very good at all without them! Don’t give in to peer pressure!
76 replies to “Thursday fast takes”
Mary Worth Mashup: Canceled today after Baja read today’s Mary Worth then was overcome by a sudden attack of reverse peristaltic reactions that makes Regan’s pea soup scene look like a gentle burp.
Luann: They’re going to Queen Unpopular’s lair? How’s that possible? Queen Unpopular is right there wearing tennis shoes!
Ignore Veronica’s passive-aggressive cattiness, hot foreground glasses girl. She’s obviously hoping you’ll hear.
So in other words, Josh, would you say the commenters… pooh-pooh your take on Marvin?
….I’ll see myself out
Marvin-“Why can’t you go on the carpet like Marvin?”
MW-“Let my love open some other things in you, Olive.”
FC-Mary had a little lamb with mint jelly.
Archie-Open your eyes.
Why are you trying to get Dilton to take off his glasses when the hot goth nerd IS RIGHT THERE?!!
MW: “Sure, Dear. Everyone has psychic abilities.”
Mary humors Olive about her claims of canine clairvoyance while dialing 911 with her left hand under the table.
Maybe more people would be interested in awakening their latent ability to communicate telepathically with dogs if dogs weren’t just constantly thinking about poop.
Archie: regarding that Asian gal with the huge buck tooth: sorry, every Asian person in the world. We didn’t mean to imply that only Caucasians can have quality dental care.
Today’s strip kicks off the Mary Worth/Scanners crossover event you’ve been waiting for.
Archie : that incidental character in the first panel… the AJGLU3000 must have interpreted Ronnie’s line as the prompt to design her, but only saw “sexy” and “glasses”…
***********
Crankshaft : “Do you use special soap to repel deer?” “Yes, particularly strong soap, normal soap wouldn’t work.”
WHERE IS THE JOKE!? Is the fact that Crankshaft’s actual line includes the word “laugh” enough to justify it being a punchline!?
***********
Dustin : is seriously injured, but to his family, that’s no excuse to make fun of him for not being currently working in an office.
***********
Luann : … No, seriously, I *SWEAR* Greg Evans is drawing that “Tiffany sticking her tongue out in disgust” expression because it looks like something else.
************
Mary Worth : Oh, so it turns out it’s not the tummy brain-fueled powers that make Olive special, it’s that she CARES MORE and is MORE FULL OF LOVE than ordinary people.
…I liked it better when she was some kind of superpowered mutant, not some kind of Avatar of Sainthood. I liked it better when Olive could do incredible things because her brain was superior, not her goodness.
…I can’t believe that the story going “No, EVERYONE could do what Olive does!” could make it worse, but “Everyone could do what Olive does if they actually started to REALLY care about each other” is a way, I guess…
MW: I looked closely at that second panel but their pinkies aren’t straight. So either Mary and Olive are NOT invaders from another planet—which events and dialogue strongly suggest—or they are but are mutants of that distant race. Either way, they are insufferably creepy.
Questionablecontent:
1. Oh, look, your annual reminder that Marigold is still alive.
2. Marigold has an online “voice”? Since when? How is it that this was never alluded to before?
3. Marigold has a catch phrase and this catch phrase is “FFFFFFF”?
4. How long till Marigold gets a rhinoceros horn as a nose like every other main character?
She’s laughing now, but just wait until Dustin draws the Flux Capacitor (she still hasn’t seen the movie! It’s a CLASSIC, Meg!).
Did we have to know that Mary is going cross eyed at the thought that everyone could be a telepath?
Wrecks Moregone:
If holding their closed mouths vaguely in contact is what Auuuuughie and Winter call kissing, what do they call having sex, and how did Winter ever get to become a mother, anyway?
“And the best way to awaken this gift is to keep cats in your house, Olive. Dozens and dozens of cats! So many some people are horrified, but they just don’t have enough love!”
Marvin: Frankly, the “I just took you out” gag would have worked better with his son, Marvin. “See if you can hold it till old man Swinson’s lawn, this time.”
Marvin has taught me that sea green is apparently the color of annoyed anger, so at least there’s learning going on today! Thanks, Marvin!
Dustin: Aren’t you supposed to be at work right now?
Uh, I’m not sure where I am. Did I tell you I hit my head?
Hot girl in the foreground removes her glasses. With a different hairstyle, she, too, is Veronica. Aaaaaand we’re out of panels.
Archie:
“I bet you’d look good without those glasses”“I bet you’d look attractive towards women without those glasses”“I bet you’d look sexy without those glasses”~Veronica towards her platonic friend.
(seriously, what?)
Mary Worth: Many people have psychic powers and love can do anything!
(Remember when Mary Worth used to give literal advice? Even terrible advice was still advice.. I don’t know what’s even happening any more)
MW: I don’t think Olive’s powers have ever been shown as being triggered by love. Or does Mary mean “if your parents love each other a bit too much, they’ll neglect you and give you lots of alone time to develop psychic powers”?
Marvin: I like how happy Bitsy looks. He’s not in any intestinal distress, he’s going back out for the love of the game (the game being feces).
MW: I’m really looking forward to this strip six months from now when it’s gone completely Scanners. Just imagining Wilbur doing another bad karaoke set when BAM! his head explodes.
Dustin: Yeesh, that is expression of a guy with severe head trauma, or someone deeply repressing what really happened…
Archie: Nope, sorry, can’t focus on anything else aside from that little bit sticking out of that girl’s mouth in the first panel. Is that a tiny tooth sticking out, some kind of piercing, or does she not know how to eat a chiclet?
MW We’re one step away from the strip turning into a Magic Girl – by the Power of Love and Friendship story, aren’t we? Try not to think of Mary in a Sailor Moon outfit, folks!
Archie: Dilton in panel three looks like a mid-century caricature of a Japanese person.
@Ukranazi Stepan:
1. I’m surprised Jeph doesn’t simply update some characters’ bio page with “btw, they won’t appear again because they were eaten by a dinosaur off-panel” more often. IT’S WEIRD IT ONLY HAPPENED ONCE, okay?
2. Maybe Hanners is thinking that Marigold’s voice becoming more shrill and nasal when she gets angry/emotional is actually Marigold purposefully doing a grating voice to match her online alter ego. (that is to say, Marigold ISN’T doing a voice, but the way she sounds when she gets worked up SOUNDS like someone trying to do an over-the-top cartoon voice)
3. Marigold’s online streaming avatar’s “catchphrase” being simply her repressing the urge to scream “F@&#” tracks, really (it would be a joke (intentional or not) about how a character’s “trademark catchphrase” is a completely unremarkable ordinary thing)
4. Never, look, Marigold has a big ugly nose to distinguish her from the other girls, who have weird, tiny, perky upturned noses.
…Look, I just felt like answering you, even though I’m pretty sure I’m off the mark on all these answers…RMMD: Summer was hoping she’d have something that didn’t need batteries twixt her nethers tonight but square-jawed Augie has school in the morning.
MW: At long last, Mary makes her move.
On Monday, when I said Mary was grooming Olive to become a cult leader, it was supposed to be a joke.
MW: My disgust at today’s strip is exceeded only my disgust at the thought that this will continue, and we’ll be “treated” to an arc where Wilbur develops telepathic powers after finding His One True Love (Who’s Not A Fish).
MW: Olive loves classic episodes of OFF as well.
Mary suddenly explaining the truth about telepathy is step one. Next, she wants to talk to Dawn about cryptocurrency.
MW: Call me when Olive makes her spoon float to feed her the sundae.
In fairness, I’m guessing that whatever Augie has between his legs also needs batteries.
LOLing at Archie and Veronica’s reaction in the last panel. “Wait, removing someone’s glasses can reduce their ability to SEE?! What strange witchcraft is this?”
@CanuckDownSouth:
I think it’s more that Mary intends to unleash the Human Instrumentality Project.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – The “I have to get up early tomorrow” is a guy line for saying, “Yes, I’ll come in and get my rocks off, but then I have to raid your fridge and leave right away,” not an excuse to not come in at all. Doesn’t Augie watch Seinfeld?. Elaine explained all this to The Virgin.
I’ve always thought of Marvin‘s art style as “Legally Distinct From Garfield,” but it may have taken things a step too far. It starts with pets thought-ballooning at their thin, white owners. It ends with diapers filled with lasagna.
Archie: I’d like to know the thought process behind the extra in the first panel. “Wait, we can’t actually be promoting glasses-shaming. Let’s include a cute girl with glasses somewhere in the comic. We need to make clear that people with glasses can be attractive, and it’s just Dilton who’s the uggo.”
MW:
And here I always thought that, insofar as it pertained to Mary Worth, “ESP” stood for “Excruciatingly Stupid Plots.”
Archie:
Archie is kind of like the “Brigadoon” of high school comic strip venues, only instead of nobody aging, nobody actually grows up.
RMMD: *SIGH* Beatty clearly has not gotten any in a very long time and needs therapy to relearn that you do *not* throw away an opportunity like this. That “kiss” in panel one doesn’t even look like anything of the kind. The perspective makes it look like Blondie just stuck her face near Augie Doggy Ding Dong Daddy’s nose for a few seconds. Not that I believe she could kiss him with that distended chin of his in the way. Apparently ‘kiss’ in this universe means smelling the other person’s greasy, makeup-caked forehead.
JP: You mean she won’t be doing it *at all*, Abbey, because she’s going to cry uncle and foist the raspberry-haired brat on you at the first opportunity.
@Baja Gaijin: I thought that was Bush Sr.?
MW:
“In fact, Olive, I’m writing a feelgood instructional book about this all which focuses on this purple smocklike thing I’m wearing that I’ve now sported for 589 consecutive days — it’s called ‘Love in the Time of Cowl-era’ !”
@Bob Tice: Nice to have your impressions confirmed, isn’t it?
RMMD: Is that a kiss?
Archie:
“How’d you end up with a weird first name like ‘Dilton,’ anyway?”
“You know how Margaux Hemingway was ostensibly conceived after her parents quaffed a bottle of Chateau Margaux? Well, I was conceived after Mom and Dad had a cheese plate — Mom prefers ‘Delice de Bourgogne,’ and Dad prefers ‘Stilton,’ so they kind of met in the middle!”
Blondie: Looking splendid in his fine Italian suit of Mocha/russet worsted wool, Dithers stands before his dressing room mirror and opts for a pair of blue brogans. As a lifelong Mothers of Invention groupie, he knows that Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.
@CanuckDownSouth: Please, don’t give me any more bad fanart ideas.
Mary Worth:
“I tried unlocking my gift, Olive, with conversations back in the day with Nostradamus. I telepathically communicated with him, ‘Would you make those quatrains of yours a little more accessible, user-friendly and relatable, so that people can actually understand what you’re trying to say?’ — apparently I was unsuccessful at unlocking, though, because you see what we ended up with!”
Dilton being a super-genius, can’t he make a machine to repair his vision? Or patent one of his inventions to afford laser-eye surgery?
This is like that stupid Harry Potter plothole, where there is a spell to repair broken glasses but no spells to repair one’s eyesight.
Submitted for your approval, a dying woman with a special gift, trying to find the right person to give it to. Where would you look? New York City? Charterstone? It doesn’t matter, for the gift, the giver, and the recipient, are where they’ve always been . . . in the Twilight Diner, off Route 7 in Santa Clara, California. Home of the Twilight Sundae.
Archie: It’s tough to be Veronica. Some days, you really need to make Archie jealous by flirting with another guy, and Dilton is the only one nearby.
Archie: In today’s performance, the role of Dilton will be played by Gilbert Gottfried
MW: Looking forward to tomorrow’s strip when Mary dons her version of Cerebro. Unlike Professor X’s device, which amplifies his psychic powers to locate emerging mutants all over the globe, Mary’s machine enhances her abilities to identify sad-sack weirdos and meddle them from afar.
Phantom: Ah, good old taupe tubes. Looks like chef here when to the Mary Worth School of Culinary Art (Of A Kind … I Suppose)
Mary Worth: A week from now, Mary visits Olive in the hospital, where she’s in a body cast with all four limbs in traction : “Turns out, what seems impossible isn’t often possible with love after all, that it’s specific to calling dogs when you’re stuck in a pine/palm tree in a hot air balloon. Would you like some more ice chips, Dear?”
@Guts Dozier: One of my favourite Archie stories, was that Veronica’s father kept getting in the way, between Archie and Veronica’s precious make-out time.
So Archie put a game on Mr. Lodge’s computer to distract him, and Mr. Lodge became completely addicted which worked, but before Archie and Veronica could have proper alone time, Mr. Lodge asks Archie for help with a level. So he goes to help him and is gone for hours. Veronica checks in on them, in her father’s office and both Archie and Mr. Lodge are massively addicted to the game, now playing two-players.
A while later, they’re still playing, Veronica (feeling spurned that Archie is playing a game instead of spending time with her) comes in with some guy to make Archie jealous “This is my new boyfriend Brad, seeing as you’re too invested in that dumb game, Brad actually pays attention to me”
Archie is too invested in the game to care and just brushes her off.
Brad (Sees the game): Oh man, I love this game! Can I join in?
Archie: Sure!
All three guys are massively addicted and Veronica just gives up.
@Westing1992: Since the glasses-wearing extra occupies most of the first frame and I hadn’t heard of Dilton before, I assumed that the characters at the table behind her were just there to show that the strip was taking place in the lunch room and that someone off-panel was addressing her by her last name. It was confusing when we then cut to the background people.
Also, since it’s the internet and the concept of sexiness is under discussion, I’ve been wondering what “Dilton” is an acronym for.
Marvin Sr. does not look happy as he’s standing there reading the dog’s thought balloon and realizing he’s trapped in an alternate Funkyverse where all the forced wordplay is biological waste related.
***
Hold on… Did Mary use her own psychic brain powers to force Aldo Kelrast off the road, killing him? I guess she needs something if she’s going to lead the new team of weak-ass superheroes, the Dependers, consisting of her, Olive as Gets Dogs to Come Here Girl and Wilbur as Fugue State Man.
***
Welcome to the world of sexist tropes, Dilton, and thank you for being the man we need to explain why people can’t just take off their glasses to be “sexier” all the time.
Archie: Is there a regular Archie HS female character who wears glasses? Strange time to introduce one.
GT: “Oy, so this app supposed to know his every play?” is a new one–it appears to be a lettering error.
Crankshaft is doing that “Hey, readers, you write the punchline? Okay.
“Yes, the soap has to be Fels-Naptha. It makes the deer think there’s a skunk around.”
Zits: Has Pierce always been cougar bait?
RMMD: Summer goes inside and unfurls the Mission Accomplished banner over her bed, having achieved her chief objective of not getting her glasses smudged. Or her lipstick.
Blondie: Mr. Dithers should be flattered by this, as it shows the more initiative and effort than he’s seen from Dagwood in ages.
FC: Amazing the books you can read in the veterinarian’s waiting room. Flea baths for everyone, including Dolly!
Okay, it was bad enough when Marvin couldn’t keep straight whether its title character was a preverbal infant or old enough to hold conversations with his parents despite still resisting toilet training. But now we have the dog opening his mouth (?) to quip at his owner (??) with a thought balloon (?!?). Even Garfield doesn’t open his mouth to thought-talk at Jon or anyone else!
FC: Dolly continues reading from the Ovine section of her Moleskine:
Barbara Black Sheep hasn’t any wool.
@Tabby Lavalamp: Yeah, so many times in movies, you have a woman with gigantic glasses, baggy clothes, hair in a bun, other characters go “Oh no, she’s unattractive, we have to make her attractive!”
Just removing the glasses alone automatically turns her into a supermodel… >_>
This reminds me of one of Charles Stross’s Laundry novels. Members of the population are getting magical powers, and the Laundry, as the government bureaucracy responsible for monitoring such things, has done statistical analysis. Power levels follow a bell curve, cut off at the left – “We can’t detect a child whose puppy always comes when she calls.”
(The briefing continued: “However, we identified that fisherman who summoned fish because his catch size was an outlier. And there’s no trouble finding people like the Crazy Cat Lady in Hertfordshire, they make national headlines.”)
@The Rambling Otter: When I was a kid, there was a Sabrina the Teenage Witch cartoon. Where Sabrina felt sorry for the nerdy kid in her class, Norma. So she cast a spell to make Norma the most popular kid in school. (Interestingly she didn’t change her appearance, just made everyone love her)
The spell went too far, and the entire town turned into a cult worshipping Norma and were burning people at the stake who weren’t “Norma enough” their Norma standards were so high at this point, that even Norma herself wasn’t Norma enough.
Of course the spell gets reversed, and Sabrina realizes that Norma was perfectly fine and happy the way she was, Sabrina never actually asking her if she was unhappy/wanted to be popular.
Good moral.
MW — “Everyone can be like me and exercise special powers–they just have to try. And if they don’t it’s their own fault and they deserve to wallow in the mud.”
Olive just became even more incredibly unlikable, but she’s obviously been to business school.
I’m not shocked that Veronica is billing and cooing over Dilton; her latest theory is that the smallest men have the largest schvances. She cornered Moose last week and was disappointed to discover he’s microdicked.
Archie: 15 years ago when this strip first ran, it was fashionable among some young women to draw a line extending from the corner of their eye, Cleopatra/East L.A. style. The tongue stud is direct from whatever strip club model the artist used for his “research.”
MW – What a bizarre couple of weirdos! No, I’m not talking about their belief in psychic bullshit, that’s common enough. But who on earth takes a spoonful of an ice cream sundae without either eating or discarding the maraschino cherry first?
Don Abundio, translated:
“Hooray! I love having my own bowling alley!”
“Why do you think he’s so excited about it, Polonio?”
“I’m not sure”
“But I don’t like the look in his eye while I’m in here resetting the pins!”
Archie: Points for effort on trying to keep things contemporary by giving Foreground Extra a lip piercing, but unfortunately it just looks like she’s got an awful cold sore.
Dustin: Dustin, when are you going to learn that when your sister asks you a question–or indeed, speaks to you at all–she’s only doing it to set up an insult? I mean, I know your pick-up-artist techniques ensure that you will never know romance, but you can’t be that desperate for female attention.
MW: Why is Mary wasting her time on the residents of Charterstone? With bullhockey like that, she could write a best-selling self-help book and meddle on a global scale!
@Peanut Gallery: Also, the sauce looks totally wrong unless it’s Magic Shell, which isn’t a very commonly available topping.
Discussing love-based telepathy? A new and weird direction for Mary Worth. Doing so while awkwardly holding sundae spoons? Continuity of form, if not content. Pushing Wilbur into the dim recesses of the strip’s memory in favor of teenage witch? A blessing from on high.
@David Matthews: I’m getting more of a “Goth gal with lip piercing” vibe here.
Dustin “Ya fuckin’ loser!”
C’shaft: For someone who has the running gag of dropping tons of money on gardening toys, Crankshaft’s solution for buck rub is bizarrely low-tech (and, I’m guessing, ineffective). What, Bean’s End can send you a live coyote to hunt your rabbits but they don’t have trunk protectors in stock?
GT: The “app” is just the Wikipedia entry for “American football plays.”
JP: “In fact, she won’t be doing this at all. It’s obvious we–well, I–will be left with most of the work.”
Luann: Oh great, Clan Evans is trying to jump on the Wicked bandwagon.
RMMD: “No, I really should get going…”
“No, I almost touched your lips that time! I’m sure to get it right soon!”
@Peanut Gallery: They’re not actual sundaes; they’re those Nectar bath products that come in the shape of ice cream. Mary and Olive have taken three bites and not noticed anything unusual.
MW – “We often forget what is possible with love!”
“Ok Mary, I don’t even need to read your mind to know what you’re thinking and frankly, it’s grossing me out. You’re what, 78? Ick!”