Ian won the award because he’s the only male professor who turned down a sexual advance from a student this year
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Mary Worth, 12/16/25
There’s a lot of hand-wringing about “grade inflation” at elite universities, which I have for the most part thought is overblown, but, I dunno: if they’re giving Ian Cameron a “University Excellence Award,” maybe things really are bad.
Family Circus, 12/16/25
Honestly love Thel’s wary expression here. She specifically told Dolly not to talk to Santa like a dumbass, but she’s clearly talking to Santa like a dumbass, and Thel’s too far away to stop her. The way the composition draws your eye to her is great, and I’m imagining a Vertigo-style dolly zoom shot on her face as she listens to this nonsense unfold.
Luann, 12/16/25
Sorry I started doing Luann on this blog again after like a decade only to become fixated on shoving the “Ugh, Brand and Toni have an active erotic life and it’s disgusting” strips in your face. This one I enjoy because I’m imagining the DeGroot parents sitting forlornly around their living room thinking “When is Brad going to come over and aim the snowflake projector at our house? He said he would do it, but where is he? He better not be fucking.”
Slylock Fox, 12/16/25
What really jumps out at me in both versions of this panel is how old these pirates look. No wonder they seem so upset at this joke of a treasure! They’ve wasted the best years of their lives!
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/16/25
Damn, Maybelle Pratt! Turns out Snuffy Smith straight-up does not like you. It’s a good thing you’re leaving town!
74 replies to “Ian won the award because he’s the only male professor who turned down a sexual advance from a student this year”
Mary Worth Mashups: A few missing final panels.
Blondie Mashup: I think Daggy is hoping for something else.
Family Circus:
“Ha, ha, ha, little girl! — you sleigh me!”
FC-“I thought you would still be in the back drinking cheap gin.”
MW-That is a rather cheaply made award. Shows how much the University cares about Ian.
Six Chix-“Forgive the pun.” “What pun?”
MW: This is right up there with the shattered Major Award leg lamp.
Slylock Fox:
Well, let’s see:
1. Stech
2. Chostle
3. Drows
4. Grainer
5. Hovels
How’d I do?
Mary Worth:
The Shoes of the Pisherman.
FC: Damn colorists. Thel’s support ribbon for cognitive disabilities should be orange.
BG & SS:
Wow. Even the signage in Hootin’ Holler has elision issues.
MW: Ian faces the realization that an award made out of the same dough as Cheetos might not be all it’s cracked up to be. He finds some small consolation however, upon finding that the pieces are delicious.
Damn, Ian thought for sure that his favorite underpants would be safe if he buried them on a deserted island. But sure enough, the parrot found some suggestible residents of Santa Royale, convinced them that they were pirates, and after a few harrowing months of scurvy, Sunny stood triumphant.
LuAnn: “Elf Care” was sitting there, patiently.
MW: Trying to figure how Sunny saves Ian’s life which seems to be the direction this story is going. Can a parrot perform the Heimlich maneuver?
Frazz : now regrets making Caufield the most popular kid in school all the children are emulating, because now that they all speak exactly the same, he can’t tell any of them apart, and has no idea WHICH kid he’s speaking to.
**********
Luann : TOMORROW : Shannon shows up to cockblock Bwad & Toni.
**********
Mary Worth : the University Excellence Award was actually awarded to the university itself, not Ian. Ian got a copy of the trophy because all members of faculty did.
**********
Slylock Fox : this is a reprint… Good to see Sunny in an earlier role! I guess that’s how the Mary Worth people spotted him for the “asshole parrot laughing at bearded old idiot’s misfortune” part!
Mary Worth:
With kicks like that, here’s betting Ian could give Travolta a run for his money in Saturday Night Fever.
Urbanisation is the key to development. Only moving people from subsistence farming to industries with higher productivity can a country industrialise and raise living standards for everyone. The Pratts are part of a social process involving tens of millions of people and Snuffy’s small preference for this or that individual is nothing before the majesty of the march of history
“Slylock Fox” saw that “Mary Worth” was into asshole parrots and decided to chip in
B&SS: It never ceases to amaze me that the residents of Hootin’ Holler are illiterate enough to leave the “g’ off the ends of gerunds, but literate enough to replace it with an apostrophe.
Slylock Fox:
“Do a little Jimmy Webb/Fifth Dimension adaptation for me, or I’ll keelhaul ya, matey! – ‘Would you like to writhe in my beautiful dubloon?….“
This Santa has death in his eyes! Listen, if you can’t stand children, you really picked the wrong job!
FC – Cuz his sleigh is up on the roof, dumbass.
MW: The inscription on this award is puzzling. I guess the wording on the gold plastic part says “UNIVERSITY/EXCELLENCE AWARD/IAN CAMERON”. But the inscription within the white oval appears to be a plea for help: “I’M/IN A….” It could be anything!
“I’M A SIZE 13 FOOT/IN A SIZE 7 SHOE” or “I’M A WOMAN/IN A MAN’S BODY” or “I’M STUCK/IN A MARRIAGE WITH A DITZY WOMAN AND HER PARROT”.
MW: There are only two scenarios in which Ian would ever have a “University Excellence” award. One would be if Toby made it and claimed it was delivered in the mail, as an attempt to stop one of her husband’s violent rages. The other would be if he ordered it for himself.
Good to see Sunny’s brother survived too and it’s having a great old time ha ha ha-ing at a couple of pirates.
@Hibbleton: Maybe by going down Ian’s throat….
Pretty sure Ma and Pa Groot are aware that Bwad was born without genitalia and is therefore incapable of fucking.
SLYLOCK: The pirate was hoping to buy that property in Th’ Holler with his booty. But no worries, the Pratts will accept heart-printed boxers as currency.
MW: Are parrots generally known for being this destructive? Or only when you go out of your way to piss them off?
FC: Thel is calculating her chances of making it to an exit, catching an Uber and racing off to a new life. Maybe THIS time…
SF: Since the Forths so famously loathe whatever jobs they have, why don’t they make their amazing clairvoyant skills their lives’ work? Oh, because they’re not psychic, just bat-crap crazy?
“I always wanted to have sex with my wife dressed as an elf! But a Tolkien elf, not a Santa elf! Now my fetish is even more twisted!”
Wrecks Moregone:
The only way this “story” can be rescued is if it ends in Auuuuughie getting sued for plagiarism and ending up without any money. Then Winter can dump him and move on to a romance with Lorry’s not-son, Pickup or whatever his name is.
@MKay:
Parrots are extremely intelligent, but normally intelligence comes with the side effect of having a sense of self preservation, which Sunny is choosing to not display.
@Baja Gaijin:
Wary Morth: the last one is by orders of magnitude the best.
You must understand that Ian got this Excellence award because he was the best cosplayer in a “Bill and Ted” contest — he used to be much thinner then
@Charterstoned: Not a finger!
MW: FWIW crows and ravens remember faces and hold grudges.
Luann: Daaaawwww, Ox got a new dog for Christmas, and these two are getting a new piglet!
RMMD: Alternate dialogue – ‘Girl you sure are full of it, you can pull my finger!’
JP: BURN IT! BURN IT WITH FIRE!!!!
@Baja Gaijin: The third one is a masterpiece.
SFx: And with this discovery, the long-running “Treasure of Oak Island” series finally comes to a close.
MW: I suppose we could have just had Sunny destroy one of Ian’s beloved belongings to make the narrative point and leave it at that, but I’m enjoying this tack (i.e. destroying a new one every day) much more. It’s like a perverse 12 Days of Christmas, with Ian ending up in an insane asylum on the Epiphany.
FC: Boy, Santa looks super bummed. Maybe he’s thinking about his actual car — a second hand 2004 Crown Victoria — and how a sled might be nicer to sleep in.
Luann: I do not like the turn this sexy talk is taking. “Mmmm, yeah, I care about Elf Health. So is that like a genetic condition? Any sexy side effects? Joint pain? Oh baby…”
BGSS: What could moving even mean in the context of Hootin Holler? Surely all the surrounding villages are full of rival clans and blood enemies. No, I think this is a kind of end-of-life transition (i.e. moving into a cave and hoping a bear eats you before winter.)
Crankshaft:
Day 2 of the noticeably black and white strip offset by the red cardinal of death. Great timing, Tom.
MW: What other major awards can Sunny destroy, and why hasn’t there been some sort of media notice about possible lost Amazonian Parrots?
@12 Hibbleton: Sunny reaches into Ian’s throat to peck out a bolus of haggis lodged by his tonsils, thus saving his life.
@24 Charterstoned: I finished your thought.
Luann: “[Self-care] is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” — Audre Lorde, 1988
“I do care about elf health.” — Brad DeGroot, 2025
@Baja Gaijin: Is it Mash-Up worthy?
Also Luann: Look at Toni’s shoes, with their sturdy-yet-raised heels, the lovingly polished buckles, how she carefully handles them by the heels to protect their, uh, fragrance after a day of playing Santa’s helper. This isn’t a one-off costume. They’ve had this outfit. They’ve had it for a while.
MW: What sketchy for-profit diploma mill does Ian work for, anyway? If Toby is passive-aggressive enough to leave the cage door open and let the parrot loose in the apartment, any decent tenured professor at any decent college or university would be smart enough just to leave the window open too.
MW: “Oh no! My fragile excellence award, and the Jenga tower I was using to display it!” My sympathies remain low.
GT Is it even possible for the panel order to get shuffled in comics publishing? Because switching #2 and #3 makes the narrative flow a bit more sensible.
MW I’m also playing the what *was* that Excellence Award saying game, and my guess is an oval with Lorem Ipsum-type text involving IWI… INA… and then “Excellent Ian” below. Which would be perfect as a head-pat from a college too incompetent to realize there are no month-long conferences and they’re paying Ian to take a solo vacation during term.
Can someone explain today’s Six Chix? If there is a pun there, I don’t see it.
Mary Worth: Oh, Ian. That award is as fleeting and hollow as the plaster it was made of. You should have held out for the cut glass version, or at the very least a plastic that wouldn’t get your CV laughed out of the application for an endowed chair.
Toby, my hat’s off to you– this is one hell of a long con. While it probably didn’t take long to convince Ian / Charterstone / the world that you’re not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, I imagine that maintaining that exact level of simplicity would take quite a bit of effort. Now, you get to destroy all of Ian’s tacky shit and watch him blame it on a bird of all things, a bird you befriended in a park like some crafty, avenging Snow White. “Oh no, not your stupid playbill that doesn’t go with the rest of our decor! Alas, the award you absolutely 3-D printed for yourself! Also I shit in your shoes.”
Is the Crankshat story (with the cardinal that can be seen in red only in on-line versions) going to go the route of Sunny? Will Pam name it Stan the Man and have him torment her dad in the same way Ian is being terrorized? Can’t wait.
The Family Circus: [Santa looks to Thel.]
[Thel shrugs.]
[Santa’s fingers brush over button labeled DOBERMANS before pushing YEET. Dolly goes flying with rocket propulsion.]
CS – It’s a Christmas miracle. Jeff and Pam are being visited by the ghost of Stan Musial.
Slylock Fox: The captain’s parrot is just so delighted by their misery! It’s squinting at them with joyful malice! I… SUNNY?! Is that you?
When Wilbur had a feud with Libby, it was stupid because Wilbur complained about nothing (cat meowing) and it was Libby’s home, not Wilbur’s. But now Sunny is actually destroying stuff Ian holds dear and it’s Ian’s home. So this is less like Wilbur with Libby (an asshole having a stupid feud with an animal) and more like Estelle with Dr Ed (when a human being is supposed to sacrifice their life for an animal and we are supposed not to see it is absurd). It’s outrageous that I am forced to side with Ian!
@Ettorre: Subsistence farming would be a huge step up for the Smifs.
Sunny is so laser-focused on destroying Ian’s treasures that it’s hard to believe it isn’t intentional.
@Ettorre: And Toby brought a huge, expensive cage that she apparently refuses to use.
You can leave Hootin’ Holler? There were people living in Hootin’ Holler who could show their faces somewhere else without being chased away by an angry mob? And the strip never showed them to us?
Also Josh you are not sorry! You enjoy our suffering!
Damn! Dolly sleighed that fake Claus!
***
So we’re all agreed that the only reason Toby isn’t keeping the parrot in the cage is she’s hoping to provoke a cardiac event in Ian, right?
***
There is a strong “And whose underwear is this?” vibe coming from those pirates and good for them. Not the cheating part, Toothless Joe. Shame on you for that. But the captain’s replacement foot does have a flared base, bringing a whole new meaning to “peg leg”.
“Shore hate t’see him go !!” “Thar both goin’, Snuffy !!” “I know !! Like I said, shore hate t’see ’em go !! What made ya think I was referrin’ t’just one o’ ’em ? You’d hafta read my dialog in text !!”
“We’re snowed in, Brad. It’s time to play a little Donner Party.”
“Ooh, I like the sound of that.”
Stabbing noises; the drip of blood; the sound of the oven turning on.
@Rube: It’s possible she just doesn’t understand that doors are supposed to be closed
@Banana Jr. 6000: Subsistence farming is the median inhabitant, others do a little less “farming” and a lot less “subsistence”
@Harmless little bunny:
Can someone explain today’s Six Chix? If there is a pun there, I don’t see it.
You’ll notice the drop shadows are exact duplicates of the originals thus mocking the notion of a platonic ideal.
Hilarious once you know the context.
Ian is an overwrought blowhard, but why the hell isn’t he shouting at Toby “cage the fucking bird, already!”? I mean, she’s clearly too stupid to figure out that that’s what the cage she bought is for, but even in his rage and self-absorption, he should be able to get that much out.
In the meantime, we’ll all enjoy the chaos and mouth-frothing.
I wanted to say that before the Spinning Jenny clothes were much more expensive, so it was not unheard to pay your servants or your mercenaries with clothes. But let’s not be pedantic, it would still be disappointing.
Hottin Holler is in desperate poverty, and yet you can see some elements of capitalism! To produce something (fish) you need to invest some initial capital instead of eating it (the worms)
Lockhorns: Yet the only clock in their living room always reads 12:00.
Beetle Bailey: Good to see Sarge and the new recruits team up to take that oath (“protect from domestic enemies) seriously.
RMMD: “Girl – you know how to pick ’em. Well, aside from that creep who became your stalker. Still, 50% is a good average.”
Toby “Honey, tonight could be a special night of love and passion for us! And you know what would really arouse me? For him to watch!”
Ian: “Sigh, fine, if that’s what floats your boat, I’m in”
Toby: “Great Ian, just sit in the cuck chair!”
FC – Santa can’t leave his sleigh in the parking lot anymore. The naughty kids who got coal last year always slash his runners.
Slylock – Of course the treasure chest is full of underwear! The map clearly indicated it was a chest of drawers.
Luann: I just realized Toni snagged Brad’s shirt with her curly-toed elf shoes. And now I’m going to dunk my laptop and head in bleach to rid myself of the mental images.
MW: If I had to guess, I’d say that Sunny’s destructive tendencies are an indication that he’s bored and seeking stimulation through any means he can. Which makes perfect sense, given that he’s cooped up with Toby all day.
SFx: The pirates in the left panel are horrified because the trunk of modern clothing indicates some sort of disruption in the time-space continuum. The pirates in the right panel are horrified because they’re super, Our Flag Means Death-level gay and come on, heart-print boxers? EWWWWW!
@Baja Gaijin:
While I always appreciate an appearance by Rene, the last panel is the best in advancing this surprisingly entertaining story arc. Ian sudden wakes up and realizes he is in h#ll and this is his punishment: to be forever tormented by this parrot. Squawk!
MW: The broken award reveals a treasure map which leads Ian, Sunny, and Mr. Alora to Slylock Island to …dig up Wilbur’s boxers? It’s becomes clear. While he was away, Toby entered Ian in a reality TV scavenger hunt.