Dark magic indeed
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Family Circus, 3/11/26
A thing I never would’ve predicted more than two decades ago when I started doing this blog is … well, I guess the fact that I’d still be doing the blog in 2026 would be at the top of the list, but not far below would be the fact that I’d become an increasingly less grudging fan of the Family Circus. Lesser strips like Marvin do pee and poop jokes all the time and I get no pleasure from it, but this is a perfectly executed panel capturing the moment right before PJ horks directly onto Big Daddy Keane’s face. Daddy knows it, PJ knows it, it’s inevitable, but we don’t have to see it or hear it directly addressed, and I think that’s beautiful.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/26
Hey, you know how Rex Morgan, M.D., is boring, a significant majority of the time? Well, today we learn that, while we’ve been watching all these boring characters do uninteresting things, there’s at least one guy who’s been hanging out off-panel experiencing even less excitement than everyone else. Truly chilling.
Rhymes With Orange, 3/11/26
Sure, we all enjoy a stage magic act. But did you know that the only thing preventing the rabbits and the birds from having sex with each other is a corporate-style HR policy? And call me a “woke scold” or whatever but I’m in favor of it. The rabbit and the bird shouldn’t have sex! It would screw up the workplace dynamics, plus I don’t even understand how it would work, biologically!
65 replies to “Dark magic indeed”
MW: Um, Mary, when you turn someone into a cat, they won’t eat salad and can’t use a drinking glass. First transmogrification, dear?
Nonono guys! “Red morning, lameass motel diner staff take warning!” You guys are doomed, read a book!
RMMD – If by “back up and running like it used to,” you mean “no more using a baseball cap as a hair net,” then I’m all for it.
RMMD:
“Now, why is it that you’re wearing your baseball cap in that inverted way, Hector?”
“Well, I’ve been working back here slicing the pumpernickel.”
“No. Don’t say it, Hector.”
“Yep. I’m the ‘catcher’ in the ‘rye‘ !”
Rhymes with Orange:
“Well, in order to be able to do that, I’d pretty much have to pull a rabbit out of a hat!”
RwO: You’d get flyaway hare!
Actually, the Rabbit-Dove god, Hathnepsepunt, occupies a minor, albeit relevant place in Ancient Egyptian mythos, particularly during the early Middle Kingdom era. Today’s Rhymes With Orange could have been a delightfully arcane reference if I hadn’t made all of that up!
Family Circus:
“…I speak of the vomitus of love.”
— Steve Miller (adapted)
RMMD: [Reader rolls eyes] Hector thinks becoming a regular character in the strip will relieve the tedium of his everyday life.
FC: I think my favorite part of this scene is Daddy Kane’s expression. Not shock or horror, just sad resignation to what is about to happen. There’s always going to be someone vomiting in this house, its just a question of when and where.
RMMD: I like the big blank space left in the dialogue box, as if it’s saying “No, that’s it. There’s no added context that would make this scene more interesting.”
RWO: What’s really sick about this scene is that the rabbit and the dove are already married, they’re just asking the magician if he’d be up for a new experience to spice things up…
RWO: I’d do what the rabbit says. You definitely don’t want him reporting that indoor outhouse to OSHA.
RMMD: He can’t wait until he gets to hire some young kitchen assistant who will listen to his obscene jokes and call him “chef”.
Between Friends : …I’ve been fighting against making a joke about how Maeve’s B-plot involved people who are featured in that large file of archived e-mails that were made public recently, and here the strip just outright says it’s true! I just assumed it was Benoît in there, not Maeve herself!
…Too far?… Too vague?…*****************
Bizarro : …Shouldn’t this strip have run next monday, not today?
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Family Circus : Meh, this strip could be better by having the facial expressions more clearly hint at what is about to happen. Bil and PJ just
have the default Hi & Lois expressionlook morose, not horrified at having done a disastrous mistake and nauseated, respectively.**************
Hagar the Horrible : doesn’t understand that’s not a toy given life. That’s a dude Merlin shrunk and froze, begging the horrible barbarians to at least reunite him with his beloved who is trapped in the same plight!
**************
Moose & Molly : are in such dire straits financially they can’t even afford to give their children a 25¢ gift. That’s the joke, folks!
**************
On the Fastrack : “You know this clear case of human error? It was actually *I*, the personification of the Y2K bug, behind it!” …Seriously?
**************
Safe Havens : oh joy, a fish hook going right through a thumb to go through ANOTHER thumb. THERE’s a nice, safe, non-wince-inducing image to start the day!
RMMD:
Doug’s pompadour is continuing to expand at a rate greater than that of the Hubble Constant.
Mary Worth Mashup: Hey Mary. It’s a cat, not a parrot.
FC: No sympathy. He didn’t notice that the kid looked awful before he swung him around?
Mary, Christmas was months ago! It’s much too far out of season to be eating holly bushes!
The cat’s expression speaks for us all, really.
RMMD — I dunno, most guys with a pornstache and goatee would never complain to the boss about not having hardly anything to do. The lazy ones would be playing Call of Duty and the industrious ones would be going full Jesse Pinkman.
FC — Say what you want about the Keene household, but they still have their dinner soup served out of a tureen in the best Victorian fashion.
MW: Cat sitting there awkwardly, “Am I supposed to eat this, or do I just sit here…?”
DT: Call in the State Police, of the proud State of State. I mean, fictional states of the US do occur in stories, but how often are said states given names, which happens – examples that come to mind are the state of Calisota from the Disney comics, Winnemac from the works of Sinclair Lewis, or from pulp author Norvell Page’s novella “But Without Horns”, the state of Wichinois.
MW: Mary seems curiously introspective. If it were anyone else, I’d say she was close to questioning whether people wanted her interfering with their lives. But this is Mary Worth, and without that there’d be nothing but — well, psychic dogs and parrots with a grudge, to pick two recent examples where her meddling was nearly non-existent.
Family Circus: Since Daddy Keane is about to be covered with vomit it’s nice of Thel to have a big steaming bowl of…water? Yeah, let’s just go ahead and say that’s water and she’s prepared to throw it over her husband to dilute PJ’s puke and prevent a peristaltic chain reaction like the one in Stand By Me.
RwO: “My next trick will be sawing a relationship in half!”
Alice: “Here, read my classic novel Breakfast of Champions, about a man whose brain is in dire need of a reset, along with my underrated novel Galapagos where I discuss my theory that our brains are much too large.”
Phantom: Whelp, looks like the Jungle Patrol is about to stage a coup d’état. RIP Colonel Worubu.
Pluggers: Huh. I’d have thought Pluggers wouldn’t care about the shape of pills because their wives put them in a piece of soft cheese and stick them to the roofs of their mounts for them to lick off completely unawares that they are being medicated.
RxMD: Props to the soul-patch, backwards ballcap motel cook, the one guy in Glenwood who refuses to get on board with the town’s retro roots country rockabilly aesthetic. March to the beat of your own drummer, man, preferably one who can beat out something other than a 4/4 shuffle!
Blondie: I absolutely love how “in the zone” Dagwood is here! It reminds me of watching professional pool players and Olympic curlers. There is only the food. The food is everything. The food is all there is.
A backwards baseball cap? Like a real person would wear?!? In Rex Morgan, M.D.?!?!? Oh, thank the gods! He has a thin moustache and a soul patch!
***
Everybody falls in love with a bird until they find out about the cloaca.
Rhymes with Orange:
RMMD: A bleak note of realism that late 90s skaters, with their soul patches and backwards baseball caps, are still out there and now pushing 50. Look at that weathered face. That tragic grip on lost youth. That’s the lined, beaten, careworn visage of a man who has just realized that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out closer to the Watergate scandal than the present day.
The Family Circus: My dad once did something like this with my niece, bouncing her up and down as we warned “Dad, she’s about to throw up!” Did he listen? No. Did she throw up on him? Yes. Did we tell that story at his funeral? Also yes!
FC: The intense stare on PJ’s face belies his thoughts; “Spank my ass, will ya!”
Pluggers like their prescription drugs square. It reminds them of their LSD-laced sugar cube youth.
Rex Morgan, M.D.: Setting aside his haircut, it’s sad to see anyone reduced to a bored motel cook, much less a talented swordsman like Inigo Montoya. “You ordered French toast. Prepare to die!” just doesn’t have the same zoom zoom zoom, you know?
MW: Poor Muffin witnessed a Mary Meddle for the first time and has already become profoundly depressed in response.
FC: Photos taken one second before disaster.
RMMD: I know I say this every time Rex Morgan does a new plot, but it bears repeating. A former A-List action star who’s become a recluse shows up under a fake name in Glenwood! This should be thrilling. At the very least, intriguing. Yet Beatty’s devotion to tedium rules unchallenged.
@ValdVin:
Pluggers like their prescription drugs square. It reminds them of their LSD-laced sugar cube youth.
I was thinking Sabin vaccine.
@Baja Gaijin: Muffin’s inner monologue is more or less exactly what went through my head when I saw the first panel. Nailed it.
I recently called Luann “an indictment of the American upper middle class”, and this week drives that point home even further. Because we’re seeing higher education’s role in furthering this status quo.
When Luann blatantly fails an assignment – an assignment that was already insultingly easy – the teacher ignores it, and starts handing out Buzzfeed personality quizzes. Which the skeevy Les manipulates to engineer a hookup with Tara. The students don’t care; they’re just trying to check the “go to college” box with as little effort as possible, so they can keep slacking and living at home rent-free. The teachers don’t care. The school doesn’t care. Why does anyone bother? Why do we, as a society, pay for this?
JP Is I, Bogdan – leaving message before going to audition for Hagrid in new Harry Potter show!
DT No wonder they don’t mind when Tracy uses excessive force or even a touch of manslaughter handling suspects, they have such a sparse command structure for law enforcement with so few competent chiefs that nobody can figure out what to do during a jail break without calling the state governor (a political office famed for its depth of militaryesque strategy)!
MW That cat is wondering what kind of idiot it’s been adopted by as s/he contemplates its meal of salad
FC: Is Thel carrying hot food or a bedpan?
Today’s Heathcliff is a perfect microcosm of everything I love about this strip. The cat has access to dynamite. The cat knows how to use said dynamite and has repeatedly utilized it to destroy a man’s property, either because the cat dislikes his lawn decor or solely to be a jerk. And the man witnessing this continued destruction of his possessions by a cat with access to dynamite is just vaguely annoyed that he’ll have to buy more gnomes. Incredible. What a world.
FC-PJ can’t handle his liquor.
MW-“What is this stuff you’re feeding me,” Muffin asks, “I only eat proper cat food.”
RMMD-I don’t get this. You are providing room service to people at the hotel who are customers. You don’t overcharge the customers for the food they order you’re providing the food for free?
RMMD-Shocking to think that with apparently how popular the ‘Glenwood Motel’ song is that more people aren’t beating a path to it.
“Good toss, Bil; you got him right in the dirty laundry hamper.”
“I was aiming for the toilet.”
MW: I’m in agreement with my fellow ‘Mudges that between her ham-fisted attempt to meddle Harv and now this salad business shows that Mary has well and truly lost her mojo. If there’s anyone in Charterstone who would actual want one of her salmon squares, it’s her cat!
MW-“At least it isn’t Wilbur again. I’m so tired of his problems,” Mary thinks to herself.
CS: So how did we get from “we’re getting married at the courthouse for tax reasons” to handing out roles like maid of honor, best man, ring bearer and so on? Are they just going to co-opt a civic building for their ceremony at 9:30 a.m. on a business day? That would be quite rude to all the people who are there for court cases, traffic tickets, business licenses, or just to do their job. But it feels exactly like something Tom Batiuk would write: a flash mob wedding.
On top of that, since Pete and Mindy have been assigned roles, I’m guessing they decide to go ahead and get hitched too. Pam, Jeff, and Ed will already be there, and it’s not like anyone else needs to be invited, amirite? (Cut to Darren and Jessica crying over Darren’s Atomik Komix art desk.)
I very much hope this happens. Because it would be spectacular.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Except society isn’t paying for this. None of this bears any resemblance to how life works. Luann is supposed to be set in 21st century America, but might as well be 29th century Mars.
@But What Do I Know?: And this guy actually looks a little like Jesse Pinkman.
RMMD: so where is this heading? Will Mae Mae’s identity be uncovered? If so, by whom? Or will she fail in love with Mud?
Family Circus: Since I was a kid, the Family Circus has made me laugh around 3-6 times a year. This is one of those times.
Rex Morgan: Have I misunderstood “job security” all these years? Have I been doing the wrong thing by not telling my boss I was sitting around, doing nothing? Or have I never had a job I truly hated? Very ponderable!
Rhymes With Orange: I can’t imagine how nerve-racking every mid-tier magician’s performance must be. If you perform every trick flawlessly, you probably get polite chuckles and applause. The slightest misstep leads to career-ending humiliation. This guy doesn’t want to have to worry about his rabbits boinking his doves mid-show, and I have to support him.
@Banana Jr. 6000: *shrug* They’ve got an appointment (3:15 the next day). You already need witnesses, you can call the people you’re coming with whatever kind of wedding attendant you want to, so as long as “walk down the aisle” means “walk up to the desk appropriately” I’m sure this is just fine for a courthouse wedding, it’s been done before and they won’t even blink at it.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: RIP Shock G
Gasoline Alley: If Walt keeps wandering across the train tracks like that he could get killed. Again.
GT:
“Coach!”
“Yes?”
“Which singular backboard do you want us to attack, the offensive or the defensive?”
Lockhorns drink non-screw cap wine? I’m a bit surprised.
@Lauralot: My neighbor said that Heathcliff keeps blowing up lawn gnomes so I asked how many lawn gnomes he has and he said he just goes to the store and gets new lawn gnomes so I said it sounds like you’re just feeding lawn gnomes to Heathcliff and then his son started crying
his *dog started crying, I guess
Is this a classic Family Circus? The shape of Dad’s face (and the face wrinkles of an exhausted breadwinner) remind me of the very early strips. Also, the fact that it’s actually kind of funny.
MW: Today’s strip prompts the question: How much vermin should a salad contain before a cat will eat it?
But in other news: Mary’s salmon square fish oil pills are catching on with the Plugger set.
@Charterstone: Dune: Maybe we’ll be treated to Mary’s
former victimsfriends having an intervention. “Mary, we’ve noticed that you’ve been… not completely your best lately…”@matt w: Perfection.
MW: The cat sadly contemplating the salad amuses me to no end. It reminds me of the “lady yelling at the cat” meme.
Wizard of Id Classics: No notes, just a really good joke.
RMMD:
Motel manager Doug emphatically declares; “I want to get this place back up and running like it used to!”
Hector responds:
“Wait. Is she a waitress or a prostitute?”
@CanuckDownSouth: A ring-bearer and a photographer, though? It sounds like they’re planning the whole ceremony, not just a handful of roles that would align with the civic needs for witnesses. Are they going to dress up? Do people do that for a courthouse wedding?
MARY WORTH: Poor Mary. She’s so depressed over her inability to butt into someone else’s life she no longer has the thenergy to cook, and thus, is reduced to feeding her cat and herself the roughage from the condo’s ferns.
@Lauralot: *tips trilby*
RMMD: Does the Glenwood Motel Cafe get that much traffic, apart from the occasional guest who doesn’t want to bother ordering for pizza or making the drive to Wanda’s Retro Diner down the road? I would assume not, and yet I can easily believe that the place is absolutely jumping compared to what normally happens in this strip.
@Ken: So are we hoping this intervention will or won’t end like the one they held for Aldo?
For some reason the content bots don’t like my Family Circus commentary. Basically what I was trying to say is that if you see a small child with that expression and you still toss them in the air, you deserve what happens next.