Honestly unsurprised that a dog would use its unprecedented power of speech for this
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Mary Worth, 6/29/26
The very first Mary Worth plot covered on this blog introduced both Tommy in full drug lord mode and launched the Wilbur/Iris relationship, so it makes sense that Wilbur’s view of Tommy is filtered through the difficulties Tommy’s caused his mother. That’s not why he’s so upset, though (obviously Wilbur has caused Iris plenty of trouble on his own). No, the real issue is that if even Dawn isn’t writing Tommy off as a hopeless addict and loser, where does that leave Wilbur? He’ll be fighting Ian to avoid the “worst dude in Charterstone” title, and Ian agreed to not murder his wife’s parrot so he’s already got a head start! Anyway, I’m looking forward both to seeing Wilbur’s emotional meltdown and learning what “teen dance-offs” are.
Alice, 6/29/26
A while back we learned that Alice might be good at her job, actually, which I found somewhat destabilizing, but we didn’t learn what her job actually is. Today we find out that she’s apparently a teacher of some kind, which is funny because we’ve never, ever seen her teaching a class. Maybe she should be laid off, actually? Since she doesn’t have any students, and teaching them is her job?
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/29/26
Ha ha, yes, Snuffy, that is certainly one way to construe the gentleman’s statement! But for real, stealing chickens from your destitute neighbors is one thing, but you stole a car and you’re going to jail jail now.
Herb and Jamaal, 6/29/26
Oh, well, big news, Herb: when people say “affordability,” they are actually specifically discussing whether people can afford to pay for goods and services. People like you, for instance! So we’re all talking about the same thing here, it turns out.
Six Chix, 6/29/26
Yeah, if my dog started talking to me like this, I would be freaking the fuck out! This guy knows what’s up!
160 replies to “Honestly unsurprised that a dog would use its unprecedented power of speech for this”
Family Circus Mashup: What if someone else spoke the second panel’s caption?
Sally Forth – Ronan is dangling his participle.
Dennis the Menace – Is this a thinly disguised version of the anti-gun control argument?
And . . . Juggs Parker is back!
BG&SS:
That thar confession that Smif just made ain’t gonna stick in court, ‘cuz the sheriff didn’t give Snuffy his Miranda warnins about the testy-moanial privilege against self-incrimination.
RMMD: “Yes, it is so disrespectful to pretend to play instruments. Say, what’s this old ‘Partridge Family’ album?”
@Horace Broon, yRMMD: Sarah has been assimilated by Luann and Shannon.
Six Chix:
Is that transparent visual nod to The Scream an illustration of Munch housin’ by proxy?
6Cx: Aren’t chicks more concerned about whether or not you put the seat down? Lid up, seat down seems like a good compromise.
Alice:
You might be feeling bad for Alice because she’s losing her job, but since she apparently works for a school run by Hitler my sympathy is limited. I’m glad they don’t have any students!
Alice:
Trying to trick her boss and save at least a part of her curriculum by using Zeno’s paradox, Alice asks: “Why don’t you do that gradually, through reducing my course load by successive halves?”
MW: “Is Tommy a classmate of yours?”
No, dad. I haven’t been to class in two years, silly.
Mary Worth:
In an exercise in sheer futility, Wilbur scans the magazine’s back pages for advertisements on increasing male potency.
Chix (sic): Lid starts flopping up and down. “Hey, isn’t someone gonna ask me my opinion. hmmpf“
Mary Worth:
“The main event at today’s slate of dance-offs is Jets v. Sharks, so I just know it’s going to end well!”
Aren’t Tommy and Dawn in their 20’s? I don’t know exactly what ‘Teen Dance Offs’ are, but I assume it would be a weird thing for childless adults to attend.
Luann: Calling it now, Tiffany’s nowhere near Paris and it’s all a fake so she can keep up appearances. To what end, who knows and who cares?
CS: Well, I stand corrected that yesterday was the end of this. I guess we have one more week of this, THEN we go back to The Interview that Never Ends.
S4th: Yesterday I was wondering to myself why they didn’t rent a vehicle large enough to fit everyone and their luggage, like a GMC Suburban. Now I know, it’s so they can get separated and the ‘joke’ will be they don’t get to have their adventures together.
MW: Wilburman is thinking it’s bush-skulkin’ time!
Ph: So if an ‘autonomous’ system is going to spring the Python, Schmelon Schmusk, why go to the trouble of picking up No-Mad No-Return yourself? Why didn’t you send a pilot-less robot plane for him? I’m thinking someone like you would have a soft spot for plot elements from ‘This Island Earth’!
MW: It’s damned seldom that the Westons can imagine themselves superior to someone. Sorry, Tommy, wrong place, wrong time.
RMMD: Of the many, many things I could find to get into a tizzy over, this wouldn’t even make the Top Ten.
BG&SS: Good thing it wasn’t a horse. As I understand it, that’s a No-Questions-Hangin’.
SXCHX: Would’ve been funnier if the dog had used the opportunity to employ the word “bitch.”
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith:
I like the expressions on the faces of Sheriff Tait and the car salesman. The latter seems shocked, as if he’s thinking “my God, I did say that! I don’t have a leg to stand on!”; the former is begrudgingly conceding that Snuffy’s right, that passes for permission in the legal wasteland of Hootin’ Holler, where people have no understanding of pragmatics or context. The attempt to bring modern conveniences like cars to the Holler will therefore be abandoned as economically unviable, setting back the region’s Human Development Index another 50 years.
MW: Ah-ha, I knew it! Irrational Wilbur Weston tantrum incoming!
C’shaft: So, Eugene and Lucy were the very last holdouts of the swing era, dancing in empty ballrooms until the late 1950s before Eugene was drafted to…um…kind of hang out in Vietnam until things picked up over there, I guess?
Dustin: “Just kidding! Actually, I was thinking you could respond to the negative reviews and offer solutions to their problems, thus raising you in the estimation of potential customers who see you want to atone for their bad experience, while spending a little extra time with me to address and correct my errors rather than putting me in a customer-facing job with apparently no training.”
“…No, I’ll just kick you to the curb and assume my problem is solved forever, the way I did with my orthodontist.”
JP: I love the subtle dread on Charlotte’s face when she asks “Am I family?” Does she share DNA with these people? Do they have some horrible condition which causes them to behave like this? Who can she talk to about receiving a full family history to give to her pediatrician?
Phantom: Five minutes later, the AI’s hallucinatory math has it launching an attack on where it assumes the Python to be hiding out: Branson, Missouri.
Pluggers are wasteful and sloppy.
RMMD: “But isn’t it really insulting to be standing here acting superior and judging the actions of people who to all appearances aren’t as privileged as we are, when we know nothing about the circumstances which led them to this point?”
“….Oh honey, and you were doing so well until then.”
Alice:
“Perhaps if you didn’t look like some hellish combination of Inspector Clouseau and Albert Einstein, sir, more students would enroll in our curriculum!”
CS: You know the Big Ball Of Violence trope, where a fight breaks out and turns into a cloud entity that absorbs random passersby? The story is exactly that, but it’s the Big Ball Of Tragedy. Those five random people are being unwittingly sucked into a world of pointless suffering, incoherent writing, and destroyed comic books. If you live in greater Cleveland and you see this thing, steer clear of it!
Luann: So Tiffany is shopping in Paris, while Luann is at a lame summer camp, and Bernice is sitting in a spare bedroom in Luann’s house. And people wonder why I say Tiffany is the best character in the strip. She would have dropped these losers years ago.
MW: Speaking of people who should have been dropped years ago…
It’s so on-brand that Alice not only feels the need to inform the reader of the artist who performed “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” but also the album it’s on, increasingly irrelevant information for the modern streaming era but oh-so-important to this comic’s aged demographic.
MW: “We’re getting into a time machine and going back to 1990 when hanging out at the mall was a thing, Dad!”
Up-to-date MW: “We’re co-shopping on Amazon and then watching Tik Tok dances.”
The wealthy Abby Spencer knows how to throw a welcoming home dinner – hot dogs with no sides.
6CHIX: This is how Son of Sam got started. The “Son of Sam” murders committed by David Berkowitz took place in New York City over a 13-month span from July 1976 to July 1977 so this year is the 50th anniversary.
Everyone else is getting ready for the big 4th of July but only this comic is honoring the legacy of one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Oh, and BTW he’s still alive.
JP: The fabulously wealthy Abbey Spencer knows how to throw a welcoming home dinner – hotdogs with no sides.
Alice: Who wants to work for an educational organization so cheap or broke that your boss doesn’t even get a chair to sit in? Wait – is he working from a Starbucks?
Also Alice: you know, she could be a dog obedience teacher.
@The Quiet Man: re: Phantom comment: Come on, now. Ignotus Vindictive has a cool mask and wants to show it off.
Alice: Obviously the best bit of this comic is the implication that Alice has spent… weeks? months? standing in front of an empty classroom teaching no-one, and didn’t notice until now. Is she even actually aware that she’s a teacher?
MW-“My daughter and my dealer? Whatever do I do?”
MW: I know this has been asked before, but it bears repeating. Why is Tommy still at Charterstone? Did Zak move out of his mansion into a two bedroom condo? Is Iris living with Zak but still paying for her condo so Tommy can feel like a big boy? Mary’s advice to Iris during the Vicodin arc was to spend more time with Tommy, which she took to mean accompanying him everywhere, including therapy. When Iris had her thyroid plot, Zak offered to “help out” with Tommy, indicating that he still needed constant supervision. And I’m supposed to believe Iris is leaving him unmonitored? Going against Mary’s advice? That’s an offense punishable by execution in Santa Royale.
What is going on with the comics section of the Seattle Times website today? Took a look at it on four browsers and nothing from Comics Kingdom is showing up and GoComics is only showing yesterday’s.
Mary Worth: “I’m going to the mall, Dad…Tommy and I are going to check out the Teen Dance-Offs!” Let us pause to marvel at this majestic piece of dialogue that could 100% be spoken by any young American in the year of our Lord 2026. Dawn (#1852 US girls’ name) and Tommy (#731 US boys’ name) are going to watch teen-agers dance off (sulk on their phones between rounds of Dance Dance Revolution) at the mall (closed in 2018, last recorded stores: Spencer’s and a Thai massage parlor). It’s low-key the start of a very chalant relationship, fr fr! (Or maybe it’s a skibidi relationship, who can say?)
Dennis the Menace: That isn’t mud Dennis is tracking into the house, the neighbors septic tank overflowed.
Marvin: For all the parents of children who can’t afford or just don’t feel like taking their kids to the new Toy Story movie you can just let them read this comic. It’s just as good!
Cranky: I don’t understand why there’s suddenly this audience for Hairy Dingus, including a super-smug looking Crankshaft. Where did they come from? For the past several days, Dingus has been in his house reading his dad’s diary. Is he leading a parade of old people somewhere? Is he like the Pied Piper, except they’re all going to the cancer and amputation wards?
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: As a teacher, I can tell you w/some authority that “skibbidi” is out, and “6/7” is about to expire as well.
@Rosstifer: Eh, a buddy and I used to go see the girl’s state basketball championships when we were in college. Of course, we were degenerates who smuggled in a pint of peach schnapps, so maybe your point stands?
Luann: Isn’t that wonderful? Tiffany found the Diamondback Trading Post at King’s Island amusement park in Cincinnati.
Wow, was today’s Six Chix secretly ghostwritten by an immature guy who resents women? “Waaa, everyone’s telling me what to do!”
Alice While the demographic “enrollment cliff” is a challenge for any educational institution to navigate, I’m pretty sure Alice’s school was doomed anyhow because its facilities consist of empty rooms and one laptop to organize the entire institution – that’s no way to attract today’s students! They at least expect chairs to sit on!
MW Well, now we know when the last time was that Moy spent any significant time in public – at least a decade or two ago, before the major decline of shopping malls!
RMMD Wow, did the writer get teased for not noticing someone doing lip-sync recently? This is getting downright weird.
@Schroduck: She continues to teach her class, but her “students” are either mannequins, or the dead bodies of her murder-spree victims.
@TheDiva: A recent comment here noted that Crankshaft has fallen into the Gasoline Alley trap of having characters age in real time but never letting them die. The weirdness with when Eugene and Lucy danced and when Larry Dinkle died, might be Batiuk recognizing it’s untenable for all of that to be pre-WWII and starting to ret-con.
Six Chix: I feel like we’re sleeping on the horror of a large, featureless room containing only a toilet with no visible plumbing connection, no toilet paper, no sink, no shower, no reading materials of any sort. But then we sleep on a lot with Six Chix, there’s only so much time in the day.
Six Chix: Installing a living room toilet in your unfurnished apartment was your first mistake.
@Rosstifer: Aren’t Tommy and Dawn in their 20’s?
They’re drawn that way, but as John points out in this post, Tommy has been around since 2004, and he looked to be in his 20s then. Does meth keep you young? Not from the mugshots I’ve seen. So we’re left with time passing strangely in the Worthiverse.
It feels like Karen Moy was curious about what the young folk are up to today so she did her research using an Archie Comics Digest. Hey, at least the teen dance-off story from the late 50s probably had some fantastic Harry Lucey art!
***
Teen dance-offs, malls, and print magazines. Should we be concerned that the Mary Worth team appears to be adrift in time?
***
Honestly? Considering how dirty the automobile sales industry operates, we should be able to take them literally. You go ahead and keep that car, Snuffy, and good for you.
***
Word play is soooooooooooo much easier when you can say the same thing by just adding a word or two! I don’t care about the cost of health care, I’m worried about the cost of my bad-health care! Can I get my own comic now?
H&J – Specifically, “I can’t afford the ability to write a funny comic strip.”
Mary Worth: Wilbur’s never looked better! Does wide-eyed shock take years off a man’s face, or has he been moisturizing?
BG&SS: Not to mention operating a motor vehicle without a license. You cannot tell me that Snuffy has a driver’s license.
@Anonymous: This is how Abbey shows that she’s not just a spoiled and pampered rich person. “See, everybody? I know how to cook!”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Not today, thanks… uh… Yes, those are nice brushes, but…”
“Polonio! You need to have more sales resistance!”
“Thank you! I’ll make us both rich with this distributorship”
[On briefcase: MLM BRUSHES, INC.]
JP: Am I family? Asks Charlotte before heading to her room to finish her writ of emancipation.
@StripEye:
Another asshole spammer
Mods: Spam comment from “StripEye” @43
Was I supposed to know Dawn is 19? She’s been 19 for 30 years and they’ve been drawing her like she’s 30 for ages.
@Victor Von: Maybe this is one of the famous Pittsburgh basement toilets?
My parents have one though someone built some mameshift plywood walls around it. It had (has?) a pennant with the 1960 World Series winning Pirates roster on it.
@Baja Gaijin: the Keane Kompound allows role play these days?
If Snuffy’s liking for the car was so powerful that it caused Hootin’ Holler to spawn drivable roads, I kinda think he had to check it out.
Wary Morth:
Wilbur will crawl through the ornamental plants at the mall, stalking Dusk and Tommy, and screaming AUUUUUUGH at intervals, terrifying everybody except Dusk, who will be too high on Tommy’s product to notice.
Life is brutal.
@TheDiva: If you want a reall belly laugh, Big Bands enjoyed a commercial resurgence in the 1960s that is mostly ignored in popular history. Remember that a few people over 35 actually continued to be alive during that era so there was still an audience out there. Buddy Rich was very popular, so was the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra. So Larry Dinkle might have had a decent career had he kept the faith rather than dying of despair. Ha ha.
Mary’s Worst: Does anyone else hear “Buck Rogers”‘s Twiki in their mind’s ears when someone mentions Tommie’s last name?
I’m not sure I’m ready for Alice to shift its focus to Hitler’s Extraordinary Playlist, but I guess we’ll see where it goes.
“The election is tight, with exactly half the votes going to ‘up’ and half to ‘down.’ It doesn’t appear that the man is going to vote, electing instead to scream into the voice . . . heh, we can all relate to that, right Roger? . . . so we’re awaiting the final vote from the cat, who has entered the polling place, shat in a box, and left without voting on ‘up’ or ‘down’. Looks like the house might be entering a constitutional crisis here. Let’s go to Steve Karnacki for analysis.”
@Lauralot: Hell, why is Dawn still in Charterstone? Even if we allow for the comic strip to live in a continuous present, Dawn has crossed what I call The Luann Threshold. That’s when you become an adult, but you can’t support yourself, and can’t focus yourself in any direction that might justify your parents continuing to support you. No wonder Luann’s parents prefer Bernice’s company.
If Dawn doesn’t like whatever Wilbur’s about to say next, it’s her own fault for accepting his support, at the cost of My House My Rules. Especially when Dawn has *two* rich parents she can sponge off of, and chooses Wilbur every single time.
Some cropping job on the preview in judge parker yesterday!
Phantom: How cute. Not-Elon thinks you can reboot the Wambesi.
@matt w:
My home in NJ had one. A very old house that had been expanded several times in the past, you could see that at one time it was the only toilet in the home -which lined up nicely with the casement window.
@Vanya: I was thinking of the 1997 swing revival brought about by the song “Zoot Suit Riot.” It was a big deal… for like six weeks.
@matt w: This one either has sentience, or just knows how MW comics are.
Is “Alice” a “me In Black” spinoff, and Alice teaches the aliens human life?
Wilbur doesn’t trust Tommy! He betrayed Iris’s trust, he became addicted to drugs, he went to prison! Unlike him, who betrayed Iris’s trust, became addicted to alcohol and didn’t go to prison (though I am sure he broke some laws faking his own death). He cannot trust someone unable to escape the consequences of his actions!
@Bob Tice:
Trying to trick her boss and save at least a part of her curriculum by using Zeno’s paradox, Alice asks: “Why don’t you do that gradually, through reducing my course load by successive halves?”
Sure, that works until they reach the Solomonic minimum. . .
@TheDiva: On Pluggers …remember when Pluggers were the type to smugly announce “Any job worth doing is worth doing well”? What happened.
Alice is an adjunct faculty member teaching at a community college or second tier state U? That explains a lot. I suspect that if I spend 5+ years of my life writing a dissertation on The Hermeneutics of Emptiness: Empty Space and the Ghost in the Machine only to have a job — with no guarantee that I would actually have remunerative work in any given semester — where I was teaching kids (with no interest in learning material in a course they have to take because general ed requirements, thankfully, still exist) stuff that was taught to me in high school (and which I managed to already know by middle school), I would end up like Alice.
Heck, it’s probably not that they didn’t have enough kids enrolled to offer the course Alice usually teaches, but rather that they didn’t have enough students to offer a full slate of advanced courses to the full time faculty. So somebody lucky and plucky enough to get tenure at Alice’s university is now has to teach the class Alice would teach in order to have a full teaching load. And (from my current personal experience as a full professor at a second tier state university) Alice, you may be comforted to know that Prof. Bigshot is also quite frustrated that his teaching load has gone up to 4:4 (it was 3:3 or less when he was hired) and that he doesn’t have one lower division lecture or lab in which he gets to introduce bright young minds to his field but rather has to teach 2-3 such courses, full of students who are struggling with high school level material.
@Rube: I see no contradiction between TheDiva’s observation and your memory. Pluggers are exactly the sort of people who would lecture “kids today” that “any job worth doing is worth doing well” while themselves doing a sloppy and half-assed job.
Snuffy Smith : Josh, You really think Snuffy would be so dumb as to commit a crime outside of Sherriff Tait (and whoever the Judge is again)’s jurisdiction?
That car salesman is regretting building his lot on the outside of Piney Creek’s limits for tax
evasionpurposes, now that he’s been told that just makes him a target for the violent inbred mutants living in the hills.**************
Mary Worth : You can do it, Wilbur! You can play the role of the senex iratus, denying his daughter’s romantic wishes, and stall this romance long enough for Brandy to come back from her trip, and the old status quo to be restored!
**************
Safe Havens : …Why do you guys need pet sitters? YOU’RE the pets! Inviting people into your house just increases the risk of your secret being blown, especially considering you’ve shown difficulty controlling the transformations, and they’ve started happening at the most inappropriate times!
Six Chix: Can we just take a moment to appreciate that the cartoonist referenced Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and did so in such a way that it actually makes the panel more interesting and adds to the intrigue of the situation rather than just “look how cultured I am?”
Pretty weird for two adults to go to a “teen dance-off”!
MW: You’d think Wilbur would make a bigger deal out of Dawn interrupting him on the toilet.
FC: Thel removes calipers from around Jeffy’s head. “Yay! You’re almost a casaba!”
The surprising thing is not that Snuffy is a thief, but that he can drive! I will still assume he doesn’t have a licence
They have such a big house that the toilette is not cramped in one corner of the bathroom but it has an entire empty wall behind it with nothing around! I think they can afford to buy a fancy dog water bowl that keep the water moving!
FG: Damn. I was hoping they’d catch her coming out of the shower.
Today’s Alice is a strip, a text below the strip commenting the strip and a text below the text explaining the text. It’s turtles all the way down — literally!
That’s the problem for wannabe populists who think they can ride it for good ends. You think you have invented a simple enough slogan for people to rally around but then it turns out the people are too dumb to get it or are too pedantic to accept it. Just blame a minority, if you want to succeed!
@Ettorre: Herb and Jamaal
MW- When Dawn and Tommy go to the dance off, Wilbur can spend quality time with his pants off!
JP: You can’t accuse Abbey of not laying a festive board. Boiled hot dogs with supermarket rolls and the plastic ketchup and mustard containers right out on the table means “dinner” at Spencer Ranch at least three nights a week, ever since Marie left. Welcome home, Soph — pass the Alka-Seltzer!
“Dad, I am going to the mall to check out the teens dance off!”
“Good idea! Just remember not to stare for too long and be discreet when taking pictures, trust me, I know!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you say you want to check out teens?”
Snuffy Smith: If “The Wind and the Willows” was half-assed and lacking cutesy animal characters.
Herb is a small businessman, so his main problem is not whether he can afford essentials, but how much he can increase the prices without either incurring a loss for each sale or without losing too many clients. The problem is not affordability, it’s profitability
Six Chix: Meanwhile, the turd he just deposited is cursing him for sending it to a sewery demise.
RMMD- “It seems insulting to real musicians like Truck Tyler, Mud Murphy, Spuds Morton, Larry Dinkle….”
A: Ahahaha, it’s funny because lowered fertility, falling immigration, hostile legislation and the exhaustion of the education premium has stopped the secular trend of expansion of higher education, forcing for the first time ever the sector to shrink, destroying many jobs and much capital of knowledge!
Crankshaft – @brendancalling: I had the same thought, wondering why the Potato Nosed Misery Brigade are suddenly outside in the middle of a crowd of random strangers. However, after giving it more thought than it deserves, it occurred to me that they’re in a park. I bet that Dinkle goes into that gazebo and plays his father’s song on his trumpet for the crowd. I’ll try to remember to have a barf bowl ready next time I read the comics.
Gasoline Alley – Actually, Snuffy turns thirty on his next birthday.
JP – Those hot dogs look like Abbey BOILED them, and she’s serving them with ketchup. The only dinner that would be tackier would be a pyramid of containers of McDonald’s sandwiches.
Rex Morgan – As others have pointed out, June has completely ignored the fact that the two girls are begging for money for food and medical expenses. Sure, June, keep on harping on how she’s not actually playing that instrument, as if she’s the Monkees. That totally negates the girls’ need. What a lesson in humanity.
Pluggers – He didn’t bother to put on old clothes. Mrs. Plugger will be overjoyed when she does the laundry.
6Chix – Now do whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll. I’m not sure about the dog, but I know how their cat would vote.
@MOP: 77- Tommy’s looking to expand his customer base.
Dustin is reporting to some fool who doesn’t know anything about gaming algorithms or creating review bots. Really, not Dustin’s problem that this company is stuck in 1997.
FC: “If I can hide my 2am cake binges from my therapist I can certainly hide them from that little dolt.”
RMMD: Send the law out to a fake fiddler on a sidewalk?
When Centerville’s first ersatz Spider-Man shows up Sarah can call the Disney legal hotline!
DtM: Ruff gets bathed in the bathtub, and there’s a reason Dennis gets hosed down in the yard.
@Baja Gaijin: FC mashup – Are you trying to give holier than thou Grandma a heart attack? She’s convinced herself that they’ve done it only four times.
Thel’s expression works better in your mashup than it does in the original comic.
@GarrisonSkunk: I didn’t know until I read his obituary that Felix Silla, who played Twiki, was also Cousin Itt on the Addams Family TV show. He did not do Twiki’s voice.
@93 I speak Jive: on Crankshaft: When you’re reading Crankshaft, you don’t need a barf bowl; you need an emesis basin the size of an Olympic swimming pool and a saline IV to replenish your fluids.
RMMD: is it possible the girl being scorned by June is actually playing the violin accompanied by recorded backup music?
@TheDiva: JP: I love the subtle dread on Charlotte’s face when she asks “Am I family?”
I think the other people around that table are Sam Driver, Sam’s wife Abbey nee Spencer, and their adopted daughters Neddy and Sophie. Charlotte is the daughter of Randy and April Parker, and granddaughter of Alan. So Charlotte is not a close blood relative of anyone at that table, but maybe today’s (quite reasonable) point is, families are more than blood.
BTW, is this Sam’s first cameo appearance this year? (Decade?) And, does anyone have a mnemonic for distinguishing Abbey, Neddy, and Sophie, perhaps based on the coral/king snake black, red, yellow poem?
@56 Ukranazi Stepan: I don’t get the reference.
@96 I speak Jive: Yes, Thel’s expression is perfect for this mashup. It took a while to find a full-length Bil (that’s what she said!). He’s usually sitting or jutting into the frame.
@I speak Jive: On CS – The dilapidated state of those background structures suggests to me they are going to the ruins of the Starlite Ballroom (closed 1956 due to a bad case of Elvis) to play Mr. Dinkle’s Opus. I’m hoping the bandstand collapses under their weight and then the rotted building caves in on top of them.
On JP – Just be glad it’s not a pile of Weenie World boxes
MW: It’s possible that Wilbur is just reacting with shock to the news that teenagers are actually going to a mall, which is not something that teenagers in 2026 generally do.
Alice: “The budget cutbacks are across the board. I mean, just look at my office — a single laptop on a small table in an otherwise empty void. I used to be the Fuhrer of an entire country!”
Snuffy: Are there roads in Hootin’ Holler? Traffic lights? Gas stations? Any of that? What century is it supposed to be there?
H&J: You know what makes this strip for me? Jamaal. Specifically the sly look he gives us in panel four. “Oh, that Herb! Always coming up with irreverent takes on the headlines! Where would I be without him?”
On Crankshaft, belatedly : Isn’t the reason for Lucy and Eugene being the only two people on the dance floor that they had won a dancing contest for the couple that kept dancing the longest, not that Larry Dinkle’s popularity had dwindled to the point those two were the only people in attendance for his concerts?
@I speak Jive: I’m looking forward to the upcoming memoir: Silla/Twiki/Itt: My World of Show Business.
@Ken: How about “Jesus Loves the Little Children?”
Red and yellow, black and white
Hair is precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little ladies in the funny papers.
@Joe Blevins: Looks like Snuffy is going to have to walk to Piney Creek and carry his gasoline back home in an open bucket. Good thing he gave up that corncob pipe.
Alice: As I recall, Bobby McFerrin was always being ironic with the seemingly flippant optimism of “Don’t Worry Be Happy”, so it’s one of those songs like “Every Breath You Take” that became a hit in defiance of its author’s intent. The record is finally being corrected in about the last place I would have expected.
6C: You never know where you’re going to see the earless descendants of the central figure from Munch’s “The Scream”.
I was expecting the panic attack in this story to be “Iris finds out she’ll never get rid of Wilbur,” but Mary Worth, she keeps ya guessing!
@Rosstifer: Thank you.
RMMD: I now suspect I saw and heard this going on in a supermarket parking lot a few years ago, and I still don’t care.
@Baja Gaijin: Ooh, that’s good! [tries hard to forget Thel’s expression]
@Ken:
Sam is not actually there. That is just a life size dummy. This strip is veering all over the highway of plot themes.
“Red touches yellow, kill a fellow; red touches black, friend of Jack, err Bogdan?!”
@Ukulele Ike: Oh, yuck. I missed that. [looks again] I suppose that six hours ago, Sophie ate a big bag of potato chips washed down with Diet Coke.
MW: I think “teen dance-off” is code for “summer tryouts for pole positions at the local strip club. Recent high school grads welcome!”
Since this Crankshaft arc began, I’ve been thinking of the Kinks’ “Come Dancing”.
I saw Ray Davies on a VH1 program talking about the song, his sisters (who were born before WW2) and he and brother Dave, who were born a dozen years later than their siblings.
There was more wistfulness, nostalgia, sadness and an uplifting resolution in ten minutes than Batiuk has found in 2 weeks.
Snuffy Smith: So Snuffy had the chance to steal a car, and the best choice he could make from the entire lot was a low-powered, putty-colored thing that looks like it was made in the 1940s? I guess no one in Hootin’ Holler has ever actually seen a car produced since the 1940s, and there was no way he was going to try to figure out how to make one of those new spaceship-looking things go up and down his local winding mountain roads — much less get a Mustang Mach-E to power up on that drawer full of C batteries the Smiths use for electricity.
@110 Poteet: Heh, heh, she said, “Hard.” Heh, heh, heh.
@UncleJeff: I’ve been wanting to post a link to the “Come Dancing” music video for weeks now! Just the vid has more wistfulness, nostalgia, and sadness than Tom could ever pull out of his ass.
Wilbur is thinking: “Wait, is Dawn dating Tommy? That will make things super awkward when Iris and I get back together.”
What bothers me, is that Dawn seems oblivious to the fact that Tommy is Iris’s son, despite Dawn knows that Wilbur and Iris had a messy falling out, because she confronted Iris about it at a dance club wearing the worst Goth(?) outfit I had ever seen.
H & L: That would be “UNalienable right”, Mr. Flagston. Or didn’t you read the 250-year-old document?
6C – Omega man flees the scene because he doesn’t know whether to obey the dog or the woman. Here’s a clue: If the lid is up, you don’t have to water the dog, but if the lid is down, you don’t have to worry about sitting on the open rim when the explosive diarrhea comes.
Oh, still can’t decide, huh?
@Professor Well Actually, RMMD: {RexMorganWaggingFinger.gif} Are you saying that June could be wrong in being so dismissive?
we briefly lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, and when looking for places to rent it was shocking the random places people stuck toilets in those houses. In the middle of rooms, in the middle of basements, more or less right next to stairs. The house we ended up renting the random toilet was in the laundry room immediately next to the washing machine (and in front of the entrance to the crawl space so you had to risk being surprised by cave crickets anytime you had to use it)
We must consider the ultimate horror: that Wilbur’s “!” is not surprise at the Beedie family returning to his life but excitement about inviting himself to the Teen Dance-Offs. As a participant? An observer? Both are terrible in their own ways.
Alice: Wait, that’s the same guy who was assigning Alice to a project in the strip Josh linked to. I don’t know what I find more disturbing, that Alice has recurring characters, like it’s a coherent narrative or something, or that just reading the strips Josh shares has got me sufficiently in the Alice mindset that I can recognise one particular group of lines around a pair of floating eyes as being “the same guy”.
Crank: So, this is still happening, apparently, although it’s sufficiently unmoored that I’m not entirely sure what “this” currently is.
EC: This is also still happening. I forgot to comment on Saturday’s strip, with the chicken wrapped in gold. I remember my favourite food critic once talking about a restaurant that did something similar, and saying that if you wanted a metaphor for how these places fleece stupid rich people, having the punters actually crap out precious metals and flush them down the toilet (because it’s not like the human body has any use for them) was a pretty good one.
MW: Look, I know Wilbur is even more staggeringly self-absorbed than Dawn, but as someone who was actually dating Tommy’s mom during some of this he has much less excuse for not having noticed Tommy’s been clean and sober for years. But I bet he hasn’t!
OTF: Sure, why not? It’s stupid, but it’s no stupider than actual billionaires’ plans for Mars, or putting the data centres in orbit.
RMMD: “Why would someone in desperate need of money not take violin lessons? Sheer laziness!”
@Liam: I’ve had that problem with the Seattle Times before. My hunch is that we’re hitting the Comics Kingdom monthly limit for free access, but because it’s on a third party provider site, we don’t get the alert. Try going incognito and see if that helps.
CS: Worst remake if “Mr. Holland’s Opus” evah.
JP: Now did you tip the DeGroot girl for delivering these Weenie World hot dogs? The dear girl is mentally challenged but she tries so hard.
FC: Mommy, every time Billy plays with his wiener it gets bigger. Will that work on me if I rub my whole body with vaseline?
@I speak Jive: #96: Twiki’s voice was done by the great Mel Blanc.
6 Chix:
I’ve got a talking dog, who cares what the wife wants.
9CL: I know it’s a common cartoonist thing to draw a character’s eyes so they’re visible behind overhanging hair, but the third panel is an exercise in body horror.
@Horace Broon: Crank: So, this is still happening, apparently, although it’s sufficiently unmoored that I’m not entirely sure what “this” currently is.
Theory: Over the next week, all the CS characters will join the procession behind Dinkle. Whole days of familiar and not-so-familiar faces, smiling and happy as they march along. On Saturday they reach the ruins of the Starlite Ballroom, where a black hole has opened. On Sunday as Dinkle plays, everyone steps into the hole and disappears. On the last note, Dinkle steps through. The final panel is solid black with white letters, “Goodbye, it’s been a great 54 years!”
Needless to say, Batiuk hasn’t warned the distributors that he was ending the strip.
MW-“Tommy? My lover Tommy?”
Crankshaft-“Then my father blew his brains out before the last leaf fell.”
Six Chix-This is exactly how the Son of Sam started.
MW: There’s a functioning mall somewhere in Santa Royale? Maybe it even has an Orange Julius.
@A. Mulyak: You’re right. Thank for making me look. My eyeballs have been trained to gloss over 9CL as quickly as possible, also to avoid reading if it is wall o’text or overly polysyllabic. Panel three is nightmare stuff, I’m shocked her left eye is not protruding on a stalk.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: With the raw eggs…? Man, I could murder one of those bad boys.
@Horace Broon: RE Alice: Not only is it the same guy, but a quick A-to-B comparison (because I use my time wisely) shows it’s a straight copy-paste. Not a single hair’s difference.
@Ken: Interesting idea.
It brought to mind the final scenes of the movie: “Roger Waters The Wall” where Waters is playing a trumpet in a graveyard for WW! soldiers and the camera pans towards one of the walls on which the name of Waters’ grandfather is carved.
I just want to say drunk Wilbur is the best Wilbur. Bring him back!
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: MW: There’s a functioning mall somewhere in Santa Royale? Maybe it even has an Orange Julis
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Wilber kept the Hickory Farms™ in business though 2015.
Weird day when, of the comic strips chosen by Josh, Snuffy Smith has the best joke. Although I do like that whoever “drew” today’s Alice didn’t want to try and come up with what it would look like for Alice to react to this bad news, so they just didn’t bother in that last panel.
Oh also Six Chix suuuucksssssss.
@Baja Gaijin:
#1 Baja, now THAT’S funny.
6Cx: “Put the lid down.” And deprive your poor dog of a watering bowl in this heat! O, no, no. Guy, you can say both seat AND lid must be up in this weather.
Six Chix: I’m getting weird vibes to that comic book “Animosity” where some weird phenomena happened giving all animals around the world human-sentience.
One guy was abusing his girlfriend, then the girlfriend’s cat suddenly started talking “Hit her again and I’ll claw your eyes out!” freaking out everybody in the room.
That is the mood that Six Chix is giving me.
Late Thread Cuisine: Surprisingly, what you see is what you get. No hidden “mystery” ingredients.
@Baja Gaijin: It got me thinking about the old Underwood meat spread cans my mother used to pack in my lunches as a kid. So I checked online, and not only is Underwood still in business, they’ve updated their marketing AND have one of the oldest continuously used trademarks in the US.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: I like it when I find nostalgic food items from when I was a kid.
As a 90’s kid, just a few months ago, I found “Dunkaroos” in a store. Sure they were sugary as hell, but very nostalgic regardless.
I had completely forgotten about them for years, so it was a nice surprise.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: That’s something that doesn’t seem widely available in Canada anymore. When we used to travel to the States a lot of, my wife, who is fond of it, would stock up
LUANN: I feel like the Evanses are giving their readers the finger at this point with their storytelling choices. “Hey look, Tiffany is in Paris, but don’t worry since you won’t be seeing any of it. Here’s a week of Bernice alone in a bedroom talking to her fish tank instead!”
@Bryan: Oooh, can’t wait for Bernice to mope and whine endlessly when her fish dies, and the rest of the cast has to give her fish a funeral to help her move on…
@Bryan: The sock-folding tip was an extra jab of the finger.
@The Rambling Otter: There were several people watching a woman get hit by her boyfriend? Yuck..
@I speak Jive: @GarrisonSkunk: I didn’t know until I read his obituary that Felix Silla, who played Twiki, was also Cousin Itt on the Addams Family TV show. He did not do Twiki’s voice.
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Yep, the legendary Mel Blanc used his “Speed Buggy” voice without the sputtering.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: @Baja Gaijin: It got me thinking about the old Underwood meat spread cans my mother used to pack in my lunches as a kid. So I checked online, and not only is Underwood still in business, they’ve updated their marketing AND have one of the oldest continuously used trademarks in the US.
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“There’s no need to fear, Underwood is here!”— Wally Cox (adapted)
@GarrisonSkunk: re Twiki: Now that you mention it…. damn I’m old.
H&J final panel: Is Herb shrinking?
@147 Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: That’s an interesting word-association.
@151 The Rambling Otter: Oh, gad. That could happen.
@Baja Gaijin: Terrifying to think on both sides.
Either with the Luann writersi hypothetically copying Moy’s “brilliant” writing.
Or the fact that their standards are too high for that…
Fun fact: I had just read up, that some years back, Greg Evans made a rule forbidding any Luann fan porn on the internet.
I don’t know what’s more disgusting, that there are people actually writing/drawing that stuff… or the fact that the writers themselves are allowed to do (near) porn in their own comic
Edit: No, the first is much much more disgusting.
MW: Sorry, but Wilbur is far too much a loser/world’s WORST boyfriend to have earned a shocked look at the mention of literally any other possible boyfriend in the world.
Even Tommy.
That is saying a lot, but yes: Wilbur is that much worse than even Tommy.
He is the very bottom of the barrel.
And no surprised & shocked looks are allowed from the bottom looking upwards – leastwise, not about what a loser literally anyone else in the world is.