Domestic dramas
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Family Circus, 9/30/26
God damn but Gary looks smug here. “That’s right, Mrs. K.! My parents love me, but they don’t love each other … and they’re engaged in a constant but unspoken game of mutual oneupmanship for my affections. The two rooms are just the beginning! I’m really sitting in the catbird seat here! Uh, by which I mean, I see Billy has a lovely home. Just the one, obviously.”
Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/30/26
“We were just taking in the fall colors! Like, uh, green! Green is a color, and it’s fall, so I guess it’s a fall color? I guess it’s fall? What month is it? What year is it? Where am I? Why am I here? Oh, it’s Mud Mountain Murphy! Are you gonna play ‘Muddy Boots?’ I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you play ‘Muddy Boots.’”
123 replies to “Domestic dramas”
If we needed more evidence the last time one of the Keanes interacted with the outside world was in the ’80s.
RMMD “We were taking in the fall colours – _literally_ taking them in! We’ve absorbed them all, draining them between Sunday and now, and only _we_ can enjoy them! Bwa ha haa! Have fun in the dull boring green world while _we’re_ looking inwards at gold and ruby-tinged nature!”
“He’s also got two different copies of The Watchtower to give us, Mommy, if you’ve just got a moment to listen to him!”
Newspaper comics are really another class. If you saw a video on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok where someone completely unprompted starts to spout stilted language to shill a random restaurant, you would rightly assume they are an influencer doing it for a fee. But no one would pay newspaper comics to act as influencers, because nobody reads them! They are doing the clumsy approval for the love of the game!
“Oppps, I need to go back! My father, Hank Sr slipped in the bathtub and splashed blood all over the bathroom. I guess that’s another kind of ‘fall colour'”
RMMD:
“…and as you can see, all of the trees around us are a monochromatic yellow-green, so that makes for perfect fall viewing!”
“Speaking of two rooms, why do we only worship one God? If YHWH had some competition, He would not be so stingy with his gifts! Should we check whether Satan wants to join in?”
FC “Also his family gives him something called colloidal silver twice a day! He’s going to be Thanos for Halloween!”
RMMD Another exciting edition of Small Talk: The Daily Comic
FC: “He also says he has a new daddy who kinda sucks which ain’t so lucky, I guess.”
RMMD:
“What brings you to the park?”
“Oh, you know. We figured we’d smoke some weed; roll some dice; maybe do a little skateboarding….”
“Billy, I wanted to tell you that you too have a room in Your Father’s house, but I don’t want to give you false hopes about being saved”
FC:
“Gary wants to know if we can watch Kramer v. Kramer on Netflix!”
They came to the park for the elephant rides, VR exhibition, and reunited Guns ‘N Roses concert, but like most of us, were disappointed to discover none of those things were actually taking place. Benches and green foliage are pretty rad, though!
“Mom, Gary has one room in his father’s house and one room in his mother’s house! Why can’t I?”
“Because I don’t know whether the milkman has any spare room”
Family Circus : this probably shocked a lot of readers when this first ran in the 1990s or so!
…Or wait, is Jeffy picking strips that were rejected when first proposed, that aren’t that provocative or controversial anymore?
**************
Luann :
a) Luann, Tara moving in with Phil was YOUR idea
*, Phil was reticent from moving AT ALL until you talked (browbeat) him into accepting this.*Okay, it was Tara’s idea, but Luann was IMMEDIATELY okay with it, and the one who pushed it on Phil the hardestb) It sure is weird that Luann’s confidante she can have this “Phil is such a catch” exchange with is a nonagenarian woman who lives in a retirement home! It’s too bad she doesn’t have a friend her age, who lives in the same house as her, with whom she could have this conversation!
(Bernice would just insult and mock her the whole way through)**************
Safe Havens : …but you terraformed Mars. It has a breathable atmosphere, and a fully-developped ecosystem with flora and fauna now.
RMMD: Deleted scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers where newly converted pod people practice human-like speech.
FC-Gary has two mommies who are into crafting.
RMMD-What brings you to the park?” “Rounding up the homeless.”
FC: They couldn’t actually be talking about…DIVORCE?? The 1910s called, they want their comic back.
RMMD: I don’t claim to be a full-time raconteuse, but dang, this dialogue is mind-numbing!
MW: The birds behind Toby’s back: “Have you heard? Pompous Ass is fiddling feathers with Meddling Biddy!”
GT: I dunno, sure looks like VT’s QB just went down without a fight, but I guess if your school can’t be bothered to turn on the lights for a night game or even mow the turf, why should your O-line be bothered to put their lives and limbs on the line blocking Borys?
Heathcliff: When did this strip start using a traditional crescent moon shape rather than its signature crescent-wrench moon?
MW: What’s crazy is being so lonely that you hallucinate having a bilingual conversation with your parents because while everyone is talking about you, no one is talking to you. Actually, that’s more sad than crazy, now that I think about it.
RMMD – I think Beatty wants to retire, do some traveling, play some golf. But no matter how intentionally dull he makes the strip, no one at the syndicate ever reads it and they just keep asking for more, almost as if everyone is on auto-pilot.
MW – Moy seems to believe dramatic tension is “Toby thinks it’s nonsense” on even days and “Toby sort of worries it’s true” on odd ones. This may keep going through Halloween. It’s Brigman I feel bad for. At least she gets to draw some parrots, though.
RMMD – also, Beatty seems to have decided there is no drama in medical storylines. He’s likely had people suggest he watch The Pitt, but he can’t afford HBO on a cartoonist’s salary.
FC: Thel looks disappointed because she’s always dreamed about a divorce, but know she’s realising a sad truth – it won’t get the kids out of her life.
FC: Thel looks exactly the way you’d expect from a housewife from the early 1960s hearing about divorce for the first time. “You mean I can just…end my marriage, and everyone will be okay with that? Why didn’t I hear about this sooner?”
RMMD: Like many neurodivergents I struggle with the art of “small talk,” being unable to summon up the energy or interest to converse about subjects which seem boring and inconsequential. Rex Morgan is doing nothing to help that mindset.
Is anybody still naming their child “Gary”?
***
Some people enjoy the comics for the jokes, some people for the action and intrigue, yet others for the soapy dramas. Then there is Rex Morgan, M.D. catering to those who who feel the other stuff is too much for their heart and just want to read a nice casual conversation between acquaintances.
GT: “That’s right, Emily Clover may be Coach of the Year, but she’s also an absolute loser who can’t win against Goshen unlike her ex-husband, Gil Thorp! Did we mention absolutely nobody came to her Coach of the Year ceremony because nobody loves her and also she’s fat and ugly?”
MW: The bird’s right–what woman in her right mind would want to be with Ian? Que loco indeed!
MW: Look at Rosie over here, not including the upside down exclamation mark before Que and so outing herself as a fake Spaniard. Shameful.
FC: This could be just the motivation Billy needs to sow dissent between his parents. “You know, I heard Daddy say that Fritzi Ritz makes him harder than Chinese algebra.”
RMMD: Jordan’s? What a wonderful restaurant! Sure beats the slop we serve at the cafe.
GT: like the Star Wars references used as a candence: “C3PO, Hutt, R2D2…” but confused about the captions
The scoreboard shows VT 0 Goshen 17 but it is only in the 2nd quarter with 7+ minutes to play or only about 1/3rd of the game. It is 3rd 15 yards to gain after or before the sack, so the drive is probably over. What does the boxed “4” mean? Too many for time outs. ? playclock – the play was just gotten off?
JP: April is busy doing secret dangerous April things. This strip is weird – veering off into a spy action drama and then co-mixing in some domestic drama.
RMMD: Is Mae Mae’s dosing too high? She looks like an animatronic.
Rex Morgan, MD: I have to grant the artist some credit here. The characters genuinely look like people I might meet (who have silhouettes I might play “Who’s That Pokémon?” with).
If you’re walking through a park and two shadowy figures appear and ask you “what brings you to the park?”, don’t engage in conversation. Just mumble something about fall colors and move on quickly, occasionally checking behind you to make sure that only your shadow is following you. Above all else, do not give a shadow person restaurant recommendations! They’re known for dining and dashing.
C’shaft: By the end of the week, Pam is driven to cackling madness, only able to mumble “apples” to herself over and over.
GT. “C-3PO!”
“Sir, I think you will continue to be sacked as long as you have only one lineman protecting you.”
“R2D2!”
“Beep beep beep!”
@treetown:
I’ll just say that F/X’s The Americans pulled this off and brilliantly, but it had complex, compelling, likeable characters (even the baddies) and storylines that made sense both within the its fictional world and realistic in relation to our world. This strip just seems throw various genre tropes at the wall and hope that the ones that stick form enough of a pattern for readers to imagine something interesting is going on.
RMMD: “We’re just taking in the fall colors. Do you know where we can find some? There doesn’t seem to be any around here.”
FC: I fed this strip into AI and it came up with this: Billy is an opera singer delivering his lines in a recitative voice while the audience eagerly waits for Thel’s foreboding response (it’s an Italian opera). Spoiler alert: Gary dies of consumption.
FC – I’m sure this is supposed to read as scandalous, but a “Gary has two daddies” would have been way more current and possibly funnier – especially because Gary has this sort of shit-eating smirk that says, “That’s right, Thel – my life is faaaaaaabulous!”
FC: Look, Jeffy, you can’t just scribble on your hair with magic marker and try to pass yourself off as a new character. You’re not fooling anyone. Well, anyone smarter than Billy.
DtM: Alice has got her bitch on, big time. Henry backs slowly out the door and says to Dennis: “You’re on your own, kid.”
MW: ¡Que Loco! Probably refers to Toby feeding the Parrots on a kitchen counter covered in bird shit.
DtM: Maybe housework would wear you out so much, Alice, if you didn’t drag an armchair into the kitchen and angle it facing the door with a bucket and mop positioned right next to you for when Henry comes home all to make some kind of weird passive-aggressive point!
@Terry Rhoden:
I think saturday’s punchline is going to be that Crankshaft bought tons of apple products and by-products, but didn’t buy any APPLES.
Mocha-ish kid equals broken family is the message being conveyed here.
Wrecks Moregone:
“Sure is. Because YOU’RE not working there.”
“Yet.”
Gil Thorp-“C3PO! Hut!” Uh, Bib Fortuna. We are calling out random Star Wars characters right?
@Ettorre: You win the internet today, sir
FC-And Gary’s dad sleeps in a racing car bed while he cries himself to sleep.
Family Circlejerk – This is one time it would be better to have HTT Grandma present, so she could cluck away on the topic of divorce.
@Victor Von: Was one JigglyPuff
Family Circle: Gary’s parents are happily married, but he sure knows how to fuck with people like the Keanes. Dennis Mitchell should be taking notes.
Rare props to RMMD here: this strip beautifully captures the awkwardness of running into a distant acquaintance in a public place. I sure hope it’s doing that on purpose.
Pluggers: Just went to the Fort Bend County Fair last weekend. Judging by their prices for fair food I’d guess Andy just racked up a $50 tab like it was nothing. So much for pluggers are poor, but we’re still on target for pluggers are fat.
FC: Don’t be so jealous of Gary, Billy. Judging by his jaundiced complexion he’ll soon die of hepatitis.
Dustin: Hate to admit it but I actually found today’s strip unironically funny.
RMMD-“What brings you to the park?” “Uh the number ten bus.”
RMMD-“What brings you to the park?” “We heard there are lots of discrete places to have sex here.”
“He’s got two rooms, one at his mother’s house and one at his father’s house. But they’re the same room in both locations. Sometimes he opens the door and it’s Mom and sometimes it’s Dad and sometimes it’s a bull-headed man roaring in a labyrinth. It’s really concerning. Can he stay with us?”
FC: Thel is such a pro that she knows to keep a neutral expression when her oldest son enters the house with his arms spread wide and says something dumb in a very loud voice.
RMMD: “What brings you to the park?” “Uh, it’s a big, public outdoor space where human beings often congregate. Why are you acting like this is something bizarre?”
Phantom: Jesus, Vindicta, now you’re just embarrassing everybody.
RMMD: This one proves the colorists don’t even bother to read the strips they are coloring.
9CL: “Scrumptious”. I seem to recall Gollum using that word to describe something to eat.
GT: If your signal callers yelling “C-3PO!”, you deserve to lose. The Ewoks are boycotting this game for reasons of blasphemy.
FAMILY CIRCUS: Unfortunately, Gary isn’t lucky enough to avoid guest-starring in the role of “Recycled Clip Art.” (This is a cut-&-paste of a previously-run strip, right down the same text under it.. Josh even featured it on this site. Josh probably didn’t notice because the previously ginger guy is now a brunette, so see, it’s “different.”)
@Guillermo el chiclero:
Oh thank God, it wasn’t just me! I thought I needed booze and a hug!
Family Circus – Ma Keane wonders if Gary’s parents would adopt Billy since they have so many rooms to spare.
Rex Morgan, MD – Mae Mae is going to try to up the Glenwood diner’s menu to compete with the top fine dining establishment in town. What’s a fancy French way of saying “Lumberjack Skillet” and “Biscuits and Gravy”?
MW: “Oh, yeah, I forgot you only speak Mexican. Donde esta la plume de ma tante?”
RMMD: “What brings you two to the park?”
“Oh, we got tired of sitting around the house on the sofa, so we decided to sit around the park on a bench….are you guys leaving soon?”
@Tabby Lavalamp: The name “Gary” had quite a good run during the late 1960s, when thousands of parents named their sons after Gary Owens. People have forgotten just how popular Laugh-In was.
@2+2=7:
There are infinite Garys, each more smug than the last.
@2+2=7:
Seven year rule. You can run the exact same storyline with the exact same character once every seven years (give or take a week), and fan turnover and the frailties of human memory mean no one will notice… or that was the idea, before the Internet and its archival made finding out what happened 7 years ago trivial…
@Anonymous:
The syndicate was celebrating getting one past Josh, but forgot about the hive-mind of commenters.
@Joe Blevins: Given that the only settings Rex Morgan M.D. characters are ever in are the the one dive bar and the three greasy spoons in town, it actually is bizarre to see our cast congregate in a place that has natural sunlight. (Thank god, they still don’t do anything, so the audience doesn’t have to get too stimulated.)
Family Circus: Thel frowns with annoyance. She was always telling Billy to not get attached to the children he lured to the Keane Kompound for use in blood sacrifices, but he never listens. Now she’ll have to listen to his blubbering while she and her husband smash open Gary’s ribcage to pull out the organs that please the Dark Lord, and it’ll be all annoying and awkward and just totally kill the mood.
Rex Morgan: “I’m glad us and Mud managed to stay friends after his life coach tried to murder me. Life’s too short for grudges.”
9CL – Yes, you can stop now. Honestly.
Arlo & Janis – Janis doesn’t have to run faster than the bear; she only has to outrun Arlo.
Crankshaft – Why isn’t this jerk in assisted living with no access to money or credit cards?
Frazz – They’re cutting up pickleball behind its back – and by extension saying that they’re superior to people who play pickleball.
Rex Morgan – Terry Beatty is just messing with us. He thinks that by the time this parade of beloved characters having stilted, boring chitchat is over, we’ll be begging for an actual story involving Truck, Buck, and possibly Aunt Tildy. He’s wrong.
FC – And a new uncle stays overnight every time he stays at his Mom’s house!
Holier than thou Grandma – Your harlot mother would know about that.
(@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: I thought so, too.)
FC- “Gary’s got two rooms! One at both of his Moms house, and one at both of his Dads house!”
@Tabby Lavalamp: Is anybody still naming their child “Gary”?
My parents did. I was born in 1972, though.
Rex Morgan: “We’re taking in the fall colors! We especially like this exhibit where an artist painted the top outline of trees, then colored them in with a solid, pukey light greenish-tan and a shadowy black, then added sky-blue where you’d assume the sky would be. I’m not sure why they put up a huge wall to block the actual trees, but you’ve gotta admire the creativity.”
@TheDiva: #25MW- It might not be so bad…she’ll have cucumber slices over her eyes.
@2+2=7: Hey, don’t exaggerate! We also spend RMMD stories in a motel room. Sometimes even the motel lobby!
@Tabby Lavalamp: @Ukulele Ike: After looking it up and confirming the surprisingly sharp decline of people being named Gary, I wonder why that is. It’s not like there’s no longer pop cultural figures or characters (like the aforementioned Gary Owens) in living memory who have the name; Gary Oldman, Gary Oak, Gary the Snail, etc.. It’s not forgotten. It just seems to have inexplicably lost it’s appeal as something you actually name your kid. Very odd.
@Guillermo el chiclero: I did too. It turns out that Dustin can actually be pretty cute and funny when it’s telling jokes instead of whining impotently and ignorantly about whatever dumbass thing is pissing off the writer today.
@Liam: “Quick! Yell out Darth Maul and Lando Calrissian or we’re gonna lose this game for sure!”
@Old School Allie Cat: Expecting modern Family Circus telling an even slightly edgy or progressive-minded joke is like expecting a pig to sprout wings and fly.
@treetown: @Charterstone: Dune: I’ve noted it here before, but all the stuff with CIApril is so vague and badly written that I still to this day have no idea who April is actually supposed to be a spy for (I’d only guess CIA because of the goofy nickname this community gave her), what any of her spy activities entail or even how any of it is supposed to be impacting her life and preventing her from living like a normal human being. She mostly seems to just randomly appear on the Parker family compound to annoy or threaten people a bit and then leaves again.
Grossy, a piece of wisdom I’ve learned,: if “friend” constantly criticizes you, drop ’em. They’re all about themselves, not about you.
JP: no doubt others have said it, but tomorrow April will drive up with Randy riding shotgun. Literally. A gang of villains is on their tail.
Is Gary the Segway Kid from “Slow Horses”?
@Rover Berkeley: re:RMMD – the colourists have snoozed off from trying to follow the dullsville events of the last several days.
@Everything Is Better With Monkeys: Now that you bring it up, the contrast between The Pitt and Beatty-era Rex Morgan during the few times it deigns to be a medical drama again is truly striking. Like, compare Robbie’s emotional breakdown over the weight and stress of being an ER doctor in a key scene of season one to Rex Morgan huffing and rolling his eyes and bitching like a fussy child over every routine checkup. Its embarrassing. And sad, when you remember how edgy and boundary-pushing RMMD as a series used to be; it used to actually have a lot in common with The Pitt, to the point that it would be distributed in medical schools.
@Everything Is Better With Monkeys: I’ve long felt bad for Brigman myself. She actually had a decent career in the comics’ world prior to becoming known mostly here for this. I can totally understand if she’s decided to spend her later years dashing out an easygoing newspaper strip so she has a little income to fluff up her borderline retirement, that’s great for her. But I also imagine that even in those circumstances, being handed mind-numbingly repetitive scripts like Moy’s to illustrate day after day would get old VERY fast and Brigman really is too good for the strip.
@Hibbleton: “We came here from a dying country music venue. We drift through the universe from concert to concert, pushed on by the winds. We adapt, and we listen to roots country. The function of life is roots country.”
@Ettorre: Modern newspaper comic characters unironically speak like the characters in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace do as a parody of bad writing. This restaurant shilling is identical in tone and delivery to a gag in that show where the action stops dead so the characters can do a bad advertising pitch for batteries.
@A Grave Mind: #58:
@ectojazzmage: #71:
I just kept picturing in my mind Dustdad, huffing and puffing and sweating profusely, dragging a 400 pound French door refrigerator into the courtromm.
The Family Circus:
Take a closer look at this “Gary”, with his wavy hair and cuffed pants. I’m guessing he’s actually Jeffy after getting into the hair dye Thel uses to touch up her grays, in disguise as part of a plot by the Keane Kids to guilt their parents into showing them some sort of affection.
The Family Circus again:
During one of the recent Family Circuses set in a church, I looked up the background of Bil Keane and discovered he was Catholic, meaning the fictional re-creation of his family probably is, too. So I suspect this incident is going to get the Keane Kids taken out of public school in favor of a Catholic institution where they won’t hear poisonous lies about the bonds of holy matrimony being breakable. You can’t be too careful, today it’s divorce, tomorrow they hear that there’s a real difference between the ousia and energeia of God!
RMMD: Some of these “conversations” remind me of those banal “making friends” sample conversations found in a Berlitz phrase book.
Would you like a cigarette?
Can you tell the way to the museum?
I heard it’s a very good restaurant.
What part of town will I find prostitutes? Are they checked regularly for diseases?
@treetown: “JP: April is busy doing secret dangerous April things.”
Nah. Big line at Starbucks.
@ectojazzmage: As I recall, it went down like this: April worked for the CIA but her CIA handler, who was her dad, had her unwittingly doing a bunch of off-the-books / illegal things (gunning running? wetwork? it’s unclear), for which he faked his death to escape culpability (and also to attend her jungle wedding), leaving her on the hook for his crimes. She did time for the crimes she committed at his behest which was supposed to get her in the clear, but the CIA came back and basically blackmailed her into going back to work for them (off the books) by threatening to dox her and her family to the various revenge-seeking baddies her father screwed over over the course of his career, and they sweetened the pot by threatening to put her back into prison if she told anyone, like her family, about having to go back to work for them on One Last Mission. It’s still totally opaque was to what the One Last Mission was, whether it was successful, how she located Randy (we don’t even know when, where, how or why he was imprisoned), and otherwise exploded a whole damn black site by herself other than that she’s Just That Good, apparently.
GT, panel 1: Today the role of Goshen Fan will be played by Sen. John Fetterman.
RMMD: Way to stick up for the restaurant you work at, Mae Mae.
GT: Is that “Goshen Rules!” sign on some magical glow-in-the-dark paper held up by a future Radium Girl?
Pluggers: Is a caramel apple the health food at the county fair?
DtM: “Sure, I could get a job that gets me out of the house, just like Lois Flagston, but who’d take care of Dennis?”
“He’s sort of a lost cause. Pursue your dream, Alice!”
“My dream of not being arrested by Family Services?”
LUANN: Mrs. Horner: “And since I’m apparently just here to catch up on gossip, I hear that Mary Worth is having an affair with her married neighbor, the hussy!”
JP-Mommy can’t come. Mommy is frigid.
JP-“Mommy and me were going to cut off a horse’s head together.”
@Charterstone: Dune: I recall that April was going on “one last mission” for the CIA when she was pregnant with Charlotte. That’s when the strip went completely off the rails, even worse than her wandering through the jungle in her wedding gown and carrying a big knife.The story involved her shooting guns and disappearing and possibly being imprisoned; I’ve blocked the details from my mind. I do remember that no one knew where she was for a long time, nor did anyone know what happened to her baby.
What blew my mind about the story was that beforehand Katherine and Alan and the rest of the cast spent a lot of time talking about April’s “last” mission. The CIA does not work that way. The memorial wall at CIA headquarters does not include any names, and those employees are dead. The identities of CIA employees, especially a supposed operative like April was alleged to be, are absolutely kept secret. Extended family and friends wouldn’t even know that she was an agent.
I’ve read a couple of books that I wanted to throw through a window, and that story was such a clusterfuck of bullshit that I wanted to throw my Kindle through a window.
@Charterstone: Dune: #81: And as I recall, the last time we saw April before she freed Randy her unconscious body was being dumped in the back of a van in Norway. No explanation as to how she escaped or discovered Randy’s whereabouts.
FC: HTT Grandma is thinking, “Hmph. Don’t be jealous of that smug-faced, swarthy-skinned little guttersnipe, Billy. Mark my words. He’ll eventually become a guest of our criminal justice system where he won’t get a cell all to himself, let alone two.”
FC: Isn’t Gary just the redheaded kid whose freckles Billy was envious of a few months ago?
@Guillermo el chiclero: Yes! I remembered she had been in a fight in Norway, but couldn’t remember the outcome! It’s like a Bond movie that show him in the death trap but skips the escape to just have him somehow reappear at crucial moments to save save the day! But who knows, maybe we’ll get to see April’s harrowing adventures some day in the form of flashbacks in family therapy, when they’re completely without stakes and can’t threaten us with anything resembling excitement.
Crank: Oh, the suspense — will tomorrow be apple sauce and Friday be apple pie, or will it be the other way round?
DT: The Dick Tracy wiki entry on Hi-Top Jones (no, really) ends by saying it’s not known if he’s still in prison, so I assume the fact he died there is new information. Also, the Dick Tracy wiki says that Flattop and Blowtop’s non-criminal father was known as Poptop, and their mother may have been Moptop, so I’m not convinced Dick is entirely responsible for the Jones family’s nicknames.
FC: How my brain works (or possibly doesn’t): I could not tell you with confidence what my work schedule is for next week without checking my phone (and I’m not entirely confident I even remembered to put it in my phone), but show me a blog post where Josh comments on how smug Random Child of Divorce looks, and I immediately think “Not only have I seen that strip before, I’ve seen Josh discuss Gary’s smugness before! Quick check of the archives… Yep, it was nearly seven years ago!”
SH: “I’ve been to Mars, back in 2019, as part of the secret Mars project Fastrack are currently working on, which will send someone to Mars at an indeterminate point in the future and hasn’t even chosen me as a candidate yet!” I guess at least when Holbrook gets round to Harley-the-Janitoring this mess, he’s got some established time travellers to pin it on.
S4th: So Keri celebrates Hallowe’en with real pumpkins, authentic masks, and … um … real spider webs? Is “celebrating Hallowe’en” code for “not dusting”?
@Everything Is Better With Monkeys: Re: RMMD: Heh, you think Terry Beatty would do stuff. (snicker) This whole strip is a big case of Author’s Appeal. Basically, this is Beatty’s dream life right here and he’s been spending the better part of ten years trying (and failing) to convince the rest of us to join the “diner rockabilly” lifestyle.
@Guillermo el chiclero: @Charterstone: Dune: “With a mighty bound, April was free.”
@Horace Broon: re: S4th: I choose to take this as “For Halloween, Kerri and her partner transform their living space into the lodge of a Satanic coven, practicing necromancy and the reanimation of the dead*.”
*dressed as sexy black cats
FC – And someday, Gary will be in complete command of those rooms, just as soon as he’s tall enough to reach a doorknob.
RMMD – “What brings you to the PARK!?” “We were just enjoying the GRATUITOUS BOLDING!!!“
Don Abundio, translated:
“What do you have in your art gallery, Abundio?”
“Sketches and paintings I made, when I was just a schoolchild”
“And even though you’re a rich man now, you never bought any others?”
“You can’t improve on perfection”
Barney Googled and Snuffed Out Smith: Granny Creeps gave her the power to read your mind, Jughaid.
Sex Organ V.D.: “What brings you to the park?” “Our feet!” Fungus gets inspired to do a cover of “You Need Feet”
9CL: Oh goody, we’re back to “Amos and Edda as codependent children” yet again.
LUANN: Lucky for me and unlucky for Mrs Horner I have paid subscriber access to GoComics, so I went back to the one time that Phil has worn anything besides those goddamn scrubs (2/27/2025 for those wanting to verify) and in no way was that a “rebellious leather jacket.” Certainly not rebellious and I doubt it’s even leather. It looks more like a denim jacket dyed black.
The Familliar Mucus: Is Sam going to eat Gary? (No,not sexually,Nelly!).
@ectojazzmage: Don’t forget Gary the Superman Robot!
LUANN: Mrs. Horner: “Wow, Phil is like that Fonzie character that so popular among the young’uns nowadays!”
RMMD: I’m getting Arrested Development vibes from, “It’s a wonderful restaurant.” Can a comic strip reap product-placement money from its own fictional business?
@Anonymous: LUANN: I honestly don’t know who’s worse: Bernice for constantly insulting and condescending her supposed best friend, or Mrs Horner for constantly blowing smoke up her ass and treating her as the specialest soon-to-be-success story in the world.
Crankshaft-Last Tango in Crankshaft
FC: Will HTT Grandma somehow find fault with Thel for letting Billy play with a divorced kid? The question fairly answers itself.
RMMD: All the trees are olive drab and everyone’s wearing shirts the exact same shade of powder blue. Everyone except MudFergus, that is, but he’s in silhouette today so the colorist can take it reeeeeaaaal easy.
@Bryan: I’ll tell you who’s worse. Professor Phelps-Fogarty, who seamlessly blows smoke and insults AT THE SAME TIME!
In Fallout 3, there was an experimentation vault, that was filled with murderous clones of some guy named Gary.
They could only say their name though. “Gary” “Gaaarry….” “Gary gary!!!!” like they were some sort of demented Pokemon.
It was actually really creepy.
C-Shaft: Tim Cook must be pissed that Crankshaft is overexposing the word “apple” while they’re rolling out a new iPhone.
DT: While the accusation that Dick has blood on his hands is a big “Duh!”, Angeltop doesn’t look like she’s being forced to do anything here. She’s holding the dynamite like the can in a Coke commercial.
Dustin: Fitch thinks that Dustdad is representing Jeffy Keane and needs the jury to see a year’s worth of Family Circus cutouts.
Luann: While we’ve probably seen Phil wearing a leather jacket, I had honestly forgotten all about it before Mrs. Horner mentioned it. If they’re going to discuss his allegedly rebellious traits, the spiked hair is right there. The young man may have killed what was left of punk rock.
MT: I feel like both the bats and the cave cricket are going to flee in horror from the sight of Honest Ernest in full horny reverie.
MW: Saul and Eve’s dogs looked like they gave the rumor some credence, but the parrots dismiss it out of
handwing. Anyone in Charterstone have some bearded dragons we can poll?Phantom: We’ve gotten to the “Mastermind Does Endless Whining” stage of the vengeance narrative.
6C: I wonder how much sea cred a pirate has when he gets sleeved but doesn’t have any of the tats inked in.
Two things (if anything) wrong with The Family Circus.
1- All of the random friends that keep coming over.
2- It suggests that Billy (and Dolly) actually have friends.
Billy: Gary is lucky! He can afford two houses because of his lucrative businesses, also he has some sort of dwarfism so he looks like a kid even at 35!
FC: Gary is lucky. If they had drawn the state line slightly differently, that city would be in Illinois. Yeesh., can you imagine? Anyway, say hello to Melvin my new ethnic friend of some kind.
Gary would LOVE to be in the Illinois tax region.
Also, Indiana.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: You’re right about her sucking, but don’t award her an honorific she most certainly has not earned. She’s a former high school guidance counselor who somehow got a job teaching a class that could’ve been a PowerPoint slide show. That does not make her a professor.
FC: “And every other weekend, Gary gets to play with the police officers while they supervise his daddy and mommy’s custody exchange”.
@Bryan: I give her the benefit of the doubt on that one. I somehow managed to earn an associate professor title once upon a time, and I couldn’t manage a PowerPoint presentation back then.
LUANN: How long has it been since the Evansii have listened to conversations among actual human beings who are about nineteen years old? Anywhere on this planet?
@Poteet:Probably the same length of time as since the creators of DUSTIN last encountered someone in their mid-twenties..
A&J: Arlo, it’s time to look up the difference between “extinct” and “extirpated.” Maybe you can do that on Janis’s phone, once you catch up with her.
@Rube: Bwahaha!
JP: Would it be possible to go back and make Randy meeting April the beginning of a really long and extremely horrible dream from which he will mercifully awaken in a day or so, with April becoming nothing more than a bad imaginary memory? Please please please? Charlotte would of course also have to disappear, and although I actually like her, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
Wait a minute. You’re saying your real first name isn’t actually “Banana”?!?