Wednesday quickies
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Mary Worth, 5/14/25
Wilbur appears to be smiling guilelessly, but he has to know at some level that this conversation is not going great. That’s why he’s holding that muffin at the ready in the second panel. If Mary starts pressing him too hard, he can always lob it at her face and make a break for it in the confusion.
Marvin, 5/14/25
Wow, look at how genuinely upset Jenny’s dad is in the final panel here! A real important thing about the comic strip Marvin is that none of the characters in it like each other, despite the fact that most of them are related.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/14/25
“Hey ladies! I know you’ve been through some tough times … so do you want a murder truck? Don’t worry, I’m sure once you dig into the details you’ll find it’s the kind of murder you’d approve of.”
125 replies to “Wednesday quickies”
RMMD: I saw Murder Truck open for Killdozer. Good times.
Wilbur. Worstie. Remember five seconds after Belle learned Dawn was vegan, when she then derided her for wearing a (clearly not) leather watchstrap? Was that accommodating Dawn’s lifestyle? Is that why you looked aghast and immediately tried to deflect tension? Because there was just too much accommodation happening?
To be fair, the truck was not actually involved in the murder. It’s just a murder-adjacent truck.
MW: “Is Belle harboring negativity toward your daughter?” Who’s writing this crap, KI? (Karen-farcical Intelligence)
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – Augie earned enough points to get a firm handshake from Summer on the way out the door. How many more points before he can get a dry hump?
RMMD: Is Terry Beatty recapping the last plot this week to cut down on any actual writing he might have to do, or is he recreating Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with his own characters? Either way is stupid; I just want to make sure why I hate it.
MW: Why do Mary’s Garlic-Cheddar Muffins look more like Crushed-granite-and-Dirty-snow-by-the-side-of-the-road Muffins?
RMMD:
“Tell me more about this ‘Augie’ fellow, Summer!”
“Well, he has what I guess you might call a papal astrological sign and birthdate.”
“Really? — what’s his zodiac constellation, and on what day of the month was he born?”
“Leo; the 14th!”
RMMD: “Murder Truck” was the album title for Truck Tyler’s ill-advised foray into death metal.
Mary Worth is telling us “Believe women! Except for the psycho bitches.”
Ahhhhhhh! Weird, looming close-up of Rex Morgan’s nurse lady! Is…is she about to eat my village?
MW:
“Surely you can’t be serious!”
“I am serious — and don’t call me a satellite and online radio platform!”
@Astroboy:
Or perhaps that they were swiped from Michaelangelo’s David?
RMMD: When does the medical aspect of all this begin? When Summer asks June for birth control? When Rex performs a ponytailectomy at Augie’s pleading?
MW: Mary has her work cut out for her on this one, just figuring out if Wilbur or Dawn is the loopier one.
MARVIN: This topic is fun when you’re a Boomer. ” Three channels. THREE! When we got two more, we thought we’d died and gone to Heaven!” ( me, to my nephew and grands)
MW: “Geez, Wilbur. Any closer and I’d have to sit on your lap.”
Marvin: Maybe Marvin doesn’t have any interest in TV because it presents its subject-matter through several layers of abstraction that his developing infant mind cannot yet comprehend. Or maybe it’s because his mother doesn’t subscribe to any channel or streaming service that’s dedicated to poop.
RMMD: “Don’t worry; it’s legal. It’s technically being transferred to our library foundation.”
Marvin: This strip is painfully out of touch with modern parenting. In reality, there would be precisely one thing Marvin wants to watch, and he would demand to watch it over and over and over and over again. If Jenny’s lucky, it’ll be Bluey. If she’s unlucky, it’ll some unbearable CGI Chinese nursery rhyme slop. If she wished on a monkey’s paw, it’ll be video games. Marvin, too young to understand the mechanics of Mario but yelling at her to do impossible things and jump on spikes repeatedly, then crying every time Mario dies.
RMMD: A women’s shelter that wants a murder truck? Is it too much to wish this heralds a comeback for Santa Royale Downtown Women’s Shelter?
@Anonymous:(this was me, damn that auto log out)
MW:
Stolid and supportive, Lampy — seen crowding, albeit unobtrusively, into the conversation in today’s first panel — is Mary’s Cardinal Richelieu, the taciturn but stentorian genius behind the throne.
FC: Very cute. I can’t wait for the moment Jeffy asks his mom if Grandpa was bent.
I’m guessing the reason for the extreme close-ups in the last two panels of Rex Morgan is that the artist didn’t want to re-draw that complex background.
RMMD:
“That’s not all, Michelle. The truck is nearly autonomous — in fact, it’s almost as if it has a mind of its own, really — and the guy even had a cute nickname for it: ‘Christine.’ Now, isn’t that sweet?”
RMMD – Augie has now involved a women’s shelter in an active homicide investigation. Not only will the shelter workers have to deal with the cops (who will impound the truck and then auction it off later), they’ll also have to do extra paperwork. And then if the police report and/or court transcript makes their physical address public, they’ll have to relocate for security purposes. So yeah, way to go, Mr. Nice Guy…you just single-handedly shut down the local women’s shelter. Your Nobel prize is in the mail.
RMMD: The autopsy report shows McStalkie was already died from an overdose before he was strangled so no actual crime was committed by McKiller and he’s released from custody.
“Hey, Augie. Where’s my truck? You what!?”
Mary Worth: “Is Belle harboring negativity toward your daughter? Sounds like somebody needs a trip to the Santa Royale Re-Education Camp. It’s a learning community!”
Mary Worth: If this strip would just show awareness of what it’s doing and came out openly about Wilbur’s fear of women/fear of confrontation (“All right! All right! I’m eating the garlic muffin, see? And if it was loaded with Clog-Be-Gone, I’d still eat it!”) a lot would be forgiven.
@Pozzo: sol (snort out loud)
Marvin: An angry, resentful father. A horrible color scheme. A smug, incontinent toddler. What do these things have in common? If you guessed “piss,” you are correct! It’s piss. It’s always piss in this strip. (Except when it’s poop.)
@Astroboy: “I’m not Willa…she died a long time ago…”
You know, Terry Beatty is actually a good artist for the medium. His characters stay pretty consistent (except for Augie’s chin), and are recognizable as humans. The only weird thing are the twice a week large hand gesture panels.
Marvin’s grandfather is folding his arms so aggressively he has annihilated at least one hand.
Mary Worth: My mother has a photo of me and my younger siblings from when I was three or four? I was holding up some trinket to the camera in evident delight very much like Wilbur is holding that muffin. Baked goods are Wilbur’s shiny objects, is what I’m saying, despite or perhaps because of the shards of glass Mary has so thoughtfully incorporated in her recipe.
MW: Based on the look of the muffin in panel two I’m somewhat convinced that Mary is trying to kill Wilbur with cooking, closing the neat circle in the plot of Belle trying to kill Dawn. Hopefully Dawn hired Mary for the task…
Marvin, the first comic of the post-feminism regime, where a woman’s place is being squeezed onto a love seat with her father while her son–literally and with obvious delight–shits on her.
Dustin: Trying to figure out whether the joke is DustinDad’s lack of mathematical reasoning, or if the artist can’t compare the calories in 24 hours of basal metabolism to the calories in 10 minutes of running. 10 minutes’ rest burns about 1/10 of that 10 minutes of running.
(Online calculators also ballpark 100 calories for walking a mile in about 30 minutes, which is still about 3 times the amount basal metabolism would burn during that time.)
/pedant
Blondie: Are those symbols over the screen supposed to mean the video game is one long expletive-fest? I didn’t realize Dagwood and Blondie were so permissive about swearing!
DT: Even with the “I will confess unreservedly now that I’m caught” trope, I don’t think even Piltdown will be able to explain all the plot nonsense. Especially the body snatch attempt and how that didn’t matter when it went wrong.
MW:
“Not to worry, Mary! Even if Dawn is right about Belle’s sordid plans and she is successful in implementing them, you and I can do Beatles-adapted karaoke together afterwards! — ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; all good Westons go to heaven/1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; all good Westons go to heaven…’ “
To be fair.. even with a 100 channels there’s no guarantee there’s age appropriate viewing for Marvin. Any who… Wilbur huh? What a clueless dork! Your FWB wants to off your daughter!!
Mary Worth: I’d like to think the slightly miniaturized muffin-hand belongs to a puppet Wilbur is cradling in his lap, just off-panel. Yes, a muffin-puppet is an unusual accessory, but if anyone owns one, it’s Wilbur Weston.
MW: Why must this story keep repeating itself at us? We’ve done nothing but watch Dawn “feel hostility from Wilbur’s guest” for the past month. Get on with it!
Luann: So you what do you think this “fun, flexible, high-paying” job is? Skeevy salesperson? Telemarketer? Pyramid scheme? Crypto promoter? Camgirl? I’m hoping for “scammer of the elderly”, so Luann can be forced to choose between paying her rent and ripping off kindly old Mrs. Horner.
CS: He’s right, you know. A daily bus-riding lottery would be much more time-consuming than their usual method of simply blowing the children off. It’s an efficiency problem, is what he’s saying.
FC-“Yeah. Old people can get bent,” Jeffy retorts.
FC-By now Jeff Keane is probably a grandfather.
MW-How is Wilbur supposed to know how Belle feels about Dawn. The man is so blindsided that he wouldn’t recognize anything negative going on.
Sure, old man, you may have only had three networks and PBS if you were lucky, but you had Battle of the friggin’ Network Stars! While your… daughter? Daughter-in-law? Niece? Random stranger? Anyway, while this woman was stuck with over a hundred choices out of which a handful of shows were any good, you got to enjoy goddamned JAMIE FARR bowl!
Dustin: So Dad has no idea how to calculate the return on an investment? The mystery of why Dustin’s family appears to still live a 1980s level suburban middle class life style, despite their father being a partner in a law firm and his mother a radio celebrity, has now been explained. I hope Dustin isn’t counting on an inheritance.
MW: Does Wilbur usually take a bite out of the paper muffin cup, or is he just a little uneasy today?
RMMD: @MKay: When does the medical aspect begin? When Niki’s new girlfriend shows up at the clinic – pregnant.
MW: “But Mary, Belle goes out of her way to accommodate Dawn’s vegan lifestyle, and that’s basically her whole personality now! Even I don’t have much to say to her outside of our ongoing ‘tofu vs tempeh’ discussion”
Marvin: God, I wish this were a Sunday strip so we could see more panels of progressively older and angrier men decrying the generation after them, until it’s a ghost of a colonial farmer whining that he only had the bible to read, and his version only had two gospels!
RMMD: Indeed it is ‘odd’. One might even say ‘suspicious’? But I guess if the police bought that story, no reason why the rest of us should spend much time thinking about it.
“Get this. The Murder Truck is a White Ford Bronco!”
Both characters look directly at the reader. They know your age. They know you get that reference.
The big difference between Josh’s critique of Marvin, ad the strip’s actual premise is that where he says “despite,” they say “because of.”
Mary Worth.. Also “lifestyle” — I hate that. Just say whatever it is, people! She supports her being …. vegan vegetarian gay bi lesbian Buddhist pot smoker ferret owner ev driver communist shaved head tattoos dancer not having kids … … anything slightly off the norm is a lifestyle.
Today, both “Blondie” and “Beetle Bailey” used the word “macchiato.” I knew Garfield was in the pocket of Big Coffee, but I guess their influence is spreading.
@Tabby Lavalamp:
Jan Smithers in the Dunk Tank >>> Jamie Farr bowling.
@Myrtle: Speaking of pregnancy – when will Jordan and Michelle decide to start a family? She’s my death pool pick, and I look forward to being teased that she won’t survive childbirth.
MW: Dawn’s vegan lifestyle? which means she walks around the house dressed as a giant carrot —probably.
MW-“But how does Belle feel about me, Wilbur,” Mary asks.
GT: Elmer fouls off a lot, which is why his teammate knows to cover his crotch with his batting helmet.
MW (in the Weston tongue): “I’m having sex Mary, nothing else matters!”
Marvin-“Everything on tv is shitty and not the type of shit I’m into,” Marvin says.
Luann – I’ve got two words for you…oops, one word: OnlyFans
MW: Does it still count as gaslighting if you’re stupidly oblivious to the real situation? Asking for a idiotic waste of matter whose only friend is a goldfish.
RMMD: So instead of getting a truck, he gets a big tax write-off! Augie just keeps racking up the wins here.
MW: “Oh, Mary, you know how women are with their silly little made-up dramas. Ooo, I don’t like the way she looked at me. This is just more hormone nonsense or something. . . . Why are you looking at me like that?”
RMMD: “You said gifted. Gifted is not a word. The word is gave.”
“Oh, sorry. I’ll try to remember that going forward.”
“Gaaaah, going forward is a useless abomination! You’re fired!”
GT: In protest of Pete Rose’s admission into the hall of fame, the players and spectators make a mockery of the game.
The second baseman squats in the infield. The pitcher ‘bowls’ straight-armed like a cricket player. The batter uses a canoe paddle. The runner takes a lead going in the wrong direction and the announcer addresses the players by nonsensical words. “Kitchen pops out to Horseradish.”
MW – Why, Belle told me she’d like Dawn to become part of the earth itself! Maybe in an abandoned mineshaft or well….
Marvin – When I grew up, all we had was basic cable…imagine living with nothing but basic cable….
RMMD – A murder-mobile…in possession of the local women’s shelter…the Dixie Chicks song just writes itself….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: Wilbur has evidently forgotten that not only is his daughter an adult who isn’t obligated to like or accept his dating preferences but veganism is not a “lifestyle.” Then again, with how close minded Santa Royale is, it’s probably treated as a euphemism for the LGBT community.
OK, now I’m going to be wondering what in my last post triggered the modbot. Polonium? Heavy metal?
DT: OK – so we have a double, got his teeth fixed, got him poisoned, then what were the late dum dums doing at the morgue?
MW: These scenes where Wilbur shows how oblivious he is the danger to Dawnie and himself aren’t just there for our amusement. It helps to create a passage of time. Time enough for Belle to finally accidentally cut Dawnie’s femoral artery. If the blackened picture frame turns later as a clinching clue that would be perfect.
RMMD: That state must have amazing department of motor vehicles – guy gives Augie the truck keys, and within a day (since the telling of the story is the next day), Augie gets the truck listed under him, and he donates it for a tax credit.
Has there been any sort of reason why Dawn decided to go for a vegan diet? Did Moy meet Paul McCartney and he told her that she had to make Dawn Weston vegetarian so that she could quote Beatles songs and she misinterpreted it as vegan? Or maybe she’s trying about thirty years too late to give Dawn a personality that doesn’t revolve around her promiscuity and daddy issues?
Mary Worth – Sigh. It’s time to recalibrate the human speech system again. Radio the mother ship to beam both of them up.
Bliss – The rest are by Lillian McKenzie and Les Moore.
Frazz – Frazz is superior because he exercises all the time and never stays still for a minute. We get it.
@Pozzo: I saw what you did there.
@Doc Wonmug: Don’t forget the upchin views of Buck talking on his phone. Beatty loses a lot of points for that.
Mary’s brain is working very hard to try to find a way to politely explain that Wilbur is a self-absorbed twit.
C’shaft: Yeah, Crankshaft can just stick with his normal practice of not picking up kids at random.
DT: So, what exactly was Piltdown’s plan if he didn’t find a homeless vet who happened to look just like him to take in, provide with an exact copy of his own dental work, murder, then dress up in his clothes and dump in a park? Send one of the nephews to the dentist instead and have him die in a fiery explosion? (Actually, he probably could have gotten away with that–fewer steps and the recency of the dental work would probably have been a lot less obvious. Let this be a lesson to all of you planning to fake your own death after embezzling a bunch of money: Keep It Simple, Stupid.)
Dustin: Except the runner has burned 100 calories in addition to the 1200-1600 they normally expend by simply existing. You, meanwhile, put away so many donuts in the course of your sedentary lifestyle that you’d have to starve yourself until mid-June just to go through your caloric input for this week so far. I think we can see why Dustdad is a lawyer and not a financial planner.
JP: Faced with the prospect of dealing with her sister’s relationship drama, Sophie wonders if she can get an earlier flight to Oslo.
Luann: Clan Evans was so, so close to acknowledging how the system is rigged so that it’s virtually impossible for a young adult to earn a livable wage and therefore gain independence. Thankfully they took a hard left turn into “Kids These Days have unrealistically high expectations!” ensuring the comfort level of their readership remains undisturbed.
Phantom: It’s kind of like The Man Who Came to Dinner, only with an even more self-centered and unreasonable guest.
Mary Worth – I really don’t understand the randomness in which certain words are bolded in Mary Worth dialogue, unless the Mary Worth creators are priming readers with answers to the crossword that the syndicate also distributes to newspapers.
Marvin – Credit to Tom Armstrong, or more likely his creative team, for recognizing anyone with children would at least have grown up in the cable era instead of ranting about only having three channels.
Rex Morgan, M.D. – This is not as honorable as it appears. Augie is going to use the tax deduction for the donation to put a down payment on a Cybertruck.
@Needless Exposition: My best guess is that Karen Moy received some blowback from the whole Keith Hillend arc, wherein vegans were portrayed as self-righteous hypocrites who eat terrible food, and is trying to compensate. Kind of like how Charles Dickens wrote Riah in Our Mutual Friend as a way of making up for the antisemitic caricature of Fagin in Oliver Twist, only with half-assed research into vegan cuisine.
Marvin: Marvin’s mom wants to make sure he sees plenty of ads for medications that treat gastrointestinal disorders, just so he’ll be prepared for the kinds of serious side effects he’ll be facing when he grows up.
Mary Worth: “Vegan lifestyle?! But she’s been eating my blueberry-bran-lard muffins and beef-tallow sandwiches for years!”
@Veronica!:
#24. RMMD. Veronica, afraid the Nobel award will need to be retracted. McStalker died in his own truck. As someone mentioned above. Augie’s new trick is murder adjacent.
@TheDiva: Technically Sonia was a vegetarian but she was also a terrible person who had no redeeming qualities or anything that made her sound like she had a life outside of Tumblr.
MW: Belle has not tried to kill Dawn with ebola, cholera, or leeches. That’s pretty vegan-friendly.
GT: Let’s forget that strike call with the pitcher holding the ball. The idea that Milford HS baseball plays in a stadium with double-deck seating all around is more amazing than the glassed-in press box.
LUANN: Back in the day, she’d order envelopes to address at home! Now there ar so many other opportunities she’ll be sent, like clicking for prize money. See Jobs on CraigsList.
@TheDiva: It’s actually not impossible for a young person to earn a livable wage; it’s just that you don’t get to live in a chic major metropolitan area and you might have to work for The Man. (Source: lived experience.)
RMMD: Murder Truck was the working title of Quentin Tarantino’s grindhouse movie Deathproof, until he was persuaded to go with a cool hot rod car instead.
@Needless Exposition: No, but there should have been. Dawn could have been going through a spell of wanting to diferentiate herself from her mayonnaise-swilling father. This is a reasonable step for young adults to take, even if they like their parents. And veganism would certainly accomplish that in Dawn’s case.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Well, considering that she practically threw a tantrum when Belle interrupted her duet to the point where she bitched to Cathy about it later, I don’t think we’re seeing any distance unless Belle somehow succeeds in her plan…which she won’t because the Westons are Rasputinian cockroaches.
@Voshkod:
Dammit, Voshkod, you’re not allowed to be THIS funny
@Doc Wonmug: re RMMD: Yes, Beatty does a good job on the adults’ faces, making them consistent and showing range of expression. Unfortunately these same middle-aged faces are used on the disproportionately-sized kids and teens
Don Abundio, translated:
“Hello, Admiral! Is it true you quit your job at the marina?”
“I got fired, Abundio”
“But at least now I don’t have to run my life by the clock”
[Sign: PAWNSHOP]
MW-“But Belle doesn’t want me to watch her accommodate Dawn’s vegan lifestyle so I hide in the closet and watch them.”
Marvin – I’m pretty sure this is intended as a meta joke about Comic Strip Time, like that episode of The Simpsons where young Homer is in a grunge band in the 1990s.
“This truck the real killer had, it wasn’t a white Ford Broncos by any chance?”
“For example,Mary, did you know Drano™ is vegan, no animal ingredients whatsoever.”
I like how Jenny’s dad’s right eyebrow is trying to push off his glasses so he no longer has to look at Marvin.Now if it can just get it to cover his nostril he’ll be home free.
@TheDiva: DT: I’d bet there was no plan to fake his death until he saw his doppelganger. He either started embezzling then or previously just figured he could embezzle and carry on (instead of cashing out and going on the lam), because nobody checked his accounts at all until the police asked questions about him. The murder / morgue theft / everything sounds incredibly stupid until you realize the caliber of financial executive Piltdown was working with.
ergh, darn cookies – 88 was me
@Tabby Lavalamp: you got to enjoy goddamned JAMIE FARR bowl!
___________________________
Especially that time Gabe Kaplin and Robert Conrad made a big deal over his nose crossing over the foul line! They just reran it on ESPN69 Classics.
@CanuckDownSouth: ergh, darn cookies – 88 was me
_________________
88 Cookies…..that was a classic Tracy bad guy!
MW: Its been there all along but our eyes were wide shut-Charterstone is a lunatic asylum. But its keepers run a revolutionary psychiatric clinic allowing the patients to run free in its boundaries and socialize with minimal interference. Occassionly a mistake is made to allow one (Wilber) a thereputic sabbatical and they must be recommitted. However the literary genious of the Mary Worth world is its convoluted levels of reality. Is any of the drama real? Is Mary a surreptitious caregiver or a longterm inmate? Is our role as the reader that of an unidentified observer, judging all, but an impotently mute witness to the constant madness? Untwisting this Jungian soap opera threatens sanity itself, but I am compelled, nay, OBSESSED to keep observing these lunatics!
@matt w: I’m sorry.
Are you referencing Belle, Dawn or Mary?
@Pozzo: Very funny.
I went to a demolition derby once – they had that think where you can pay $5 to take a hammer to an old car for a few minutes. The proceeds went to the county’s Battered Women’s Shelter.
Tennessee: You can’t make this shit up.
So, a murder truck, by comparison, sounds charming.
What we’re learning here is Wilbur is used to villains who are even more cartoonishly, mustache-twirlingly evil than Belle with the perpetual crazy eyes, the uncontrollable laughter, the poorly hidden physical attacks (remember her spraying Dawn with soy sauce?) and the inexplicable sudden-onset-obsessive-need-to-murder-his-daughter. He just can’t fathom the idea of someone hiding malicious intentions behind polite actions. Or maybe Belle has a motorized rotating vagina ribbed for his pleasure, that could also explain a lot.
Good shit from the ‘Mudges today. (Voshkod for MVP).
Just not the kind of shit Marvin’s into.
I think the Miller family is more aggressively hateful than the Kudlick family. The Kudlick grandfather can be downright decent at times. This might explain why he’s
been buried in the backyarddisappeared from the strip.Thanks to the magic of the week-ahead view on Comics Kingdom, I can report an extremely stupid plot beat coming up in Mary Worth. No spoilers, though.
RMMD: It never hurts to have an extra set of prints on a murder truck.
@Peanut Gallery:
Pensé que podría estar empeñando su bola de boliche, pero esto sigue siendo bastante triste.
Marvin was originally meant to have been born in the early 1980s, but I guess now canonically his parents were actually born later than that
#99 MW: thanks, Taig. Why would we read this strip about a nosy old busybody but for him!
The Familiar Mucus: ” Old people get bent over when talking to their grandkids.” “Stewardess,I speak Melonhead. She says, ” Get bent, Old Person!”
@Violet: Good idea. The bowling ball would have been more poignant and less of a non-sequitur. But either way, he should come face-to-face with Rhino Man from Pluggers hocking his TV.
Can’t wait for Chekhov’s Poison to go off when a series of hijinks ends with all the Mary Worth characters eating Belle’s poisoned food and the police chalking it all up to a cult suicide ritual.
MW- Except for the tea, and some handy tomato slicing, Bats really hasn’t tried to kill Dawn lately. Which i say to her- GET A MOVE ON!
@Peanut Gallery:
Poverty is the international language!
CS: The room temperature of the bus drivers’ garage must be higher than the collective I.Q. of the four bus drivers in it.
Wait, can I change “poverty” to “destitution”? Has a better ring to it.
Dawn and Wilbur both take turns confiding in Mary.
How about an actual licensed therapist, or… you know… calling the Police? Assuming that Dawn has legit proof that Belle is trying to kill her. Which really, Belle should just be wearing a shirt that says “I’m a murderer!” on it.
@The Rambling Otter: I feel like Santa Royale is in some sort of weird time flux where despite the smartphones and women wearing pants, it’s still the 1950s where segregation is rampant, no fault divorce doesn’t exist, and no one believed in therapy because they blamed everything else for their problems.
FG: Kotch? Isn’t that an old Walter Matthau movie?
@Banana Jr. 6000: Luann could do an OnlyFans and shove her fist up her asshole.
Curtis: Um, is there significance to the hatless doppel-Curtis prominently featured in the final panel? I was so confused it almost distracted me from noticing that Curtis in silhouette really draws attention to the fact that you should be able to see his hair through the gap above the adjustable strap, and the fact it’s just a gap makes it look like his head has a slot in it.
DT: For the second time in two days I feel it’s necessary to point out that Dick got dragged into this because Homicide and the morgue found the body suspicious but there was no evidence he’d been murdered. I mean, at this point it’s not exactly news that everyone in Neo-Chicago law enforcement is bad at their job, but still.
FC: Tell HTT Grandma “Old people’s bodies are in constant pain, but it’s worth it because they can see us better!” and see what she thinks about that.
JP: You know, when the actual point of the strip is “Neddy is basically incapable of letting anything be about someone else,” it kind of takes the fun out of things a bit.
Marvin, meta: “[H]ow genuinely upset Jenny’s dad is” isn’t even the worst part of how much everyone in the strip hates each other portrayed in the final panel. That is surely Marvin smirking because his mom is irritated because her dad is genuinely upset that she was trying to make a point that he interpreted as casting aspersions on her childhood.
(And actually, Jenny, many studies have shown that too much choice can lead to indecision, where you can’t decide on a programme because you keep thinking there might be a better one if you keep looking, until eventually you give up and find yourself spending the whole of Sunday afternoon watching repeats of Murder, She Wrote for the umpteenth time and suddenly remembering who the killer is halfway through each one. I mean, just for example.) (And now I feel like I should have saved that observation and sent it to the Chief Plugger.)
OTF: TFW years ago you thought it’d be funny if the office building looked like a steadily rising bar chart, and now you want to do a gag that kind of requires the top floor not being much smaller than the others, so you just decide to go for it anyway.
S4th: So, wait, is this a stable time loop, where Hil wouldn’t have checked if Future Hil hadn’t told her, but Future Hil only knew to check because she already had? Or does Future Hil not know what the e-mail says and just went back in time because she did delete her e-mail eventually and this is the only way she can find out? Or maybe Future Hil doesn’t know what the e-mail says because the simplest explanation continues to be that she’s a stress-induced hallucination.
@TheDiva: “Phantom: It’s kind of like The Man Who Came to Dinner, only with an even more self-centered and unreasonable guest.”
All Savarna needs is a horribly miscast Bette Davis to be her secretary!
@Horace Broon:
#115. JP: Soph should shut her down and say “today is about ME. And my friends. Now congratulate us.”. I was taught the only effective way to treat a narcssist is to make them think and talk about others, otherwise you’re just enabling their problem.
@Don: Yep. I probably still have the first collected book of the early strips.. ala Garfield at the time.In fact Marvin came across as a human Garfield in baby form.
MW: Why do I feel like I’m about to hear a garlic-cheddar muffin cry out in pain?
RMMD: Woman’s Shelter Representative: This is a very generous gesture. Could you tell us where the truck came from?
Augie: I, uh, found it. But I don’t need it. Because I already have a car. So you can have it. Well, bye.
C-Shaft: A daily lottery to ride on Crankshaft’s bus would develop very Shirley Jackson overtones.
DT: The last remaining suspect has decided to fess up to everything, but with convoluted self-justifications. Dick’s no happier about it than you are.
JP: If I didn’t know that Neddy and Hank had just broken up Neddy’s little performance would have convinced me that Hank was in a shallow grave somewhere.
SSmith: Snuffy was so sure that “Nice knockers, your honor” was a winning line.
Sex Organ V.D. turned into an ad for Kill Kars For Kids™ so quickly I didn’t notice it!
@Artist formerly known as Ben: SSmith: Snuffy was so sure that “Nice knockers, your honor” was a winning line.
____________
It worked for Dan Fielding.
MMarvin: Let’s see, with TWO adults and an only occasionally verbal infant in front of the TV, who gets the pick the program? Why, the star of the strip, of course!
@Garrisonskunk: Ah, New Orleans.
@Garrisonskunk: Gaaah! That’s an earworm that I don’t want!
When that comes on TV, we hit the mute button in record speed.