We know not what may be, and what we may be is smooshed flat
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Blondie, 7/27/25
The Blondie creative team has never met a young person that it didn’t want to call a lazy sack of shit, but … I kept waiting for this strip’s punchline to be “Napping and playing video games at work? This nepo baby is just like me for real!” but somehow it never happens. I guess the whole thing could be a subtle joke, but nothing about Blondie in general or today’s installment in particular, which includes the normal English phrase “urban expression,” has ever made it seem like the strip is capable of subtlety.
Mary Worth, 7/27/25
Some claim that New York is the so-called “Greatest City In The World,” but Mary, despite her professed love of the place, has on previous visits already encountered two of its greatest dangers: the criminals who lurk in the city parks and shove innocent bystandards with no warning, and the reckless drivers who speed into pedestrians as they innocently step into the street. Now we must add a third member to this unholy trinity: air conditioning units that simply rain down from the windows of New York’s famously tall buildings, killing dozens a year. Anyway, Olive is thinking about the challenges that come with her gifts, which is a weird setup to her using her gifts to save Mary from a certain bludgeoning death, seemingly without any challenges at all. Unless maybe this wasn’t a use of her psychic powers, but instead she just heard the classic Big Apple “Eyyyy! I’m droppin’ an air conditioning unit outta my window ovah here!” Only in New York, baybee! Amiright folks?
94 replies to “We know not what may be, and what we may be is smooshed flat”
MW:
“Let’s look at the inscription on this thing, Mary!”
” ‘This window air conditioning unit is the property of Ted Miller. ‘ ”
MW-“Well that’s it. I’m leaving this town.”
FC-“Does Daddy know about this yet?” I’m going to assume he wasn’t there for the conception.
Slylock Fox-Max gnaws off Slylock’s foot.
RMMD-“What’ll ya have?” “Hmm too many choices. How much SPAM is in the SPAM sausages eggs and SPAM?”
It’s so weird, it feels like Moy is building up Olive to be the hero of some cutesy tween novel featuring a plucky imaginative girl.
Like Matilda, Eloise or Anne of Green Gables.
MW:
“The evolving plot line I espied by clicking on this morning’s installment is what I would call ‘A Midsummer Night’s Scream.’ “
— William Shakespeare
@The Rambling Otter: Speaking of Anne of Green Gables, I’ve been to the house that Lucy Maud Montgomery based Green Gables on.
Right next to the “haunted” forest as per the story goes. And THAT FOREST IN REAL LIFE IS CREEPY. All the trees looked completely dead, it looked so barren and desolate.
MW: Teenager living in New York? Whines endlessly about the challenges of their gifts? Said gifts mainly consist of psychic premonitions of head injuries? Newspaper Spider-Man… welcome back.
Blondie: Thank goodness Dithers’ nephew will have more time to devote to his side hustle: driving around in a hippie VW Bus solving ghost mysteries with three friends and a talking dog.
@Schroduck: Except Newspaper Spidey’s “Spidey Sense” never actually worked.
As he got hit on the head with bricks and was punched in the face constantly.
MW:
“If I were to anthropomorphize that portable air conditioner, Olive, I’d say: ‘You know you’re a “Plugger” when there’s an electrical cord attached to you’ !”
We came *this* close to Toby becoming Meddler in Chief and Mary didn’t even get knocked out?!? Boooooooo
Blondie: Is it just me, or does Nephew’s shirt look like a medieval tunic?
“Duuude…. I’ve gotta jump back into Narnia and fulfill an ancient prophecy. Enjoy your dead-end job loser!”
Blondie :
a) Dagwood meets Dustin
b) Oh, this is just a variation of “Dagwood meets a homeless person”, where suddenly, the lazy, shirking Dagwood Bumstead is righteous enough to be outraged at the shiftlessness of the person he meets.
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Frazz : Caufield has Super-Strength?
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Luann : has quit her own strip in disgust. You’d think the title character leaving would jeopardise the continuation of this comic, but, in recent years, we’ve seen that this strip can spend MONTHS not focusing on the supposed main character.
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Mary Worth : Olive’s ESP has evolved to the point that she has danger-sensing precognition? If it works on butlers and loose bricks too, Olive has a great future in a certain career path, if she chooses to follow it. Just hope she likes wearing tights!
MW:
I am reminded of the great Three Stooges short, a takeoff on “Pygmalion,” where the episode ends in an inevitable pie fight, there is a dangling pie stuck to the ceiling, Moe is having a conversation with a society matron who is directly underneath the pie, in which she says, “I feel as if the sword of Damocles is hanging over my head!”, and Moe responds: “Lady, you must be psychic!”
“We’re never given more than we can handle, Olive. Just world fallacy? Oh, I know that one. It’s when you fail to see the world is intrinsically just and try to change how things work. Then the world will punish you for acting above your station.”
Blondie: Before the final panel, I thought this would be an inspirational: “Even when I’m dust, they’ll be another generation to carry on my slovenly habits.”
Mary Worth: In the past 40 years, there’s only been one documented case of a falling air-conditioning unit killing a person in New York City (although there have been several other non-fatal instances). Which I assume means Olive has been doing her job as a psychic, running around the city and warning people before anything bad happens, like the young Kyle Chandler in the mid-’90s TV show “Early Edition.” An oracle’s job is never done — and despite Mary’s cliches about never being given more than we can handle, I imagine Olive could use a vacation, but has already predicted that she’s not going to get one.
@Bob Tice: Funny thing, a videogame was released recently, where you’re in a house, and literally EVERYTHING appliances, furniture, whatever… if you choose takes on a human form and you can date it. I’m certain there’s an Air Conditioner in there somewhere.
As one person online put it “I’m less bewildered by the premise and more towards how they got all these big-name voice actors for it”
Blondie: Ha, silly millennials, quitting their jobs because they find them uninspiring. No, the real way to do it is to never quit, and just double down on your napping and goofing off! Also, dress like an off-duty Hearse driver. Not sure how that one helps, but don’t mess with the formula.
MW: I know, let’s introduce our storyline about the magic girl with psychic precognition powers with a quote about how the future in unknowable. Perfect choice, no notes.
FC: Dolly whacks Jeffy on the head. “It’s ‘open your legs’, stupid.”
MW: The Dangerous New York Stereotype Tour. Next up: a rude taxi driver and a shove off a subway platform.
RMMD: Personally, I’d have gone with, “long-winded ol’ goat,” but Wanda’s marrying him, so it’s her call.
MW: I’m in favor of nurturing a child’s gifts and encouraging their personal growth and development but Olive’s “gifts” can only be treated with psychological help and a steady diet of SSRIs as well as staying away from meddling old biddies.
RMMD:
“This whole episode has inspired me to wordsmithin’ and tune-makin’, darlin’. Here’s my start: ‘A young ‘un had called me a putative father/Turns out it was all just distraction and bother.’ Whattaya think, Wanda?”
“Way too cerebral for roots country.”
“Is that an Urban expression? Curious. Alas, I am not proficient in the language of Urban. Fortunately, I have acquired a copy of the Urban Dictionary, which I have right here. This should prove most enlightening.”
Mary knows that it’s probably not healthy to enable the behaviour of someone who believes they have psychic powers, but it is VERY funny. It’s the same reason she keeps Wilbur around.
Josh, I think you meant, “I’m defenestrating here! I’m defenestrating here!” Alas, Putin has missed the opportunity to rid the world of Mary Worth. Maybe next time!
MW:
“My aim is true.”
— Elvis Costello
“Mine obviously isn’t.”
— Whoever threw the air conditioner at Mary
Watching Mary Worth mentor a young psychic, thinking about an X-Men relaunch with Mary in the role of Professor X, and begrudgingly admitting that yes, I would read that. “Please, ah can’t control mah powers, anyone ah touch might die!” (an elderly woman in a wheelchair rolls into the room carrying a plate of muffins) “Well. It sounds like you could use some advice.”
MW: Today’s strip has been presented by guest artist Baja Gajin. Here, he has used his iconic, recurring theme of a flaming meteorite smashing through the atmosphere, but given it an urban twist suitable to the NYC locale, substituting a window air conditioning unit in place of the well known fireball. We expect to see more of this appliance in Gajin’s forthcoming pieces, as the theme of squashing Mary and her little, flat-chested friend like bugs on the sidewalk will no doubt develop among readers and commenters alike.
MW: Was that a Commando 8?
MW: Meanwhile, up above, Wilbur ducks back into the window. ‘Curses, foiled again!’ he mutters as he lowers the dollar store mask over his face. ‘No matter, WILBURMAN! will strike again, and this time he will not fail! Yesterday, ‘Ask Wendy’! Tomorrow, Charterstone!’
@The Rambling Otter: Yeah, if Matilda decided to join forces with The Trunchbull to further immiserate Miss Honey and the other schoolchildren.
JP: We really should be a lot more pissed (as pissed as Randy here who’s reverted back to full gorilla form) that apparently the only reason Ces ginned up this whole ‘Sophie n’ Reena go to Norway’ gimmick was so he could once again indulge in his bewildering desire to write the next Jason Bourne/John Wick blockbuster.
RMMD: ‘Yep, my son-but-not-really is invited, and he’ll bring his whole band! So git back in that kitchen, darlin’! We’ll need a whole heap more of eggs, biscuits n’ gravy! I hear those boys have appetities like hosses!’
@The Rambling Otter:
This serves to explain, in part, why I have never played a video game since 1980’s Atari Space Invaders.
MW: The role of Olive is being played by Billy Mumy.
@Bob Tice:
Ha! Very understandable ^^
Luann: “Our daughter is having a mental breakdown.” “Must be a day ending in ‘Y’. *SIGH* I’ll go restrain her before she starts smashing crockery over her head and urinating on the floor again.”
Watch Mary’s neck grow even longer as she inspects the damage.
“A quick trip to the break room might give me an energy boost.” What, is that where his coke connection hangs out?
FC: Thel finds that reading her psalter doesn’t bring the inner peace she was seeking.
“Why do I keep going back to psalm 137:9: ‘Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.'” She thinks.
Blondie: C’mon, Josh. Dagwood is breaking the fourth wall by staring straight at the reader when the nephew says, “And don’t even think about catching a quick nap at your desk.”
@The Rambling Otter: Although this type of game, is called a “Widget Series” by which it is designed to be off the walls bizarre on purpose (and LSD may or may not have been involved)
Katamari Damacy is a prime example of how deep the rabbit hole goes.
@Hibbleton: My Mom has a refrigerator magnet, that says:
“Grandchildren are the reward for not killing your children.”
That’s a weirdly blank expression on Mary’s face in the “Look out!” panel.
MW – Falling safes and pianos – probably the only down side of the Big Apple….
There is no JUNGLE JIM! today. So instead, here’s a life lesson from a plugger.
Daggy — So how long did the nephew work there? Was it a week, as implied by the last two panels, or longer, as explicated in the first one? Apparently the writer isn’t into the whole “eight-hour workday” or not playing video games while on the clock because he/she couldn’t be bothered to resolve this incoherence.
MW — “the Quality of Mercy is not strained; it droppeth as a gentle rain from Heaven. But sometimes it’s like an room air conditioner.” William Shakespeare
There’s something haunting about Mary’s expression as Olive pulls her aside; her mouth is agape and her eyes are fixed ahead. It’s as if her soul has already left her body and begun its ascension, but Olive has unnaturally dragged it back to Earth. Once again, God’s Will that Mary Worth die in New York has been thwarted. But He will surely try again. Just as He has tried countless times to see Wilbur die at sea.
@Anonymous: This comic would have probably worked better that if instead of being Dither’s Nephew. It literally was a crossover with Dustin.
Except Dustin getting an actual job would probably break the space-time continuum.
MW: High above the sidewalk, a Roadrunner peers down from an apartment after dropping an ACME air conditioner from the window.
@Bob Tice: Well put.
And on that note, Seinfeld also did the falling air conditioner better.
SFx (find six): It’s a cookbook!
@46 Scratchy Scrotum LXIX:
Oh, yes. Yes, it was.
Mary Worth: Olive’s clairvoyance was indeed impressive, but only for a few seconds. Then Mary looked down and saw the girl’s sneaker in a big pile of dog shit. ” There’s always something interesting happening here!” she smirked.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Also in “The Good Place” I don’t remember exactly, but wasn’t Chidi killed by a fallen air conditioner?
Fudge Packer – If I got a call that started with, “You have to listen. I’m on a burner phone . . .,” I think I would listen rather than scream back into the phone. Fortunately, I have led a life that has never caused someone to call and say, “You have to listen. I’m on a burner phone . . . “
Blondie: Dithers should ask the vending company to stock the machines with beverages fortified with vitamin D because it looks like everyone there has rickets.
MW – The hell is with Mary’s neck in P3 and P7? Brigman doing some sort of tribute to Joe Giella’s occasional, random and hilarious losses of artistic perspective? You’re going to need to try harder, Brigman. In addition to all the ginormous sofas and laptops, Giella once gave Mary three hands. Top that.
Blondie: The distinction between “still” and “used to” in panel 2 disturbs me, but not as much as thinking that Dithers &Co. still has one of those vending machines that’ll drop a paper cup and squirt soda, along with the mold accumulated in the pipes, in a three foot vicinity.
JP: Good grief, they’re setting this up for “Sophie clues in Randy, Randy goes action hero and rescues April”, aren’t they? If you wanted to do a spy action hero, rather than trying to twist lawyer characters all out of recognition, you could try starting a new comic strip!
Blondie, shame on you! You have almost a century of tradition behind you! Don’t just be bargain “Dustin”!
Mary, shaking her fist to the heavens: “Nice try, jackass!”
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Yes, but Randy is fighting against several tropes about bad plots that would be resolved by people listening for just two minutes. This *is* the strip that had a woman hide out for months without ever telling a single detail about how she *wasn’t* responsible for the death of the guy who followed her into the woods
RMMD: Fans are surprised when Truck includes a roots country version of Billy Jean in his new act.
She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son
MW: Olive: “Mary, it’s time to share the source of my special gift.”
::Olive exposes her midriff, revealing a smiling face::
“Please greet my absorbed twin, my belly brain! I call her Pimento!”
@The Rambling Otter:
And on “Russian Doll,” whose writers openly admitted to “borrowing” the falling air conditioner gag from “The Good Place.”
Today’s supplement to the canon of nephewism: Adult nephews are always in their twenties, no matter how old or young their aunt/uncle is.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Most people these days don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. So, more likely scenario is that you get an auto-transcribed voicemail that says “Please help, I’m calling from a burner phone” which you read an hour after the call.
Which, to be fair, would be better matched to the dramatic pace of most of the legacy strips.
(Today’s Mary Worth quote genuine, from Ophelia’s mad scene, btw. Increasingly bitter about this.)
Blondie: The Awful Young Man spent all his time sleeping at his desk and avoiding work, unlike Dagwood who…um…
MW: Really, Mary? New York is “one of your favorite places”? The busy, frantic pace? The astonishing variety of skin tones? The proliferation of establishments that serve bizarre foods like gyros and falafel? A musical where the Founding Fathers spout that awful “rap” noise? I can’t think of a place less suited to your vibe.
@matt w: If Olive starts singing randomly while toying with flowers before falling/jumping into a river and drowning, it will be the best Mary Worth arc ever.
@The Rambling Otter: Well, we can all hope this storyline ends with someone taking an air conditioner to the head
@The Rambling Otter: Sounds like a video game version of the “Everything is Alive” podcast, which features interviews with lonely baseball hats, cans of generic soda with existentialist crises, subway cars worried about the afterlife, and more. It’s really funny.
C’shaft: Though it isn’t on the same level as vinyl, apparently there is a bit of a hipster market for 8-tracks. So this may be the closest a Crankshaft character ever gets to being trendy.
DT: Cut, cut! Sphryna, “Is that a threat” is Dr. Lakoyle’s line! Try it again, from “Good of ya to show up, dollface…”
Dustin: These are the people ChatGPT was made for.
@Bob Tice:
Tonight the gene pool let me down/
And now young Cody’s hanging round/
The one lost son I thought I’d found/
Tonight, the gene pool let me down…
@The Quiet Man: Two years ago, I had a special needs student that would do that. Nice kid, but when she got upset—about once a week, maybe more—off came the clothes, down came the urine, and out of the classroom she’d go, running naked down the hall and shrieking.
She eventually got transferred to somewhere more suitable for her needs.
Still a more capable person than Luann, too.
MW-That’s odd. Today isn’t the day to be dropping air conditioners on that side of the street.
@Bob Tice: and I laughed.
MW – Yes, New York City is a dangerous place. Not the people; the inanimate structure of the the city itself is violently rejecting Mary, like T-cells attacking a foreign organism.
@Bud: A passing New Yorker growls, “Hey lady! We don’t like rubber-neckers around here!”
MW – “We’re never given more than we can handle, Mary? Are you telling me that people never have mental breakdowns and never die before they’re ready?”
“Those are kinds of handling.”
Don Abundio, translated:
“What’s the matter, Bety?”
“I feel guilty”
“I finally told that pest Don Abundio how much I despise him”
“At least you got rid of him”
[Skywriting: GO OUT WITH ME, BETY]
MW: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
SMASH!
“Hey Cuomo, watch out! You almost hit an old lady and a kid!”
MW: In the coming days, Olivphia will fill Mary in on her new boyfriend. “He really, really hates his stepfather. He’s moody, dresses all in black and tends to make endlessly long speeches. But, overall, he’s a pretty nice guy.”
Olivphelia, that is. Stupid dyslexia.
@Peanut Gallery: Alternative answer: “Those people are weaklings. They could handle anything if they’d only have the good sense to listen to my wise advice.”
Blondie – “My nephew? Cripes, Bumstead, don’t you know your own bastard when you see him?”
@The Rambling Otter: Olive obviously has super powers.
@Charterstoned: “You’re a bad man!”
@brendancalling: That’s good to hear. I hope she went on to have a stable, fulfilling life.
I can’t remember the last time I got a physical cheque instead of having my pay deposited directly into my bank account. Am I out of touch? Surely it can’t be the cartoonists.
***
When Josh described Mary’s past experiences I thought it was a joke and those links were going to go to the story of Wilbur’s dissociative episode showing how dangerous Santa Royale is compared to New York. People sure do get shoved a lot in the panels of Mary Worth, huh?
MW: Mary and Olive wandered into an episode of Seinfeld.
MW – “You were right, Mary, about the challenges that come with my gifts. Like when we were studying colonial American history at school and at recess the other kids tied me to a telephone pole and started stacking wood around my feet until the teachers intervened. Then the next day they threw me in the creek to see if I’d float.
“But don’t worry. Halloween is coming and then they’ll pay!!!”
Mary Worth: Karen Moy’s understanding of New York seems to be stuck in the 70s and 80s view of the city where it was a dangerous hive of crime and poverty, even though its been thoroughly gentrified for nearly forty years now. It definitely serves as a nice encapsulation of just how out-of-touch newspaper comic writers tend to be.
Mary Worth. Wow. When there’s no clip art for her to fall back on, it sadly obvious just how badly Brigman’s art skills have atrophied. No wonder we get the same Wilbur and Dawn talking heads stories over and over.
Mary does have awfully bad luck in NYC… maybe the denizens read this blog and have learned to hate and fear her…?
MW: “We’re never given more than we can handle” may be one of the worst things you ever can say to another person. It’s dismissive, smug, condescending, manipulative, victim-blaming, pseudo-Christian drivelpuke. Watch 30 minutes of TV news, and you’ll see plenty of people being given more than any human being should have to handle. Or just look into what the rates of suicide and depression are. Being given more than you can handle is the default state of life. Get that shit out of my face.
@Astroboy: I think you just created a potential Tragedeigh with Olivphelia.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Dismissive, smug, condescending, manipulative, victim-blaming, pseudo-Christian drivelpuke is basically Mary Worth in a nutshell.