Bad romances
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/2/25
So the big news that Augie delivered over pad thai is that not one but two publishers are interested in his manuscript and are bidding up the price! Is this the sort of thing that will finally get him riled up enough to have sex with his girlfriend? Well, no, apparently not. Sorry, Summer! He’s got papers to grade, and anyway Thai food does a number on his tummy, so you’re dodging a bullet, really.
Mary Worth, 11/2/25
“It sometimes feels like the good is getting better … and the bad is getting worse. But children like Olive give me hope that their psychic powers will turn the tide in the imminent final apocalyptic confrontation between the evil and the righteous.”
“Ha ha, so true! But through it all, one thing is for sure … our love is here to stay. That is for sure, right, Mary? Because you still haven’t changed your relationship status on Facebook.”
Garfield, 11/2/25
THINGS GARFIELD IS NOT AFRAID OF: The shades of the dead, terrifying the living by demonstrating that the veil between this world and the next is much thinner than you might believe
THINGS GARFIELD IS AFRAID OF: Running out of ice cream
THINGS GARFIELD SHOULD BE AFRAID OF: Having his flesh torn from his body and hung from a tree, where his soul remains trapped and in agony within a somehow still living husk
182 replies to “Bad romances”
Mary Worth Mashups: Which of these alternate final panels matches what you think?
Family Circus Mashups: What if Daddy was allowed to show who really haunted his thoughts?
Popeye: Even the throwaway panels are good. As usual!
Sally Forth: Crazy funny!
Dennis the Menace: That was wayyyy to far to go to get to that tired old punchline.
Judge Parker: Neddy, hang that at the local NBC station. It’ll fit in right nice with their peacock.
The lyrics to “Love Is Here To Stay” were written by Ira Gershwin after his brother George died. If you’re going to be a know-it-all, Mary, at least get the easy stuff correct.
RMMD-And Augie needs something more than just a kiss.
MW:
“The Rockies are crumbling?!? — it’s a real schist storm!”
— George Gershwin
MW:
“My brother would have been a lot wealthier if he’d been able to establish an ‘IRA‘ account.
— George Gershwin
Next up: Auuuuuughie gets sued for plagiarism by authors who claim he stole their plots, which authors he never knew existed, and who all turn out to be Rene Belluso in disguise.
No, neither Gibraltar nor the Rocky Mountains are made of clay. Is there a geologist in the house?
MW:
“It’s been said nothing is permanent except change….”
“Objection! Hearsay!”
“Now, now, Jeff — you’re a medical doctor, not a juris doctor….”
So “children like Olive give you hope”, do they, Mary? And how many children like that do you think exist, given Olive’s only noteworthy trait is supernatural powers?
MW: “Things are pretty bad and all things eventually crumble to dust but as long as the illustrator shines a light on your boobs I’m okay with it.”
@Bob Tice:
Let me guess: anyone who doesn’t deposit money into it gets kneecapped?
GOOD MORNING!
Would to believe it was GA that kept me up to speed this morning? Indeed, I’d thought Old Man Walt’s time had come.
PHANTOM: Speaking of time, what year is it? Will Kit take this fleeing thief back to Germany for desertion of it’s WW II army and theft of state property or tothe Hague for war crimes?
JP: Neddy needed 9 months and Mark or Declan to prepare for a child.
Dammit, when she said the only thing permanent is change i was hoping that was her breaking up with him to run the cult of Olive full time.
@Baja Gaijin:
Actually the best final panel would be a silhouette of a couple having sex, the woman on top, of course.
$19.95 dinner for two? Such a deal! (They change the sign if they see Mud Mountain Murphy coming.)
RMMD: I’m now fairly confident that Summer will find Augie’s book unreadable, but will agonize whether to lie to him and say it’s great. The only question is why she hates it. I can’t see Augie writing some pretentious, dense Joycean stream-of-consciousness word-play (much less two publishers in a bidding war for it). It seems more likely he’s written the latest thinly-disguised slash-fic ripoff of some Netflix series, and Summer will be uncomfortable at the frequent sex scenes.
MW:
The full moon transforms Jeff into the loup garou of legend, and he devours Mary as if she were some kind of peripatetic muffin.
The End.
MW — I never realized how close Santa Royale was to Dover Beach.
“You can never walk on the same pier twice–except in Mary Worth, where nothing ever changes!”
Heraclitus, probably. . .
RMMD: “This is exciting!” Lady, as an objective outside observer, I can assure you that it is not.
MW: “Sometimes it feels like the good is getting better…and the bad is getting worse. So I guess, on average, things are pretty much the same? Oh sweet, I thought for a minute there, I might have to change the way I live! Hey, wanna rip around the bay in your ginormous boat again?!”
Garfield: So, it looks as though Jon Arbuckle has died and is now a ghost. For all those years that we explored Garfield without Garfield, did we ever consider Garfield without Jon? Eh, seems about the same.
RMMD: Truth be told, Augie’s book will be so bad Summer won’t be able to finish it. She’ll just smile and intone, “It’s so… unique.”
BTW: did you know corn flakes is/are made from Inedible field corn and not from sweet corn?
DtM: Alice usually comes off as a pretty dull woman besides being a bad cook and in reality she’s never shown any talent in anything at all so let’s give her this little joke as lame as it is.
@pugfuggly:
#20: W: Damn Boomers.
RMMD:
“I need to return this garish green jacket to Rory McIlroy, so I need to get going….”
Garfield certainly looks like he’s thinking “Blow me” in the title panel.
Print out today’s Mary Worth and save it in your first aid kit as a powerful emetic.
As we transition from Mary’s rhapsodies about Olive to Jeff’s rhapsodies about Mary, Mary Worth is recreating Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde but with unearned praise instead of sex.
RMMD: I predict Summer reads the book, and discovers the book is about a stalker (like HER stalker) and in the book she gets murdered before the old guy shows up and shoots the murderer and gives the boyfriend hanging out his truck…..
RMMD:
“That was a lovely meal — and I have enough left over for lunch tomorrow. Aerosmith was spot on when it sang of this restaurant, ‘Wok This Way,’ first by themselves and then with Run-DMC!”
RMMD — “Mine was too good–I cleaned my plate.” See, this is why Augie rubs women the wrong way. First of all, it’s an embedded criticism (you didn’t eat all your food like I did, leaving a dirty plate–and you weren’t able to appreciate the cuisine as much as I did) and second, she was right there–she saw what you did. Clumsy exposition is a turnoff in real life too, plus it displays a desire to talk about yourself when there is no need to, and you could have talked about her–“I’m glad you enjoyed it” or something of the kind.
But hey, I guess character-revealing dialogue in Rex Morgan is a plus, right? Excuse the rant.
MW: More like, “Olive is Here to Stay,” because I feel like Mary is NEVER going to stop bringing her up. This may have even surpassed the “My Neighbor Keith Hillend” glut.
MW:
“In time the Rockies may crumble,
Gibraltar may tumble,
Jeff Cory may stumble,
Dawn Weston will fumble,
Prof Cameron will mumble,
Worth’s muffins may bumble —
They all just taste like clay,
But our drudge is here to stay.”
— Ira and George Gershwin (adapted)
Frazz : Okay, so not knowing about how most saints actually DO get their own day throughout the year, on top of All-Saints day, that’s too stupid and blatantly wrong to have Caufield be the one to blather it.
But not knowing about LUCID DREAMING, that’s a Caufield-worthy blatantly wrong rant?
************
Garfield : Lyman (or the ectoplasmic representation that’s all that left of him in this mortal world) knows Garfield too well.
***********
Rex Morgan M.D. : UP NEXT : Augie’s book is so terrible Summer can not even bring herself to fully skim it, and has to bluff her way out of pretending she actually read it all. So, basically, the traditional “book club/book report” storyline.
***********
Ripley’s Don’t Believe It :
NOT A “FACT” : what the hell are those scribbles… are those… colorist instructions? GC allows those?
“FACTS”
a) They also were covered in jewels and gold, but those were LONG gone by the time Howard Carter showed up.
b) Now a bunch of Pluggers are confused as to why it shares a name with that logic puzzle with the numbers.
c) Picture unrelated. David Rush took all those hits to the face because he picked a fight with Spongebob, and lost.
d) A standard croquet tactic is qualified as “bizarre” in golf.
*************
Slylock Fox : Woah, a lot going on today :
Which picture is different : Number 2, because it’s the only one where one of the witnesses going “THEY WENT THATAWAY” is, in fact, secretly the culprit in disguise.
Mystery : Someone being such a sloppy pickpocket that they have multiple eyewitnesses of them doing it HAS to be a distraction! Maybe Cassandra Cat is burglarising the jewelry store, or Harry Ape is holding up the money wagon refilling the ATMs…
Differences : HAGAR THE HORRIBLE!? Why?
Two out of the three comics are of the “Damn, when are they going to bone already” genre. Too bad Luann has out-of-continuity entries in Sundays, or else we could have the Sexual Frustration Trifecta.
@15 Ukranazi Stepan: AAAAAHHHH!!!!! I’M BLIND!!!!!
@20 pugfuggly: on Garfield: That’s not Jon’s ghost; it’s Lyman’s. Remember him?
@32 Anonymous: Ninja’d!
MW — “In time the Rockies may crumble.”
George Gerswhin needs to check the MLB standings–I’m pretty sure that’s been happening all year!
Also BTW: What a World Series! Thanks, Blue Jays– wish you’d won.
It’s Sunday and time for JUNGLE JIM!
At least they’ve got the baby bottle.
Mary Worth: Did you catch it? IRA Gershwin, not George wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin songs.
MW Mary’s self-congratulations at noticing Olive’s Specialness reaches a breaking point where she winds up patting herself on the back, leaving Dr Jeff to awkwardly place his right arm on his left shoulder to simulate a hug, ironically getting more human contact on a date with Mary than he has in years.
(*Look* at those arms in the last panel, Mary’s biceps has an edge line that goes over the arm on Dr Jeff behind. And the lighting doesn’t work for that forearm to be Mary’s)
@Tonio: We *did* get the trifecta. Instead of boning like the world is ending (because it is!) Pigface and Hair Helmet would rather simp on the demon spawn they inexplicably keep letting themselves be saddled with.
@Baja Gaijin: The final thought balloon should have a closeup of the mother’s face while she’s at the height of sexual passion. Don’t be fooled by the family’s strict religious beliefs – the father is a Kama Sutra bonemaster.
@41 Tonio: Yeah, about that. I don’t wanna think about what kind of horror happened to create Dolly, Jeffy, Billy, and PJ.
Don Abundio, translated:
“120 kilos! Nice inflatable dumbbell, Don Abundio!”
“But I hope you don’t expect anyone to be fooled by that!”
“There’s always a bigger dumbbell, my dear”
Notice how Mary didn’t say that she loves Jeff.
Might as well say “I ehhhhh…. you too”
Also, is it creepy that we have such a huge focus on “Will these characters get to fucking already?”
When said characters are either incredibly lame, uninteresting or a decrepit old hag.
@Sequitur: Next week we find out what’s in it!
Milk.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – Forget the Rene Belluso in disguise stuff. I think Augie is really Rex. I’d recognize that rigid procto finger anywhere.
MW- “And if the sun refused to shine…..” If Mark Trail’s cockroach tutorial hadn’t ruined Sunday breakfast this bullshit sure would’ve. And did.
And Pat443 has said what I was going to say about this week’s quote, busted because George wasn’t the lyricist. Karen, would you like it if someone quoted today’s strip and attributed it to June Brigman? (looks at today’s strip) Don’t answer that.
I honestly could not remember a single “Garfield” strip ever appearing in The Comics Curmudgeon. Thank goodness for well organized archives! I was able to look up old posts including “Garfield” to attempt to refresh my memory. “Garfield” is apparently something like a memory eraser. Josh comments wittily on “Garfield” a few times a year. Maybe it’s the lasagna.
@But What Do I Know?:
MW — I never realized how close Santa Royale was to Dover Beach.
Olive as the cosmic last resort
Mary Worth: “One thing is for sure…Our love is here to stay. And also my neck dysplasia. I’m like an owl! Hoo loves you, baby?”
Rex Morgan, M.D.: “So, uh, what’s the etiquette here? Do we go dutch on the cost of paper and toner, or do I pick up the tab and hold it over you for sex?”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: “Oh, who am I kidding? No author in the history of the world has ever used a manuscript to get laid.”
MW: “Our Love Is Here to Stay”? I believe it is a song from George and Ira Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess that might better describe this relationship: “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.
Oh shit. Is Augie going to be Rex Morgan’s Les Moore?
***
The scariest thing about Garfield is reading old collections and realizing it used to be good.
MW – Good call on the Gershwin reference, Jeff. If you had used, say, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” Mary would have said “oh, you mean Olive!”
RMMD: How funny would it be if that “manuscript” were just pages and pages of the same phrase — “All work and no play makes Augie a dull boy.” — repeated endlessly?
P.S. There are tight ponytails and then there are hairstyles that qualify as abuse of one’s own hair and scalp.
MW: “So, uh … which one of us is throwing the other off the end of this pier? I’ve kinda lost the plot. Karen Moy, little help? Can we get a narration box or something?”
‘field: Since cats do not eat ice cream — and probably could not be induced to do so — I think it’s time to admit that Garfield is not a cat but a small human in a cat costume.
FC: “And you know what? It’s kinda nice. Unless that person is a tramp who sleeps with every jamoke in town. Where is your mom, anyway?”
“This is exciting”. Finding typos, she means. That’s the most thrill she’ll have from the book. And from Augie in general
FC-Billy has a thing for Nancy?
MW: In some better reality, Ira caught the brain tumor in 1937 and George lived until 1983.
@Baja Gaijin: “I’m gay, Mary” would go a long way toward explaining the whole strip and everybody in it.
Hagar threatens to kill his neighbors if they don’t give him candy and then wipes his ass on his front lawn. I imagine he’d be played by Russel Crowe in the movie.
Leaf blowers usually operate from a distance, why is that so close to Garfield’s face? Well, that leaf blower expected to be made ambassador to France
Rex Morgan, MD: In panel 4, Augie’s chinline shifts from “adult Bobby Hill” to “Bruce Campbell.” I’m not sure if they got a different cartoon actor in the role or what, but he looks less like a teacher who’s writing a pre-popular novel and more like he’s about to score a touchdown for Coach Coachington.
Today Mary was supposed to bring the reader the wisdom of Heraclitus, on how change is the only eternal phenomenon — Panta rhei. However, Moy decided that the average reader doesn’t know anything about Pre-socratic philosophy, so instead she wrote in a quotation by Gershwin. And yet, I think it is still too optimistic to believe the average reader will know who Gershwin is!
You might think that Mary’s life in her gated community is a blessed golden cage. She only needs to worry about the bourgeois problems of Wilbur and Iris, unaware of the real problem of real people in the real world. Guess again! Mary is perfectly aware that the world is going to hell in handbasket! But she manages to stay sane because she believes that psychic children will save us! There is still hope in the world!
After proclaiming his love, Jeff’s left hand is daring to go downward, wanting to explore the undiscovered country! Sorry Jeff, your love might be here to stay, but not here to advance!
Garfield is here to teach us the virtue of stoicism and being unmoved by immaterial phenomena. Jim Davis is here to teach us the virtue of making a strip by xeroxing
@Baja Gaijin:
Well JIm Davis once explained Lyman’s disappearance with “Don’t look in Jon’s basement” so that does track.
CS – Don’t just stand there, Mindy. Grab your phone and post that to TikTok! Caption it “Weird shit my grandpa can do” and watch the likes roll in. There’s influencer money to be made!
@But What Do I Know?:
Don’t say that! If Mary Worth quotes Matthew Arnold’s On Dover Beach next Sunday, I’m blaming you.
MW is doing its best to ruin one of my favorite Gene Kelly movies. What’s next, Xanadu?
BG&SS: Any chance of this being funny is ruined by the topper, in which every reader knows the object in question is a horseshoe.
Beetle Bailey is allowed to operate heavy construction machinery? Sarge, for once Beetle has the ability to leave you a mangled pile of skin, muscle, and bone on the ground. Lucky for you he’s so used to being a PFC he’s not gonna get any ideas about revenge.
MW: Of course today’s quote is attributed to George Gershwin and not his brother Ira. What is Mary Worth if not a celebration of ignoring the contributions of others in order to heap all the praise onto one person?
RMMD: Look, you don’t want to get into the weeds of what specifically Augie’s written, fine–better to have people think his prose is awful than provide us a sample and remove all doubt. But at least tell us what kind of book it is! Taut Tom Clancy-esque political thriller? Epic fantasy with elaborate worldbuilding a la Robert Jordan or George RR Martin? Nicholas Sparks-style sentimental romance? Is it even the kind of book Summer would be interested in if she wasn’t dating the author? Try to be specific for once! Who knows? Your characters might develop a single personality trait!
@Bob Tice: MW; it looks like Dr. Jeff is mutating Saul’s potato nose. Maybe it IS Saul?
MW: has Mary ever returned Jeff’s professions of love?
FC: Billy’s paramour appears to be the melon head version of Nancy.
RMMD: It’s got to be a memoir. “My Fascinating Twenty-Five Years of Teaching High School English in the Boonies.” Summer will be fast asleep before she gets through the Acknowledgements.
MARY WORTH: “Oh Jeff! Your boat driving skills and Bum-Boat budget are so there for me!” (Just saying that I noticed that too, @The Rambling Otter.)
Dustin: You know, it’s not 1980 anymore; schools actually do try to do something about bullying now. Meanwhile pulling the fire alarm is likely to get you arrested, as it might be assumed you were trying to get people out in the open so you could shoot at them.
JP: Again, I could believe a kindergarten-first grade kid colored this–one that’s particularly good at staying in the lines and filling the space, maybe, but it’s possible–but not that she drew the whole thing freehand. What, is the good old hand-trace turkey too plebeian for the Parker-Spencer-Drivers?
@Baja Gaijin: MW Mashups: Definitely panel 2.
FC Mashups: I thought for sure, Edda VanHoesenburger would have been on his mind.
Mary Worth:
Mary — “Nothing is permanent, except change.”
Jeff — “But, Mary, what about H.R. 3074/S. 1525, otherwise known as the ‘Common Cents Act,’ which was referred to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs earlier this year? That bill would direct the Secretary of the Treasury to suspend the production of pennies. So change isn’t permanent at all, get it? Wait, I think I’ve finally found a logical loophole to get out of this relationship. I’m free!”
[Olive, speaking directly into Jeff’s mind] — “Oh, no you’re not, buddy! You think you can dump my friend Mary? I’ll give you a mental zap so hard you’ll go right over the side of this pier, and I’m not kidding! Now, tell your girlfriend things are fine, and be quick about it!”
Jeff — “Um, it’s fine, Mary. We’re fine, our nation’s currency system is fine, everything is fine. It’s good that you have a friend with scary mental powers who has the maturity of a child. It’s real good!”
Mary — “Oh, Jeff, you’re so sweet. Now, quote me some more romantic songs from my youth, in the late 1930s.”
Jeff — “Wait, how old are you again? Ah, never mind. It’s all good! I’ll be with you forever… sigh… yep, our love is here to stay.”
As long as we’re handing out cartoonist compliments, Oglaf is pretty damn funny today.
FC: being haunted by floating heads is a Mary Worth thing. Stay in your lane kid
9CL: pretentious and repetitive as usual
RMMD: I am vaguely curious about what, if anything, Summer reads in her spare time. I don’t believe we’ve ever seen her reading anything in strip (apparently she watches a lot of movies?). The spectrum of genres and styles is so wide, and individual taste varies so much… I assume, based on the way the world of RMMD works, Summer is going to come back tomorrow and say ‘Wow, this is amazing! I couldn’t put it down! This is a bestseller for sure! Everyone will love it without exception!’ (Similar to Judge Parker’s book which was beloved by everyone in the universe except one killjoy lit professor.) But in reality books just don’t work like that. Even the most popular bestsellers are only read and enjoyed by a small fraction of the population. And especially if Summer just doesn’t read a lot of books, her ‘civilian’ reaction would probably land as either ‘well, I don’t have a great basis for comparison, but this sounds great, I’m sure it’s just as good as the latest Stephen King or David Foster Wallace’ or ‘well, I don’t enjoy this, but I also don’t have a great basis for comparison, so probably it’s good and I just don’t get it.’ Either way, whatever she says to Augie will be more a reflection of her feelings for HIM, rather than his manuscript.
Stupid ghost. Doesn’t he know Garfield could just up and die anytime eating the ice cream?
RMMD: In an actual bit of drama, Augie has forgotten to change the dedication from his old lover to Summer. A flustered Augie explains that, as any fan of Green Acres knows, “Ralph” is also a girls name.
Beetle Bailey- Is there some joke I’m missing?
Garfield: I do not care for “Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt 3”
That Mary Worth quote should be credited to lyricist Ira Gershwin. (BTW, that was the last melody George composed, and Ira came up with the lyric after his brother’s death, so George never heard those words, let alone writing them!)
@seismic-2: Or, also from Porgy and Bess, “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing”
9CL: He’s playing the piano, you ass, and a Chopin ballade at that. That makes him a piano player in nearly everyone’s book.
And who bestowed the title of “pianist” on you, anyway? You had home lessons in some backwater of New Hampshire and no training at all after high school. Your ugly husband has a Julliaird degree. You are a fucking pretender, fancy gloves nonwithstanding.
@75 TheDiva: on Rex Morgan: Augie’s books will be published by the Herb & Jamaal Company That Makes Non-specific Bound Printed Things. Specificity isn’t a requirement.
@81 taig: Who’s Edda VanHoesenburger?
@83 Ukulele Ike: Agreed. Didn’t bash the reader over the head by stating which part flew away.
@88 Unca Bob: Nope. Just like pretty much every Beetle Bailey in the past 20 years.
Legacy Boondocks: Eerie forecast of a Riley in the White House
SMBC: The limiting reagent is always funding
@Baja Gaijin:
Who’s Edda VanHoesenburger?
The 9 Chickweed Lane main character (much more so now that EVERY female character in that strip has her design and personality).
MW: The way that Jeff seems to genuinely love Mary, but turns his entire head away from her embrace? All I’m saying is that the quote box maybe should have used Cole Porter lyrics instead.
@Unca Bob: Hah, ’cause Beetle’s an 11B trying to do the job of a 12N. What a knee-slapper!
@Baja Gaijin: They are all excellent!
Dustin: I don’t know what irritates me more: the idea that kids should never seek adult help when dealing with bullies, or that the two are apparently using modern controllers and an HDTV to play Frogger.
@96 Anonymous: Ah. I don’t read that strip.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/2/25: Comic creators always on the cutting edge with manuscripts being passed around on paper.
FC – Holier than thou Grandma finds out about Billy’s crush. “She looks a lot like your mother. She’s probably a harlot, too.”
What’s up with what the little girl has on her head? It’s too wide for a headband and too narrow for a half hat. In any case, it’s 196Os, not 2025.
Mary Worth – Wait a minute – who’s Olive? How come we never heard about her before?
In the name of all that is holy, when will this shit end?
Pluggers – So for eight months of the year he has the wrong time on the clock in his car. And he wonders why he’s two hours late for every appointment between March and November.
Rex Morgan – As
@Pozzo: pointed out, the big celebration dinner set Augie back $19.95. He doesn’t realize that Summer isn’t some cheap hooker. He’ll have to spend at least $25 before she’ll put out.
Crankshaft – I’m not twisting my head around to read this. Crankshaft is literally a pain in the neck.
@UncleJeff:
If Jeff en ded up with Saul’s pug nose, that would be the Wynter of his discontent.
Poor Ira Gershwin, author of those lyrics, overlooked in favor of George again.
@103 I speak Jive: on Family Circus: The pre-pubescent girl knows women use them but doesn’t know one doesn’t wear a Kotex Maxi-pad on her head.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Don’t forget Olive’s constant patting herself on the back and repeated reminders of how special she is.
@Activist: I have zero interest in most sports, but over the past year or so I’ve started watching baseball, mostly because Mr. Jive is a big Phillies fan. We watched the World Series, and I really enjoyed the game last night, up until the point the Dodgers won. I was hoping for the Blue Jays, too.
@Joe Blevins: Re Summer’s ponytail – You are absolutely right that that ponytail is too tight. She is looking forward to hair loss.
It’s also a throwback to the 1950s. The practice today is to tie it back much lower and looser.
@Ukulele Ike: I don’t understand how Edda could be a ballerina for years, then quit ballet and suddenly turn into a world class pianist.
@Baja Gaijin: Don’t start now.
MT: A lot of today’s strip is true, and the art is good. Thank you, Jules.
However, some cockroach species are (still) woodland species. When they get into a building by accident, the only real problem they cause is human fear. I find an occasional woodland cockroach in my house and I just put them back outside. They don’t spread disease, they don’t cause damage, and calling an exterminator for a few accidental woodland cockroaches would be a dubious expenditure.
@I speak Jive: Just looking at Summer’s awful ponytail makes my head hurt. Is she inflicting that thing on herself to atone for some misdeed in a past life, or what?
@miranda: See, if George and Ira had swapped lifespans, today we could be enjoying the great Rhapsody in Day-Glo Aquamarine, which George wrote in 1966 during an acid trip with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia.
@I speak Jive: Edda never had any serious training in ballet either, just hired by a world-class dance company right out of high school, after the world-class ballet scout saw her talent-show performance of “See the Pretty Little Butterfly’s Sexy Sexy Legs.” Which makes her one of the greatest natural
hookershoofers of our time.@Ukulele Ike: And don’t forget the glorious Rhapsody in Harvest Gold and Avocado Green, composed in 1974 after he saw his Aunt Rose’s kitchen renovation.
RMMD has a topper which begins the scene, then at the start of the truncated, shorter, strip, backs up to tell the reader we’re In The Parking Lot of the Thai Palace.
That wins Worst Topper of Sunday in a crowded field.
@110 Poteet: Which makes your head hurt worse: Summer’s awful ponytail or June’s inexplicable spit curl?
@JamesBont: Frogger (along with many other old arcade/atari/etc… games) has been ported to modern consoles, especially due to game companies like “Arcade Archives” which is its sole mission. I have many classic arcade games on my Nintendo Switch because of this.
Frazz: Yep, polysemy sure is crazy, huh? I’m sure that Caulfield is going to invent a conlang where each word has exactly one meaning OR ELSE, DAMMIT.
MW: As early bird Sequitur pointed out yesterday, this is a big quote fail, as Ira’s the one who wrote the lyrics. Though let’s be real, neither Gershwin brother would want to be associated with this.
RMMD: When Summer says she might not make it through the whole thing, does she mean tonight or ever? Hey, maybe she’ll call up both publishers in the bidding war and say, “What are you, nuts?”
Mary Worth tomorrow. Toby. All alone.
@19 Sequitur: Spoiler Alert, please! Now I’m all bummed out there won’t be another week of Mary and Jeff on the boardwalk after dark, blathering away endlessly.
Hmm, something’s making the site swallow my comment, so I’m going to do it in stages and see what happens.
DT: “Good heavens, Inspector, you surely can’t mean … this was the murder weapon? My examination of the body suggests you should be looking for something much larger and sharper!”
EC: Sometimes it’s more obvious this is in reruns than others. “I came up with the idea of putting a camcorder outside so I could record troublemakers! It’s a fairly bulky solution; I guess ideally it’d be possible to make a video camera so small it would just fit in the doorbell, but that sounds like sci-fi nonsense!”
So far so good.
HtH: I feel like the historically accurate version of being TPed would be teenagers covering the tree in leaves, which seems redundant. Based on past Hallowe’en strips, I’ve already accepted that the Horribles heard about the Celtic festival of Samhain from somewhere and decided guising sounded more fun than the household rites of Álfablót, so I guess this just explains how they got the neighbours to go along with it.
MW: I hadn’t noticed this until someone else pointed it out, but once again, no psychic woo on Sundays! The Sunday-only readers are getting a substantially different story, and one that is marginally less stupid.
Anyway, what a sweet ending! (Please be the ending.) Jeff loves Mary and Mary … appreciates that Jeff loves her. Awww!
Pluggers aren’t just unable to handle simple tasks, they’re proud of it.
Okay, the Rex Morgan comment is the problem.
SFx crossover special: Never mind the differences, I’m more concerned about what’s happening to Honi’s lower half, and whether Lucky Eddie is involved somehow.
@120 Baja Gaijin:
Oh, I’m sure you’ll find something to do with that bag o’ seeds.
Experimenting with my RMMD comment.
Yes, asking your girlfriend to check for typos when she reads your MS is a good idea … unlesss you were so uncomfortable with her seeing it before you got some external validation that this happens after you’re pretty sure it’s getting published! Who cares about typos now, Augie? The two definitely-not-a-vanity-press publishers sure don’t!
Huh, apparently the site doesn’t like a synonym for “check for typos” that rhymes with “hoof-seeding”? Weird.
@Horace Broon: It’s because of an abusive troll who takes a tantrum whenever Josh makes a typo, or when the troll, who, like most “grammar nazis” seems to have very limited reading skills, thinks Josh has made a typo.
@Sequitur: And yet, even now I know that, I still can’t shake the feeling that Tuesday might involve Mary arriving and Toby asking what happened with that kid who was going to visit…
C-Shaft: It could have been worse, folks. Crankshaft could have just been drawn in silhouette.
DT: King wrote out a full page of chess notation before finding a pawn to clutch as his dying clue. If he’d spent that time walking to the nearest hospital he’d still be alive.
JP: Obviously if Neddy doesn’t put up Charlotte’s NBC turkey peacock drawing Charlotte’s contact won’t find the code embedded in it.
Luann: Neither Bwad nor Toni has a remote in their hands, yet the voice on the teevee won’t finish a single sentence. It’s not the news, they’re watching a televised poetry slam. No wonder they threw it over for stuffed toy story time.
SFx: If you haven’t turned your head upside down to see the answer, it doesn’t matter because you already know the answer. The future will bring very stupid rats who think they’re criminal masterminds, and other wonders.
@Rube: Ah, that makes sense.
@Baja Gaijin: Cheer up! Toby could be all alone, thinking of Olive and anxiously waiting to ask Mary, “How was your visit with Olive, Mary?” thus unleashing another re-hash. And as Carlos Alora tends to HVAC maintenance, Mary can re-cap her close call with rogue window unit. And let’s not forget Saul and Eve, who will want to gush over their heroic dogs. I’m not hoping for it, but I won’t be surprised if this denouement gets stretched out longer than a piece of warm Turkish taffy.
Good golly, look at that moon and cloud combo behind Mary! Who knew she was the new Herald? Galactus hungers!
So does Jeff, for sex, but now Galactus is gonna eat the Earth. (She wasn’t going to give him any anyway!)
Summer might like the book, but now Mary Worth has foretold that Galactus is gonna eat the Earth! Shouldn’t have cranked it before the date, Augie! It was your LAST CHANCE!
In Garfield, Josh understands that’s a leaf, right? I’m not going to go through 134 comments to see if somebody told him.
DT: OK, so King (murder victim) wrote out the score of the game and presumably added the annotations (those ? and ! after move, and penned ‘le roi est mort’) Then was stabbed spurting blood onto the score and leaving him time to grab the white king rook’s pawn. Perhaps the events went like this. King replayed the game and marked annotations. He then was resetting the board for whomever might next use the chess set when he was attacked. We don’t know with what weapon and from what angle but in the first comic of the mini mystery there was NOT a bloody mess so perhaps it was a quick stable into some internal vessel (like a renal artery) but then where did the blood from the score come from? A stable to the carotid artery, aorta or heart would have led to a lot of blood.
So far the mystery deepens but the last couple of efforts have not nailed the landing.
MW: face it doc jeff, you might as well try to hook up with any the wait staff at the Bum Boat. They probably know you better than Mary!
RMMD: Could it be that the creators have gotten bored with Rex and June and so hoped these forays into the RMMD Universe of characters might somehow find someone who they focus on?
MW – I’ve had the blues, the reds and the pinks; One thing’s for sure – love stinks….
J Geils Band
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Forget the Rene Belluso in disguise stuff. I think Augie is really Rex. I’d recognize that rigid procto finger anywhere.
Needlessly getting Summer’s hopes up.
RMMD’s lousy topper: ”Considering I forked over the twenty bucks for dinner, that’s going to be MY lunch tomorrow. Hand over the doggie bag.”
Late Thread Cuisine: It claims to be an “omelette.” Do you agree?
@Baja Gaijin: I suppose it’s an omelette, but as for what’s oozing out of it…
@JeffMcm: Right, but I think Josh’s point was, how did Garfield get to be a leaf?
@140 Baja Gaijin:
Oh, yeah, it’s an omelette but someone shot it and its guts are spilling out.
@132 Charterstoned: I found tomorrow’s strip. I was able to think up a good mashup.
@141 Majicou: The filling isn’t anything unusual: milk, flour, butter, mushrooms, salt, pepper. The presentation is sorta grody. No “sorta” about it; it’s grody looking.
@143 Sequitur: A great way to start breakfast: wounded bleeding food.
@Ukulele Ike:
I knew nothing about ballet until my son started dating a ballerina, now my DIL. Her family lived in New Jersey but when she was accepted into the School of American Ballet in NYC, her dad quit his nursing job and got a job in a florist shop in the City to watch over her. By the time she entered the school at six, she already had been taking lessons for three years. The school is very difficult to get into and it is intense. Additionally, my DIL took private lessons and, during the summer, attended ballet camps. What I am trying to point out is that this is not unlike any kid who wants to be a professional baseball or football player who works at it night-and-day to try and achieve their dream. And it’s not unlike those pursuits in that they establish themselves in various productions. They are seen by their teachers and by the program directors and the word gets around leading to bigger and better roles. Just like in other sports, ballet dancers by the time they are 15, are pretty well known commodities. They may do further study in college but many become professional dancers once they finish high school. The SAB is a feeder into the New York Ballet Company which is what Brooke called the City company. It is very competitive to get into and in a big year they might take in ten new hires, usually less. When she graduated HS, my DIL thought for sure she was going to be hired by NYBC because her skills were well known. She wasn’t, though, probably for two reasons. She is, at 5’3″. a tad bit short and she isn’t white. Ballet companies strive for a uniform look (a real-life Seth could never be a ballet dancer) but diversity wasn’t really a thing in the ballet world of 15 years ago, especially the most prestigious American ballet company. But there were other people that had seen her dance and the director at PNB in Seattle called her and asked her if she would like to dance for him. So, at 17, she moved across the country, all by herself, to a place she had never heard of to fulfill her dream and is now a Principal Dancer. The idea that a total unknown could be hired by the best American ballet company is ludicrous. Yes, a Roy Hobbs could exist in the baseball world of the 1930s but it is a laughable idea in this century. Production managers want to hire the best talent they can and they watch as many productions as they can to spot talent.
I asked my DIL if she had had any time to follow any other pursuits and she said that she had taken piano lessons for seven years. She said that she never was any good because she had no time to practice.
@Baja Gaijin:
By the technical definition it is an omelette. Not sure who would order a phlegm omelette though.
@145 Baja Gaijin:
Denny’s new Bang Bang Bleeding Omelet Breakfast!
@Baja Gaijin: It’s a little…underdone, perhaps? A runny omelette? I would gasp, compliment the presentation, and excuse myself from eating it by claiming an allergy to eggs.
@Baja Gaijin: I generally like white sauces, but this one seems to be announcing “I am bad for your bod and also taste crappy.” The appearance is so off-putting that I don’t care if those things in the sauce are mushrooms. Or body parts of dead pixies, who knows.
@Baja Gaijin: Ah, so they are mushrooms, thanks. The sauce still looks so weirdly gross that I would pass.
@Unca $crooge: Wow. She sounds like someone who has enough self-discipline for five or six people. Wow again.
@JeffMcm: Josh was doing something called “Observational Humor”
That is a thing that exists you know. Not everything has to be literal.
@Baja Gaijin: How kind of you to ask! The winner is June’s horrid hair hank, because it’s right on her face. But that ponytail is a close second.
@150 Poteet:
Dead pixies. Just the thing to feed the Grue.
@Unca $crooge: “She is, at 5’3 a tad bit short”
Funny, I heard a story that Judge Judy’s father wanted her to be a ballet dancer when she was young, but she didn’t make the cut because she was so short. So she went into law instead.
@Sequitur: I honestly don’t know how that Hotel in “Return to Zork” gets any business, as they don’t pay for lighting, but Grues will eat anyone in the darkness.
I guess no-one survives to write a terrible review…
@Unca $crooge:
Thanks for that explanation. At the University, I had a work study student who had gone to the school for professional children in NYC as a ballerina. She quit ballet to attend the college and seemed very bitter about it. Sounds like she lead the childhood life of your DIL without the payoff.
@157 The Rambling Otter:
You know… that makes sense.
@Charterstoned: A lot of semi-soft cheeses look like that when molten. Could be Brie or Taleggio.
@Unca $crooge: If only your son had the foresight to marry Edda Burber, you could now be enjoying world-class ballerina moves, world-class piano playing, and, for all I know, world-class plumbing skills.
@Treetown: I think Dick Tracy is taking a leaf from Dan Brown, who also had fatally-stabbed persons creating complex puzzles that could only be solved by one super-genius, instead of, oh, I don’t know, writing their murderer’s name.
@146 Unca $crooge: I am in total awe of your daughter-in-law. Such dedication from such a young age. I hope she’s happy with how her life turned out.
@147 Anonymous: This recipe is from 1968. Apparently phlegm omelettes were “boss”.
@150 Poteet: Parts of dead pixies. I’ll have to look for recipes including them.
@160 Ukulele Ike: It’s a recipe card from the late 60s aimed at midwestern hausfraus. It can’t be Brie or Taleggio
Luann: Allow me to inform you that today’s sappy strip has received 383 hearts. It’s an insult to anyone who has ever needed a heart transplant.
(If this post looks familiar I apologize. I wrote it before but it slipped into an alternate universe. Perhaps it noclipped into the back rooms. See? I’m still hip.)
@Ettorre: What about Geddy Lee citing Heraclitus, would that have worked?
@made of wince: It’s up to 388 now.
Don’t look at me. Tweren’t none of them mine.
(Elegiac) Ah, sweet Luanne, today you gift us with a smile….and perhaps a tear.
No shit. I’m gonna cut this strip out of the fucking newspaper with a switchblade and stick it on my fucking refrigerator.
Latest Luann (I don’t know where Uke Ike got Luanne) heart count is 396.
@Baja Gaijin: It can’t be Brie or Taleggio
Aha! Swiss Knight Gruyere processed cheese food wedges! Pity they didn’t use the pimento, for that ever popular bloody phlegm look!
@Sequitur: Give me a break. I’m still struggling with Thorp/Thorpe.
(The latter is a small songbird native to the NE Russian coast of the Sea of Japan; the former is an obscure and very crude sex term. “The Countess asked me to thorp her good, so I thorped the shit out of her for the next forty-five minutes.”)
@Baja Gaijin: a basic roux white sauce, then, yeah… they look like that. Salted flour-thickened milk goop. I may be desensitized by my parents’ fondness of it so I don’t think it’s grody, but I agree it neither looks nor tastes delicious.
Luann heart count is now 401.
Somebody stop this madness!
@CanuckDownSouth: Bechamel is one of Escoffier’s five Mother Sauces, it’s the basis for all sorts of delicious variations. Grate some Gruyere or Parmesan into it and you have Mornay, which I would proudly serve to the Moon King ladeled over dirty tennis shoes.
@Ukulele Ike: oh, add in even some cheapo cheddar and it gets tasty quickly, but I grew up with a lot of just the base goop, and I suspect not as much butter and salt/pepper seasoning as a decent bechamel.
@CanuckDownSouth: Well, I DO respect Canadian cuisine. I’ve had tourtiere in Quebec that equal or surpass the best meat pies in France or Great Britain. And Mackintosh toffee!
But I must salute Canadian humorist Bruce McCall, who wrote in the 1970s National Lampoon that Big Food had tested the new green Jell-O on a Canadian focus group who “went into convulsions, rolling on the floor, shouting that the powerful lime flavor hurt their mouths.”
Luann hearts up to 409.
@175 Sequitur: Stop obsessing. Go to bed.
@178 Baja Gaijin:
411.
414.
416.
Is Mary Worth about to reveal her werevixen form to Dr.Jeffy?
@180 GarrisonSkunk:
No.
Be prepared for a parrot.
418.