Whose luggage is that and why did they bring it on their date
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Mary Worth, 11/4/25
Sorry to be a “liberal coastal elitist” who “has a basic understanding of how academia works,” but a “teachers conference” isn’t really a thing that a tenured PhD English prof at a large state university like Ian would go to; there are plenty of academic conferences where he’d make the rounds, of course, but those tend to run the length of a long weekend, not “a few weeks.” What I’m trying to say is that Toby has no real idea where her husband actually is right now, maybe because he never told her, or maybe because he did tell her and she forgot. When he does finally get home, in a few days or weeks or months or whatever, he will presumably find her on this park bench, her face having been viciously pecked off after she fought a parrot for control of a bag of sunflower seeds and lost.
Pardon My Planet, 11/4/25
I concede that there’s the core of a halfway funny joke about “runway models” here. But building a superstructure around it where you’ve got a dumpy old man grousing that someone misrepresented their attractiveness on a dating app, and also somehow a sex-with-twins fantasy is involved? That’s the misogynist pervert vibe that Pardon My Planet does best.
Marvin, 11/4/25
Glad to see we’re moving past “fire hydrants: they’re toilets, for dogs” to “fire hydrants: they’re the center of a dog’s social life, because they piss there, but for once we’re not dwelling on that part.” Anyway, what’s the most weird and off-putting way to describe someone using color to mask the fact that they’re going grey? It’s probably “has fake brown hair,” right?
Archie, 11/4/25
Hey, teens! It’s Archie! The comic strip about teens, full of jokes that are relatable … to teens!
119 replies to “Whose luggage is that and why did they bring it on their date”
Mary Worth Mashups: Oh come ON! There’s gotta be a more interesting “person of interest” and I hope I caught one in the three linked mashups.
Pardon My Planet-The truth about how your luggage ends up missing.
FC-Sorry, Jeffy, no screwdrivers until you’re twenty-one.
MW-Oh how suspenseful. A pirateless parrot is loose.
Six Chix-A very subtle inside joke that only one person will get and they don’t read this comic.
Zits-And here’s a picture of Jeremy’s mom.
@Baja Gaijin:
The lure of food is so powerful that Dagwood will cross over to other comics.
MW:
“Hooray! A kindred spirit for me to visit…a birdbrain! Awk, awk!”
Sorry to be a “liberal coastal elitist” who “has a basic understanding of how academia works…”
Aw, geez, Josh is getting all defensive again. Must be heading back to Buffalo to have Thanksgiving with his Republican Plugger relatives who want him to get a real job.
Marvin: Am I the only one who thought the larger dog was referring to his lover when he says “mistress” and he was waxing poetic about her, perhaps imitating the Bard and writing an anti sonnet? I am the only one? Alas.
@Baja Gaijin: I’m totally sticking with the rogue air conditioning window unit.
MW: As the parrot lands on Toby’s shoulder, she suddenly realizes her true calling and leaves her boring suburban life to become a pirate on the high seas.
Archie : “Fred, I think you have hypermetropia.” “Hypermetropia? Nah, we don’t get cape comics in the funnies no more.”
************
Crankshaft : “That can’t be right. The artstyle radically changed, like, FIVE times. That’s not a ‘I merely improved as an artist’ amount of times.”
…And of course, Bat
iukTON Thomas won’tadmitmention he’s had someone else DRAW the strip for a while.************
Luann : the way they “fixed” the storyline is that NOW Dez’s roomies are super-enthuisiastic about owning a dog so that when they prove worthless in taking care of it, it’s no longer Dez’s fault for forcing this responsibility on people who REPEATEDLY VOICED OBJECTIONS to her doing it.
************
Mary Worth : Quick, Toby! Use your love of all things big and small to telepathically tell that parrot to leave your food alone!
…Oh wait, married to Ian Cameron, her ability to feel love atrophied decades ago.
************
Rex Morgan M.D. : Anti-Prediction : the way this storyline definitely won’t go is : “I don’t want the main character of this novel to be a thinly-veiled version of me, Augie. Not because you turned me into a ridiculously overpowered Mary Sue, THAT part I’m cool with. It’s the CONSTANT SEXUALISATION. Why does EVERY CHAPTER have a paragraph-long description of a buttshot in it!?”
MW: Ugh. I thought I was joking yesterday when I said Toby would be visited by telepathic birds demanding food. No, no, even Moy wouldn’t dive that deep into the woo-woo pool. Surely this will turn out to be a more normal Mary Worth arc. Let’s see…
I predict probably Toby takes the lost bird home and runs an ad. The owner, a handsome young man (Brigman’s pencils lingering as she delineates his shoulders and chest) shows up, and Toby begins a brief and ultimately chaste flirtatious fling which ends before Ian gets back from his conference, just in time for everyone to gather around Mary’s table for the usual Thanksgiving tableau.
PMP: So, they posted together on a dating site? Shades of Chickweed Lane!
RMMD: Augie has either lifted the entire stalker experience, or this book is about two people who go out to eat and have numbingly boring conversations.
MW: This is going to be great, when the bird starts repeating everything it’s heard from a lonely Toby.
“My husband is an impotent windbag.”
” I use Mary Worth’s muffins to prop the door open.”
Pardon Mt Planet: THEY BROUGHT THE LUGGAGE CART WITH THEM to his home where he’s prepared for his sensual experience by putting a wooden chair next to a table that has a solitary glass of wine.
@Charterstoned: concur! It’s a classic now
MW: @Sid, Agent to the Animal Stars! Great work on placing the parrot! Not sure what its presence signifies for Toby–other than the probable need to wash her sweatshirt–but that thing fluttering down like that is the most action this strip has seen in weeks. Hope the Doves o’ Love don’t get their beaks out of joint.
Marvin –
♪ I dream of Jeanie with the fake brown hair,
Borne like a vapor on the fetid air;
I see her stooping with an old plastic bag,
Picking up my poop, which makes my tail wag.
Don Abundio, translated:
[On van: T.V. REPAIR]
“We have to make a service call at the mansion of Don Abundio”
“Do you know what the problem is?”
“No, but it should be easy to find. These rich idiots usually do something stupid that messes up their reception!”
“Ah, yes! There we go!”
@MKay:MW: This is going to be great, when the bird starts repeating everything it’s heard from a lonely Toby.
“My husband is an impotent windbag.”
” I use Mary Worth’s muffins to prop the door open.”
Choking on my coffee!!! This is COTW material!
@MKay: I’m going with the stalker, plus the gratuitous buttshots that Anonymous@9 predicted.
Speaking of which, my congratulations to “I speak Jive” for yesterday’s nearly-accurate prediction of Summer’s reading speed.
@Ken: My prediction is this parrot belongs to another precocious little girl (with or without a tummy brain) who has cancer or some other debilitation, but Toby will be all ‘The parrot clearly chose ME! Finders Keepers!’ until Ian finally returns, pats her on the shoulder and tells her ‘it’s hard’ (heh…) but she has to ‘be nice’ and return the parrot to its rightful owner.
RMMD: ‘For Summer, who was there and totally helpless to run her own life until a big, strapping man named Augie came along and solved all her problems. How about that sex now?’
A little help here, please?
Who was stalking Summer? I kinda recall that, but I’m not interested enough to go through past strips.
Thanks.
Going from a guest artist back to the inexplicably employed Gil Thorpe regular artist is like reading one of those old Doonesbury strips where Uncle Duke’s drugs take hold.
PMP: It’s not surprising that many newspaper comics can’t draw attractive people, but it takes a special combination of skill and ineptness to fail to draw ugly people. Oh yeah, I’m sure this guy feels real catfished by a pair of tall, curvy, busty blondes. Is he meant to be turned off by their muscular airport ground crew physiques? Because I’ll be honest, I think that’s half their appeal.
Marvin: Do female dog owners still call themselves “mistress”? It took me way too long to realise this dog wasn’t boasting about his extramarital affair.
I simply can’t get my head around Thorp not ending in an E. The man has so little going for him, an additional vowel is needed for some spice.
Archie: I’m unironically loving how gleefully maniacal Archie’s mom looks in panel one. I’d like to see more of that energy in this strip.
MW – Toeby wanna boner….
PMP – …with a lot of baggage….
Marvin – …to piss. How could you forget the main thing….
Archie – Hey gang! Come on over and feel my dad’s enlarged prostate….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: He may have been a bad date she met in an online singles service? Except the guy who got bounced in February for harassing Summer and Augie doesn’t look much like the really bad date where Beatty ripped off The Far Side. Maybe there were some strips in between that didn’t meet Josh’s standards for snarky comment.
Pardon My Planet: It’s even kinkier when you realize that schlubby dude is looking at two much younger twins who are basically begging him for a three-way and he goes for the neg. So what we got here is some humiliation kink blue collar incest cosplay going on here, which is a lot for the pages of the Cincinnati Intelligencer or whoever runs this strip.
Luann My single-digit-aged kids are more mature about dog fostering…
RMMD At least it won’t be a thinly-veiled retelling of her stalker, triggering trauma, because “a guy followed me home, we found him dead in his car the next morning. the police questioned us for five minutes and the real killer walked up to them and confessed” doesn’t qualify as a mystery, let alone a bidding-war-generating one. He’s hidden her real life scenario under a time-travelling alien invasion at a minimum
GT So now we establish that Gil and Mimi started their romance in 1982. And have a preteen and teen in 2025. Are we supposed to believe that they had an on-again, off-again relationship for *decades* before settling down and having a hail-mary try at a family? Or that they were together for ages and only decided to try for kids when they got bored? You know, either one of those might not be a bad basis for their marriage collapsing as the kids got older and closer to independence, so I doubt there is *any* solid plot plan.
Archie had two jobs in this strip: look worried because his parents are arguing, and smile at the tension-relieving punchline. Let’s see how he did, shall we?
@Ken: There were other dates, they were going for a week of “plenty of fish in the sea, but look at the poor quality” strips IIRC. I *think* the stalker was officially shown on one of them.
PMP: I don’t want to know how they use the pylons.
Phantom: “I Gotta Be Me”, the showstopper from the Broadway musical, “Purple Stripeypants”.
Marvin had to bring in two random dogs to do gossip, because Bitsy and all the humans lean heavily towards constant griping.
Being married to Toby has its obvious drawbacks, but one major benefit for Ian is that she’ll believe anything he tells her.
MW- so it begins. Toby adopts the bird, and thus the battle of whose pet is the best begins. Wilbur’s fish is easily dismissed causing severe trauma in the Weston household. Ultimately, the geezer’s dog win out, as we all know that DOGS ARE GOOD
Archie: The looks Archie exchanges with his mom! In the first panel, they’re having a good time ribbing ol’ Fred about some unrelated foible. In panel two, Fred brings up his eyesight for no reason and grows a halo. In the final panel, they’re genuinely worried that they’re losing a family member to delusion. Good times!
Their insistence on meeting at a quaint tarmac-side cafe should have been a giveaway.
MW: Tomorrow, Toby rediscovers the long-believed-extinct Carolina Parakeet!
Marvin – Josh’s comment made me realize that the dog was talking about his owner and not his side piece, cuz I had a lot of questions dog marital issues and mange solutions.
Marvin: Dude, get with the times. Cartoon pets refer to their owners as “human,” “mom/dad,” or “people” nowadays; “mistress” makes it sound like you have regular appointments with a professional dominatrix.
MW: God help me, if they call OIive back to communicate with this damned parrot….
Also, Ian must have some pretty sweet tenure if he can just go away for a month or so in the late fall.
What airline, real or fetish-imagined, has a flight attendant (or, as I’m sure this strip would have it, “stewardess”) uniform consisting of a sky blue top, matching shorts, and striped athletic socks?
Oh crap. We’re going to get Olive coming back to Charterstone to telepathically communicate with the parrot to bring Toby’s sunflower seeds back, aren’t we? At least bring in Dick Tracy instead so he can punch the thieving bird.
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The funniest thing in Pardon My Planet is that the women are still out of that guy’s league.
***
I honestly forgot there are people who use “master” and “mistress” for dog owners, which is a whole weird thing, but the fun thing about it was spending a few seconds thinking that pooch was talking about his affair partner. And now I’m wondering why there isn’t a specific word for a male affair partner but at least it’s not “master”.
***
If your title character isn’t going to part of the joke in the day’s comic, they should be in the background reacting to the joke. This will prevent a Barney Google or Fritzi Ritz situation. Well done, Archie artist. Well done. You saved us from reading Fred in twenty years.
@Ken: Thanks. It’s kind of coming back to me now. I’m just not used to RMMD having anything interesting going on. But Augie Doggie Style might be revealing his creepy side in the book. That could be interesting, so . . . you know, probably won’t happen. Thanks again.
@TheDiva: “Also, Ian must have some pretty sweet tenure if he can just go away for a month or so in the late fall.”
Maybe he’s on a sabbatical and (a) he sensibly left Toby behind and (b) she’s too stupid to understand.
@Baja Gaijin: I have to choose the bear.
The role of the avian psychopomp is well established in folklore. The whip-poor-wills gather around the home of a dying person, taking flight en masse at the moment of death to catch the soul and escort it to the beyond. Poe’s eponymous Raven is sent from night’s Plutonian shores to herald the loss of that sainted maiden Lenore. The majestic owl, the tiny sparrow, the nefarious cuckoo, all have their role in shepherding the spirits of the departed to their deserved afterlife. At this, the moment of her death (perhaps by choking on a sunflower seed?), the universe sends a parrot down for Toby’s soul, as it too is colorful and beautiful and only capable of repeating what other people say.
Archie – In panel three, Fred doesn’t look like he needs glasses as much as he needs Metamucil.
MW: parrot will adopt Toby but cut her loose after finding out how stupid she is.
MW: Show, don’t tell. That second narration box tells me exactly what’s happening, but why is the “camera” pointed at some bird instead of Wilbur?
DT: I don’t have the spoons right now to Google “how long does it take for a stabbing victim to bleed out,” but I’m guessing the answer is “less time then it would take him to write out the notation for a full chess game that’s also a ciphered message identifying his killer.”
Dustin: Oh please, if there’s anything that Dustdad hates more than physical activity it’s anyone younger than him; he certainly wouldn’t pay to have the latter lecture him about the former.
JP: You know, most people would have just tacked it to the fridge door with a magnet; there’s no need to get a custom frame job at Michael’s.
Luann: It’s funny because these idiots will so botch the poor dog’s care so badly that he’ll be unadoptable and the shelter will have no choice but to euthanize.
RMMD: Okay, I take back everything bad I said about this arc–“Augie turned Summer’s traumatic experience with a stalker into a mystery novel with a title that sounds like it comes from a 1950s sexploitation B-movie without telling her about it, he only let her find out about it after publishers started biting to maximize the chances that she won’t bring up any qualms about it for fear of ruining his shot at a bestseller, and somehow this will not be a deal-breaker for her” is as delightfully absurd as Rex Morgan has been since the stalker arc itself.
@Liam: Is there really a joke in Six Chix? I can’t imagine it is about ICE, but I don’t have any other idea.
@Harmless little bunny:
#Evergreen
RMMD: I hope we’re getting into a “bad art friend” story here. Summer is outraged that Augie borrowed her identity (“Autumn Rook,” seriously?) to project his fantasies onto, transforming her into a caricature of herself and forcing her to relive her trauma. They have an acrimonious breakup and sue each other for the profits of the bidding war.
Also, a few notes on page 1 of this manuscript. First, “Stalked!” is a terrible title for a mystery novel. Second, “Autumn Rook” as a fig leaf for “Summer Knight” is terrible too. Third, the label “An Autumn Rook Mystery” makes it sound like Augie is going to write a whole series of books that are ripped from his real life experiences, or possibly somebody else’s life experiences, given what we’ve seen of his life (spends his evenings grading high school English compositions and watching his loser nephew’s band perform in dive bars, too busy to have sex even once).
Marvin: “Also, I can smell the cancer slowly eating away at her insides. It’s a shame, really, all that chemo and radiation did nothing for her. Anyway, are you going to piss on that hydrant, or can I?”
Now I’m upset that Hot Shots! (1991) didn’t think of the “runway models” joke first. They were so close, with a runway burlesque dancer using those pointing sticks in a delightful gag that could have segued smoothly into having the guy just striking a model pose and not even need to spell it out in words. PMP not only sabotaged its own joke with a halfassed, sexist execution, but it had to make this classic comedy a little bit poorer by making us imagine what could have been. Boo.
Looks like Mary Worth is going topical! There are Mexican green parrots that have gone feral in Southern California, from a cluster of related species in the Yucatan. It’s mostly a good thing, not like with pythons in Florida, because the species are threatened or endangered in their wild habitat, and the birds also pretty popular with the locals, even though they do take quite a few bites out of backyard fruit. There’s a complication in that they are interbreeding, which conservationists have usually considered bad since it can erase species boundaries, but there’s been some recent research indicating this happens in the wild, with groups of species forming “species flocks” where the species boundaries can shift or disappear and that process enables better adaptation to new environments (for example, moving from the Yucatan jungles to urban California).
I don’t think they’ve actually made it to the Central Coast where Mary Worth is vaguely situated, but that’s not a big deal. Typically, as Mary Worth dives into a message plotline, the question now is – will MW attach a really lame moral, or will it completely blow it with nonsense, as usual?
6-7
@Charterstoned: re MW: Yeah, nobody expects the Parrot, amirite? heh heh heh Well, actually, some folks were predicting Birds, but more of a Hitchcockian scenario, as I recall. Pauley here was glad to get a non-Pirate role for a change – hopes to expand his range and show he’s not just another pretty Polly. He does gender fluid roles, as the script requires.
And he gets to show his flying skills! Well, just a leap with outspread wings, but it’s better than sitting in a cage or on some peg-legged guy’s shoulder, that’s for sure. I think he’s gonna be a welcome and refreshing addition here. Whether it’s permanent or not remains to be seen…. that’s still in negotiation.
Mary Worth: Parrots can live for up to 75 years, and once they find a soul mate, will often shriek, whistle, gleefully pull their feathers out in joy and produce lovely, unfertilized eggs. It’s a step up from marriage to Ian, is what I’m saying, Toby should take note of it.
DT: Ok kids, go back and copy down the chess score. The numbers on top reference moves where there are annotations. ? Is this going to be Playfair square cipher? If one were dying probably a simple or well used method would be used BUT how does King (the victim) know someone will read it and understand? Simplest method was grabbing the pawn – If the killer was the bishop he would grab bishop, if it was the knighted surgeon, he would grab the knight. Grabbing the pawn may be phonetic clue to the Count. But I’m probably over over thinking this. If it is a double substitution cipher I declare shenanigans since that is very unlikely given his dying.
MW: That raptor is looking for something to add to its nest – like Toby’s hair!
JP: OK – let’s moving it along and start centering the strip about Charlotte and let all of the spy, thriller, young adult angst romance just fade away.
GT: Wait, so Gil was already employed by the school and he is trying to date a student ?! Surely I’m confused.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Adding, sunflower seeds by themselves would probably be a bit boring for a parrot. They’d prefer having some hot peppers and other fruit and nuts mixed in. Still, having had a parrot crawl up my pants leg and do manly battle over a piece of toast, I have to agree: Don’t f**k with the little terrorist, just give him what he wants and no one gets hurt.
9CL/PMP – Crossover vibe is heavy today as both comics feature a schlubby doofus scheming to get a little identical twincest action going.
Gasoline Alley: Did that background kitchen worker hop around between panels, or did the diner hire twins?
Beetle Bailey: Good to know the Army isn’t recruiting guys who’ll cause a land-based version of Tailhook.
Zits: I hope to still be alive when, in some far-off year, we find out Jeremy was conceived at Coachella.
FC: “Jeffy, I said ‘Bring me the fire extingui–AAAAAAAGH!”
Mary Worth: Let it not be said that Mary Worth is predictable in it’s batshit insanity.
Marvin: I don’t know what’s weirder. The implication that dogs can get married and therefore have mistresses they cheat on their spouses with, or the implication that some dogs’ fur is fake.
Archie: I’m no expert on the intricate lore of Archie, so I’m curious; has Archie’s dad always looked like John Polito?
FC: This one is just the right size to put up my nose, or my butt!
@Baja Gaijin: re mashups – Thanks, BG, for the Ol’ Rex cameo! He’ll be available for live shots through the rest of the month before he begins his hibernation. After that, regular archival rates will apply.
Wait – does that Air Conditioner Unit work year-round, or just in warmer months? Maybe we could work out a seasonal schedule with its agent…
Pardon My Planet: There can only be one explanation for this scenario, namely that it’s date night on the runway at LaGuardia, which is both baffling and potentially gruesome when the Airbus from Heathrow lands on the trio. (Air France has a policy of steering around menage-à-trois whenever possible.)
@TheDiva: As well using a dip pen! Extra stars to the murder victim for no drips!
Clearly the writer was enamored with the idea of a chess score clue, and somewhere there was an idea of a british DT set in the pseudovictorian age and we get this mash up.
If the victim was stabbed and dying and had pen and paper, why do an elaborate hidden clue in a chess score unless he knew the murderer might be the one to find him. But if so, why not just grab a piece (pawn for the Count, knight for the Sir Surgeon, and bishop for the Bishop) and then sweep the board knocking the pieces around in a faux death throe. This way, only someone opening up his fist (ie the copper guv) would have the clue.
If the victim was just writing out the score and got stabbed and realized he was dying then added the annotations as a very deep cipher clue, then who does he expect to figure this out? His colleagues at the cipher room ancestor of MI5/MI6??
Mary Worth: Ian was encouraged to “take some time off” from his college teaching duties in order to avoid a “me-too” situation… at least until the, um, situation transfers or graduates. He told Toby he’s going to a teachers’ conference, but he’s actually been secretly living in different Charterstone condos while the residents are on vacation. Sorry to give away the surprise ending to the next Mary Worth plot line — casually known as “Wilbur thinks there’s a ghost at Charterstone!” — but now you know the rest of the story.
@Guillermo el Chiclero:
I would have gone with “OF COURSE Jeffy assumes everyone with the same level of intelligence as him is the same age.”
Mary Worth running out of schmaltzy stories about humans finding true love and moving on to pablum about cute animals is the end stage of late capitalism that we always knew was coming and yet didn’t expect somehow.
@Kirk Out: You may be the only one who thought he was speaking of his lover, but yeah, there’s definitely a tinge of Sonnet 130 there.
Marvin – I’ll bet that the man who wrote “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head” could probably top this cur for “most off-putting.”
Too bad Olive isn’t around to pre-emptively intercept the bird and communicate with it. Such is life.
@Charterstoned: @17: You’re too kind!
I’m happy to see Ian is enjoying so much quality time with his other family. Good for them!
6ix Chix: For some cartoonists, an implicit “I know, right?’ counts as a punch line.
MW: Meanwhile, Ian is spending time with his other family – Helen, and the daughter they share. Getting to know the grandchildren has been delightful. Their sweet innocence and child-like sense of the world is so…. He remembers he needs to call Toby today.
H&L: Hi, if you want to start an argument you don’t have to say who you’re voting for. All you need to do is state “Calling in bomb threats to polling places is terrorism. And both sides don’t.”
Mary Worth: “Awk! I bring greetings and a warning from someone you don’t know – a young woman named Olive. Stay away from any hot-air balloons you might see in the vicinity.”
Mary Worth: One could hypothesize Ian Cameron to be leading a double life, except that the life we know about with Toby doesn’t count as one.
Ian could be going to a conference specifically focused on pedagogy in humanities in higher education, but unless his position is non-tenure-track and instructional only (and even if it is), I doubt he’d be that reflective.
Blondie: Not only does Dagwood remain the same age after 90+ years, but he remains the same weight after 90 million calories.
@Baja Gaijin:
Honestly, I was expecting Wilbur Weston…
MARY WORTH: Oh no! Olive was the only person around who had mastery over animal-kind and now she’s left. So now we’re stuck with yet another Charterstone resident having a “battle-of-wits” with their pets and losing. Badly.
MT- Panel #2 Tess: “It was bad enough when they tore up our crops, but when they stole my fucking false teeth, it got personal!”
REX MORGAN M.D.: I love that there’s a “bidding war” over something that in reality would be a Lifetime movie-of-the-week starring Tori Spelling at best (and that’s assuming that Augie did enough embellishments on this story. If it’s a straight retelling, the publishers would have simply fallen asleep by before the end of chapter 1)
@Peanut Gallery: All the neighbors are playing Tic Tac Toe with their aerials.
@Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women: You just know they’ve done this with countless other suckers by now and it never gets old. I can see them having a YouTube channel or something and making shorts out of reactions like this guy’s as a side gig. Get your bread, queens.
@Tabby Lavalamp: And now I’m wondering why there isn’t a specific word for a male affair partner but at least it’s not “master”.
Same reason there isn’t any word for “slut” that applies to the male gender. We’re all like that.
@TheDiva: Re; Luann: You’re missing the important point, which is that Dez, strong-arming her uninterested unqualified roommates into adopting a rescue dog into a traumatizing environment obviously proves she’s the most exceptionally considerate person around.
@Dmsilev: What airline, real or fetish-imagined, has a flight attendant (or, as I’m sure this strip would have it, “stewardess”) uniform consisting of a sky blue top, matching shorts, and striped athletic socks?
Usually it’s the job of a mechanic or other ground crew to walk the airplane up to the dock with batons, not a flight attendant.
RMMD- By Augustus Shuster? As in Simon and Schuster? Oh boy! I guess I don’t blame Summer though. She was probably expecting something more like “Her huge boobs seemed to fill the room as they glowed in the soft moonbeams. Her wide,round ass jiggled playfully as she looked over her shoulder and beckoned him to follow her into the bedroom. But then he realized…he had papers to grade.”
@TheDiva, Luann: Euthanize the roomies, I hope.
PARDON My PLANET: Just on this site alone, there have a been a number of Pardon My Planet strips that feature a balding, schlubby, heavy-eye-lidded. middle-aged man reacting to some kind of kink, so I can only conclude that we seeing Wilbur Weston’s lasted gig as a cartoonist for Playboy Magazine or something.
PARDON MY PLANET (2): @Schroduck: Unfortunately these women committed the unspeakable sin of not being sexualized enough, wearing “realistic” uniforms of their occupation and all (do these broads not realize you can’t effectively guide planes unless you’re in a crop top and low-rise hot pants? Duh!)
MW- Toby: “Only a few big buds left. Looks like tomorrow’s power walk better take me straight to the dispensary! “
PMP: Maybe he’s not turned on, but I am!
Marvin takes place in some sort of fantasy where dogs can roam free around the neighbourhood unleashed without their owners knowing where they are.
In turn, already within a fantasy for a writer who can write a scat fetish comic in public newspapers for decades and not be arrested yet.
@Tom T.: I mean, I’m gay and I find this kind of hot.
I have to re-evaluate myself now, I think.
FC – “Grandma said that it’s good I found this because I have a screw loose.”
Frazz – “Of course, I don’t have to join a gym at New Year’s – I get strenuous exercise all year. I’m superior to those tubs of lard because I’m a runner. Have I ever mentioned that?”
Mary Worth – Does school management usually approve hotel payments for month long absences?
So far we have Toby snacking on sunflower seeds, and now a parrot is going to dive bomb her. Remember, this is Mary Worth, and every story in the past year has been much worse than the previous one. I’m wondering how this one will turn into an infuriating mess.
Pluggers – Yeah, pluggers are the only ones this ever happens to.
Rex Morgan – So the bidding war book is a thinly veiled take on Summer’s experience with the stalker.
This reminds me of the Barney Miller episode in which Harris’s book was being published, and he had to ask the other detectives to sign releases in order to use them as characters in the book. Of course Dietrich refused to sign, causing Harris a lot of angst.
The difference between that and RMMD is that the Barney Miller episode was entertaining.
9CL – Yeah, “yowza” is the word that comes to mind when I see a pair of twenty year olds who dress from the Young & Frumpy catalog.
@Baja Gaijin: Mashups – It’s a tie between the air conditioner and the bear.
@Ken: Thank you!
Mary Worth – Mary has set this parrot as a spy, to repeat the words Toby and Ian speak to each other.
Pardon My Planet – I’d be so mad if I got back from a long trip only to discover my baggage was delayed so some mid-looking twin spinsters could use the suitcases as props to win over some not-even-rich middle aged schlub.
Marvin – Trying to make a recurring bit with dogs so you don’t have to draw Marvin and family? I respect that. But the execution of jokes about dog gossip needs work. Maybe work some ideas with Mother Goose and Grimm creative team.
Archie – Last thing Fred Andrews wants is to look like that uggo Dilton.
CS: Aw, crap. Batton’s back…
@Kirk Out: Well, I thought it read “mattress”.
I guess it’s back to the optometrist.
Phantom: “Okay, transcribing Secret Commander’s top secret 6AM message to Colonel Worubu — ‘Stop….hiring…. philosophy….majors.’ Got it.”
Crank: I would like to believe that shifting to “Batton Thomas relives dull anecdotes from Batty’s experience at ComicCon” means that “Batton Thomas tells dull anecdotes from Batty’s early career to a journalist who can’t make an excuse and leave because Batty’s writing him” is over. I don’t, though.
DT: As regards the even greater mystery, what time period we’re meant to be in, we know it’s not the Victorian era (because King was His Majesty’s cipher expert), we know it’s after the 1970s, when British chess players started using algebraic notation, and now we know it’s before the 1870s, and the popularisation of the fountain pen. We’re narrowing it down to “never”!
FC: On the one hand, I feel like the many good reasons not to let a little kid root around a tool box probably go double for Jeffy. On the other hand … is it too mean to say that there’s also a sense in which they matter less because it’s Jeffy?
MW, meta: Wait, Josh, are you suggesting that Karen Moy doesn’t thoroughly research the world of higher education before writing these strips? That’s the kind of claim that could get you reported to School Management!
RMMD: So Summer opens a book called Stalked!, written by the guy she met when she was being stalked, sees it’s dedicated to her for being “there when it happened” and has no idea what this could possibly be referring to? With that in mind, I feel it’s entirely possible she’ll read the whole thing without making the connection and congratulate Augie on his imagination.
S4th: I assume the speech bubbles in panel 1 are misplaced, because otherwise Ted’s mom is having Thanksgiving with Jackie (but Ted and Sally aren’t) and Sally has chosen the most convoluted way of saying “So, everyone’s going to your house?”
SH: Imagine spending so much time considering the question “What if animals were all sentient, and the obligate carnivores were mostly nice people but still had to feed on other animals?” that having one comic strip almost entirely devoted to the topic just wasn’t enough!
MW: I hope that Parrot shits on her head.
In that one fantasy novel I read, early on, the protagonist (from our world) is told by his new otter friend that they were going to meet a talking bird.
The protagonist laments that birds existed mostly to shit on his head.
The otter was appalled as no self-respecting bird (in his world at any rate) would ever do something so vulgar.
@Rita Lake: “Autumn Rook” as a fig leaf for “Summer Knight” is terrible too.
I honestly can’t decide if I’m more mad that he went for such a blatant reference to her real name, or that he went for a blatant reference that didn’t even keep the pun that was already there! “Autumn Daye”, surely?
Pluggers: What gets Claude Manx really pissed is those aren’t even his leaves. Ed Crankshaft blew them over from his yard.
Oh God I know it’d be a retread of the Wilbur vs Libby storyline but I’m really hoping Toby adopts this parrot and Ian doesn’t like it but Toby chooses the parrot over him. I want to see him sulking about his wife left him for a parrot.
Pluggers: Claude is not upset so much with the leaves as the huge vermin he sees building nests in them. Next thought: “However will I rid my property of all these rats?”
@Charterstoned:
#7. MW: and I always stick with the bear. Rex and allies need all the jobs they can horde now as the long sleep approaches (hibernation)
Part of the strip was off screen so I was surprised to read Tobi’s favorite food is roaches.
BETWEEN FRIENDS: Gotta admit, Maeve has exceeded expectations. Instead of cutting and run or just letting Benoit handle his meddling daughter, Maeve looks for the core. Is grown daughter delusional, has Benoit had gold diggers before, or is daughter still living off an income from divorced-parent guilt.
@1 Baja Gaijin:
I’m surprised that Baja would choose a Dagwood with a clown jester hat.
“Yo! Polly-O! Where’s the party?”
Toby disappointS the Polly-O parrot TERRIBLY.
@Horace Broon: Regarding Dick Tracy I have a theory. The TL;DR is “the writer is an idiot.”
The detailed version is that the writer doesn’t bother to do any research, and just relies on his vague memories of dozens of movies and Masterpiece Theatre episodes to build a highly-inaccurate composite “Britain.” If instead this were set in Africa, it would undoubtedly draw on old Tarzan movies, and everyone would be running around in loincloths, saying “Ungawa, ungawa,” and wrestling lions. You know, like The Phantom.
PMP — let’s give this comic a bit of credit… maybe those twins are supposed to be hot but fell victim to a bad artist? Not everybody can draw like Brooke McD.
@Activist: I am loving Benoit’s daughter, young Mademoiselle Ballz. She calls ‘em like she sees ‘em.
Remember Slut Friend’s last fuck partner? Everything was off the table when she thought he was a lowly barista, but when she found out he owned the entire chain of coffee shops (Tim Horton himself?!?), her legs immediately swung open in welcome.
“When you finish down there, let me borrow a shovel. I want to, uh, take a look at your backyard.”
9cl — speaking of Brooke… which twin is he speaking to? His fiancé or her sister? I’ve completely lost track here.
FG: The water’s great, Flash, but where’s the rubdown and therapeutic massage by the nubile masseuses that comes with the sauna deal?