The spices go on the pumpkin, they’re not in the pumpkin
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Hi and Lois, 11/8/25
In addition to being a coastal elitist who knows about academia, I contain multitudes and am also a Rust Belt native who was in a bowling league growing up, so let me explain something to you effete non-bowlers out there: it is extremely easy to throw a gutter ball, and if you were engaged in an earnest contest to see who could throw more gutter balls, that contest would simply end in a tie, because you and your opponent would each get the ball in the gutter at every opportunity (20 per game). I must assume that Dot and Ditto engaged in some sort of conceptually more complex competition, in which they each pledged to bowl to the best of their abilities as if they were attempting to knock down as many pins as possible, and yet still agreed that the “winner” at the end would be the one who had most frequently failed in the task. Under such conditions, could you ever know whether your opponent was operating in good faith? Dot’s facial expression shows that she has profound doubts about the results of this admittedly confusing competition.
Six Chix, 11/8/25
It’s a nice touch that they gave Pumpkin Boyfriend orange hands. He’s not just a guy with a pumpkin for a head, he’s all pumpkin, and it’s a good thing he didn’t go into that coffee shop or all the autumn-crazed maniacs in there would have torn him to pieces.
72 replies to “The spices go on the pumpkin, they’re not in the pumpkin”
There are 314 Bowling alleys in California as of May 5, 2025. Sounds like a coastal elitist sport to me.
The top three cities with the most Bowling alleys are Los Angeles with 56 Bowling alleys, San Diego with 25 Bowling alleys, San Francisco with 20 Bowling alleys.
MW: A mounted park policeman gallops up behind Toby and arrests her for littering, an offense which carries a mandatory 6-month sentence in Santa Royale PRISON.
On to the next story.
Six Chix:
“Here you go! I got you a vanilla chai!”
“You must be out of your gourd. So to speak.”
RMMD-Summer needs to finish reading that book before she jumps to any more conclusions.
FC-You won’t be getting anything from the museum cafe. Have you seen those prices?
Six Chix-And tell Tuesday Chix to take off that pumpkin.
Hi and Lois:
Bowling for Dullards.
Hi and Lois-I would like to go bowling again but sadly in the Charleston, SC area there are so few bowling alleys nowadays. There was one near my house but it got torn down and a 7-11 has been built on top.
Bowling? As in cricket?
Chix (sic): I guess to a pumpkin person, pumpkin spice smells like B O?
6C: We never think about how differently The Legend of Sleepy Hollow would have gone if Ichabod Crane was really into pumpkin spice. Or if he was fucking the Headless Horseman. Thankfully Six Chix is here to show us how it would go.
Hi and Lois:
“I made a sport out of razzing Ditto’s ineptness at bowling while he was trying his hand at it. In fact, none other than The Searchers once recorded a famous song about that sport!”
“Really??? — what song might that have been, Dot???”
” ‘Needles and Pins‘ !”
Six Chix:
“Order for Jack O. Lantern!”
Pearls before Swine – Pig apparently read The Joy of Sex by J. D. Vance.
H&L: Lois continues; “BTW, we owe the lanes $1500 for broken gutter guards.”
Bizarro : “She was inside the car when I did this.”
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Dustin : is playing the role of his dad today; no, seriously, it was supposed to be DustinSister and DustinDad having this conversation, wasn’t it? But they switched out DustinDad because the people making this strip DON’T want to write DustinDad to come across as a despicable loser
even though that’s what DustinDad *IS*.************
Hagar the Horrible : Helga has a brother!? Since when!?
************
On the Fastrack : “Oh, wow, so, like, that coffin is actually some kind of external hard drive that allows you to access your old data?” “What’s an external hard drive? And no, I just rewrite all the documents I lose, just like Ms Trellis tells me to do!”
***********
Six Chix : “Pumpkin Boyfriend”? Josh, that’s BIANCA XUNISE. Stephanie Piro is doing something nice for her fellow chix!
FC: Thel sees Jeffy by the R. Mutt display. “NOOOOOOO!”
6CHX: In about a week, Pumpkin Stud will be all shriveled and slimy and covered in fruit flies and no one will bother him, so, no worries.
MW: Toby reluctantly says farewell to the biggest pecker she’s seen in a LONG time.
RMMD: If Summer is this hysterical after five pages, maybe books just aren’t for her.
9CL: Do the people who frequent this venue ever get to see anything BUT a sex show? Like, you know, a non-sweaty, music-type concert where everyone keeps it in their pants?
GT: I enjoy onomatopoeia as much as the next person, but this strip takes it to a “Huh?” level.
6c-You begin by disembowling the pumpkin, and then put the spices in the guts. Or just get the pumpkin to drink lots of pumpkin spice, and then disembowel him. Either way works.
H&L: There’s a weird thing about this strip that I couldn’t quite put my finger on until recently, which is that it doesn’t seem to respect the basic rules of visual storytelling. Like today: did Dot and Ditto sneak in the back door, then make a u-turn in the living room while talking to Lois? Why aren’t they wearing coats like Hi? Why do they live in a house with disgusting pea-green walls? Ok, that last one is not storytelling per se, but I think the point stands.
6Cx: God, if I ever saw a storefront that looked like that I would assume it was a Wile E Coyote trap to catch the most basic Roadrunner ever.
BB – Buxley, you are perched precariously on the center thwart of a solo canoe that has been given oarlocks for some reason. Given the moral panic at the prospect of the nations youth “canoodling” in canoes during the late 1800’s, one can only assume that this design was the Chastity Belt of the Charles River. Either that, or the artist has never laid eyes on a canoe before.
Off-panel, the sentient peppermint-stick who completes their throuple is saying “What the hell, dude.”
@Ukranazi Stepan: You need to spend more time reading Zippy the Pinhead for bowling lore, but no, think ninepin.
@Anonymous: You’re wrong. The pumpkin is missing the piercings. Either that or it was some kind of challenge: Draw Bianca like a fashion doll instead of a Bratz doll.
@MKay: 9CL – Nah, this is one of those “sex acts on stage” venues from Times Square, ca 1982. A straight up concert would have the demanding a full refund.
The anagram of “Sunny the Parrot” is “A Thorny Punster.”
Coincidence? — I think not.
Mary Worth Mashup: Inspired by @3 Charterstoned.
CS: Like those clowns in Congress! What a bunch of clowns!
RMMD: Does Blondie really need to have read the whole book? She knows what it’s about.
‘I met a nice lady when another man was being mean to her. I tried to make him stop being mean, but he didn’t, and the mean man sat in his car outside her house ALL night! Then this other man, who we thought was mean but actually wasn’t because he was dying, killed the mean man and gave me his pickup truck because he was dying. Then I took the nice lady out to a restaurant where they serve yummy noodles and then I wrote this book. The End!’
[Excellent, Augie! You get a gold star today! Now sit down and let’s let Buck tell his story about the milkshakes!]
@8 Ukranazi Stepan: Bowling, as in a “sport” that pluggers can take take part in without having a heart attack or be away from their chili cheese fries and beer for more than 72 seconds. No small high-speed balls that can endanger the particpants’ balls.
As I recall, there was a Family Circlejerk once with Thel – in the plumbing section of a store such as Home Depot, yelling, “No Jeffy, that’s a display model.”
In other news, nice to see the Bumsteads getting away from “the Clockers” and getting back toward the Glambaster mode with Ernie Mooglemeyer.
Nice Allen Saunders tribute in Arlo & Janis. Wonder if Karen Moy ever gets such a shout out.
Luann – If Dash doesn’t want that dildo-shaped peanut-butter celery, I’m sure Stef can find another use for it. But I’d hate to see the jizz towel after that.
@Baja Gaijin: Sheriff Stober rides again!
Crankshaft: which is why the comics industry has never been stronger … err
DT: okay – not bad, but still feels that they had this idea about a cipher had had to find a way to jam it in somewhere. What was the weapon? A quill pen? Was Sir Mayne Jack the Ripper?
MW: shouldn’t there be a cloud of pigeons all trying to get some of those sunflower seeds?
@29 Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Have you ever walked through the plumbing section of Home Depot or Lowes and noticed the display toilets are displayed high above floor level and sometimes on an angle? Yeah, fiction reflects reality.
@30 Charterstoned: It was either him or the unnamed cop in Judge Parker.
Six Chix: At the biggest coffee specialty place in the country it’s already peppermint flavor season, and some holiday music is on the PA. But don’t tell Six Chix.
Luann: All I can think about is how Larry, Moe, and Curly are even less ready to live with a cat than a dog.
Legacy strip readers are relieved that Pluggers all came back to the Real God after whatever they did during their beatnik, hippie, or New Age years.
GT: I know that all these girls have likely not been playing football during recess since they were in grammar school, but should a WR be that surprised to be shouting “I got it! I got it!” before she catches the ball?
Gasoline Alley: What I’m hearing is that thanks to an assignation in the walk-in freezer that Toodle is pregnant.
Beetle Bailey: That’s not Beetle’s worry. After overdosing on Merchant/Ivory movies he thinks unplanned pregnancies only occur from fornicating in canoes or rowboats.
DtM: But Grandpa is old enough to remember when you could throw a football on the sidewalk because everybody wasn’t going zipping thru their suburban subdivision at 60 mph.
FC: Jeffy, walking past The Martyrdom of Hippolytus: “I want four horses.”
FC: Jeffy, walking past The Problem We All Live With: “Do you have any extra tomatoes?”
H&L: Hi loves bowling so much he has a little tote bag with bowling pins on it!
BB The old joke about what American beer and making love in a canoe have in common is said by foreigners, but does this mean that USAers actually don’t know how to use a canoe for sexytimes??
Remember when fucking Bigfoot was supposedly a rite of passage that all of the Chix’s had to do?
Now its fucking pumpkins.
I can’t help but feel that Stephanie Piro is doing this to cheer up Bianca Xunise by playing into her
kinkspersonal interests, which if so, is nice that she’s trying, as opposed to just enabling her to be whiny and miserable like Bannerman was doing.@CanuckDownSouth: Well, there was a commercial for a small boat called The Johnson. The jingle went “You’ll have a lot of fun, with you, your wife and your Johnson!”
(Wasn’t a canoe though, but close enough)
Pluggers still don’t dare to curse the God who has played such cruel tricks on them.
I’m not a botanist, but wouldn’t the pumpkin head start rotting once it’s carved?
Beatoff Bailey – C’mon, Beetle. Go for it and find out that “getting it wet” has multiple meanings.
G ^@#*&^$@! Thorp – Do receivers really wear fingerless gloves? I think Rachel Merrill got her inspiration from the ones Wilbur wore while jerking off to a thought balloon of Iris in the Antarctic.
Pluggers: I’m still straggling between the realms of religion and Atheism. I’m just too stubborn on logic to fully commit to God.
I have a tiny Guardian Angel statue (I won’t explain the backstory to it but the statue is very very important to me)
I placed the statue on a desk while I was cleaning, then when I reached out to pick it up as I finished to put it back in its proper place, I slipped, almost fell, but managed to stop myself.
I felt it was some sort of sign.
Why is Hi holding a bowling-themed purse?
CS: Comic books! Comic books comic books comic books comicbooks comicbooks comicbookscomicbookscomicbookscomicbookscomicbooks severe autism.
@Batiuk’s Attic: That’s how it worked in the Wizard of Oz novels. Jack Pumpkinhead (who is self-explanatory) eventually settled down and became a pumpkin farmer, so he’d always have an emergency pumpkin on hand when his would start to rot away.
RMMD:
“This invasion of privacy has me angry and frustrated!”
“I get the anger but why the frustration?”
“He still hasn’t invaded my privates.”
luann I don’t know how much of this idiocy should be on the characters versus the clearly-incompetent rescue organization. The “sweater=bed” shows they didn’t get a dog bed or blanket. Were they just … left with the dog? Off-leash so he could dart away? Do they even *have* a leash? Dog food? food *bowls* even? (Note: these are things that should be provided!) And no information? Not even feeding guidelines?? (How in the world did they release a dog to a group that thinks it would drink milk??!)
Six Chix: “Btw this vanilla chai has Pumpkin Spice in it. The sign does say ‘Pumpkin Spice EVERYTHING!’ after all. I could have gone to a different coffee shop but nah…”
Six Chix: The fact that this pumpkin guy has to go into hiding, makes me feel that he’s not normal in that reality. Like how The Devil turned Homer Simpson’s head into a donut at the end of one of the Treehouse of Horror segments.
6C: Okay, if you’re a sentient pumpkin who no doubt goes through a living Hell every fall as people project their expectations of the season onto you, you are permitted to complain about pumpkin spice stuff. But everyone else needs to get over it already.
In Santa Royale? Please. It’s an exclusive community. Peacocks yes, doves of love yes, parrots yes, but no sparrows and no pigeons.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Sister, remember when you loaned me five dollars to start a lemonade stand? That was my first business venture”
“And now I’m a captain of industry!”
“You’re a devious weasel!”
“And you never paid me back the five bucks!”
B. Bailey: Beetle finds that making a boat from a mil-spec army lid from a shipping container isn’t conducive to staying afloat let alone mild petting.
@Ken: Santa Royale is coastal. Seagulls. Lots and lots of seagulls.
We’re about due for a remake of The Birds, right?
DT: Okay, “castling” the letters was really gilding the lily on King’s part. At this rate he could have gotten up, walked into the next room, and said “Mayne stabbed me” before collapsing.
C’shaft: “And all the heroes were white and women knew their place and….I should have stopped on the first one, shouldn’t I?”
Dustin: Dustin and Dustsis’ inability to look each other in the eye confirms my suspicion that one if not both of them is severely neurodivergent and struggles with standard social interaction–a difficulty made all the worse by the fact that they’re both horrible people.
HotC: Kat’s the lesbian, right? Because, you know, this would track…
JP: Sorry, but NO WAY does same do his Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. If anything he’s a “grab something at Walgreen’s on Christmas Eve” sort of guy.
Luann: You are NOT his family, Dez. You are a temporary custodian working with the animal shelter to take care of him until he gets adopted by what will be his actual family. If you don’t understand that you shouldn’t be fostering.
MW: Translation: “Damn, how stupid IS she?”
MW: I’m not sure how I’ll react if this parrot vignette turns out to be a one-week filler that goes absolutely nowhere, and on Sunday a new Wilbur arc starts.
DT: Guest Writer Costello: “Now, Guest Artist Beaty, everybody knows English people have really bad teeth. So don’t forget to draw the really bad teeth.”
FC – Every time the Keanes drag the melonheads to an art museum I wonder – WHY? Are they out of their minds? The melonheads are too young – and let’s face it, too stupid – to get anything out of it, let alone appreciate it. The visit is boring for the child, who will make sure that the parent doesn’t enjoy the visit. Wait until they’re eight or nine. If the Keanes insist on going now, take them to the museum’s children’s programs.
I did notice that Jeffy is the only melonhead on this museum visit. Holier than thou Grandma agreed to babysit the other three, but said, “I’m not watching Jeffy. He’s a moron who is possessed by Satan.”
JP – They’re going to bus in a bunch of Amish and have an Amish barn raising. That’s the only way they’ll have it done by Christmas. Especially in this strip.
Mother Goose & Grimm – I’m going to start using this excuse.
Crankshaft – I don’t want to think about what happened in Batiuk’s pants when he wrote Silver Age comics.
JP: Why yes, I was getting a Christmas vibe from this “rebuild the stables” story, specifically “Do You Hear What I Hear,” as Charlotte spoke to Neddy, who went to Abbey, who went to Sam. Mind you, the carol gets it over with in four verses, while JP is looking to drag out a lot longer.
It’s The Effete Pumpkin, Six Chix
@CanuckDownSouth: Easy. See, Dez is so exceptionally compassionate (I mean, “caring about the less fortunate”? How many college kids do that?) that organizations are utterly helpless in her hippy-dippy Magical Negro radiance and then have no choice but to randomly send her a box full of puppies every month.
JP: She’s getting you a necktie, Sam.
Phantom: ”I sure love seeing Jungle Patrol guys steppin’ and fetchin,’ Devil. Like his ass was on fire.”
@Liam: #5RMMD- You’re right. Wait till she gets to the part about the patent leather corset and fishnet stockings.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX:
That’s a mean way to refer to Kip (snicker.)
Hi And Lois: I can’t believe that Hi let his kids disrespect the sport like this. This is not ‘Nam, this is bowling, there are rules. Has the world gones CRAZY?! AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE RULES?!?!
Six Chix: The lore implications of this one are out of this world.
@2+2=7:
…This is reminding me that Dez got the idea to adopt an abandoned dog… from being told she could do it by Jack… at a massive charity event held to raise awareness on the issue… organised by a group that was founded and is run by Bets.
It’s super-weird that the strip has done NOTHING with “Bets manages a charity that promotes rescuing abandoned pets, has no idea HOW that actually works”. Like, if Dez isn’t going to learn a lesson about how you shouldn’t jump into doing a good deed when you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing and/or aren’t ready, maybe Bets could…?
MW- Too bad Halloween was last week. This parrot could climb into a fake skull, fly around the room and scare the shit out of the Three Stooges. (Wilbur, Dawn , and Dr. Jeff.)
@Liam: We lived down the street from a bowling alley in North Charleston from 81-83. It is no longer there.
9CL: I think Brooke has accidentally interchanged his twins. The one dating Alistair had her hair parted on the left (from the reader’s perspective), and now he’s snogging the one with her hair parted on the right. The alternative is… too troubling to spell out here.
Six Chix is basically repurposing the standard “turkey on Thanksgiving” gag. I don’t think it works as well with Jack Pumpkinhead – he has to replace his head when it rots, guys, it’s canon – but the fact that peppermint flavoring is more important to him than Christmas checks out.
@CanuckDownSouth: It’s not that the dog won’t drink the milk; it’s more that Dez will have a lot of cleaning up to do about an hour later.
FC: “I’m hungry… for melonhead.”
@TheDiva: luann the rescue we foster for *does* give fostering families the option to “foster fail” and adopt before the profile goes up (since that takes a couple of weeks). You would still have to pay the fees, but the approval is pretty much a rubber stamp because you were already foster-approved. You still don’t go in saying you’re the foster dog’s “family” the moment you meet. Sheesh, this is one bit where it’s good that dogs can’t understand conversations, more just the tone and a few key words.
H&L: There is a bowling alley around the corner from us in northern Virginia. The parking lot is always packed.
@pugfuggly: H&L: The kids came in through the garage door a minute ago and took off their coats. Hi first went around to the backyard to pee. As visual storytelling goes, it’s actually quite evocative.
@MKay: 6C: In a couple of weeks, we’ll get jokes about the boyfriend being a total turkey.
@ValdVin: GT: She’s been playing softball for five years. She’s used to having to wave three of her teammates away as they all converge on a pop fly.