Twists and/or turns
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Mary Worth, 1/19/26
Last week, the main conflict of this Toby storyline — “Toby got a bird and Ian hated it” — was resolved as Ian submitted to Sunny’s charms. Now we can move on to the next storyli–wait, what’s this? Another bird has arrived? Bird number two? The bird drama continues, with two birds instead of one? This is an intriguing development! Will each new bird have to save Ian’s life in turn in order to be accepted into the flock?
Judge Parker, 1/19/26
Oh, hey, remember Randy’s long-lost sister Ann, who showed up in everyone’s lives again not that long ago only to eventually get sent to jail? Well, it looks like she’s once again reappeared in dramatic fashi–hold on, I’ve just read panel two, and it turns out that the fashion of her reappearance is not as dramatic as all that. Ah, well! Adjust your expectations accordingly.
Hi and Lois, 1/19/26
I’m really digging the dramatic change in Hi’s facial expressions between the two panels here. “Oh man, this is great! Wait, I’m supposed to be sober for whatever this is? Absolutely not.”
90 replies to “Twists and/or turns”
Mary Worth:
“What’s this?” muses Toby. “Well, it’s an indefinite pronoun used to identify a thing just mentioned or observed. But that’s not important now!”
Mary Worth:
TAP! TAP! TAP!
“Savion Glover?!? Let me guess — Sunny is your bird, and you’ve come to reclaim him!”
Judge Parker:
“Ann?! There’s no steam coming out of your breath! — just like the old Sergeant Preston of the Yukon TV series, and holiday-themed commercials showing people hauling Christmas trees from tree lots!”
CS: The gall of this man.
H and L:
Nothing says “dweeb” quite like a hat with ear flaps on an adult male.
Slylock Fox-The ring was found by Gollum.
MW-Thus begins Toby’s new life as the Crazy Bird Lady of Charterstone.
FC-“And here are the pictures that Mommy doesn’t want us to see.”
Mary Worth: The next day, Toby is wiping down the conference room where she and Ian… have their meetings? Do their taxes? Roleplay “horny professor and grad student who can’t keep their hands off each other after a riveting seminar”? In any case, another bird has shown up — which would be a boring development, except it allows us to see that her two-story condo is above the treetops for some reason.
Hi and Lois: Hey, Lois, a fire log is still a real fire — it burns with smoke and everything. So putting it in a purely decorative fireplace with no chimney attached might not be the best way to relax with your husband on a cold winter night. Anyhoo, enjoy the sirens!
Blondie: Now we learn that among Dagwood’s many random responsibilities at the J.C. Dithers company, he also does the hiring. Which I guess falls along the lines of “those who can’t do, teach.” Though it would seem prudent for him to select a candidate who’s even less competent than he is — which would be a tough task indeed. Hope you’re up for the job, glasses guy with weird haircut and ill-fitting suit! Insulting your interviewer is a promising start!
MW – Yes…bird number two…that sums up this strip pretty well….
JP – It was a dark and stormy night….
H&L – So…mocktail…faux humor…perfect….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: There’s been plenty of bird number two in this story, hopefully now Ian’s shoes will be twice as full.
MW: Sunny freezes dead in his tracks when he sees Polly “The Animal” Guzman, notorious cartel enforcer, fly in the window. (Stay tuned).
You know the great comic switcheroos of the past? Well, today, all the artists coordinated to ensure today’s strips all involve opening a door for someone clad in green being extremely annoying! I’m not sure what the deeper meaning is yet, but I’m sure Welcoming Shrieking Green People/Animals Week 2026 is going to be a blast.
H&L: Either Lois is reviving the Women’s Temperance Movement, or Thirsty picked the back door lock.
LUANN: Nil’s not Banksy?? And here, SO many people (Bernice) thought he was!
RMMD: No, I will NOT accept that Rex is going to have to perform his own surgery. Don’t even try it.
MW: The Camerons are well on their way to an apartment decorated in Guano Revival.
MW: In the climactic scene of the 2007 movie 1408, John Cusack’s character has a total breakdown that culminates with him screaming “I WAS OUT! I WAS OUT!!!!!” over and over again. Reading today’s Mary Worth, I had a similar reaction.
MW – make it stop!!
GT – wait, the game just finished and THEN the anthem? This strip jumps around so randomly it’s like having a high fever and only coming out of delirium sporadically.
MW Sunny’s been found by the rest of the new truck-crash-escaped feral flock. Realizing he’d rather spend his days with somebody smart, he abandons Toby in favor of the birds as the strip resets itself.
Watch your back Sunny. Ever hear of the expression “kill two birds with one stone”?
MW: Tomorrow, the Count from Sesame Street takes over for the rest of the week. “Three! Three exotic birds! Ha ha ha!”
Mary Worth:
“What’s this? — or, more precisely, what’s on ‘Tap‘ ?”
The new bird, Moony, will call Toby a Drunken Axx and it’ll need Lampy catching fire for Toby to accept her.
Dustin: She really is mentally abusive, isn’t she?
When I prayed for the idiotic relationship dramas of Mary Worth to stop, this is not what I had in mind. Anyway, I for one welcome our new avian overlords and remind them that religious figure can be useful in controlling a human population, I guess?
FC: “Know where Mommy used to live? The whore house!”
Hi and Lois: Sometimes Lois is very specific — she’s burning a “fire log,” as opposed to “a chopping log” or “a sitting log.” Sometimes she’s a bit too specific — there’s no way that “mocktail” is anything but water with an olive in a fancy glass, unless she happens to have denatured vodka, but not real vodka, around the house.
H&L: Why a “mocktail?”
Judge Parker: [Sizes up Ann’s outfit coldly] Right, less “drama” than “70s sitcom.”
MW: get ready for a week of parrot erotica.
Mary Worth: Toby goes out, buys a second cage for the bird she calls “Stormy,” and spends the week commenting on how different the two birds’ personalities are, wondering why Sunny never comes home. . . . It’s the same bird, you imbecile!
MW/CS: Here’s a brainteaser – who’s a less welcome presence on the Monday starting a new storyline, Mister Comic Writer Person or Wilbur?
It would appear to be the latter as Moy got wind of who was turning up in the other strip and thought ‘shit, now I have to wait 1-3 weeks to bring him out again. What can I do?? Eh, let’s just repeat the last storyline with a ‘new’ bird. I can set Ian’s Valentine’s box of chocolates on fire or something…’
MW: One by one, the avian cast members of Mark Trail are escaping from the strip. Given the state of that strip these days their desire to escape is certainly understandable, but I’m sorry, whoever you are, you really made the wrong choice about which strip to escape into.
JP: “No, I didn’t escape. Instead, I bribed the parole board into letting me out early for good behavior. That’s why I’m here – do you or Dad happen to have $450K in small bills lying around the house?”
MW – Yesterday Ian was watching The Birds on TV. Today a second parrot shows up. I’m pretty sure where this is going, so I’m going to be on the lookout for a cameo by Karen Moy.
MW: After Ian forsakes Toby’s companionship for Sunny’s, Toby doesn’t sulk. She finds a new soulmate.
(Beetles, Another Girl)
You’re making me say that I’ve got nobody but you
But as from today, well, I’ve got somebody that’s new
I ain’t no fool and I don’t take what I don’t want
For I have got
Another bird
Another bird
Who will love me ’til the end
Through thick and thin
Who will always be my friend
Of course you attract birds, Toby; YOU’RE A BIRD BRAIN
CS: Oh goody, Batton Thomas. My excitement knows every bound.
Bizarro: classic mix of low brow and high brow humor!
GT: Is Gil working for Valley Tech on the side or is that someone else? Or does the Milford Gym have other team names up on their walls?
JP: Maybe Anne is on a good behavior release due to overcrowding.
MW: Sunny is spreading the word! I’ve cowed Ian and now we rule this condo!
Phantom: General Chum – “oh, I shouldn’t have eaten the three day old sushi”
RMMD: The hospital is calling, your case is cancelled due to an outbreak of pink eye!
Slylock Fox: No, that bird is having a massive choking fit because a ring that can fit on the toe/finger of a big bear must be huge!
Apparently the Me Too movement caused Pearls before Swine to update the previous joke:
Boss Bob says to Mary: “I’m going to have to lay you or Jack off.”
Mary: “You better jack off. I have a headache.”
Do others also think the current G. (*&@#@! Thorp guest artist is at least as bad as Rachel Merrill?
JP: Probably not the best time to bring out the jazz hands.
Crankshaft : …could you, at least, get beyond “so here’s an amusing anecdote from when I was just starting out”? You have a 50 year career yet all you talk about is how weird it was when you first started! Don’t you have interesting stuff, like befriending other cartoonists, or how certain storylines were received, or how one particular character became a breakout popular character that defined your comic in the public’s eye?
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Hi & Lois : “If you were gonna cheap out on me like that, I would have preferred you turned the tv on to the yule log channel and served me a cup of microwaved chocolate milk. No, seriously, I would have liked that better.”
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Luann : features characters for which “hang clothes from decades past in a retirement home, in a timeline that list the different years” is too high concept for them to understand.
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Mary Worth : I’m going with “Toby is too stupid to keep track as to whether Sunny is inside the house or not, and thinks Sunny coming back in is a different bird coming in”.
While it’s a nice change from their usual depressing ennui, Hi and Lois forgot the joke again.
MW-No, no, no, no, NO! Just no.
@Anonymous:
On Crankshaft: Say what you will about Batiuk (and we’ve all said a LOT) but he recognizes that his career pretty much peaked when he got his big break and to tell about the rest of his career would be even more boring than telling how it began for the umpteenth time.
On Luann: Philodendron doesn’t get it not because it’s too high concept for his bougeois brain, he doesn’t get it because it’s blindingly stupid, pointless, and doubtful that Nil isn’t just blowing smoke up his ass about obtaining permission before driving those clamps through the wall to hang clothesline from*.
*I DO believe these characters are too dumb to use basic hand tools.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX:
I love the depiction of Coach Gerards -but I am a fan of anime, especially ahoge.
Ian may currently running on the high of not dying, but surely that will fade as their condo becomes more and more a guano-encrusted health hazard.
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One of the conditions of Ann’s release is that she’s not allowed to wear gloves, no matter how cold it is outside. Maybe she’ll reconsider her life of crime as she’s getting a frostbitten finger removed.
***
Between the two panels, the chair and fireplace are clearly right by the front door. No sane person builds and furnishes a house that way, so I don’t blame the colourist at all for assuming these are different spaces with different walls.
Hi and Lois: I’m getting feelings towards an episode of Star Trek: TNG
Where Scotty returned, was in the Enterprise’s bar, orders Scotch and gets synthetic non-alcoholic scotch.
He is “understandably” ticked off about this.
Arlo and Janis: I love the other comic strip callout in today’s strip.
@The Rambling Otter: In the Star-Trek verse, even though in the future smoking and drugs are abolished, humanity could not do the same for alcohol, and real alcohol is still around, just not allowed on Starfleet vessels.
H&L: Lois is burning a “fire” log as opposed to… a web log? A disappointed Hi grabs his mocktini and stares into the fire.
“One day, Fruhlinger. One day.”
Ann?!
(Her?!)
@The Rambling Otter:
It turns out Josh is wrong, it’s not “Ann-who-is-Randy’s-Sister”, it’s “Ann Eiffel” from Luann!
Mary Worth- What are the odds they just completely redo the entire Sunny storyline again beat-for-beat for lack of any other ideas and hope nobody notices? Probably pretty low, but never zero!
H&L- LOIS FLAGSTON, LEAVE THIS MAN!
Hi and Lois-The mocktail is really to keep Thirsty away. If he gets a whiff of alcohol he’ll be over there real fast.
MW: @Sid, Agent to the Animal Stars! Nice work on placing the extra parrot, Dude! You should probably exert some contractual control over the dialogue—otherwise, you’ll have them parroting each other’s lines and pretty soon all the word balloons in the strip will be filled with nothing but “Seeds!” “Seeds?” “Seeds….” “SEEDS!!!”
Hi & Lois have a really pathological relationship with alcohol (remember when they did not want to drink a glass of wine in front of their children?) but I guess that’s what living next door to Thirsty will do to you
@Bob Tice: H&L vs. JP: I see your Hi Flagstone dweeb hat and raise you one Ann Parker dweeb hat.
S4th: It’s currently two degrees above zero here in Chicago. Eating a large pot of molten Gruyere sounds pretty good right about now, 1970s cliche or no.
BF: Oh for god’s sake, just take the checkout girl job at Walmart. You have less aptitude for the creative life than Bianca Xunise.
Crankshaft: So where’s the Historic Marker?
Parrots will continue until morale improves
DT: Special appearance by Edda & Amos from “9 Chickweed Lane”.
Huh. Ann, the parrot, and Lois are all dressed in green and gold. Is there a subliminal message in there somewhere?
Mary Worth‘s prequel to The Birds is coming along swimmingly. Presumably, eposure to Ian made all avian life hate humanity, but at a soap opera strip’s pace, we’ll probably never know.
SFx: Rollo is more clever than I thought. I, like everyone else, expected the clever crow to be the thief’s accomplice.
DtM: I’m not expecting Lasker/Capablanca, but no black king on the board? Dennis has brilliantly learned to play chess like checkers.
H&L: A mock martini? At least make it a mock dirty martini: One olive, and fill the glass with brine.
What’s a nice surprise, Hi? Coming home and finding out you have a wife? Wait’ll he finds out Ditto and Dot weren’t a dream…
JP – “Sorry I missed Christmas. I’m running a little late. Escaped from prison? Oh, no no no. I’m a ghost. You know… I wear the bucket hat I forged in life, and all that. Anyway, you will be haunted by three spirits… look, I’d better come in so you can close your door. No sense both of catching our death of cold, heh heh!”
Don Abundio, translated:
“I’ve heard that the best place to hide drugs is inside a telephone. Does that make sense?”
“I guess so, but of course I’ve never had my house searched by the police”
“Oh… Me neither”
“I was just speaking hypothetically”
Mary Worth: So the big reveal of this arc is that Sunny was actually cheating on his mate with Toby and the newly-brainwashed Ian this whole time? Guessing what comes next is the part where somebody kills somebody else in a fit of jealous rage. My money is on Toby smacking Sunny with a frying pan while shrieking about how she thought he loved her.
Judge Parker: Wasn’t Ann in prison for white-collar shit like fraud? Why is Katherine reacting like she’s speaking to a serial killer? “OH GOD, PLEASE DON’T EMBEZZLE ME, I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE!”
Hi And Lois: I think Hi is just confused that his wife wants to engage with him romantically or sexually in any real way, which is fair.
Daddy Daze: I’m gonna say it’s a bad idea to talk about “made up holidays” on Martin Luther King Day, especially in the current political climate.
Phantom: “It…it was all just a bad dream! Welp, time to get up for my checkout girl job at Walmart.”
@ectojazzmage:
On JP: Because that’s what overwritten ‘DRAMA!’ demands. Who knows what other accomplices/jilted lovers out for Ann’s blood might be on her trail? Not to mention, do we *really* know she didn’t kill that guy out in the woods?
Others have already plausibly speculated that Ann’s here to kidnap the raspberry-haired brat. Wouldn’t that be a nice little way to bring everyone together. Ann kidnaps the brat on behalf of the remnants of Pavel’s mob, bringing CIApril back from wherever she was, Sophie turns up because her visa ran out and she got deported, we have a great big killing spree and the strip ends with that drunken detective sitting in a diner muttering to himself ‘Forget it, it’s Cavelton, isn’t that right Wanda?’
H&L – “And I’ve set out your Fleshlight for later.”
SFx: “Cowardly crook,” my ass. Let’s see you try to take a ring away from a bear, Weber.
GT: Is this little recital in honor of MLK Day? Maryland was a slave state, wasn’t it?
JUDGE PARKER: I don’t know about prison, but Ann always dresses like she’s perpetually trying to escape from 1966.
@2+2=7: THAT’s it! Now we just need Patrick McGoohan to turn up and explain everything!
MW: So, I’m guessing this is Sunny’s mate, who has found him through mumble mumble parrot smart bird mumble, and has come to fly away with him and reassert the status quo now that we’ve all Learned a Very Important Lesson. And now that Sunny has realized just how truly boring Ian is when he’s not in a temper.
RMMD: “I was let out early for plot complications!”
H&L: Lois has finally had enough of dealing with Hi’s whiskey dick.
@61 Peanut Gallery: The judge has already been visited by three spirits: whiskey, Scottish whisky, and gin.
Dustin: It’s not as though she had to be a mind reader for that. It’s either, “I’m judging you” or “I’m hungry” with this guy.
FC: This will blow your mind, Jeffy: she also lives in that picture book!
MW- Perhaps this other parrot is some sort of avian Avery, coming to take Sunny back to the asylum, where he serves as Belle Batfrey’s therapy bird. Hahaha…
MW: Maybe if you stopped rolling around in crushed sunflower seeds, you’d stop “attracting” random birds.
HnL: Lois remembers the last time Hi mixed alcohol and fire. She still has nightmares about those third-degree burns.
Mocktail martini = flat Sprite with an olive in it. Yum
@Ukulele Ike: #68- Maryland was a border state.
CS: Yay! It’s everyone’s favorite one-armed journalist/author insert duo. It’s also everyone’s least favorite duo.
@Victor Von: I love the word “swimmingly.”
C’shaft: Man, imagine you’re a building that’s stood for decades, seen people of all kinds come and go, witnessed the joys and travails of human existence, and the highlight of all of that was a smug teacher deciding to turn his pithy observations on high school into a comic strip. It’s enough to make a structure go full Amityville Horror.
DT: Time was, Minty and his weirdly deformed eyes would be the ringleader of this gang, and the no-neck Czar would just be a random thug. How the mighty have fallen.
Dustin: Oh please, Dustdad, it’s not like you make any effort to hide your contempt for your entire family and the world in general.
GT: Emily’s assistant coach is a dead ringer for Gil, and Gerards’ is giving off a Coach Luke vibe. Is this some kind of bizarre petty vengeance on their exes?
Luann: On the one hand, I hate Phil and his “I don’t get modern art” mindset because it demonstrates a shallow understanding of the purpose, creation, and experience of art and is rooted in fascist judgements of non-representative art as “degenerate.” On the other hand, I hate Nil because his art is incredibly stupid and no amount of pretentious BS-ing can disguise that, and I hate Luann for trying to be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in this relationship. Jack, by just standing there and not saying or doing anything, is the most likeable character in today’s strip.
Pluggers keep inventing new ways to be really, really stupid about technology.
MW – Will this circle back to how Toby took a bird that may belong to someone else?
@Will: *adding “My excitement knows every bound” to my vocabulary*
@Ukulele Ike:
@Anonymous:
I believe that canonically Milford/the Thorpiverse is set in Connecticut regardless.
LUANN: Luann, I think Phil already tried “not getting” when these two “artiste” interrupted your awkward backseat quickie.
LUANN (2): Also has Luann tried “just doing” her job? Remember how the whole point of the last week is that Luann is just so busy as a Weenie-world career gal that she barely has time for her go-nowhere relationship with Phil? If you do, then you’re certainly not Luann, who is spending valuable “coffee date time” pretending to understand art.
Crank: …so, how about that Keesterman and his ankle, eh? Do you think it’s broken? Do you think Ed and his daughter can convince him to to go to the doctor? Can we please have another week about that?
DT: Okay, so Minty works for Endless, who wants Tracy to find Czar before Mr Mirror does because she’d rather he were jailed than dead. But also, Minty works for Czar, who doesn’t want Tracy or Mr Mirror to find him because he’d rather be neither. It’s not currently clear whether he’s told Czar about Endless’s actions. But also, Czar has absolutely no patience with any of the precautions Minty is taking to prevent him being jailed or dead because … he’s an idiot?
And that’s before we even begin to get into the near-certainty that Endless is Mr Mirror and is just using Tracy to flush Czar out! Does Minty know that? Who knows?
FG: Really? A weekend cliffhanger of “The other Dragon Men can see Bok as easily as he can see them!” and the resolution is “Yeah, but they didn’t“?
JP: Whatever the non-escaping reason for Ann suddenly turning up when the Parkers and the audience thought she was in prison turns out to be, I’d like to get my “If only she’d had some way of sending them a message in advance” snark in now to avoid the rush. (Having said that, I suppose it’s entirely possible she’s been trying to phone them for days, but it’s always been wine o’clock.)
MW: Going full DuMaurier would be fun, but my real hope for the conflict in Act 2 of the Sunny Saga is that Sunny and the new parrot hate each other. Moy appears to be turning Charterstone into some kind of all-animals-live-in-harmony utopia straight out of late-Elrod Mark Trail, and I think a bit of fighting for dominance and territory could add some much needed realism to the strip.
SH: To be fair, being transformed into a St Bernard by a girlfriend who’s sometimes a cat but is currently also a St Bernard, in order to save you from supposed certain death in an avalanche that doesn’t actually seem to have been that big a deal is so far outside anything even vaguely resembling my experience that I can’t say for certain it’s not the best time for a “where is this relationship going?” talk.
@Bob Tice: its -11 as I am going to work.
You damn betcha I’m wearing my rabbit fur flaps.
H&L: Lois did not “do the best she could”. She’s still wearing clothes, she’s not lounging on a bearskin rug in front of the fire.
@Lord Flatulence: it was on sale at the liquor store where Lois buys her afternoon supplies.
MARY WORTH: Boy, Toby is pretty ecstatic at being the epicenter of the Birdemic. (Sunny II: “You’re my ‘hot Ferrari!’ Squawk!”)