Romantical comics
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Six Chix, 2/14/26
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Are you experiencing romantic love? I hope so, because if you aren’t, aliens are going to vaporize you, just straight-up transform you into a pile of smoldering ash with an energy weapon of unimaginable power.
Family Circus, 2/14/26
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, and I found the Family Circus kids annoying. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways, and realized that the Family Circus kids are supposed to be annoying and that’s like 90% of the joke of every panel. I really like Ma Keane’s facial expression in this one: “Oh, you’re putting it … uh … there? Where we can all step on it? And you’re definitely going to have a meltdown if I try to move it? Huh. Great. Happy Valentine’s Day to me.”
Pluggers, 2/14/26
Look, Chicken-Lady, your husband has always had a sexual fantasy about doing it with a mime, and he wants your help fulfilling it, and if you can’t see that, you’ve got more problems than failing eyesight.
Pickles, 2/14/26
Hey, were you wondering what the Pickles family was up to? Well, the Pickles daughter is worried about her parents, and she should be. They got disoriented and ran their car off the road. They should not be driving! They’re a danger to themselves and others!
Marvin, 2/14/26
Ha ha, it’s funny because as an infant Marvin was left unsupervised by his parents and ate dog food!
77 replies to “Romantical comics”
FC: My brain somehow corrected that to ‘pity pity bottom’, which I think actually makes more sense.
Plugger: Actually, I think that’s your husband finding a cutesy way of telling you to shut the fuck up.
MW: It’s good to try NEW THINGS. But this is Mary Worth we’re talking about. “…We are eating at the ‘Old Familiar’!” is a reference to Mary and Jeff dining at the Bum Boat and not to some spicy late-night entertainment Mary has planned for their Valentine’s Day.
Is the Pickles writer vacationing near me? This week alone a mom with her kid drove into a lake and a couple drove into a canal (all parties were rescued by passersby’s). I certainly saw the humor in it.
Six Chix: C’mon, aliens, she’s lonely on Valentine’s Day! You could at least have probed her a little. (Also, it’s clearly a cold Earth day — would it have killed you guys to put on a sweater?)
Pluggers: Since chickens can’t chew their food, that candy heart will still say “Be Mime” long after she swallows it whole, until it finally reaches her gizzard and gets ground up into a paste. That’s probably about as romantic as Pluggers will ever get.
Marvin: So Marvin has dog food in his cheeks, his belly, and his diaper all at the same time. It’s kind of funny if you never, ever, ever, ever really think about it.
Dennis the Menace: Looks like Dennis has entered his Oedipal phase of development. With most kids, that wouldn’t mean literally killing his father — but I’m thinking Henry should start locking his bedroom door at night.
FC:
“I’m putting this near the grill at the bottom of the fridge, Mommy, because I know I ‘grate‘ on you sometimes!”
MW: if anyone but Mary said eating at the old familiar would be dirty.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – Why don’t they just let Johnny get a vasectomy? Those would be cool scars to display at Show and Tell.
Luann – Is Dash or Ox going to get a handy? Or both?
Six Chix embarks on a wonderful new direction! Where were these guys for all those years of Cathy?
Six Chix:
Something about today’s installment reminded me of the old “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs” advertising campaign panels.
We all have our fetishes, I’m Chicken Lady’s husband needed to be forthright and communicate. He’s, uh, the dog fella, right?
A cryptic, surreal and unfunny comic about a depressed woman and the aliens who love her in a fucked-up alien way? Six Chix is going to be hearing from Alice‘s lawyers.
Marvin:
Maybe that little stagecoach that comes with Chuck Wagon dog food will arrive and take Marvin away.
It’s not very funny, but Pickles DOES teach us the valuable lesson that old people are awful.
MW: They aren’t going to spend the entire meal continuing to marvel about Ian and Toby acquiring birds, are they?
Oh, and how does Dr Jeff ALWAYS know to call Mary for a date right when she’s wrapped up a fascinating adventure?
PLUGGERS: When she was just a pullet, “Luv” was the cool word on candy hearts.
MW: “It’s good to try NEW THINGS. You can LIGHTLY TOUCH me with your LEFT arm when we leave this dump.”
Pluggers:
” ‘WILL U B MINE?’ — apparently, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince was responsible for composing the sayings on these candy hearts!”
That Six Chix woman has won Valentine’s Day. Jealous!
Six Chix:
Are these ETs two of the six writers/illustrators for this utterly unfathomable strip?
Six Chix is providing biting satire on how humans make life-or-death choices for other animals in the belief that they’re ending suffering, I see.
Like, at least I can usually guess what the INTENDED joke in Six Chix is; but this time all I see is “HAHA Earthling, could be worse!”
GT: Today’s special guest — Hawaiian-shirt wearing Keith Hernandez as the announcer
Great day for the Marvin inflation community on AO3. Both of them must be thrilled.
@MKay: Oh, and how does Dr Jeff ALWAYS know to call Mary for a date right when she’s wrapped up a fascinating adventure?
He doesn’t. Jeff calls Mary for a dinner date every day. She just mostly turns him down.
@MKay: MW: Think of it like ballet, or kabuki — all stylized movements, performed exactly the same way every time.
Or go with what several people have suggested over the last week: Lazy writing done solely to pad out the story.
Six Chix: “It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m alone and unloved, and now I’m just a stain on the snow!” Yep, a lesson there for all of us.
Blondie – there to remind us of all the times we watched our parents have sofa sex.
Six Chix-Now do that to Tuesday Chix.
Six Chix: It seems that Saturday Chick had read the comic “Strange Planet” and wanted to cash in on that, without realizing what made those aliens so endearing.
Pickles: My Great-Aunt lost her driver’s license because she drove through a construction site and ended up in a ditch.
“I go this route all the time!”
That same Great-Aunt got her license to begin with, by not even doing the test, she just gave the instructor a bottle of rum and he passed her.
(This was in the 40’s or so… people supposedly could get away with that sort of thing back then)
MW: Jeff suggests they go to a tapas bar if Mary wants to enjoy small samples of different foods.
“Just what I feared.” Says Mary through clenched teeth. “Bad Bunny has ruined America!”
I wonder if Dagwood will be eating at the Old Familiar tonight.
DtM – Dennis awoke before dawn. He put his boots on. He took a face from the ancient gallery . . .
GT: “Another packed house, full of awkward looking gap-toothed people.”
Crankshaft: The girl has the heavy-lidded expression typical of a child who has to deal with Crank on a regular basis.
J. Parker: So, what is the deal here? Is this mysterious snowmobile going to turn out to be a transforming robot sent to bust through the wall, get Randy and fly off? I mean, that would be faintly of interest.
Pluggers: Her eyesight is fine, that candy comes from a factory with very relaxed standards, resulting in hearts with messages like “HOG ME” and “LIVE BUG”
GT The art has reached the point where my reaction is “thank goodness the colorist went with blond for the guy at the back, because otherwise it looks like a racist caricature”
MW-“It’s good to try new things just like Toby and Ian getting parrots. Have I told you about Toby and Ian getting parrots?”
Six Chix-“SOB! Even Tuesday Chix has that abnormal inhuman sandwich.”
FC: Overseas readers are wondering why there’s a wardrobe in the kitchen with kid’s art plastered all over it.
@richardf8:
Dammit, dude, you made me snort coffee!
@Bob Tice: Six Chix: Oh how I would love to have Rachel Leigh Cook show up with a frying pan and beat the living cr** out of these horrible characters.
@Charterstoned: #23: Oh, I get it; she only accepts when she has something *interesting* to talk about.
@Hibbleton: Thel: Climb into the wardrobe Jeffy and stay inside for about a hour, you’ll be transported to Narnia and go on a magical whimsical adventure and meet Santa Claus.
Jeffy: Yay!
(Too dark?)
@Ken: #24: OK, so now I’m picturing Mary in a tutu, so thanks for that!
JP: [Jump cuts from snowmobile to Randy and back] Tension mounts as the lock picking kit Randy ordered from Amazon has almost arrived.
Luann: No, Dash, this is very much NOT a date. A date would involve you inviting Tiffany someplace, in a way that says, or at least implies, that you are interested in pursuing a romantic relationship. Tiffany is showing interest in a mutual pet, and absolutely nothing else. Going there and acting like this is a date when it isn’t will not get you anywhere. Women have been wise to that act for at least ten years, and Tiffany has been approached by males many times in her life. So expect to start answering to the name “creep.” Oh well; if you took dating from Luann, you deserve whatever you get.
God, I hate Niceguys(TM).
FRAZZ: Ooo, he’s SO mean. Ooo, now he’s stabbing innocent little robins in the back. /s
M: Oooo, he’s do not ce. Ooo dinner on the Bum Boat with Stellan, no less
Marvin – Marvin’s parents wanted him to be raised by wolves, but since there are no wolves in the suburbs, they did the next best thing: abdicating all parental responsibility to the family dog.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Neither, because thanks to Luann being a buttinsky, Ox (probably for the first time in his life) is going to overthink things and make this ‘date’ all awkward and uncomfortable, leading to tepid DRAMA!! and much stupidity.
JP: [Stentorian Narrator from ‘The Dover Boys’] Poor Randy! Will no one save him? Will no one come to his assistance?? But wait! What’s this?? It appears to be his overpowered wife, and that’s just who it will be! She’ll not fail him, I’ll betcha!’
RMMD: ‘Champeen’?? That settles it, Beatty must wish it was 1933 and he could go work for Hal Roach writing ‘Our Gang’ comedies…
Marvin: Don’t worry — he’ll poop it all out shortly, and most dogs would be fine with that.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Yeah… I fear this is the start of some real character assassination for Ox and he’s about to be Gunther-ized.
I gotta digress here for a second, because as someone who has been unable to ‘make a date’ with women for most of their adult life (only in the past year have I been able to even make a start and that was with a lot of therapy beforehand) I’ve lived with a crippling fear of being labeled a creepy ‘NiceGuy’ because I do enjoy sexual intercourse and wish I could have experienced it more often when I was younger. So I keep it cordial and polite, I don’t approach, I don’t make compliments that go beyond ‘that’s a nice outfit you have on today’ and I do my best to find other things to keep my mind on when I go home to my empty apartment.
Still, I hope that some day someone sees me and the vibe they get isn’t ‘Guy who will be a creep and take a mile if I give them an inch’ but instead ‘someone who will fall on their knees in gratitude if I give them an inch because they didn’t push, didn’t cajole, didn’t make creepy innuendos like a… like a character in ‘Luann’!’
When the Pickles parents stand up, it appears they’ll be at least four feet taller than their adult daughter.
Pluggers – “Be Mime” means “”Shut the fuck up. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
You’re a plugger if your beloved gives you cheap candy hearts for Valentine’s Day, and also if your memory is so bad that you can’t remember “Be Mine” has always been one of the sayings on those. Look, I’m sorry, but if you’re a plugger the romance is dead. But the good news according to STI statistics in retirement homes, your sex life is still going strong.
***
So today’s Six Chix is just a cry for help, right?
@Charterstoned: “…Jeff calls Mary for a dinner date every day. She just mostly turns him down.”
She accepts when she’s hungry. Hey, free fish.
JP: Randy had better hope somebody pays the ransom, because there’s no way he’s got the brains to plan a Siberian prison escape.
@The Quiet Man: “…I don’t make compliments that go beyond ‘that’s a nice outfit you have on today’…”
When I was a younger man, an older lady schooled me on this point. The proper phrasing is “You make that outfit look nice.”
GT: “My Eyes! Boom boom! My eyes! Boom boom!”
@Little Blue Bicycle: You’d think Rachel could’ve taken some lessons or practiced drawing during her time off.
P3 reminds me of “The Simpsons” episode where the sadistic dentist forced Ralph Wiggum to look at “The Big Book of British Smiles”.
MW-They should try the Italian fish which is a former Mafia member pulled from the water.
6C: Noooo, now she’ll never experience the true joy of Valentine’s Day–stocking up on half price chocolate!
Pluggers: Does the candy heart have a typo or is Plugger Lady still unable to read it clearly despite multiple corrective lenses? I need to know whether the joke is “Pluggers are legally blind” or “Pluggers are so cheap that they buy off-brand dollar store candy hearts that don’t just taste like chalk, they are chalk.”
Family Circus : This gag would be even better if, as I initially thought (but sadly turned out not to be the case), Jeffy was taping his drawing UPSIDE-DOWN.
**************
Gil Thorp : is this intentional? Like, the implication is that every Milford sports fan is a fat-headed genetic abomination or something?
*************
Six Chix : Yeah, I also cannot hear the song “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone” and not think of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996)
(That is the explanation as to why this comic juxtaposes Valentine’s Day and being disintegrated by aliens, right?)Six Chix: Is it a problem that, given a setup where a woman screams about the pain of heartbreak to literal space aliens, this is how I’d finish the joke, too? I’m going to assume the problem’s with the setup, not with me.
Marvin: There’s your dinner, Bitsy! He hasn’t crawled far!
(Since we’ve traveled back in time, I’m going to encourage Bitsy to devour Marvin as an infant. It’s the classic “Eat Baby Hitler” scenario.)
@Ukulele Ike: For the record, I don’t phrase it in quite that way. I typically say ‘If I may pay you a compliment, I love your look.’
I don’t think I could pull off the way your mentor suggested it.
@TheDiva: A store I worked at would sell those big heart-shaped boxes of candy….but we would have most of them still on the shelves the day after Valentine’s.
I always imagined one of our Plugger-like customers handing one of those discounted boxes to their sweetie and saying something like: “OK, honey. I know you’re mad I didn’t get you something yesterday but $13.99 when I can get it the Day After for 5 bucks?”
Pickles – That was NOT a cow pasture! Somebody had took and drawed white lines all over it and drove posts in it, and I don’t know what all, and I looked down there and I seen five or six convicts a-running up and down and a-blowing whistles. And then I looked down there and I seen these pretty girls wearin’ these little bitty short dresses and a-dancing around, and so I thought I’d sit down and see what it was that was a-going to happen. About the time I got set down good I looked down there and I seen thirty or forty men come a-runnin’ out of one end of a great big outhouse down there and everybody where I was a-settin’ got up and hollered! And I asked this fella that was a-sittin’ beside of me, “Friend, what is it that they’re a-hollerin’ for?” Well, he whopped me on the back and he says, “Buddy, have a drink!”
“I’m just going to tape this to the fridge like a goddamn idiot.”
DT: So Endless Mahoney left a handwritten thank-you note spritzed with her distinctive perfume in the money briefcase? This may be the single most incompetent assassination attempt since Squeaky Fromme.
Dustin: I would say Dustin’s best quality is his ability to tolerate his sister without throttling her.
GT: Special cameo by the ghost of Cass Elliot.
HotC: Weirdly, the teen characters of Heart in the City may have the healthiest relationship behavior in the comics.
JP: If that’s April coming to the rescue, I’m not sure whether it would be funnier to hear the details of her improbable escape and tracking of Randy, or just to have the whole issue dismissed with a shrug.
Luann: No, Dash has a date, you’re just his chaperone.
MW: Look at those daredevils, ordering the seafood platter at the restaurant they’ve been going to every single week for the past twenty years! Will they go all out and opt for the soup instead of the salad? Stay tuned!
Don Abundio, translated:
“Does Don Abundio really have that much trouble with grapefruit?”
“He makes it squirt deliberately…”
“Just to show how clever he is!”
@Roto13: Magnets are the tools of the devil. No one knows how they work!
@Bob Tice: ….while singing “Sugar Walls” to himself.
@TheDiva: On JP – the funniest of all would be next week to have April and Randy just show up back at the ranch to reclaim the Raspberry-Haired Brat and saying in essence to the readers, ‘that sure was a great scene, too bad you couldn’t see it!’ and cutting for one panel to a smoking crater where the prison once stood.
A ballsy move would be to have the guards standing at the prison gates watching CIApril* approach, cutting to the snowmobile approaching, and have two weeks of back-and-forth, a la John Cleese as Sir Lancelot in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’.
*We all *know* it’s her, right? We don’t need to pretend here.
H&L: Well, that went sour fast.
@Little Blue Bicycle: #54- GT- Milford High.. Where The Hills Have Eyes.
PLUGGER: In any case, the actual point is that Plugger ripped of Futurama yet again. So don’t be surprised if tomorrow’s strip is Chicken-Lady ranting about how this chalky and unpleasant concept of “mime” anger and infuriates her before trying to enslave earth in revenge.
@matt w: “And what’s this thing… a hibachi!? Damn it, Hi, when I ask you for something you have to listen more carefully!”
MW- If it’s so good to try new things, maybe we could try something like a new story arc? Wilbur should be out on probation by now. BTW, isn’t Dr. Jeff supposed to be younger than Mary?
Pluggers: Unfortunately for this chicken lady, she just exposed herself to a euclid-level cognitohazard and will slowly transform into a mime, silently pleading for a death that the SCP Foundation will not grant her as they lock her forever into a tiny cell for experimentation. Sad!
Six Chix: …I got nothing.
RMMD- Johnny and Michael were gonna have a champ-spleen-ship match.
@The Quiet Man: I had a long response to this, which isn’t letting me post for some reason. Short version: “Niceguys” suck. Don’t confuse being a “Niceguy” with being a genuinely good person. Kindness, empathy, compassion, supportiveness, etc., are attractive qualities. If you’re actually a good person, and it’s not just a misguided seduction act, the right women will notice. Don’t ever, ever, ever apologize for who you are, or think that you should. I’m a reformed Niceguy, and I’m eager to tell any man who will listen that that approach is doomed to failure.
Most men who identify as Niceguys aren’t nice at all. They’re trying to create an obligation, with the expectation that they will be repaid in romance and/or sex. Men who do that are no different than every other sexual predator. They’re just using a different technique, and one that women recognize at this point. The answer to “why don’t women don’t like nice guys?” is very simple: “most women do like nice guys; you’re just not one.”
Yes, sometimes women overreact badly to being approached, no matter how gentlemanly you try to be. But don’t let that paralyze you. If you’re coming from a sincere place, an overreaction reflects worse on them than you. And lesson #1 here is “value yourself.” So write it up as a swing and a miss, walk back to the dugout, and wait for your next at-bat. You’re going to fail sometimes. Just disengage, walk away, and don’t spend another nanosecond thinking about anyone who would treat you so unreasonably.
I hope this helps. It took me way too long to figure all this out.
JP: And in typical the Judge Parker fashion of “I’ve got mine, fuck you” plot resolution April (that sure isn’t Nanook of the North) will bust Randy out while leaving his buddy Bogdan to rot. Just like Alan Parker left Roy, who basically kept Alan from being killed in prison, to go pound sand. As added loose ends we’ll get no story of how April escaped from Pavel Jr.’s goons or how Randy ended up in that prison in the first place.