Dark magic indeed
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Family Circus, 3/11/26
A thing I never would’ve predicted more than two decades ago when I started doing this blog is … well, I guess the fact that I’d still be doing the blog in 2026 would be at the top of the list, but not far below would be the fact that I’d become an increasingly less grudging fan of the Family Circus. Lesser strips like Marvin do pee and poop jokes all the time and I get no pleasure from it, but this is a perfectly executed panel capturing the moment right before PJ horks directly onto Big Daddy Keane’s face. Daddy knows it, PJ knows it, it’s inevitable, but we don’t have to see it or hear it directly addressed, and I think that’s beautiful.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/26
Hey, you know how Rex Morgan, M.D., is boring, a significant majority of the time? Well, today we learn that, while we’ve been watching all these boring characters do uninteresting things, there’s at least one guy who’s been hanging out off-panel experiencing even less excitement than everyone else. Truly chilling.
Rhymes With Orange, 3/11/26
Sure, we all enjoy a stage magic act. But did you know that the only thing preventing the rabbits and the birds from having sex with each other is a corporate-style HR policy? And call me a “woke scold” or whatever but I’m in favor of it. The rabbit and the bird shouldn’t have sex! It would screw up the workplace dynamics, plus I don’t even understand how it would work, biologically!
93 replies to “Dark magic indeed”
MW: Um, Mary, when you turn someone into a cat, they won’t eat salad and can’t use a drinking glass. First transmogrification, dear?
Nonono guys! “Red morning, lameass motel diner staff take warning!” You guys are doomed, read a book!
RMMD – If by “back up and running like it used to,” you mean “no more using a baseball cap as a hair net,” then I’m all for it.
RMMD:
“Now, why is it that you’re wearing your baseball cap in that inverted way, Hector?”
“Well, I’ve been working back here slicing the pumpernickel.”
“No. Don’t say it, Hector.”
“Yep. I’m the ‘catcher’ in the ‘rye‘ !”
Rhymes with Orange:
“Well, in order to be able to do that, I’d pretty much have to pull a rabbit out of a hat!”
RwO: You’d get flyaway hare!
Actually, the Rabbit-Dove god, Hathnepsepunt, occupies a minor, albeit relevant place in Ancient Egyptian mythos, particularly during the early Middle Kingdom era. Today’s Rhymes With Orange could have been a delightfully arcane reference if I hadn’t made all of that up!
Family Circus:
“…I speak of the vomitus of love.”
— Steve Miller (adapted)
RMMD: [Reader rolls eyes] Hector thinks becoming a regular character in the strip will relieve the tedium of his everyday life.
FC: I think my favorite part of this scene is Daddy Kane’s expression. Not shock or horror, just sad resignation to what is about to happen. There’s always going to be someone vomiting in this house, its just a question of when and where.
RMMD: I like the big blank space left in the dialogue box, as if it’s saying “No, that’s it. There’s no added context that would make this scene more interesting.”
RWO: What’s really sick about this scene is that the rabbit and the dove are already married, they’re just asking the magician if he’d be up for a new experience to spice things up…
RWO: I’d do what the rabbit says. You definitely don’t want him reporting that indoor outhouse to OSHA.
RMMD: He can’t wait until he gets to hire some young kitchen assistant who will listen to his obscene jokes and call him “chef”.
Between Friends : …I’ve been fighting against making a joke about how Maeve’s B-plot involved people who are featured in that large file of archived e-mails that were made public recently, and here the strip just outright says it’s true! I just assumed it was Benoît in there, not Maeve herself!
…Too far?… Too vague?…*****************
Bizarro : …Shouldn’t this strip have run next monday, not today?
***************
Family Circus : Meh, this strip could be better by having the facial expressions more clearly hint at what is about to happen. Bil and PJ just
have the default Hi & Lois expressionlook morose, not horrified at having done a disastrous mistake and nauseated, respectively.**************
Hagar the Horrible : doesn’t understand that’s not a toy given life. That’s a dude Merlin shrunk and froze, begging the horrible barbarians to at least reunite him with his beloved who is trapped in the same plight!
**************
Moose & Molly : are in such dire straits financially they can’t even afford to give their children a 25¢ gift. That’s the joke, folks!
**************
On the Fastrack : “You know this clear case of human error? It was actually *I*, the personification of the Y2K bug, behind it!” …Seriously?
**************
Safe Havens : oh joy, a fish hook going right through a thumb to go through ANOTHER thumb. THERE’s a nice, safe, non-wince-inducing image to start the day!
RMMD:
Doug’s pompadour is continuing to expand at a rate greater than that of the Hubble Constant.
Mary Worth Mashup: Hey Mary. It’s a cat, not a parrot.
FC: No sympathy. He didn’t notice that the kid looked awful before he swung him around?
Mary, Christmas was months ago! It’s much too far out of season to be eating holly bushes!
The cat’s expression speaks for us all, really.
RMMD — I dunno, most guys with a pornstache and goatee would never complain to the boss about not having hardly anything to do. The lazy ones would be playing Call of Duty and the industrious ones would be going full Jesse Pinkman.
FC — Say what you want about the Keene household, but they still have their dinner soup served out of a tureen in the best Victorian fashion.
MW: Cat sitting there awkwardly, “Am I supposed to eat this, or do I just sit here…?”
DT: Call in the State Police, of the proud State of State. I mean, fictional states of the US do occur in stories, but how often are said states given names, which happens – examples that come to mind are the state of Calisota from the Disney comics, Winnemac from the works of Sinclair Lewis, or from pulp author Norvell Page’s novella “But Without Horns”, the state of Wichinois.
MW: Mary seems curiously introspective. If it were anyone else, I’d say she was close to questioning whether people wanted her interfering with their lives. But this is Mary Worth, and without that there’d be nothing but — well, psychic dogs and parrots with a grudge, to pick two recent examples where her meddling was nearly non-existent.
Family Circus: Since Daddy Keane is about to be covered with vomit it’s nice of Thel to have a big steaming bowl of…water? Yeah, let’s just go ahead and say that’s water and she’s prepared to throw it over her husband to dilute PJ’s puke and prevent a peristaltic chain reaction like the one in Stand By Me.
RwO: “My next trick will be sawing a relationship in half!”
Alice: “Here, read my classic novel Breakfast of Champions, about a man whose brain is in dire need of a reset, along with my underrated novel Galapagos where I discuss my theory that our brains are much too large.”
Phantom: Whelp, looks like the Jungle Patrol is about to stage a coup d’état. RIP Colonel Worubu.
Pluggers: Huh. I’d have thought Pluggers wouldn’t care about the shape of pills because their wives put them in a piece of soft cheese and stick them to the roofs of their mounts for them to lick off completely unawares that they are being medicated.
RxMD: Props to the soul-patch, backwards ballcap motel cook, the one guy in Glenwood who refuses to get on board with the town’s retro roots country rockabilly aesthetic. March to the beat of your own drummer, man, preferably one who can beat out something other than a 4/4 shuffle!
Blondie: I absolutely love how “in the zone” Dagwood is here! It reminds me of watching professional pool players and Olympic curlers. There is only the food. The food is everything. The food is all there is.
A backwards baseball cap? Like a real person would wear?!? In Rex Morgan, M.D.?!?!? Oh, thank the gods! He has a thin moustache and a soul patch!
***
Everybody falls in love with a bird until they find out about the cloaca.
Rhymes with Orange:
RMMD: A bleak note of realism that late 90s skaters, with their soul patches and backwards baseball caps, are still out there and now pushing 50. Look at that weathered face. That tragic grip on lost youth. That’s the lined, beaten, careworn visage of a man who has just realized that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out closer to the Watergate scandal than the present day.
The Family Circus: My dad once did something like this with my niece, bouncing her up and down as we warned “Dad, she’s about to throw up!” Did he listen? No. Did she throw up on him? Yes. Did we tell that story at his funeral? Also yes!
FC: The intense stare on PJ’s face belies his thoughts; “Spank my ass, will ya!”
Pluggers like their prescription drugs square. It reminds them of their LSD-laced sugar cube youth.
Rex Morgan, M.D.: Setting aside his haircut, it’s sad to see anyone reduced to a bored motel cook, much less a talented swordsman like Inigo Montoya. “You ordered French toast. Prepare to die!” just doesn’t have the same zoom zoom zoom, you know?
MW: Poor Muffin witnessed a Mary Meddle for the first time and has already become profoundly depressed in response.
FC: Photos taken one second before disaster.
RMMD: I know I say this every time Rex Morgan does a new plot, but it bears repeating. A former A-List action star who’s become a recluse shows up under a fake name in Glenwood! This should be thrilling. At the very least, intriguing. Yet Beatty’s devotion to tedium rules unchallenged.
@ValdVin:
Pluggers like their prescription drugs square. It reminds them of their LSD-laced sugar cube youth.
I was thinking Sabin vaccine.
@Baja Gaijin: Muffin’s inner monologue is more or less exactly what went through my head when I saw the first panel. Nailed it.
I recently called Luann “an indictment of the American upper middle class”, and this week drives that point home even further. Because we’re seeing higher education’s role in furthering this status quo.
When Luann blatantly fails an assignment – an assignment that was already insultingly easy – the teacher ignores it, and starts handing out Buzzfeed personality quizzes. Which the skeevy Les manipulates to engineer a hookup with Tara. The students don’t care; they’re just trying to check the “go to college” box with as little effort as possible, so they can keep slacking and living at home rent-free. The teachers don’t care. The school doesn’t care. Why does anyone bother? Why do we, as a society, pay for this?
JP Is I, Bogdan – leaving message before going to audition for Hagrid in new Harry Potter show!
DT No wonder they don’t mind when Tracy uses excessive force or even a touch of manslaughter handling suspects, they have such a sparse command structure for law enforcement with so few competent chiefs that nobody can figure out what to do during a jail break without calling the state governor (a political office famed for its depth of militaryesque strategy)!
MW That cat is wondering what kind of idiot it’s been adopted by as s/he contemplates its meal of salad
FC: Is Thel carrying hot food or a bedpan?
Today’s Heathcliff is a perfect microcosm of everything I love about this strip. The cat has access to dynamite. The cat knows how to use said dynamite and has repeatedly utilized it to destroy a man’s property, either because the cat dislikes his lawn decor or solely to be a jerk. And the man witnessing this continued destruction of his possessions by a cat with access to dynamite is just vaguely annoyed that he’ll have to buy more gnomes. Incredible. What a world.
FC-PJ can’t handle his liquor.
MW-“What is this stuff you’re feeding me,” Muffin asks, “I only eat proper cat food.”
RMMD-I don’t get this. You are providing room service to people at the hotel who are customers. You don’t overcharge the customers for the food they order you’re providing the food for free?
RMMD-Shocking to think that with apparently how popular the ‘Glenwood Motel’ song is that more people aren’t beating a path to it.
“Good toss, Bil; you got him right in the dirty laundry hamper.”
“I was aiming for the toilet.”
MW: I’m in agreement with my fellow ‘Mudges that between her ham-fisted attempt to meddle Harv and now this salad business shows that Mary has well and truly lost her mojo. If there’s anyone in Charterstone who would actual want one of her salmon squares, it’s her cat!
MW-“At least it isn’t Wilbur again. I’m so tired of his problems,” Mary thinks to herself.
CS: So how did we get from “we’re getting married at the courthouse for tax reasons” to handing out roles like maid of honor, best man, ring bearer and so on? Are they just going to co-opt a civic building for their ceremony at 9:30 a.m. on a business day? That would be quite rude to all the people who are there for court cases, traffic tickets, business licenses, or just to do their job. But it feels exactly like something Tom Batiuk would write: a flash mob wedding.
On top of that, since Pete and Mindy have been assigned roles, I’m guessing they decide to go ahead and get hitched too. Pam, Jeff, and Ed will already be there, and it’s not like anyone else needs to be invited, amirite? (Cut to Darren and Jessica crying over Darren’s Atomik Komix art desk.)
I very much hope this happens. Because it would be spectacular.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Except society isn’t paying for this. None of this bears any resemblance to how life works. Luann is supposed to be set in 21st century America, but might as well be 29th century Mars.
@But What Do I Know?: And this guy actually looks a little like Jesse Pinkman.
RMMD: so where is this heading? Will Mae Mae’s identity be uncovered? If so, by whom? Or will she fail in love with Mud?
Family Circus: Since I was a kid, the Family Circus has made me laugh around 3-6 times a year. This is one of those times.
Rex Morgan: Have I misunderstood “job security” all these years? Have I been doing the wrong thing by not telling my boss I was sitting around, doing nothing? Or have I never had a job I truly hated? Very ponderable!
Rhymes With Orange: I can’t imagine how nerve-racking every mid-tier magician’s performance must be. If you perform every trick flawlessly, you probably get polite chuckles and applause. The slightest misstep leads to career-ending humiliation. This guy doesn’t want to have to worry about his rabbits boinking his doves mid-show, and I have to support him.
@Banana Jr. 6000: *shrug* They’ve got an appointment (3:15 the next day). You already need witnesses, you can call the people you’re coming with whatever kind of wedding attendant you want to, so as long as “walk down the aisle” means “walk up to the desk appropriately” I’m sure this is just fine for a courthouse wedding, it’s been done before and they won’t even blink at it.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: RIP Shock G
Gasoline Alley: If Walt keeps wandering across the train tracks like that he could get killed. Again.
GT:
“Coach!”
“Yes?”
“Which singular backboard do you want us to attack, the offensive or the defensive?”
Lockhorns drink non-screw cap wine? I’m a bit surprised.
@Lauralot: My neighbor said that Heathcliff keeps blowing up lawn gnomes so I asked how many lawn gnomes he has and he said he just goes to the store and gets new lawn gnomes so I said it sounds like you’re just feeding lawn gnomes to Heathcliff and then his son started crying
his *dog started crying, I guess
Is this a classic Family Circus? The shape of Dad’s face (and the face wrinkles of an exhausted breadwinner) remind me of the very early strips. Also, the fact that it’s actually kind of funny.
MW: Today’s strip prompts the question: How much vermin should a salad contain before a cat will eat it?
But in other news: Mary’s salmon square fish oil pills are catching on with the Plugger set.
@Charterstone: Dune: Maybe we’ll be treated to Mary’s
former victimsfriends having an intervention. “Mary, we’ve noticed that you’ve been… not completely your best lately…”@matt w: Perfection.
MW: The cat sadly contemplating the salad amuses me to no end. It reminds me of the “lady yelling at the cat” meme.
Wizard of Id Classics: No notes, just a really good joke.
RMMD:
Motel manager Doug emphatically declares; “I want to get this place back up and running like it used to!”
Hector responds:
“Wait. Is she a waitress or a prostitute?”
@CanuckDownSouth: A ring-bearer and a photographer, though? It sounds like they’re planning the whole ceremony, not just a handful of roles that would align with the civic needs for witnesses. Are they going to dress up? Do people do that for a courthouse wedding?
MARY WORTH: Poor Mary. She’s so depressed over her inability to butt into someone else’s life she no longer has the thenergy to cook, and thus, is reduced to feeding her cat and herself the roughage from the condo’s ferns.
@Lauralot: *tips trilby*
RMMD: Does the Glenwood Motel Cafe get that much traffic, apart from the occasional guest who doesn’t want to bother ordering for pizza or making the drive to Wanda’s Retro Diner down the road? I would assume not, and yet I can easily believe that the place is absolutely jumping compared to what normally happens in this strip.
@Ken: So are we hoping this intervention will or won’t end like the one they held for Aldo?
For some reason the content bots don’t like my Family Circus commentary. Basically what I was trying to say is that if you see a small child with that expression and you still toss them in the air, you deserve what happens next.
@Charterstone: Dune: I was hoping for a different kind of dramatic ending, like Mary’s son and grandson showing up. According to wikipedia, they haven’t been seen since the 1960s, and Mary now says she has no children, so that’s definitely a badly-broken relationship. Tend to the beam in your own eye, Mary, before you go meddling with Mr. H and his daughter Sharon.
@Banana Jr. 6000: But you forgot the big point that Luann doesn’t go to a “real” college, silly. She’s a dummy, so she ‘s stuck going to a junior college (psst! Don’t tell the Evans that those credits transfer), which is basically just glorified junior high (right down making all of Luann’s old instructors teach classes here!)
Also I think the scary part here is that the professors and the school honestly do care. Yes this is them at their best.* Frightening, isn’t it.
*Alternatively, it could be that everyone around Luann was instructed to dumb themselves down severely to take pity of the protagonist so she doesn’t feel so bad, I mean so (sigh) “her inner beauty can shine through like a beacon.”
C’shaft: “You will bend all of Middle-Earth to your will and cover the lands in a second darkness!”
Dustin: My dudes*, it is the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six. Women have been a recognized (if occasionally still marginalized) demographic in geek spaces for decades. If you’re unattractive to the opposite sex, you’ve got to stop blaming the comic books.
*I’ll let you decide if I’m speaking to the characters or the writers.
GT: Great, I’m sure that will be massive comfort to Isis while she’s dying in a detention center.
JP: Caaaaaaalled it.
Luann: Hey, at least the bullshit personality quiz is creative with the naming. None of that boring “The Innovator” or ENFJ crap.
MW: Poor Mary. She’s already given her opinion on the perils of internet dating once, that should have fixed everything! Why hasn’t the problem been solved forever?
Phantom: I’m not surprised that the devoted followers of The Ghost Who Occasionally Commits Human Rights Violations go in for this sort of “ends justify the means” rationalization.
Pluggers are going to choke on that Starburst-sized tablet.
My g/f observes that the guy who draws/writes RMMD loves thicc-bodied women. Wanda, Mae-Mae here, Buck’s wife… Beatty likes ‘em big.
RwO: Let me guess, this is a “Devil Doll” scenario, and the rabbit and dove were once human
(and a married couple) whom are trapped under the magician’s whim to entertain.
They just miss f***ing… just let them f***…
Like Victor Von, I also was amused by today’s Family Circlejerk, although I get a chuckle out of it 6 to 9 times a year.
However, with all the talk of P. J. about to spew chunks on Bil, people have ignored that in Luann, Tara has accused Les of shitting himself. This reiterates my comment of yesterday that Les was going to get it wet; it just changes the meaning a bit of what “getting it wet” means.
Too late, Josh, there are several sites with plenty of rabbit+bird (not sure about doves specifically) action in all manners of details (de-tails?). As long as they remain professional on stage, what harm is there… not like they are employees or paid…
FC – They usually let PJ out to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. It builds character. Kids are never too young for Feral Child Summer!
Don Abundio, translated:
“There’s no place to put my umbrella!”
“That’s Expenses, boss”
“There’s plenty of room under ‘P’ for Profits”
MW:
“This is Sid, Agent to the Animal Stars. Leave your message at the beep, sweetheart.”
BEEP!
“Yeah, Sid, this is Muffin. Look I’m grateful for the gig with Worth, especially that it might be recurring, but she’s feeding me salad Sid. Salad. I’m a cat, I don’t eat salad. And I can’t get anyone to tell me what my motivation should be for eating this salad. There’s not even any meat in it. Tuna salad, I could eat the tuna but this? And muffins? I’m Muffin. This is some surreal David Lynch sh….”
BEEP!
@2+2=7: Junior college still costs public funds to operate. And even if junior college was tuition-free (which it isn’t), there’s still textbooks, opportunity cost, and other expenses. The whole charade seems like a waste of everyone’s time.
I know I’m being very pedantic here. But young America is packed to the rafters with Luanns and Dustins right now. Not because their generation is inherently flawed, but because their parents’ generation failed to give them the direction they needed, and maintained a society that favors well-to-do young people at every opportunity. And our society is fine with letting them consume limited social resources to skate by. My own young adult life in the 90s was much the same, so it hits close to home for me.
On Luann :
1. Mrs Fogarty asking her students to tell her their score INDIVIDUALLY like this just reinforces the idea that Luann, Tara and Les are the only there.
2. Why did Les bother changing his answers when it turns out he could have just said that he got the exact same result as Tara, regardless of what his answers were? He could have then gotten his REAL result later, if he cared to get it! (which he doesn’t, but still)
3. I know the weird “color – terrain feature – animal” are supposed to sound like opaque psychology woo code words, but I just guess “these are the names from the cast of a cartoon show about brightly colored magical animals” from it.
Rhymes With Orange: Actually this sort of pairing may explain the origin of Easter eggs.
@2+2=7: Or — work with me here — Luann’s town is the equivalent of a dementia village, set up to make Luann and her friends feel “normal” despite whatever… condition they have. Having the same people teach high school and college is just a consequence of the limited number of trained staff. Their apparent lack of standards is because education is not their primary goal. Luann may eventually “graduate” but will never leave the facility, so will never have (or need) a real job.
@Ken: I like it, but let’s dial it up to 11. Let’s have Jack Worth show up to the intervention too! “Mary, your constant, unwelcome, misguided meddling amongst my Wall Street peers and their families not only drove me fake my own death and embark on a spiritual odyssey that led me to Nyamjang Chu Monastery, but it was the proximate cause of the 1987 Black Monday Wall Street crash. I’m breaking a 40-year vow of silence to tell you that you need to cut this shit out!”
@Terry Rhoden: “Yellowstone” became one of my favorite hate-watches when they had episodes involving a kidnapping, automatic rifle fire in the downtown area and fistfights galore and THE top authorities in the state (the Dutton family – ‘the good guys’) called out the most powerful law enforcement agency around.
Not the State Police. Not the National Guard.
The LIVESTOCK PATROL (commanded by a member of the Dutton family – ‘the good guys’)
Soon, there dozens of white guys in full body armor (marked LIVESTOCK PATROL), masks and assault weapons roaming around starting gun fights. The corporate guy who ordered the kidnapping gets shot while on the toilet and bodies are dumped down a ravine used by the Dutton family for years.
Did I mention the Dutton family are ‘the good guys’?
RMMD – Glenwood is getting pretty fancy, y’all. They already have a DiPreto’s for that triple-thick shake action. There’s Jordan’s fancy-pants restaurant from fine dining, and then there’s The Diner. And that’s where the real problem is going to arise.
When the Glenwood Motel Cafe opens, there’s going to be a Cafe-on-Diner smackdown. This town has room for only one folksy, sassy, plump waitress, and that one is Wanda, by gum!
I don’t know who this buxom blonde johnny-come-lately bimbo thinks she is, but she “mae-mae” get her teeth slapped out of her head.
RMMD-They are going to need to reassure people that they won’t be murdered in the showers anymore.
Rex Morgan: A motel with room service is actually a concept I could really get into. You’re usually lucky if there’s a Denny’s or Waffle House in walking distance, and their waitresses are hardly ever former movie stars. Like, fewer than 1 out of 20, if I’m doing the numbers.
Crankshaft-We shall no longer see this kid as he and Ed go off on a quest to get rid of a ring.
Reading ‘Gil Thorp’ today, seeing the newest member of the Glenwood Motel Gang in RMMD and reading the comments about ‘Luann’, I’m really straining not to post something that would blow right past the ‘no politics’ rule here.
Not because I’m in disagreement with what any of you have said, mind, but because my mind can’t help taking it two giant steps further.
FC: Thel is doing a piss-poor job of jutting today. We don’t wanna see dirty pillows of the small, throw-pillow variety. We wanna see massive melons. Jut, Thel – jut as if your life depended on it! We’re all counting on you!
@BigTed: There’s always the possibility that the motel delivery person might knock on the wrong door in the middle of the night and the renter gets mad thinking it’s the pimp interrupting his ‘date’ after just five minutes.
Ya gotta include that kind of risk in your business model.
Rex Morgan: Am I reading this right? Is this implying that this hotel hasn’t had any real customers in years and has just been dedicated entirely to housing and feeding Truck and occassionally his visiting friends? No wonder this manager wants to change things up. He probably desperately wants to talk to anyone that isn’t somehow related to the roots country scene, just for variety’s sake if nothing else.
Also Rex Morgan: REALLY not a fan of how Beatty drew Stalker Lady in the first panel. What the hell is that pose? Is she part turtle?
@The Quiet Man: Yeah, I’m also working hard to keep my observations about the class-based world of Luann under glass. I’m probably thinking the same giant two steps you are.
@Ken: Interesting theory. Would be a hell of a twist if decided the Evanses to end Luann this way.
@matt w: Truly a loss. He was a talented guy.
@Schroduck: #27: To put in another perspective, Tony Hawk is now plugging over the counter arthritis pain reliefs on the plugger demographic channels.