Honestly unsurprised that a dog would use its unprecedented power of speech for this
Post Content
Mary Worth, 6/29/26
The very first Mary Worth plot covered on this blog introduced both Tommy in full drug lord mode and launched the Wilbur/Iris relationship, so it makes sense that Wilbur’s view of Tommy is filtered through the difficulties Tommy’s caused his mother. That’s not why he’s so upset, though (obviously Wilbur has caused Iris plenty of trouble on his own). No, the real issue is that if even Dawn isn’t writing Tommy off as a hopeless addict and loser, where does that leave Wilbur? He’ll be fighting Ian to avoid the “worst dude in Charterstone” title, and Ian agreed to not murder his wife’s parrot so he’s already got a head start! Anyway, I’m looking forward both to seeing Wilbur’s emotional meltdown and learning what “teen dance-offs” are.
Alice, 6/29/26
A while back we learned that Alice might be good at her job, actually, which I found somewhat destabilizing, but we didn’t learn what her job actually is. Today we find out that she’s apparently a teacher of some kind, which is funny because we’ve never, ever seen her teaching a class. Maybe she should be laid off, actually? Since she doesn’t have any students, and teaching them is her job?
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/29/26
Ha ha, yes, Snuffy, that is certainly one way to construe the gentleman’s statement! But for real, stealing chickens from your destitute neighbors is one thing, but you stole a car and you’re going to jail jail now.
Herb and Jamaal, 6/29/26
Oh, well, big news, Herb: when people say “affordability,” they are actually specifically discussing whether people can afford to pay for goods and services. People like you, for instance! So we’re all talking about the same thing here, it turns out.
Six Chix, 6/29/26
Yeah, if my dog started talking to me like this, I would be freaking the fuck out! This guy knows what’s up!
90 replies to “Honestly unsurprised that a dog would use its unprecedented power of speech for this”
Family Circus Mashup: What if someone else spoke the second panel’s caption?
Sally Forth – Ronan is dangling his participle.
Dennis the Menace – Is this a thinly disguised version of the anti-gun control argument?
And . . . Juggs Parker is back!
BG&SS:
That thar confession that Smif just made ain’t gonna stick in court, ‘cuz the sheriff didn’t give Snuffy his Miranda warnins about the testy-moanial privilege against self-incrimination.
RMMD: “Yes, it is so disrespectful to pretend to play instruments. Say, what’s this old ‘Partridge Family’ album?”
@Horace Broon, yRMMD: Sarah has been assimilated by Luann and Shannon.
Six Chix:
Is that transparent visual nod to The Scream an illustration of Munch housin’ by proxy?
6Cx: Aren’t chicks more concerned about whether or not you put the seat down? Lid up, seat down seems like a good compromise.
Alice:
You might be feeling bad for Alice because she’s losing her job, but since she apparently works for a school run by Hitler my sympathy is limited. I’m glad they don’t have any students!
Alice:
Trying to trick her boss and save at least a part of her curriculum by using Zeno’s paradox, Alice asks: “Why don’t you do that gradually, through reducing my course load by successive halves?”
MW: “Is Tommy a classmate of yours?”
No, dad. I haven’t been to class in two years, silly.
Mary Worth:
In an exercise in sheer futility, Wilbur scans the magazine’s back pages for advertisements on increasing male potency.
Chix (sic): Lid starts flopping up and down. “Hey, isn’t someone gonna ask me my opinion. hmmpf“
Mary Worth:
“The main event at today’s slate of dance-offs is Jets v. Sharks, so I just know it’s going to end well!”
Aren’t Tommy and Dawn in their 20’s? I don’t know exactly what ‘Teen Dance Offs’ are, but I assume it would be a weird thing for childless adults to attend.
Luann: Calling it now, Tiffany’s nowhere near Paris and it’s all a fake so she can keep up appearances. To what end, who knows and who cares?
CS: Well, I stand corrected that yesterday was the end of this. I guess we have one more week of this, THEN we go back to The Interview that Never Ends.
S4th: Yesterday I was wondering to myself why they didn’t rent a vehicle large enough to fit everyone and their luggage, like a GMC Suburban. Now I know, it’s so they can get separated and the ‘joke’ will be they don’t get to have their adventures together.
MW: Wilburman is thinking it’s bush-skulkin’ time!
Ph: So if an ‘autonomous’ system is going to spring the Python, Schmelon Schmusk, why go to the trouble of picking up No-Mad No-Return yourself? Why didn’t you send a pilot-less robot plane for him? I’m thinking someone like you would have a soft spot for plot elements from ‘This Island Earth’!
MW: It’s damned seldom that the Westons can imagine themselves superior to someone. Sorry, Tommy, wrong place, wrong time.
RMMD: Of the many, many things I could find to get into a tizzy over, this wouldn’t even make the Top Ten.
BG&SS: Good thing it wasn’t a horse. As I understand it, that’s a No-Questions-Hangin’.
SXCHX: Would’ve been funnier if the dog had used the opportunity to employ the word “bitch.”
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith:
I like the expressions on the faces of Sheriff Tait and the car salesman. The latter seems shocked, as if he’s thinking “my God, I did say that! I don’t have a leg to stand on!”; the former is begrudgingly conceding that Snuffy’s right, that passes for permission in the legal wasteland of Hootin’ Holler, where people have no understanding of pragmatics or context. The attempt to bring modern conveniences like cars to the Holler will therefore be abandoned as economically unviable, setting back the region’s Human Development Index another 50 years.
MW: Ah-ha, I knew it! Irrational Wilbur Weston tantrum incoming!
C’shaft: So, Eugene and Lucy were the very last holdouts of the swing era, dancing in empty ballrooms until the late 1950s before Eugene was drafted to…um…kind of hang out in Vietnam until things picked up over there, I guess?
Dustin: “Just kidding! Actually, I was thinking you could respond to the negative reviews and offer solutions to their problems, thus raising you in the estimation of potential customers who see you want to atone for their bad experience, while spending a little extra time with me to address and correct my errors rather than putting me in a customer-facing job with apparently no training.”
“…No, I’ll just kick you to the curb and assume my problem is solved forever, the way I did with my orthodontist.”
JP: I love the subtle dread on Charlotte’s face when she asks “Am I family?” Does she share DNA with these people? Do they have some horrible condition which causes them to behave like this? Who can she talk to about receiving a full family history to give to her pediatrician?
Phantom: Five minutes later, the AI’s hallucinatory math has it launching an attack on where it assumes the Python to be hiding out: Branson, Missouri.
Pluggers are wasteful and sloppy.
RMMD: “But isn’t it really insulting to be standing here acting superior and judging the actions of people who to all appearances aren’t as privileged as we are, when we know nothing about the circumstances which led them to this point?”
“….Oh honey, and you were doing so well until then.”
Alice:
“Perhaps if you didn’t look like some hellish combination of Inspector Clouseau and Albert Einstein, sir, more students would enroll in our curriculum!”
CS: You know the Big Ball Of Violence trope, where a fight breaks out and turns into a cloud entity that absorbs random passersby? The story is exactly that, but it’s the Big Ball Of Tragedy. Those five random people are being unwittingly sucked into a world of pointless suffering, incoherent writing, and destroyed comic books. If you live in greater Cleveland and you see this thing, steer clear of it!
Luann: So Tiffany is shopping in Paris, while Luann is at a lame summer camp, and Bernice is sitting in a spare bedroom in Luann’s house. And people wonder why I say Tiffany is the best character in the strip. She would have dropped these losers years ago.
MW: Speaking of people who should have been dropped years ago…
It’s so on-brand that Alice not only feels the need to inform the reader of the artist who performed “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” but also the album it’s on, increasingly irrelevant information for the modern streaming era but oh-so-important to this comic’s aged demographic.
MW: “We’re getting into a time machine and going back to 1990 when hanging out at the mall was a thing, Dad!”
Up-to-date MW: “We’re co-shopping on Amazon and then watching Tik Tok dances.”
The wealthy Abby Spencer knows how to throw a welcoming home dinner – hot dogs with no sides.
6CHIX: This is how Son of Sam got started. The “Son of Sam” murders committed by David Berkowitz took place in New York City over a 13-month span from July 1976 to July 1977 so this year is the 50th anniversary.
Everyone else is getting ready for the big 4th of July but only this comic is honoring the legacy of one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Oh, and BTW he’s still alive.
JP: The fabulously wealthy Abbey Spencer knows how to throw a welcoming home dinner – hotdogs with no sides.
Alice: Who wants to work for an educational organization so cheap or broke that your boss doesn’t even get a chair to sit in? Wait – is he working from a Starbucks?
Also Alice: you know, she could be a dog obedience teacher.
@The Quiet Man: re: Phantom comment: Come on, now. Ignotus Vindictive has a cool mask and wants to show it off.
Alice: Obviously the best bit of this comic is the implication that Alice has spent… weeks? months? standing in front of an empty classroom teaching no-one, and didn’t notice until now. Is she even actually aware that she’s a teacher?
MW-“My daughter and my dealer? Whatever do I do?”
MW: I know this has been asked before, but it bears repeating. Why is Tommy still at Charterstone? Did Zak move out of his mansion into a two bedroom condo? Is Iris living with Zak but still paying for her condo so Tommy can feel like a big boy? Mary’s advice to Iris during the Vicodin arc was to spend more time with Tommy, which she took to mean accompanying him everywhere, including therapy. When Iris had her thyroid plot, Zak offered to “help out” with Tommy, indicating that he still needed constant supervision. And I’m supposed to believe Iris is leaving him unmonitored? Going against Mary’s advice? That’s an offense punishable by execution in Santa Royale.
What is going on with the comics section of the Seattle Times website today? Took a look at it on four browsers and nothing from Comics Kingdom is showing up and GoComics is only showing yesterday’s.
Mary Worth: “I’m going to the mall, Dad…Tommy and I are going to check out the Teen Dance-Offs!” Let us pause to marvel at this majestic piece of dialogue that could 100% be spoken by any young American in the year of our Lord 2026. Dawn (#1852 US girls’ name) and Tommy (#731 US boys’ name) are going to watch teen-agers dance off (sulk on their phones between rounds of Dance Dance Revolution) at the mall (closed in 2018, last recorded stores: Spencer’s and a Thai massage parlor). It’s low-key the start of a very chalant relationship, fr fr! (Or maybe it’s a skibidi relationship, who can say?)
Dennis the Menace: That isn’t mud Dennis is tracking into the house, the neighbors septic tank overflowed.
Marvin: For all the parents of children who can’t afford or just don’t feel like taking their kids to the new Toy Story movie you can just let them read this comic. It’s just as good!
Cranky: I don’t understand why there’s suddenly this audience for Hairy Dingus, including a super-smug looking Crankshaft. Where did they come from? For the past several days, Dingus has been in his house reading his dad’s diary. Is he leading a parade of old people somewhere? Is he like the Pied Piper, except they’re all going to the cancer and amputation wards?
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: As a teacher, I can tell you w/some authority that “skibbidi” is out, and “6/7” is about to expire as well.
@Rosstifer: Eh, a buddy and I used to go see the girl’s state basketball championships when we were in college. Of course, we were degenerates who smuggled in a pint of peach schnapps, so maybe your point stands?
Luann: Isn’t that wonderful? Tiffany found the Diamondback Trading Post at King’s Island amusement park in Cincinnati.
Wow, was today’s Six Chix secretly ghostwritten by an immature guy who resents women? “Waaa, everyone’s telling me what to do!”
Alice While the demographic “enrollment cliff” is a challenge for any educational institution to navigate, I’m pretty sure Alice’s school was doomed anyhow because its facilities consist of empty rooms and one laptop to organize the entire institution – that’s no way to attract today’s students! They at least expect chairs to sit on!
MW Well, now we know when the last time was that Moy spent any significant time in public – at least a decade or two ago, before the major decline of shopping malls!
RMMD Wow, did the writer get teased for not noticing someone doing lip-sync recently? This is getting downright weird.
@Schroduck: She continues to teach her class, but her “students” are either mannequins, or the dead bodies of her murder-spree victims.
@TheDiva: A recent comment here noted that Crankshaft has fallen into the Gasoline Alley trap of having characters age in real time but never letting them die. The weirdness with when Eugene and Lucy danced and when Larry Dinkle died, might be Batiuk recognizing it’s untenable for all of that to be pre-WWII and starting to ret-con.
Six Chix: I feel like we’re sleeping on the horror of a large, featureless room containing only a toilet with no visible plumbing connection, no toilet paper, no sink, no shower, no reading materials of any sort. But then we sleep on a lot with Six Chix, there’s only so much time in the day.
Six Chix: Installing a living room toilet in your unfurnished apartment was your first mistake.
That’s a really clever take on the Mary Worth storyline. I’ve always appreciated how absurd those strips could get!
@Rosstifer: Aren’t Tommy and Dawn in their 20’s?
They’re drawn that way, but as John points out in this post, Tommy has been around since 2004, and he looked to be in his 20s then. Does meth keep you young? Not from the mugshots I’ve seen. So we’re left with time passing strangely in the Worthiverse.
It feels like Karen Moy was curious about what the young folk are up to today so she did her research using an Archie Comics Digest. Hey, at least the teen dance-off story from the late 50s probably had some fantastic Harry Lucey art!
***
Teen dance-offs, malls, and print magazines. Should we be concerned that the Mary Worth team appears to be adrift in time?
***
Honestly? Considering how dirty the automobile sales industry operates, we should be able to take them literally. You go ahead and keep that car, Snuffy, and good for you.
***
Word play is soooooooooooo much easier when you can say the same thing by just adding a word or two! I don’t care about the cost of health care, I’m worried about the cost of my bad-health care! Can I get my own comic now?
H&J – Specifically, “I can’t afford the ability to write a funny comic strip.”
Mary Worth: Wilbur’s never looked better! Does wide-eyed shock take years off a man’s face, or has he been moisturizing?
BG&SS: Not to mention operating a motor vehicle without a license. You cannot tell me that Snuffy has a driver’s license.
@Anonymous: This is how Abbey shows that she’s not just a spoiled and pampered rich person. “See, everybody? I know how to cook!”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Not today, thanks… uh… Yes, those are nice brushes, but…”
“Polonio! You need to have more sales resistance!”
“Thank you! I’ll make us both rich with this distributorship”
[On briefcase: MLM BRUSHES, INC.]
JP: Am I family? Asks Charlotte before heading to her room to finish her writ of emancipation.
@StripEye:
Another asshole spammer
Mods: Spam comment from “StripEye” @43
Was I supposed to know Dawn is 19? She’s been 19 for 30 years and they’ve been drawing her like she’s 30 for ages.
@Victor Von: Maybe this is one of the famous Pittsburgh basement toilets?
My parents have one though someone built some mameshift plywood walls around it. It had (has?) a pennant with the 1960 World Series winning Pirates roster on it.
@Baja Gaijin: the Keane Kompound allows role play these days?
If Snuffy’s liking for the car was so powerful that it caused Hootin’ Holler to spawn drivable roads, I kinda think he had to check it out.
Wary Morth:
Wilbur will crawl through the ornamental plants at the mall, stalking Dusk and Tommy, and screaming AUUUUUUGH at intervals, terrifying everybody except Dusk, who will be too high on Tommy’s product to notice.
Life is brutal.
@TheDiva: If you want a reall belly laugh, Big Bands enjoyed a commercial resurgence in the 1960s that is mostly ignored in popular history. Remember that a few people over 35 actually continued to be alive during that era so there was still an audience out there. Buddy Rich was very popular, so was the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra. So Larry Dinkle might have had a decent career had he kept the faith rather than dying of despair. Ha ha.
Mary’s Worst: Does anyone else hear “Buck Rogers”‘s Twiki in their mind’s ears when someone mentions Tommie’s last name?
I’m not sure I’m ready for Alice to shift its focus to Hitler’s Extraordinary Playlist, but I guess we’ll see where it goes.
“The election is tight, with exactly half the votes going to ‘up’ and half to ‘down.’ It doesn’t appear that the man is going to vote, electing instead to scream into the voice . . . heh, we can all relate to that, right Roger? . . . so we’re awaiting the final vote from the cat, who has entered the polling place, shat in a box, and left without voting on ‘up’ or ‘down’. Looks like the house might be entering a constitutional crisis here. Let’s go to Steve Karnacki for analysis.”
@Lauralot: Hell, why is Dawn still in Charterstone? Even if we allow for the comic strip to live in a continuous present, Dawn has crossed what I call The Luann Threshold. That’s when you become an adult, but you can’t support yourself, and can’t focus yourself in any direction that might justify your parents continuing to support you. No wonder Luann’s parents prefer Bernice’s company.
If Dawn doesn’t like whatever Wilbur’s about to say next, it’s her own fault for accepting his support, at the cost of My House My Rules. Especially when Dawn has *two* rich parents she can sponge off of, and chooses Wilbur every single time.
Some cropping job on the preview in judge parker yesterday!
Phantom: How cute. Not-Elon thinks you can reboot the Wambesi.
@matt w:
My home in NJ had one. A very old house that had been expanded several times in the past, you could see that at one time it was the only toilet in the home -which lined up nicely with the casement window.
@Vanya: I was thinking of the 1997 swing revival brought about by the song “Zoot Suit Riot.” It was a big deal… for like six weeks.
@matt w: This one either has sentience, or just knows how MW comics are.
Is “Alice” a “me In Black” spinoff, and Alice teaches the aliens human life?
Wilbur doesn’t trust Tommy! He betrayed Iris’s trust, he became addicted to drugs, he went to prison! Unlike him, who betrayed Iris’s trust, became addicted to alcohol and didn’t go to prison (though I am sure he broke some laws faking his own death). He cannot trust someone unable to escape the consequences of his actions!
@Bob Tice:
Trying to trick her boss and save at least a part of her curriculum by using Zeno’s paradox, Alice asks: “Why don’t you do that gradually, through reducing my course load by successive halves?”
Sure, that works until they reach the Solomonic minimum. . .
@TheDiva: On Pluggers …remember when Pluggers were the type to smugly announce “Any job worth doing is worth doing well”? What happened.
Alice is an adjunct faculty member teaching at a community college or second tier state U? That explains a lot. I suspect that if I spend 5+ years of my life writing a dissertation on The Hermeneutics of Emptiness: Empty Space and the Ghost in the Machine only to have a job — with no guarantee that I would actually have remunerative work in any given semester — where I was teaching kids (with no interest in learning material in a course they have to take because general ed requirements, thankfully, still exist) stuff that was taught to me in high school (and which I managed to already know by middle school), I would end up like Alice.
Heck, it’s probably not that they didn’t have enough kids enrolled to offer the course Alice usually teaches, but rather that they didn’t have enough students to offer a full slate of advanced courses to the full time faculty. So somebody lucky and plucky enough to get tenure at Alice’s university is now has to teach the class Alice would teach in order to have a full teaching load. And (from my current personal experience as a full professor at a second tier state university) Alice, you may be comforted to know that Prof. Bigshot is also quite frustrated that his teaching load has gone up to 4:4 (it was 3:3 or less when he was hired) and that he doesn’t have one lower division lecture or lab in which he gets to introduce bright young minds to his field but rather has to teach 2-3 such courses, full of students who are struggling with high school level material.
@Rube: I see no contradiction between TheDiva’s observation and your memory. Pluggers are exactly the sort of people who would lecture “kids today” that “any job worth doing is worth doing well” while themselves doing a sloppy and half-assed job.
Snuffy Smith : Josh, You really think Snuffy would be so dumb as to commit a crime outside of Sherriff Tait (and whoever the Judge is again)’s jurisdiction?
That car salesman is regretting building his lot on the outside of Piney Creek’s limits for tax
evasionpurposes, now that he’s been told that just makes him a target for the violent inbred mutants living in the hills.**************
Mary Worth : You can do it, Wilbur! You can play the role of the senex iratus, denying his daughter’s romantic wishes, and stall this romance long enough for Brandy to come back from her trip, and the old status quo to be restored!
**************
Safe Havens : …Why do you guys need pet sitters? YOU’RE the pets! Inviting people into your house just increases the risk of your secret being blown, especially considering you’ve shown difficulty controlling the transformations, and they’ve started happening at the most inappropriate times!
Six Chix: Can we just take a moment to appreciate that the cartoonist referenced Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and did so in such a way that it actually makes the panel more interesting and adds to the intrigue of the situation rather than just “look how cultured I am?”
Pretty weird for two adults to go to a “teen dance-off”!
MW: You’d think Wilbur would make a bigger deal out of Dawn interrupting him on the toilet.
FC: Thel removes calipers from around Jeffy’s head. “Yay! You’re almost a casaba!”
The surprising thing is not that Snuffy is a thief, but that he can drive! I will still assume he doesn’t have a licence
They have such a big house that the toilette is not cramped in one corner of the bathroom but it has an entire empty wall behind it with nothing around! I think they can afford to buy a fancy dog water bowl that keep the water moving!
FG: Damn. I was hoping they’d catch her coming out of the shower.
Today’s Alice is a strip, a text below the strip commenting the strip and a text below the text explaining the text. It’s turtles all the way down — literally!
That’s the problem for wannabe populists who think they can ride it for good ends. You think you have invented a simple enough slogan for people to rally around but then it turns out the people are too dumb to get it or are too pedantic to accept it. Just blame a minority, if you want to succeed!
@Ettorre: Herb and Jamaal
MW- When Dawn and Tommy go to the dance off, Wilbur can spend quality time with his pants off!
JP: You can’t accuse Abbey of not laying a festive board. Boiled hot dogs with supermarket rolls and the plastic ketchup and mustard containers right out on the table means “dinner” at Spencer Ranch at least three nights a week, ever since Marie left. Welcome home, Soph — pass the Alka-Seltzer!
“Dad, I am going to the mall to check out the teens dance off!”
“Good idea! Just remember not to stare for too long and be discreet when taking pictures, trust me, I know!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you say you want to check out teens?”
Snuffy Smith: If “The Wind and the Willows” was half-assed and lacking cutesy animal characters.
Herb is a small businessman, so his main problem is not whether he can afford essentials, but how much he can increase the prices without either incurring a loss for each sale or without losing too many clients. The problem is not affordability, it’s profitability
Six Chix: Meanwhile, the turd he just deposited is cursing him for sending it to a sewery demise.