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Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/20/25

Look, I know what I’m about to say is gonna make me sound like a humorless nitpicker, but I promise that I do in fact know that the whole point of “cartooning” is that you draw a person in a funny, unrealistic way that works only when you don’t think about what exactly is going on with the parts you can’t see, under the clothes or under the skin. But I gotta nitpick it when they make you think about it! Like, love handles are just above your hips, and I’m sure the Mother Goose and Grimm house style is to think of the waist of their characters as being comically high, and that’s hard to read when they’re wearing flowing robes like this demon is, but … those are boobs, right? Saggy boobs? They don’t look like love handles at all, I’m sorry, and I’m so mad about it I can’t even go in depth on how the “hell spa” wordplay doesn’t quite work (yeah, I know it’s a pun, but do you think we on the mortal plane go to an “Earth spa,” demon??? c’mon).

Family Circus, 10/20/25

Normally, I would think the “parent makes a big show of teasing a kid when they do something good by implying that there’s something wrong with them” is not really the sort of thing you want to do if you’re really aiming to reinforce good behavior, but based on Jeffy’s face here, there’s no real danger of that, because that is one of the blankest expressions I’ve ever seen. No thoughts, only Jeffy. He is definitely not processing Ma Keane’s complicated little semiotic dance, which I guess is really just for her.

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Mary Worth, 9/16/25

It’s not exactly clear how much time in-strip is supposed to have elapsed between the current storyline and Olive’s original appearance in the strip; presumably it’s not the 11 years that have passed in real time, but probably like … five or six, I’m guessing? And one of the oddnesses of childhood is that five or six years wouldn’t seem so long to someone Mary’s age, but a kid in that scenario really would say “I remember” like it happened in another era. So, so far, so normal, except that Olive also says “remember” when she talks about her spooky visions of the life she and Mary lived in Ancient Egypt, so I think that adds a different valence to it. Anyway, I guess if you were a naive child, you might think that being able to talk to animals would make you a good vet, but hopefully she’ll get a chance to talk to Dr. Ed and learn that that job is just one dead pomeranian after another, and the only thing that would make it worse would be if you could hear the pomeranians speak in complete sentences.

Hi and Lois, 9/16/25

Lois is desperate to see some evidence that two people really can stay happily married to each other for any length of time, and she is not finding it today.

Family Circus, 9/16/25

Sure, Jeffy is being an idiot as usual, but don’t be so grotesquely smug about it, Billy. You didn’t arrange things so that time only flows in one direction, at the same rate for everyone in the same inertial referential frame! What if you were shot into space at relativistic speeds for an extended space voyage and Jeffy stayed on Earth and you came back and he was older? Who’d be smug then, huh, Billy? I mean, probably you, I guess, you’d be a worldwide celebrity and hero of exploration, and he’d still just be some guy, and an old guy to boot.

Garfield, 9/16/25

Wait, do you expect me to believe that notorious dog-hater Garfield is watching some kind of TV show starring a talking dog, and complimenting the talking dog character? Sorry, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at all. #notmygarfield #garfieldcanonicallyhasnothingbutcontemptfordogs

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Luann, 9/11/25

Many years ago, when I was a TA in grad school, I had a very precocious undergraduate student who used to come to office hours to hang out and shoot the shit with me. The final exam was three essay questions, and I graded them blind without looking at the name on the front until I was done, and I was disappointed to see that he had completely biffed one of the questions, and it was enough to drag down the A+ he had going into the final to an A-. But if I was disappointed, he was enraged, and after grades came out, he tracked down my home phone number and yelled at me about this, telling me at one point that his father said sometimes teachers give a bad grade to students they felt intellectually intimidated by, and because I had at that point already quit grad school, I got to just laugh at him and hang up. Anyway, I don’t really have the energy to go into the dynamic here between Bernice and [squints] “Alan,” but mostly what I’m trying to say is that if any student of mine included an unsolicited 12-minute animated graphic as part of their assignment, they would not be getting five bonus points, and it wouldn’t be because of my intellectual envy, I tell you what.

Dustin, 9/11/25

Wait, is Dustin’s dad saying he’s good at sex, or not good at sex? Or is he saying that having kids despite not having had sex very often or for very long is evidence that he’s good at sex, because I do not think that claim holds up to scrutiny. In conclusion, I hate this strip a lot, because it’s difficult to parse and in the process of attempting to do so I have to think about Dustin’s parents having sex, which — and I’m sure you, being in the same boat as I am now, agree with me on this point — is a profoundly unpleasant experience, for me, and, I assume, for them.

Family Circus, 9/11/25

God, I love Jeffy’s facial expression here. His brain isn’t hungry at all! He doesn’t know anything, but the important thing is that he doesn’t want to know anything, and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t want to know anything. He is nothing but true to himself.