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Family Circus, 9/22/19

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think the joke in today’s Family Circus is too subtle for me. Is it that they both look smug in the final panel because they each think they’ve pulled one over on the other — Ma Keane because she’s talked Jeffy down to a goldfish, Jeffy because the goldfish is what he wanted all along, but he “went big” with his requests so that she’d be more willing to get him a goldfish? I don’t think Jeffy’s actually smart enough to pull that off. I think Ma Keane is looking smug because she talked Jeffy down to getting a goldfish, and Jeffy looks smug because he realized he can eat the goldfish.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/22/19

Oh hey, in case you forgot, Buck, who’s having a new baby with Mindy, already has an old baby — what scientist call a “teen” — from his previous marriage (not to the lady who shot him in the head, the one before that). Anyway, here Buck is having a man-to-man talk with his teen son about how great it is that his teen son knows how to poop in a toilet. They seem like they have fun!

Shoe, 9/22/19

I really love how completely depressed this lady looks here, just utterly wrecked by how poorly the evening has gone up till this point. Clearly the date is unsalvageable, so why not open the dinner conversation with “Hey, you ever eat anything that just gave you the shits real bad?”

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Mary Worth, 9/21/19

Longtime friend of the blog and Heathcliff obsessive Brandi Brown has a theory that 9/11 never happened in the Mary Worth universe, and after this strip, I’m finally convinced. In a world where commercial airlines were never weaponized, lax airport security allows even gross foreigners like Hugo to just pop off for an hour or two for a quick makeout session while storms over the midwest delay the daily Santa Royale International-Charles de Gaulle nonstop flight. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But Josh, what about the special Mary Worth strip commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks?” Well, while the Apartment 3-G that ran that day makes a fairly explicit reference to the attacks and the Twin Towers, the Mary Worth strip just features Mary leaving a message for some lady about her son who died ten years before, which, he could’ve died in any number of ways! Didn’t have to be in a terrorist attack. The fact that this lady saw that Mary was calling and let it go straight to voicemail makes sense in any version of the timestream, of course.

Family Circus, 9/21/19

Ha ha, kids sure do say the darnedest things, especially after you’ve sought shelter from a natural disaster but just left them upstairs to stare out of a completely unshuttered and unprotected window!

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Six Chix, 9/17/19

I want to pass over the actual joke at the core of today’s Six Chix (ha ha, moms sure love wine, amiright) and actually get into the visual shorthand being deployed here to establish that this is, in fact, a high-powered businessman, which, no matter what else I say about it, I have to admit that it worked, because we can all agree this is supposed to be a high-powered businessman, right? Anyway, our high-powered businessman is wearing a grey suit, obviously; he’s also wearing what appears to be a backpack with that suit, which more and more people are doing nowadays, but he’s also carrying a briefcase, because that’s a more universal high-powered businessman signifier, I guess. He’s also heading down into the subway, to establish he’s in New York City, the Big Apple, the nexus of all high-powered businessman energy (I will refrain from going on at great insufferable length about how the A, D, F, 1, 3, and 6 lines do not intersect anywhere). Finally, he’s yelling into his phone, which is a thing that high-powered businessmen do, the way they get things done. Who exactly is he ordering wine from? Is this a thing you can do in New York: order wine, over the phone? I’m definitely not high-powered enough to know!

(UPDATE: I 100% read the old woman in the background as just walking by on the sidewalk, which I think is fair given that her body language is not that different from the other dude on the sidewalk, and she was small because she’s a little further away, but I think commenters are right that she’s supposed to be the mother in question and … tiny? And strapped to his back? Like a …baby would be? Jesus, this fucking strip.)

Family Circus, 9/17/19

This isn’t just another Dolly malapropism, folks: PJ’s a robot! The older Keane Kids are biological units, but, I think we can all agree, those experiments were failures. PJ’s the next generation: cleaner, more efficient. He’s the future.