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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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Garfield, 7/19/25

True comics internet oldheads remember Garfield Minus Garfield, a webcomic that, as the title implied, took daily Garfield comics in which Jon and Garfield interacted and simply removed Garfield from them. This became a minor internet sensation back in 2008, and apparently tickled Jim Davis so much that it became an officially licensed book. That was many years ago, and I hope I don’t sound churlish when I say that the concept never really worked for me because it seemed slightly off. Surely the joke should not be that Jon is alone and talking to nobody; Garfield should remain in the frame but his thought balloons should be removed, to show us the “real” world where Jon is just a depressed and/or deranged man talking to his cat, who, like all cats, cannot understand him or talk back. Today’s strip is a great example of why that would work. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” says Jon, with absolutely no joy in his eyes, before staring at his cat for two panels in absolute silence.

Mary Worth, 7/19/25

21st century commercial air travel is, in terms of deaths or injuries per mile, the safest form of transportation humankind has ever produced. I guess it’s slightly more dangerous than simply staying at home and sitting absolutely still, so technically Mary isn’t wrong when she says it’s “a privilege and also a risk,” but she is being extremely overdramatic. She’s also referring to flying coach via Denver to New York City, a place she’s visited at least twice before, as “explor[ing] the unknown,” so she’s really on one today, I guess.

Dustin, 7/19/25

Helen is clearly used to Ed not specifying that he wants his bacon crispy and then complaining when he gets it and it’s not crispy, so she intervenes in panel one here, hoping that their waitress will not in fact hate them by the end of the meal. By panel three we can already see her effort was in vain.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/23/25

Now, look, you know that Spark Plug is a horse and I know that Spark Plug is a horse, but if you didn’t know that Spark Plug is a horse, nothing about this strip would tell you that, right? Like, call me out of touch, but I’m reasonably sure that “brown-eyed baby” isn’t universally known code for a horse. Lots of human babies have brown eyes! Imagine if you were someone who didn’t know the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith lore, and for some reason today was the first time you decided to read this strip. You’d be baffled! “It sounds like this Barney Google fella does have a baby,” you’d say, “and it has brown eyes and a funny name! Why would he give his baby to these people to babysit, one of whom didn’t even remember the baby existed at all?”

Gil Thorp, 6/23/25

Sorry to trouble you, Gil, but we can’t have someone obsessed with late 19th/early 20th century spiritualism chaperone the prom. Can you imagine? Why, by the end of the evening he’ll be leading them in seances and such, when they should by rights be out in their cars, fingerbanging each other and/or being fingerbanged!

The Phantom, 6/23/25

Speaking of narration from the dead, I’m always a fan of when The Phantom reminds us that everything we see in the strip is a story dreamed up by writer Lee Falk (1911-1999). Sorry, General Chuma! You have been summoned into existence merely to be tormented for our amusement by a pencil-mustached, pipe-smoking sadist.

Garfield, 6/23/25

Remember Garfield, the cartoon cat who famously hates Mondays? You’ve heard him telling jokes about hating Mondays before, of course. But what if he typed those jokes, into a computer? That’d be pretty wild, huh?