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Archive: Mary Worth

137

The whackest place to live in America, maybe

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/11/26

OK, there’s two things that could be going on here. The first is that we’re meant to understand that Hootin’ Holler is one of the proposed wackiest places to live in America, which, no! No!! It’s poor and depressing and violent! That’s not wacky at all! The other possibility is that the gag writer just thought of the idea of a “wackiest places to live in America” list to serve as a counterpoint to the well-trod territory of the best places to live list, and decided that Snuffy hearing about this idea that certainly isn’t a joke and can barely be called a premise was good enough for a Saturday strip and then moved on with their life. Honestly, I respect the second one more.

Mary Worth, 4/11/26

“Mary has immediately begun to use her new pet to serve as a sounding board for her to workshop what she thinks is the best possible spin on her meddling,” is, I guess, not a huge surprise. Anyway, I just want to say now and for the record that it’s possible for an older man to have a perfectly good relationship with his children and to fall in love with a fake internet babe and send her lots of money! I feel like sending lots of money to a hot girl you met online is not necessarily something you check in with your kids about, even if you love them and speak to them regularly! The correlation here is not causation!

Family Circus, 4/11/26

The movies? Why would Billy want to do that when he could keep reading about The City of Brotherly Love, America’s silliest town! Eagles fans pelting Santa Claus with batteries … the MOVE bombing … that innocent robot they murdered … it’s all very silly and Billy simply can’t get enough!

149

To be fair, everyone in Marvin kind of hates each other

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Marvin, 4/10/26

Pixar’s beloved Toy Story movies are about, among other things, the complicated emotional relationship between toys and humans, especially when humans become too old for toys anymore. Marvin has been doing something similar this week, except that the toys and Marvin kind of hate each other, and now his parents have told him that he has to leave them in his toy box almost all the time, and they’re going to die.

Mary Worth, 4/10/26

Despite her fearsome reputation, Mary is, honestly, fairly conflict averse. She’s still reeling over the time Harvey stormed off because she gently suggested to him that maybe he’s not “in love,” he just got horny over a fake lady on his phone. So she’s really trying her darndest to get Sharon to show up at Charterstone without saying the words “scam” or “$200,000,” and it’s really quite impressive.

Hi and Lois, 4/10/26

I feel like this would make a little more sense if this was just a random young person for Hi to be scornful towards, but, you know what? I’m enjoying the scenario we’ve been given here, where he’s taking an elevator ride with his own son, who has turned his back on his father and is listening to music or a podcast or maybe even just white noise rather than trying to interact with him in any way.

155

Fraught greetings

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Luann, 4/6/26

So at some point in the long stretch when I was demonstrating self-care and not reading Luann, there was some kind of romantic/emotional entanglement between Bernice and a guy named “Piro,” which I have learned about peripherally but have never sought out further details on. I guess the fool’s paradise I’ve been living in ends today, though, and I’ll soon be learning more than I ever wanted to know. For today I mostly just wanted to point out that the Luann brain trust apparently decided to start a plot with a booty call text, learned that “u up?” is a popular format for such a message, and couldn’t bring themselves to introduce such a barbarism in their comic, so they did the best they could with it.

Mary Worth, 4/6/26

OK, I have to hand it to Mary, “He had a girlfriend … and now he doesn’t. He’s upset about it” is an extremely funny way to describe the Harvey story to this point. Still, I feel like if you wanted to pull an emotionally distant adult child back into her father’s life, “He sent $200,000, which presumably you would have been in line to inherit, to someone he’s never met in person” would be a somewhat more effective hook? I don’t mean to tell Mary how to do her business, though, and Sharon’s reaction seems to indicate that “salacious gossip” may be the best on-ramp to get her involved in the situation.

Judge Parker, 4/6/26

Bogdan update! Just moments after Bogdan was punched in the throat by Neddy, an unnamed third party has begun bludgeoning him with a baseball bat, or a cricket bat, or maybe a fraternity paddle? Whatever it is, it’s definitely something you don’t want to be hit in the head with, even if you hadn’t just been punched in the throat, and, as we’ve discussed, Bogdan has been punched in the throat relatively recently.