“Beasley, you imbecile. That’s not an award. The cup with ‘#1’ on it is given out to all the mail carriers, on account of they don’t give them time for bathroom breaks anymore.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Holy hell, Keane, you got outsmarted by goddamned Jeffy. It’s time to finally step out to the store for the pack of cigarettes and start a new life in a new city under an assumed name, but you’ll probably screw that up because you got outsmarted by goddamned Jeffy.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“By the by, Gertie, once you’re done wigging out over cicadas in bananas, call the police! There’s a giant bug monster in the house!” –ectojazzmage

“I shared this strip with my 20-something children, and they asked to be removed from the will.” –taig

“I can see why strips about precocious children appeal to the newspaper comics’ aging demographic. Both the very young and the very old live in a hazy cultural sphere where they’re aware of the existence of things but aren’t entirely clear on what those things are.” –TheDiva

“Dagwood must be high as fuck on Scotchgard fumes if he made it all the way home without food stains on his beard.” –nescio

“Wait a damn minute — he left while Mary was mid-bake. You don’t want those muffins once they get cold, friend.” –Old School Allie Cat

“Get your guns and body armor. Call up your militia buddies. We’re going to war, because I’ll die before I live on ‘Renewable Energy Alley.’” –Voshkod

“There once was a former Marine/ Whose intelligence wasn’t so keen/ So to answer the question/ Due to steroid ingestion/ He has a non-functioning peen.” –astroboy

“Mailherb didn’t even deliver any mail today, junk or otherwise; he just wanted to show off. Still, at least he put in more effort than the artist art compiler, who could not be bothered to find (let alone draw) more appropriate hand-grip assets to go with that clip-art trophy.” –jroggs

“I like that this strip seems to imply that postal workers can just deliver junk mail to whoever they want, whenever they want. The next time I end up with a big fat wad of sushi menus and political pamphlets I’ll know its because I pissed someone off.” –pugfuggly

“So Snuffy Smiff met God and refused to pay $50 for a painting. God punished Snuffy by making his mouth vanish, depriving him of speaking such insights as ‘purty good thar, feller.’ Did God punish Snuffy for not buying the painting? For calling him ‘feller?’ For praising His divine work as only ‘purty good?’ For murdering the English language? Parsons might explain away this depraved diety every Sunday but it boils down to a simple fact: you can’t spell ‘Hootin’ Holler’ without ‘Hell’ — and that explains a lot of Snuffy’s and the town’s miserable existence.” –KMD

“On second look and seeing Plato, looks more like a failed attempt to get some of that sweet Bose noise cancelling headphone product placement money. [Hangs up landline] ‘That was Bose. It’s a hard no. Hmm, run it anyway.’” –Hibbleton

“‘Oh no, no, no! I’m not stupid enough to walk into this trap!’ Buddy, you knew what you were into when you signed up to appear in a Judge Parker strip as a short-lived villain. If you had developed a schtick with a pun-based stage name you could have been in Dick Tracy.” –Philip

“Beetle is practically a Bodhisattva. He has no interest in being conscious or having physical sensations like food for Sarge or music for Rocky or sex with Miss Buxley. His only desire is to sleep and let his ego dissolve with consciousness. Truly, he’s the epitome of enlightenment! Or clinical depression, whatever.” –Ettorre

“Oh no, no, no! I’m not stupid enough to walk into this trap! If I walk through that door, I’m committing to at least a 10-minute interaction inside! Which in this strip will take six months or more to play out! Not for me! So long, suckers!” –cheech wizard

“Not to be a stickler, but it’s ‘Wooo!! Choo-choo!!’ when trying to get your kids to eat.” –Kevin on Earth

“Honestly love the idea of little Billy Keane trying to namedrop his family at school while the teacher groans at his shit. ‘Oh, I’m sorry ma’am, I was busy coming up with malapropisms for … [lowers sunglasses] The Family Circus.’ [teacher is already stamping an F on his paper]” –Dan

“Billy simply drew his panic attack! The huge numbers on the blackboard and the droplets of sweat are nice touches but the kids laughing at Billy’s incompetence are the strip’s tragic, crowning glory. It’s going to take more than a little art therapy to fix this kid.” –Victor Von

“‘Keith! How things are with your former girlfriend and your daughter?’ ‘Well the problem is that they are now my current girlfriend and my former daughter.’” –Ettore Costa, on Bluesky

“Considering Rex’s actual personality, I’m going to assume that ‘chirpy bedside manor’ is not a typo but instead a reference to a model mansion full of finches that Rex had placed next to Rene’s bed in hopes of driving him insane(r).” –beneprism.rip, on Bluesky

“Brisket with milk? ‘Sam’ rips off his rubber mask to reveal he is, in reality, Not-Kosher-Man! The hero who always shows up when something about the situation is decidedly Not Kosher!” –Peanut Gallery

“Mud is right to phrase Rene’s admission of nephewdom as a guilty confession. The authorities might have overlooked Rene’s scams and murder attempts, but there’s no way anyone can forgive a crime so heinous as being related to Lyle Ollman.” –jroggs

“The unbelievable news can’t be that this strip is finally ending after 100 years, because TV news doesn’t chase the audiences old enough to read Gasoline Alley, and the newspapers don’t have reporters to cover the corruption in City Hall, let alone that a favorite(?) comic strip for their aging readers is ending.” –Philip

“And I want my coffin to be a giant flour tortilla. I won’t be remembered for much, so let’s get nuts.” –made of wince

“Wisely, Jeffy’s parents never allow him to handle money, which is why he’s unfamiliar with two of the most prominent faces on coins and bills. Of course, most kids these days probably know their folks’ AmEx and Venmo numbers by heart, or just go straight to the Amazon app no one remembers to close on the family tablet. But the punkinheads aren’t savvy enough to figure those things out, which is why they still rely on dusty old American History books that cover the period from Washington to the current Great War.” –BigTed

“I wonder if Shoe actually takes place in our world, exactly as it is, but the cartoonist has this weird mental problem that translates everything he sees into birds and bird-friendly environments. Where other people see an office building or a restaurant, he sees a tree or a branch. It would really explain quite a lot and solve several problems.” –BeckoningChasm

“‘Hey, this strip is going to run just a couple days after the superbowl, do you think a football ref–‘ ‘No.’” –pugfuggly

“Clothes are a thing in the Shoeniverse but nobody confronts Shoe over his constant nudity. I can only assume they live in so much fear of this cloacahole’s newspaper destroying them that they just let him get away with everything short of murder. When someone like that walks naked as the day he hatched into your office, you’re not going to ask him to put out a cigar.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Arctic Circle has been a long-running experiment to find out under what circumstances you can depict the act of motorboating a woman’s breasts in the newspaper. Turns out you can, as long as the motorboater is a penguin and the motorboatee has seven fingers.” –Schroduck

“There are food dishes you can have fun writing words in sauce on top of, and there are food-wrapped-in-bread solutions that may permit the Earl of Sandwich to eat one-handed with a minimum of complications whilst indulging in his gambling addiction unimpeded, but the overlap between those two is clearly nonexistent. I’m sorry Blondie, but this is literally not a sandwich. And come to think, it looks about the size and shape of a double decker pizza? Why not call it that? Surely that’s the sort of novel food monstrosity Dagwood loves.” –Amelie Wikström

“The position of Cookie’s head bothers me. Is she part owl?” –Pozzo

“Like the mighty python, Keith can take days or even weeks to digest disappointing news.” –Voshkod

“LET’S CHECK IN ON JUNE’S ‘AUNT’ TILDY AND HER HUSBAND ‘THE COUNT’. SEE IF THEY’RE DOING ANYTHING INTERESTING. OH, THEY AREN’T. STILL, WORTH IT FOR THE ‘SCARE QUOTES’.” –Applemask

“‘How relaxed and open my neighbor has become,’ thought Mary. Carlos Alora had warned her about this — the decrepit sewage system at Charterstone wasn’t prepared for such frequent use. ‘These muffins ought to help him become a little more … constrained,’ she cackled softly, to no one at all.” –But What Do I Know?

“Mary will bring muffins. She will bring muffins and remind Keith that there is no objective reality. So what if Sonia is not his biological daughter. He has raised this adult for nearly a few months and even ruined a relationship. She’s as much his daughter as Keith is now Mary’s son.” –moscowtheclown

“Since Marvin’s mom has apparently abandoned a toddler in a public place, I think putting him in a red snowsuit is kind of burying the lede in terms of parental cruelty.” –Rube

“The Perfesser’s subsequent creativity was limited to donning purple leg warmers. What a feeling!” –nescio

“I like Gertie’s exclamation point in the last panel. ‘Yeah, your uncle refused life-providing sustenance, but I figured it was just a whim. But you’re saying it’s an indication that the news deeply troubled him? I never would have realized!’” –Westing1992

“Wouldn’t it be funny if someone tried to make homemade pizza for their family, but all they did was dump some mozzarella and pepperoni slices on a baking tray? Well, if you get a kick out of contrived implications suggesting a young mother probably has some serious neurological health problems, then this comic’s for you, you absolute jerk!” –jroggs

“‘State-of-the-art digital’ snack machines that look exactly like any other vending machines, except they spell Snackz with a ‘z’? Yep, that checks out. There probably are higher-tech food dispensers available, but the staff really enjoys the laughs when Dagwood gets his hand stuck up this one two or three times a week.” –BigTed

“I’m sorry the syndicate chose not to print the last row of panels, where Mark’s horse bucks him off, tramples him, and runs off to join the horse orgy.” –Pozzo

“Interesting that the narration box calls Sal a ‘former acquaintance’ while Keith seems to think they were ‘ol’ pals’. Looking forward to the phone call between these two as Keith explains his current situation in an overly-familiar way while Sal desperately tries to get context clues to figure out who the fuck he is.” –pugfuggly

“Sal, two weeks later: ‘Turns out, your hunch was right — she has the exact same fingerprints as you, old buddy!’” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Given her whispery delivery, her pseudo-threatening commentary and the way she’s sitting in that chair, I think it’s clear to see that Lois has become the ‘Godmother’ of some Italian crime syndicate. I … wouldn’t be asking her too many question if I were you, Hi.” –2+2=7

“I think I’ll send my ol’ pal Sal a request. ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ would be a good one. I’ll have him dedicate to Kitty and Sonia.” –Weaselboy

“Given their remote location and unstated food insecurity, it kind of makes you wonder what was in the cookie jar. Here are my guesses: 1. Loweezy’s Homemade Mo-Lasses Snaps. 2. Those inexpensive flower shaped ‘butter’ cookies that have a hole in the middle so that small kids can wear them like a ring. 3. Bullets.” –Old School Allie Cat

“Today’s Snuffy Smith shows the dangerously non-Euclidian nature of the Smif Shack. Corners and straight lines collide in a cacophony of geometry chaos. Roofs run together in total disregard of stability or sanity. Of the spoor the Haunter o’ th’ Holler leaves, broken perspective is the plainest. The mind tries to bend unreality into being and recoils in terror. Only the strange can live among the strangeness; only those touched by the Haunter can survive near it. The TVA men knew it when they surveyed the Holler in the 30’s, and the Army recruiters understood that no soldier can be found in such soft spots of the Earth. Here is the rock upon which the New Deal foundered, the shadowed glen that Social Security ignores, the dark corner that neither Internet nor spy satellite can find. Welcome to Hootin’ Holler.” –Voshkod

“So we actually have two cartoons today with the same setting? Hell (Hell) and Hell (Williamsport, PA), do I have that right?” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Yes, my nephew. You do realize there’s only about 80 people in this universe, right? The odds aren’t quite as long as you might think.” –cheech wizard

“Can’t believe Family Circus threw in a detail like PJ’s ragged, torn-up, threadbare blanket but somehow refrained from referring to it in the text. I spent a confused few microseconds wondering if the blanket symbolized PJ’s own impeding twilight years, or perhaps death, like a memento mori in a Renaissance painting. Then I remembered it was Family Circus and it was just another sign that the Keane Kids were encouraged to fend for themselves while Daddy drunk-worked and Mommy consoled herself with opiates and daydreams.” –Chance

“We can’t all be winners.’ Just from exposure to Keith, Kitty has gone from progressive vegetarian to Randian libertarian! The sex must be that good!” –Ettorre

“Park Ranger Turns Pale Seeing This ‘Odd Rock’. He Calls Police When He Realizes What’s Inside” –Knocking Hats

“Julie dumped Chip because she couldn’t bear his techno hipsterism. How is a teen meant to maintain a relationship with a boy who still has a 2003-era Nokia? I’m amazed it even supports the Unicode emoji block.” –Schroduck

“A piece of rope just being there is the most menacing damned thing this comic has ever presented. Are the adults all bound and gagged in the basement while Dennis and Joey watch Better Call Saul, and this is a piece left over, or is Dennis just ready to take care of matters if Joey starts on about how TV shows about troubled men may be critically praised but they’re beginning to wear out their welcome as far as he’s concerned?” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Chip misread Julie’s cryptic suggestion that they go on a date to the movies to see Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the fifth major film in the franchise? If Chip does finally pick up on the clue, he’d be smart not to engage in any debate about the 2016 reboot and its relationship to the main series.” –Philip