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Folks, I want you to cast your minds back to the long-forgotten year 2004. A young man not yet 30 had decided to try out this “blogging” thing that seemed to be getting so much attention those days, focusing on his favorite under-appreciated art form, the newspaper comic strips. He started on July 11th of that year with a post about Non Sequitur, a strip that he would soon bore of. The next day, however? The next day … was pure gold.

Mary Worth, 7/12/2004

That’s right: I, your faithful comics curmudgeon, have been talking about Wilbur Weston’s sex life since 2004. As is only meet and proper, for this momentous occasion, I have decided to bring back my beloved CafePress store and urge you to purchase a t-shirt or other item that shares this fact and this message with the whole world!

Anyway! Twenty years is a long time to be doing anything — so long that it kind of snuck up on me and I didn’t put together an elaborate series of anniversaposts like I did in 2014 — but I still love the comics, still love doing the blog, and still love all of you. Big thanks to Uncle Lumpy for being a great fill-in, and to you all for being faithful and funny readers and commenters, whether you started reading yesterday or in 2004! Your reward: You get to read this blog again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and (assuming the comics and the internet still exist and the sun has not expanded to a red giant to swallow the earth) so forth, indefinitely.

And finally, since I must always be closing: if you think that 20 years of looking at ads on this website is enough and want an elegant, ad-free experience, perhaps I can interest you in a subscription, either to a no-ads version of the site or an ad-free email version of each post delivered to your inbox each morning? Just a thought! No worries if not, no paywall will ever descend to block access to this important cultural artifact. Normal comics jokes resume tomorrow! But until then, feel free to sound off in the comments about how this blog has changed your life.

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Would you like a comment of the week for your long holidy weekend, or perhaps your one-day return to work, or perhaps you don’t even live in America or have a job? Well here it is, whatever your circumstances:

“They may have gotten the font wrong, but at least they still used a banner headline, which is what newspapers do for stories of mildly passing interest.” –Missal

Your runners up are also here for you to enjoy!

“Marvin’s recent shift to speaking instead of just thought-bubbling was weird, but developmentally made sense. But narratively this means everyone has to talk now, including the animals, and I don’t really like the implications of this. It takes things from ‘Magical realist whimsy about the inner lives of children and animals’ to ‘Cats are intelligent and have declared economic war on mankind with their only weapon: shitting.’” –Schroduck

“Mary, meanwhile, pays her respects by mournfully grabbing Jeff’s ass. Considering that she hooked up with one of her many suitors at his mother’s passing, it’s clear that funerals really get the ol’ gal going. No wonder she was so eager to arrange all this dead fish silliness: If she can spice up her stagnant love life with the deathly pallor of eroticism, she’ll happily put up with Wilbur’s blathering about ‘closure’ or whatever.” –2+2=7

“You’d think given how much newspaper cartoonists love golf at least one of them would put in the effort to work out what hands look like when holding a golf club.” –Veronica

“There are a lot of extremely nasty and unhealthy relationships in the comics, some of which are even noticed by the cartoonists who make them. The Halftracks’ marriage has always been in the mix, but this vaults them from the low-boiling comfortable contempt of the Lockhorns up to just south of the outright substance abuse and domestic violence of the Thurstons and Capps. Sure, Mrs. Halftrack hasn’t taken to ‘humorously’ beating her husband yet, but she has reached the point of abject hatred where every single thing her husband does infuriates her and prompts her to aggressively impose her will over him. Grim stuff. Almost as grim as a cartoon that thinks a drawing of a putting green makes for a serviceable comedic punchline.” –jroggs

“Hi and Lois having another strip about golf: Stop this, no one but cartoonist cares about golf! Hi and Lois having a strip where they are having a mental breakdown and need to be held: Stop this, I don’t want this to be relatable!” –Ettore Costa, on Bluesky

“[Stellan floating head approaches] Mary: [shakes head] [Stellan floating head recedes]” –Kevin on Earth

“3/15/2024: The National Association of Realtors announces a settlement ending their standard 6% commission. 7/1/2024: Lois experiences a very bad day. Coincidence? Probably. Grim? Oh my, yes. [Chortles darkly]” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Nice of this strip to show the perils of making a phone call while on the can.” –taig

“The print media pool has shrunk so much in Milford that the newspaper doesn’t even bother putting their name on the banner. Which newspaper? The news paper. You know the one.” –pugfuggly

“It’s nice to see Gil worrying if he held his ex-wife back as he sits there comfortably reading the newspaper while his new girlfriend cooks his breakfast for him.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Clover Wins First Championship, Sedge Takes Second, Moss a Distant Third, Grass a Surprising Last in National Groundcover Competition” –Voshkod

“My sympathies lie with the Dad in the background who clearly doesn’t want to be there and who’s about to get an earful from his wife as he hands his kid a stick of cotton-candy by the spun sugar end.” –Hibbleton

“I would not call slipping into a deep depression after the loss of a goldfish a quirk.” –Liam

“Dolly stares with cool curiosity. ‘These humans experience violent distress,’ she thinks. ‘I can turn this to my advantage.’ She’s packed more menace into this look than Dennis has accomplished in seventy-plus years.” –matt w

“Walt is canonically 124 years old and still both mentally sharp and able to stand on his own. He should be making millions from all the scientists studying him for the secrets to immortality. $7,000 is a pittance compared to that.” –The Ghost of Jarrod

“Mr. Huff? Glenwood Police Department here. We want to let you know that we’ve recovered the missing sleeves from your undershirt, as well as the missing ‘g’ from the word ‘calling’ whose elision by you, together with the undershirt you’re wearing, identify you unmistakably as a cartoon member of the Exposition Lower Classes.” –Bob Tice

“So Randy’s problems are environmental AND hereditary: a brutish father and a genetic predisposition to crew cuts.” –MKay

“The first guy here appears to be drinking a shark smoothie, which he blended up in his Bass-o-Matic. Meanwhile, the other guy is sipping pure shark’s blood through a straw, which is how you know he’s a rage-aholic weirdo. We can only hope a shark attacks both of them out of pure revenge, but it’s more likely we’ll just get three more months of two-person dialogue scenes, which are far easier to draw.” –BigTed

“The right way to celebrate our independence was to ditch Wilbur.” –Little Blue Bicycle

“I want to hear the rest of this kid’s tight five. How many more questions does he have in that chamber? ‘Which one was funnier — Lewis or Clark? What was Jamestown really like? Were you a bigger fan of the Angles, Saxons, or Jutes? What are your thoughts on people who sell bad copper?’” –els

“In the world of Hagar the Horrible, they have window glass and chef’s costuming (kerchief, spatula, chef’s hat), but nobody can hem a goddamn shirt sleeve.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar, or back me on Patreon! Thanks to all for your support and readership!

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It’s all happening, and by “all” I mean the publication of this week’s top comment:

“Pretty much anybody who actually read the Bible will tell you that Adam ate the forbidden fruit too with little convincing and thus has no place to be making passive aggressive cracks about Eve eating it, so I can only presume this midrash has made the decision to depict Adam as some kind of gaslighter. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t know what good and evil are. I didn’t eat the fruit. What? You sound crazy.'” –ectojazzmage

Along with the hilarious runners up!

“‘The Futon in the Rec Room at Camp Swampy,’ one of the Mountain Goats’ saddest songs.” –Rex Thrillho, on Twitter

“‘Does the metric system like the number ten?’ is such a dumb question. It would be like ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ except maybe the Keane Kompound has been sedevacantist since Vatican II.” –Ettore Costa, on Bluesky

“Turns out our ‘fingers’ are covered with stiff, insensitive feathers that make braille all but impossible to read, rendering the format completely unworkable. We’re birds!” –pugfuggly

“Holy shit! His mother and father, his aunt and her boyfriend, and the dog are all Marvin’s ‘staff’?! Like, they’re in his employ, to fire at will, there only to help him accomplish … the delivery of a, we’ll call it, a joke? Is Tom Armstrong on Marvin’s staff? As a reader, am I?” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Jenny? Good news, bad news time. Bad news: Marvin is tracking a mysterious purple mess through the house. Good news: we’re finally free of the Grimace.” –Blackdrazon

“Years later, a few days after Grandma Keane is laid to rest, Bil and Thel are cleaning out her house when Bil hears Thel screaming from the bedroom. There, huddled in the corner of the closet, sits the desiccated corpse of their missing son. They will finally have closure of sorts, but never any answers.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Purple. The traditional color of royalty. A chair, reserved for only one person, like a throne. Marvin, suspiciously close to Merovingian. I wasn’t expecting today to be the the day that Marvin declared its titular toddler to be Emperor of France and blood heir to Christ, but I can’t say I was surprised it happened.” –Voshkod

“Oh goody, it’s time for another one of my ‘what age is Marvin supposed to be, anyway?’ headaches. In today’s strip he is a) walking upright, b) speaking in clear, complete sentences, and c) taking the initiative to clean up a mess that he made. And yet, he is still not toilet trained. Maybe he’s like Peter Pan or the kid in The Tin Drum, caught in a state of permanently arrested development as an open rebellion against the social order, or maybe Big Plumbing.” –TheDiva

“As if manual labor and the pain of childbirth weren’t bad enough, now we gotta do math!?” –Hibbleton

“Theologians have argued for centuries about whether or not Adam had a belly button, but maybe they should have been arguing whether he had male-pattern baldness.” –Schroduck

“The characters in Marvin are so loathsome that I could easily imagine ‘Jeff and Pam dump demented Grandpa at an abandoned Sears with Marvin, who tries to form a feral bond with a half-melted mannequin’ as a 2024 story arc.” –Quiggle

“I’m intrigued that the ghost alien has tentacle eyes that have lashes and a flirtatious vibe in direct contrast to the bland face eyes. Wait, no, not ‘intrigued.’ What’s the word .. ah, yes: mortified.” –Vice President John Adams

“The mark of a good bartender is not only remembering people’s drink orders, but remembering whatever stupid pop culture references they toss out as well. Beth is a good bartender.” –Weaselboy

“I’d like to think that ‘Don’t get him wet’ is a well-understood unspoken rule about Gil. I certainly don’t want to hear anyone utter it again.” –nescio

“We all know that sand is coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere. What this strip presupposes is … maybe that’s sexy?” –Stop Motion Cyclops

“The lack of Euclidean geometry or even a track or any distinguishing features beyond a vast white plain that drivers could go any direction in made the R’lyeh 500 one of the more challenging NASCAR races.” –Old Man Shadow

“‘I think you need a pit stop’ is how Gertie’s husband begs her to take her meds. He knows full well how dangerous she can be when an unmedicated Gertie doesn’t fulfill her obsessive need for twisted metal and burning flesh. The authorities currently suspect the Spike Strip Bandit of causing eight fatalities, and he’s got the latest wanted poster to prove it.” –MasterMahan

“Oh, great, the punkinheads are playing in unfinished building sites! I guess parents really did allow ‘free-range kids’ back in the 1970s, or whenever this panel was originally published. (Hint: That house will sell for $15,000.)” –BigTed

“A superyacht? We see the true nature of the Charterstone world: Jeff is actually a billionaire who pays Mary to carry out mind games on the residents, who are all just playthings in the couple’s diabolical world. They deliberately engineered the death of Wilbur’s fish as a wager to see what it would take to break him.” –Tonio

“Here’s hoping Jeff bills Wilbur for fuel and crew overtime costs. Should run into several thousand dollars.” –SabeHombre

“Okay, like you say, that’s not Jeff’s boat, so there’s still a slim possibility that the fish funeral is an elaborate front, a conspiracy in which every character in Mary Worth agrees to get Wilbur down to the docks, clock him in the back of the head, and two days later he wakes up on the deck of a merchant vessel bound for another country. The captain throws him a mop, and that’s the last we ever see of Wilbur. When Dawn gets back, everyone simply agrees that she never had a father. ‘Oh!’ says Dawn, confused but agreeable.” –Dan

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar, or back me on Patreon! Thanks to all for your support and readership!