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Archive: Mother Goose and Grimm

164

Animal spirits

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/4/26

Yeah, it is a good thing they aren’t playing for money! Imagine if the Smifs had learned that Sukey, a being that they have long treated as a beast and a possession that does manual labor at their bidding, were intelligent enough to understand the concept of the exchange value of currency — and, moreover, had somehow already acquired possession of enough of it to wager. The implications would be truly horrific.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/4/26

After some reflection, I’m OK with an entire Mother Goose and Grimm strip that consists of a glimpse into the internal monologue of a character we’ve never seen before as he dances with Mother Goose. What’s unsettling me is that he’s a human and none of said monologue includes reflection on the fact that he’s dancing with a human-sized bird. Do you think he already mentally covered that ground before we got here? Do you think he has a plan for when Ma Goose’s person-sized bird boyfriend shows up, and tries to peck him to death or swat at him with his powerful wings?

Mary Worth, 3/4/26

Ah, man, I guess it’s time to start the “blame game” for why our boy Harvey has gotten himself catfished. I think we can all agree that it’s probably a woman’s fault, and “Trixie”’s puppeteer isn’t even female, so I guess the problem is … Harvey’s daughter, for living a fun go-go single life in fast-paced Goleta and not spending her every waking moment monitoring his screen time? Enh, that’ll do.

150

To me, these animals are not funny

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/15/26

You’d think I’d be happy to see a strip that eschews “someone wants to defy the laws of nature and have sex with a half-fish being” for “someone wants to obey the laws of nature and eat a half-fish being,” but sorry, I just don’t find it likely. Why would Atilla become fish-mad in the (literal) face of a being who is, in terms of the bits you usually interact with, mostly human, and yet ignore Ma Goose, who is 100% bird, albeit an anthropomorphized one? And sure, in real life a cat is far too small and a goose far too ornery for that conflict to go well for the cat, but these characters are roughly the same size so the power dynamic is different. You can make your silly fantasy comic setting increasingly convoluted and I will fight it every step of the way!

Luann, 2/15/26

Meanwhile, in Luann, everyone is fully human, yet nobody is acting like a normal human being. “I’m going to give my husband a gift card to a lingerie shop for Valentine’s Day, in the expectation that he will immediately become horny, rush off to purchase some erotic underwear for me, and then come back so I can put it on and then we can have sex. The ideal time to initiate this process? When our college-age daughter is standing inches away from us. She’ll be impressed!”

Dustin, 2/15/26

The thing about Dustin’s mom is that she exists in a reality where the comic strip Dustin is not in the newspaper. Unlike her, we unfortunately will read through the day’s news, feeling terror, anger, jealousy, and encroaching old age in turn, only to get to the comics section, encounter Dustin, and feel mingled contempt and disgust.

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Family drama

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Mary Worth, 2/5/26

“Good lord,” you’re no doubt thinking, “how is it that, more than two weeks after Ian ended his war against Sunny the parrot by pathetically surrendering, this plot is still happening?” Well, it’s to set up a long-term plot point: if Ian refused to love the bird Toby acquired a few weeks earlier just because it shat in his shoes, could she ever trust him again? Somehow, after so many years of marriage, Toby has finally noticed that her husband is an asshole, and sure, maybe it’s over something that he’s actually right about, but he’s on thin ice going forward (until Toby remembers she has neither a job nor any marketable skills).

Judge Parker, 2/5/26

Ann’s triumphant return has, predictably, devolved into wall-of-text family dysfunction, but I am kind of curious why Ann’s dialogue in the second panel makes it seem like she’s trying to de-escalate but the jagged-edged word balloon indicates that she’s yelling. Maybe she’s worried a furious Katherine is about to deliver a potful of hot coffee right to her face? Don’t worry, Ann, that would be exciting, so it definitely won’t happen.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/5/26

Say, just out of curiosity, did, uh, Robin Hood famously have any kind of interesting relationship with the tax assessment and collection apparatus? You know, the kind of dynamic that might provide a punchline of some sort in a strip like this? A better punchline than what we got here, maybe?