October 3 is the last day that this comic strip will appear. I never liked it much, because it recycles the same four or five jokes over and over. She’s too fat to fit into a swimsuit. She gets aggravated by her mother. Repeat this sequence for over 30 years.
Only 34 years too late.
They added some new ones? When did that happen?
So how do you think they should wrap it up? She goes crazy at her office and shoots everyone before turning the gun on herself?
On October 4th, they begin to print Classic Cathy.
Are you trying to get this thread moved to The BBQ Pit??
May the good Lord help us if the artist decides to “retire” the same way the “For Better or Worse” artist did.
I used to love Cathy. I used to really identify with the character, and go through the same issues. However, I grew up, and found other issues. Cathy…didn’t. Yeah, I don’t like the way I look in a bathing suit. You know what? I didn’t like the way I looked in one when I weighed 115 pounds, either. Nowadays, I buy something with a skirt on it, and just get over myself. If someone has an issue with the way I look, well, they don’t have to look at me. I’m not trying to put myself on display. And Cathy is old enough to do the same. She needs to quit looking at the microkinis and start looking at things that are appropriate for her age. She needs to act her age, and act like a professional woman. When she was in college, it was appropriate for her to stress out over some of these things. She’s supposedly a middle aged (or at least not a 20 something) woman now, with a husband and a career. She needs to act like it. She and her mother should have moved on to a new stage in their relationship, even if Cathy never has kids. Cathy stopped developing, as a person, as a character, sometime in her mid 20s. However, she has visibly moved into new stages in her job and life.
Running the same stale jokes in the strip every day really wears a strip out. We can all point to strips that do this (how many more times will Dagwood have to run into the letter carrier before one of them changes his behavior?) and without fail, these strips have a loyal readership…and are deadly dull to people who don’t have an emotional attachment to the strips. It’s better to quit while they’re still asking for more.
I MISS The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and the daily Foxtrot (the guy still does a Sunday strip). But I’m glad that I didn’t have to suffer through those strips getting old and stale. I can remember them fondly, without the pain of seeing them getting stale. BC and The Wizard of Id used to be really great strips when I was a kid, and this isn’t just nostalgia talking, I still have some of the old books of strip collections. But the writer/artist has become obsessed with new ideas, which don’t work with the old settings.
Cathy was in high school or college in the early years wasn’t she?
Then later she got the office job and bf. Did she ever marry him?
There should have been an ‘Ack!’ in the title.
I did let out a laugh at this recent strip.
I will dance on Cathy’s grave!
Srsly, even my craptacular local paper (the LVRJ) moved Cathy to the freaking classifieds like 10 years ago; too many fans to stop running it, but no way does it need to take up space from Get Fuzzy, Cul de Sac and all the other good strips. And now it won’t even need that space! Woot! I’d rather read another classified about a property being rezoned than read this shitty comic.
The local paper in every city I’ve lived in dumped Cathy several years ago except for the comics-deficient Chicago Tribune. The Journal Star in Peoria, IL got rid of it when I was living there; the Gainesville (FL) Sun dumped it when I lived there, and the Washington Post got rid of it when I lived there. I don’t see why the Tribune editors saw fit to hold onto Cathy to the very end.
They’re starting to mix in references to new media. A recent strip had Blondie texting to the letter carrier to warn him when Dagwood left. Not a laugh riot, but a nod to progress.
I liked the strip where Elmo* and his friends were raising money with a Virtual Car Wash. You email them a digital picture of your car - they photoshop out all the dirt and imperfections and email it back to you.
*the pesky neighbor kid in Blondie
That’s awesome!
The San Francisco Chronicle, which has reduced its Sunday comics “section” to a single four-panel sheet in recent years, still wastes valuable real estate on the Sunday Cathy. (They don’t run the daily strip.) I’m hoping that they will use the freed-up space when Cathy ends for the Sunday Sherman’s Lagoon, which currently runs weekdays only.
Progress sure does come slowly to that strip. I remember what a big deal it was when, after six decades, Blondie was finally liberated from housewifery with her catering business.
Our local fishwrap dropped Cathy years ago, and NO ONE NOTICED. Or if they did, they couldn’t be bothered to say anything, yea or nay. I liked it at one point when it was still new and funny and could sort of identify. I liked her parade of loser blind dates (though she settled for Irving only because it was endless fodder for marriage jokes. No baby jokes, she had to have friends with kids, more endless fodder. some of it was good in a satirical way). But jeez, time marches on, and she’s never advanced beyond an irritating finicky high-maintenance ass. Shaped like an egg, too.
I used to like it a little, but that all evaporated when she married Irving. The guy is a total ass, and he even got Cathy fired at one point on his advice as a downsizing consultant. Any guy who got me fired would earn undying hatred from me.