I would’ve liked to see Cathy decide to have an abortion. That would’ve been a great way to end it.
Cathy) Mom, I’m pregnant and I decided to terminate the pregnancy.
Then just let the strip end…
It would’ve assured Cathy went out with a bang.
Oooooh! I second the motion!
Quite frankly, she sounds like a complete nut.
RE: backlash about cancelling comics: a few years ago one of my friends worked at the Dallas Morning News in the “arts” or whatever department. There was a big push to quietly cancel a bunch of strips.
According to my friend, out of all the comics they tried to quietly get rid of, the one for which they got the most angry letters was…
…this one.
To the astonishment of everyone that worked there. She said it wasn’t even close.
Yeah, that’s the Jean Teasdale effect. People who are susceptible to glurge to begin with are also set in their ways, sometimes neurotically, and naturally want things the way they want them or else. A lot of people like Pearls Before Swine (for example), but I can’t see even its most ardent fans raising that kind of ruckus.
If --big IF-- you want to have your jaw flop open at the sheer immature of the public, just read the comments under that last comic.
Full of treasures like:
*Have truly enjoyed Cathy all these years!
Thanks for wonderful work and great plots. *
Shoot! Were there great plots and I missed them?
Thank you Cathy G. for all the years you gave us, the laughs and smiles, the craziness, the obsessions, the chocolate, shoes and most importantly, family…
And OMG, there were people who never noticed how neurotic these women were!:
*Cathy’s mother was always the perfect mother…a titch neurotic at times, but always coming through with the perfect words to say… They will be great grandparents…we just won’t be able to share in all their good times. As Cathy would say …’WAAAAAAAAAAAA’…
Baby Cathy will grow up oblivious to what her mom went through and will be a well-rounded little girl. Thank you for this comic and you will be missed!
Don’t go! I grew up with Cathy and I will miss her. She was like a friend you called and talked for hours with, or went out for coffee with. Thank you Ms. Guisewite for giving us a daily companion many of us could relate to. Maybe you could update us every now and then on how it’s going with Cathy, Irving and the family?
*
Now THAT’S scary. Cathy G. could pull a Lynn J. and drag her characters back from the grave to torment us even more…
I remember that time. I could not believe the amount of backlash for that crappy comic.
I enjoy a lot of comics in the DMN, but I don’t understand why they will cancel a daily strip and keep running the Sunday strip. In particular, I wonder why they keep running Hi and Lois, Drabble, and Red and Rover. I’d have to look at the Sunday paper to figure out which others are Sunday only. Now, I LIKE The Piranha Club, and I wish that they’d pick up as a daily again.
The majority of people who read newspapers nowadays and who write letters to editors are older folks, who must enjoy the comfort of seeing the same Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Marmaduke, etc. jokes over and over and over and over.
I used to love Cathy too (and yes, I am a woman). Then again, I don’t have to relate perfectly to things to like them (I actually find it scary when people say things like that), I never assumed the author was saying all women acted exactly like her, I never looked to her as a role model, I openly acknowledged that she was corny, verbose and maladjusted, and I thought the fact that her eyeballs touched was cute (I thought a lot of the terrible representations of things were cute, actually).
However, I admit that virtually no Cathy comic I’ve read since they got married has been funny to me. I mostly liked the late 80s/early 90s period (back when I was reading the funnies every week).
Bingo.
Newspapers are skewing very, very old. I’m 38 and know very few people my age who regularly read the papers; I and maybe one or two other of my aquaintances. Almost everyone I know who’s a regular newspaper reader is much older than I am.
That’s anecdotal but it’s trivially easy to Google up cites and studies that show newspaper readership skews old; most estimate 55-60 as the average age. Old people are disproportionately likely to resist change and to dislike anything edgy, threatening, or unusual; they want the comfort of another Hi & Lois cartoon that’s pretty much the same as the last one. Jean Teasdale is, in a sense, unrealistic in that someone like her is much likelier to be 60, rather than forty and change, which I believe “Jean” now is.
“Cathy” is a perfect example of this because the underlying premise itself is so dated; Cathy (whether you’re talking about the character or the cartoonist) is a almost-crazy neurotic who can’t deal with being an independent woman juggling a job and a personal life. As the Comic Doctor points out, in 1976 this was still kind of a topical issue; it had been revolutionary in 1970 for TV to air a sitcom, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, about a woman whose focus was her career. In 1976 it was still the common assumption that women should get married at 21 and stay home with the kids. Today… I mean, I’m a single guy and if I met a woman who DIDN’T have a career she could handle, I’d think there was something wrong with her mentally. So old people can still relate to Cathy, whereas to most young people her neuroses seem almost alien.
They also have one hell of an archive, at least for the color strips.
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Yes! I came here to point that out.
*Yet another strip retires with more to write, but i suppose it is far better this way (leaving with more to say) than years of mediocre strips and a slowly declining readership…how many strips overstayed their welcome?
*Pretty much the EXACT OPPOSITE of the consensus here. 
Funny how apt it is that I won the T-shirt at karaoke this week for identifying Alice Cooper as the artist on “You and Me.” First time I heard that song, I compared it to Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness as a blatant attempt to slyly, surreptitiously mock its target audience. These comments demonstrate that Cathy is in the same category.
You rock! The site isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I’ve yet seen for comics by far! And it has some of my favorites that the local papers stopped carrying years ago, so now I can read Boffo and Willie 'n Ethel and Non Sequitor and etc. and etc. again!
Thanks much, Bosstone!
RickJay writes:
> As the Comic Doctor points out, in 1976 this was still kind of a topical issue; it
> had been revolutionary in 1970 for TV to air a sitcom, the Mary Tyler Moore
> Show, about a woman whose focus was her career. In 1976 it was still the
> common assumption that women should get married at 21 and stay home with
> the kids.
You exaggerate somewhat here. I graduated from high school in 1970. Cathy Guisewite is a little less than two years older than me. Maybe in 1955 it was standard to assume that a woman would be marrying soon after high school (or soon after college if she went to college) and having kids immediately, but it no longer was in 1970. In 1968, when (I assume) Guisewite graduated from high school, it was assumed that the vast majority of women would have a career, although they would probably take time off at some point for kids. A lot of women did have a focus on their career and expected to do very well in it. They knew that it would be an uphill climb all the way though. That’s the real difference between when I or Cuisewite graduated from high school and now. A woman graduating from high school now doesn’t usually think that it’s going to be a big deal for her to have a career-focused life. In 1970 such a woman would know that she would have to do a lot of pushing past frontiers.
Yes! Amazed I made it to the second page before someone had this sentiment. Jim Davis admitted decades ago that he’s just cashing in on the character for as much $$$ as he possibly can. He doesn’t even draw the cartoon anymore, he literally phones it in.
An ex-gf loved Garfield, which absolutely baffled me. I once purchased a Garfield book as part of a present for her. When the guy at the register sort of smirked at me I told him “no no, this is for my girlfriend. I hate Garfield. I still get teary-eyed when I read the last Calvin and Hobbes (…lets go exploring! sniff).” No lie, he looked me in the eye and said “Dude, I’d get another girlfriend.” I didn’t (well, not for a long time and not for that reason), but it did give me pause for a few seconds.
Yeah, Garfield or Marmaduke (… and certainly Cathy*!) would be a deal-breaker for me.
"Sorry, you’re a smokin’ hottie with a Tesla Roadster parked at your summer home in Marseille, but you just…snickered…at that cat!"*
Fittingly, it ends with the long-suffering grandma’s final wish (GRANDCHILD!!) granted. Classic good-night-drive-safely moment. Nothing special, really, but about the best way this could have ended.
Eh. Like I mentioned earlier, not great, but at least it provided a perspective, however warped, that was underrepresented in mainstream comics. I’d feel a lot better about this if there still were non-mainstream perspectives being offered to us. Honestly, by '03 the only one I could name would be The Boondocks, and that one’s long passed.
I’m not surprised at all that there are readers who are going to miss this terribly. Like it or not, there are still women out there who related to this, and heck, it’s nowhere near as anachronistic as Beetle Bailey or Blondie.
…
So…yeah.
…
And for the last time, it’s “aack”! Two A’s! TWO! It’s Bill The Cat who says “ack”! Geez! 
By the way, the ghost of Cathy is currently haunting over at Pearls Before Swine.
I suppose nobody knows the answer to this, but does anyone here think they’ll be able to transition to serving a younger audience when this one gets too old and dead to support them?
Anyway, what gets me is that Cathy is dying relatively young: Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey both date to the 1950s, Dick Tracy dates to the 1930s, and Snuffy Smith (officially Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, originally Barney Google) dates to 1919.* What’s interesting about that 1919 date, aside from it being older than King Tut’s back molar, is that American newspaper comics in their modern form only go back to the latter half of the 19th Century. Having a relic from that close to the birth of the medium still being produced and sold would be unimaginable in any other business.
*(Snuffy hisownself dates to 1934, during an otherwise mostly forgotten cultural obsession with ‘hillbillies’, and slowly took over the comic from there, his domination being complete from the 1950s onwards.)
So newspaper comics pages are a gerontocracy like unto the Soviet Politburo, and just about as resistant to change. What else is new? Well, don’t expect them to ever improve. Comics artists are online now, making webcomics without worrying what some retired spackle-mixer in West Plains, MO is going to think about their next plot arc. It’s true that 90% of them are crap, but multiply A Metric Shitload by 10% and you still end up with more than enough good ones to keep you up nights reading.