Cathy

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Mayor: Do you like Family Circus, Mr. Trick?
Mr. Trick: I read Marmaduke.
Mayor: Agh! Uuugh That dog's always on the furniture! It's so unsanitary.
Mr. Trick: No one tells Marmaduke what to do. That is my kind of dog.
Allan: I like to read Cathy!
[The Mayor and Trick just stare]

Cathy was a Newspaper Comic strip by Cathy Guisewite which ran from 1976 to October 3, 2010. It revolved around the eponymous character's life as a single woman, her dealing with a stressful workplace, diets, junk food, being able to fit in swimwear, the dating scene, and an overbearing mother.

In the 1970s (the age of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the E.R.A.), a comic about a single young woman trying to make a career was new and innovative. The strip was extremely popular in its heyday, with many women readers readily identifying with the title character as she dealt with common problems of modern single life. A rumor in the 1980's that she was finally going to marry Irving sparked a lot of fan backlash from single women who didn't want to lose this character they could relate to. (Cathy finally did marry Irving in 2005, and the final strip in 2010 featured the announcement that Cathy was pregnant with a girl).

These days, the strip is a frequent target of parody and Take Thats, owing to its repetitive nature, devotion to Men Buy From Mars, Women Buy From Venus, and general blandness. That Cathy is a weak character by modern standards, breaking down emotionally at any point for any reason or no reason doesn't help; she seemed modern back when a career woman was the exception rather than the rule, but Society Marches On and at some point this began doing more to lower the glass ceiling than to raise it. Pearls Before Swine and Liberty Meadows satirize the strip frequently, and the Comic Book Doctor wrote a lengthy article on what the strip does wrong.

Tropes used in Cathy include: