Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for March 13, 2018

you and your big mouth, Petey Otterloop, Jr.

Alice drags Petey kicking and screaming back to reality.

I fed my kids a big bowl of oatmeal and they never complained. I would add a little brown sugar in it and sometimes a briskly stirred egg for extra nutrition. I ate it too.

Well! We got the Bug-eyed part for Petey!

Oatmeal was tolerable. It was cream of wheat that gave me bug-eyes – as I ran screaming from the table.

My father would have said it’s good for you. Puts hair on your chest.

Nice goin Petey.

This became a ridiculous trend with cereal boxes. Mascots morphed from charming to insane. Somewhere over the recent decades, marketing people got the idea that kids’ attention was slipping away, and they could only be reached by upping the ante on ‘in your face’ extremity. Characters on boxes could no longer simply smile, or look as if they adored the cereal. They had to be cackling as though having an emotional breakdown. Cocoa- Puffs’ Sonny started to look less Coo-coo when everybody else was wide eyed and hysterical.

Thankfully now and then, one of the cereals has a throwback box with the older, calmer version of their mascot restored.

Pete, its because he went from eating Oatmeal to eating this cereal. You will find out soon enough.

I’ve always liked oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, Malt-o-Meal, grits, etc, as long as they were prepared right.

Perhaps Pete should consult with Calvin & Hobbes on the proper amount of cereal required for the desired effect.

I never had oatmeal as a kid. Couldn’t stand it when I finally tried it as an adult.

On the other hand, my parents would never buy me the Calvinesque “Sugar Bomb” sort of cereal. It was always cornflakes or raisin bran.

Although not “bug-eyed” my oatmeal has a pretentious mascot who keeps claiming that “Nothing is better for thee…than me”.

My oatmeal is special. I cook chopped granny smith apples, cranberries, blueberries and dried peaches init with cinnamon and Splenda. My wife refuses to try it. She doesn’t like its appearance.

There is direct visual evidence that the correct answer to Petey’s question is none (compare his normal, beady little eyes in panel 3 with his bugged-out eyes in panel 4). All it took was Madeline’s threat of (bleah!) hot oatmeal….