21 thoughts on “June 9, 2012

  1. Fiona! Pull the tie harder. No jury will convict you! Remember C. Montgomery Burns vs Maggie Simpson!

  2. I like the way he’s holding Fiona – as if to say, “I’m not finished with her yet, so don’t even think of taking her back!”

    • Are you kidding? He’d read her the Grumbel’s policy manual for a bedtime story! Though, to be fair, it would probably put her right to sleep…

  3. Okay, I have to admit, this made me giggle for the sheer unexpectedness of humanity in Stuart. Whoulda thunk?

  4. Fiona is supposed to be two months old. She looks like she’s at least five times that age…

    I’m also in agreement with the theory about his sister having kids. But… how often does he even see his sister? She’s only been mentioned once in the strip, when there was that whole plotline about “how Stuart could actually love somebody.” I think that if his sister did have kids… he’d have only seen them a few times when they were newborns, when he was there to congratulate her on the birth…

    Just thinking out loud.

  5. Haven’t any of you seen the episode of The Office where Michael Scott was holding the babies? Even the weirdest managers can love being around random children (in a non-creepy way).

  6. I’ve many bosses in my day. One in particular drank the same corporate Kool-Aid as Stuart. And as eye-rollingly difficult as it was to work for him at times, I had worked for actual evil in the past, and knew that that wasn’t it. So I always understood that underneath the yes-man mentality was a human. Sure, as his employee, I rarely got to see it, but I knew it existed. Stuart isn’t evil (the closest this strip has seen to that is Jerry). He might have even been like Marla when he first got started. Fighting corporate is a exhausting in its futility. It’s enough to wear anyone down. It’s not unheard of for an otherwise decent person weary from fighting years of the good fight, to just give in. It’s the easy way out, sure, but not everyone has Marla’s strength.

    So yeah, it doesn’t surprise me to see Zucchini head’s human side. And maybe I could be wrong; maybe he IS just a corporate drone. But like Silverneurotic said, if Stuart didn’t have at least some redeeming qualities, he would be a one-dimensional, undeveloped character. And Norm is a better story-teller than that.

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