There are, of course, Cathy cartoons that just don’t hold up, effectively encapsulating our lowest societal expectations of women. (Did we really need quite so many riffs on the horrors of water weight?) But as a currently fat-and-fine-with-it person who really did once compulsively count calories and google new diets daily, I am frequently flummoxed by the modern imperative to “love yourself!!!” that sits atop a mountain of cultural messaging valorizing thinness. Cathy’s fretting about her weight may not be strictly feminist, but it’s real as hell.

“A lot of times, body positivity just makes everybody feel worse about themselves. It’s harder to express vulnerability now, because it’s no longer okay to say you’re not okay with everything about yourself,” Guisewite says. At least Cathy is honest about her insecurity, speaking it aloud instead of stashing it under a veneer of faux-confidence or corporate-sponsored virtue-signaling about how All Bodies Are Beautiful™. (In one strip from 1978, Cathy’s friend, her mother, and her date all tell her she’s “beautiful in your own special way, Cathy”—setting her up for the obvious, yet weirdly heartrending, rebuttal: “I want to be beautiful in everyone else’s way!”)

November 22, 1978

© Cathy Guisewite.  Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel.

Body nonsense aside, as I leafed through the new Cathy collection, I was also struck by its doses of familial sweetness. When Cathy’s not pitying or berating herself, she’s contemplating the contradictions of feminist liberation from a daughter’s perspective, or reverting to her child-self at her mother’s kitchen table. It’s easy to distill Cathy to her desperate flailing for male affection, but there’s an argument to be made that the comic’s real love story was the one between Cathy and her mother.