While Cathy hasn’t returned to syndicated comics, she has returned.
Cathy Guisewite features the cartoon Cathy in her book Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault, Guisewite also features cartoon Cathy in a series of panels on her Instagram account.
And these days the topic is “sheltering in place.”
Though the syndicated newspaper comic strip she starred in ended in 2010, these days you can find Cathy on Instagram, where her creator and namesake, Cathy Guisewite, has been posting original one-panel strips for the past couple of years. (I suppose technically these posts might not count as canon, but let’s just assume they do.) …
What’s the difference between a Cathy comic from before the coronavirus crisis and one from after? As far as I can tell, it mostly comes down to the types of food that our waist-size-obsessed heroine is agonizing over. Before all this, it was usually, as anyone who knows the first thing about Cathy could tell you, chocolate, or else some other sweet. But now, the snacks that bedevil her have started to nod to life under lockdown: instant mashed potatoes, boxed mac ’n’ cheese, homemade baked goods.