Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “A little comic relief”
A gentle direction — no specifics.
Closer — the category is coming into focus.
Near-direct — only read if you’re stuck.
Direction only.
Getting closer.
Near-direct.
6 theme words — lengths in random order
Spaces not counted in total
All theme words — shuffled
These words fit the theme on the surface, but aren’t part of today’s solution. Knowing them ahead of time can save you minutes of searching.
The world's most famous lazy cat is a syndicated strip, so it feels guaranteed to appear. It isn't in this lineup, and the grid has no spare letters to waste hunting for it.
Another long-running office strip that fits the vibe perfectly. Solvers keep circling it because the theme feels right, but the six titles are a different set.
A character, not a feature title. Once the theme clicks, this name feels inevitable — but every answer here is the name of a strip, not a player inside one.
One of the answers is slang for blemishes, so this medical word looks thematically linked. The puzzle wants the strip name itself, not the condition it jokes about.
a textbook decoy
5.5 feels right because the clue does half the work — 'comic relief' is a pun that hands you the category within a minute — while ZIPPY is the title most solvers stall on, since Zippy the Pinhead is a far deeper cut than BLONDIE or PEANUTS. Once PEANUTS and ZITS land, though, the grid collapses fast: the six answers plus the spangram use all 48 squares, so there is no filler to sift through and every remaining cluster has to be a title. The spangram was arguably easier to spot than some of the strips, because 13 letters of unbroken path stand out visually the moment you accept the long answer is a phrase rather than a name. What makes the set sneakier than it looks is that all six titles double as ordinary vocabulary — pickles, zits, mutts, blondie, zippy, peanuts — so nothing in the grid announces itself as a proper noun.
'A little comic relief' is doing double duty: it's the literary term for a humorous break in a serious story, and it's also a literal wink at the strips themselves. 'A little' is the sly part, pointing at how tiny a daily strip is on the page. It's a gentle nudge rather than a puzzle, and once you spot the theme — newspaper comic strips like BLONDIE, PEANUTS, and ZITS, with THEFUNNYPAGES as the spangram — the title's pun feels obvious in hindsight.
What sets this set apart is that the editor picked titles that already live as ordinary English words: BLONDIE, MUTTS, PEANUTS, PICKLES, ZIPPY, ZITS. None announce themselves as proper nouns, so the grid stays flat and unhelpful until you commit to the theme. The deeper cuts, PICKLES and ZIPPY, balance the instantly recognizable PEANUTS and ZITS, and the spangram THEFUNNYPAGES reframes the whole grid as a place rather than a list — which is exactly the joke.
