Mothers send strips to daughters to make a point. Daughters smack strips down on the breakfast table to make a point. My own mom sometimes cuts a strip out and sends it to me to make sure I understand her.

Cathy Guisewite is best known as the creator of the long-running comic strip *Cathy* (1976–2010), which often mined everyday domestic life—food, work, self-image, and family dynamics—for humor. This quotation reflects a pre-digital habit common in late-20th-century American households: clipping items from newspapers (especially comics) and mailing or handing them to relatives as a pointed, affectionate form of commentary. Guisewite frames the comic strip itself as a kind of intergenerational shorthand between mothers and daughters—an efficient way to say “this is you,” “this is me,” or “this is what I mean,” without a direct confrontation.

The quote treats comic strips as a social language: a “strip” becomes evidence in an argument, a nudge toward self-recognition, or a safe proxy for criticism. By repeating “to make a point,” Guisewite highlights how humor can carry emotional force—softening blunt truths while still delivering them. The mother–daughter exchange suggests both intimacy and tension: they know each other well enough to communicate through a clipped joke, yet the need for indirectness implies that direct advice might be resisted. The final line—her mother cutting out and sending a strip to the cartoonist herself—adds a self-referential twist, showing how even the creator can be “read” and corrected by family.