McDonnell usually has a theme for each entire week of daily Mutts strips; last week he produced a very nice collection of “meta” and “fourth wall” gags:
As an unusual bonus, the Sunday strip also fits in with the overall topic of the daily strips:
P.S. I decided to fetch the monochrome originals from Mutts.com, in particular because I felt that the Thursday and Friday strips do not work as well in color.
P.P.S. I was very disappointed when Arcamax switched Mutts to the colorized daily strips, and neither Arcamax nor Comics Kingdom bothers to include the title panel for the Sunday strips, which is often a real loss.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The last strip in this group very clearly drew inspiration from the work of Jules Feiffer, both in the style of drawing the dancer and in the idea of issuing seasonal “A Dance To ____” strips.
Here is a biographical piece on Feiffer: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/f/feiffer.htm . The first illustration at the top of the article is an instance of “A Dance to Spring”.
From the biographical post about Feiffer to which Mitch4 provided a link:
Feiffer also wrote the script for the Alan Arkin movie ‘Carnal Knowledge’ (1971).
Alan Arkin?
The Wednesday panel was my favorite.
Steve, good catch! It looks like they messed up their notes — Arkin directed (and took a role in) the movie of “Little Murders”, script by Feiffer based on his play. But Arkin does not seem connected with “Carnal Knowledge”, which does have a Feiffer script.
@ Chak – I agree that Wednesday was definitely the best strip; next on my ranking was Friday. Saturday‘s strip was very weak (almost lame), but that was precisely the point.
P.S. Mitch may be right about Feiffer‘s influence on the Sunday strip, but if so, I would expect that the title panel would be a reference to another one of Feiffer‘s drawings. Does anyone recognize the antecedent?
Kilby, I don’t really understand your point about the title panel. Why would you expect that? In any case, I’m not talking about “influence”, I’m talking about hommage! To anyone who grew up seeing the Feiffer strip regularly, it is entirely obvious that this was an intentional tribute. (The only thing missing is an explicit note.)
The following is shot from the Comics Kingdom comments:
Another example
And one more dancer cartoon
Enjoy!
And finally, the dancer goes Meta
@ Mitch – It was precisely the enormous wealth of dance versions that Feiffer drew that kept me from mentioning the topic within the text I wrote for this post; I simply was not able to select a “primary” example, and did not want to confuse the immediate “meta” issue. Less is more.
The point I was trying to make is that McDonnell is well known for a wide variety of tributes in his Sunday title panels (there’s even a collection of them in book form). It’s normally not his style to mention the inspiration for a strip with a direct text line, but it would definitely be his style to include a reference to Feiffer in the title panel. However, I am not familiar enough with Feiffer’s work to recognize whether the “big” Mooch is a direct reference to a separate drawing, or just an additional random dancer.
I thought the whole week was saying “I have no funny ideas today, so I’m just going to fake it.” That said, I did laugh at the “india Ink” line.
And with the whole discussion about tributes, no one mentioned the Thursday strip?
Thanks, jjmcgaffey! How could we ignore Ignatz and Krazy!
This Sunday’s Mutts again used the Feiffer-derived “dancer” figure and “A Dance To ___” subject. Nicely done!
A memorial allusion for Feiffer.
(Thatababy by Paul Trap, 03 Feb 2025)
Here in March 2025, a very nice Feiffer tribute in La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz.