The Comics Curmudgeon

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Maybe it's just that the standards of menace have been so raised by the likes of Calvin and Hobbes or Bart Simpson but I can't remember ever seeing Dennis engage in behavior that would make him a poor children's party guest. He wears a tiny suit to church for goodness sake! He's really just a menace because the strip is called Dennis the Menace but who told the inhabitants of the strip that? Who is going around badmouthing this precocious kid who at worst doesn't always live up to 1950s standards of etiquette? I ask but we all already know it's Mr. Wilson, Mr. Wilson is making the neighbor kid a social pariah out of a sort of misplaced dissatisfaction and inadequacy that his pension wasn't enough to settle him in a gated community with no children.

—BananaSam
35

Depressing Tuesday

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Shoe, 7/14/26

I appreciate that this joke could’ve worked fine by just saying that ol’ Uncle Herm was a lousy bowler; but no, we also gotta work in the fact that he was a big drunk as well. It’s nice to see the Perfesser is continuing the family tradition of nephews having a semi-close relationship with their alcoholic uncles. Will Skyler make visits to the graveyard to leave flowers on his tombstone when he dies, an event that, based on his general vibes, always seems imminent?

Dennis the Menace, 7/14/26

“The only motivations other people have for doing things all involve their feelings about me, the main character of reality” is admittedly a pretty menacing attitude to go through life with. You have to hand it to Dennis today, menace-wise!

Pluggers, 7/14/26

“Even the small bits of pleasure pluggers once took in everyday life have been transformed into nagging, painful reminders of their failing bodies.” —Pluggers, the comic strip beloved (???) by pluggers everywhere

154

Really had to resist including some family tree diagrams for this one

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/13/26

In The City of God, St. Augustine famously tells a story of a pirate who had been captured by Alexander the Great: “When that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What do you mean by seizing the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.’” Now, Augustine’s point is that a king who rules without virtue is simply a brigand on a larger scale; but Hagar, whose opinions on the new religion from the south are mixed at best, takes the harder-headed view, more common among modern commentators, that recognizes the similarities between states and criminal enterprises without necessarily applying moral valence to it. The king is stronger than Hagar, so he must submit to his cruelties, but he also looks forward to passing them down the line to his own victims.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/13/26

So Lyle Ollman, the inventor of the Mirakle Method, is the grandfather of the scam twins Jean and Jane, and Rene/Jimmy is their uncle, but Lyle is also Rene’s uncle and … I don’t think that really works? I guess it works if whichever of Lyle’s children is a parent to the twins married someone whose sibling married Rene in a weird sibling/cousin double marriage situation, but Rene doesn’t seem like the marrying kind; it could also be that one of Rene’s siblings married his or her own first cousin to produce these two kids. It’s also possible that this whole family suffers from intense, multigenerational nephewism and nobody has any parents at all: it’s just uncles as far back as anyone can remember.

Andy Capp, 7/13/26

“Yeah I’m trying to lose some ugly excess weight … by which I mean my spouse, whom I hate!” is a classic and beloved joke format of course, and I suppose it was inevitable that it would get a GLP-1 spin eventually, but I don’t think anyone expected it to happen in Andy Capp first.

137

Mostly AI Sunday

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Blondie, 7/12/26

Back in early 2024, Dithers had to regretfully report that DithersCo wasn’t using AI tools to boost productivity, with his employees mostly using their computers to play dumb and possibly scammy games on Facebook. In the subsequent months, it appears that the company has adopted AI — but, sadly, primarily as an automated toady for the boss, who has become the latest CEO to succumb to AI psychosis. Ironically, Dagwood and his coworkers are immune, since they refuse to engage with their devices on any level deeper than “Renegade-Rhino-Rummy.”

Zits, 7/12/26

I hadn’t mentioned it here, but earlier this year Zits went into reruns on weekdays and is now only doing new strips on Sundays. But that doesn’t mean the strip is shying away from storylines relevant to today’s teens, including real dark ones like “Jeremy gets dumped for a computer.”

Mary Worth, 7/12/26

Man, I didn’t think you could beat “Wilbur Weston thinks I’m a druggie loser so I might as well do drugs” for sheer patheticness, but then today Mary Worth hit us with “I’m going to flush these perfectly good drugs that probably cost me a week’s worth of pay from my minimum wage job down the toilet so I can live up to the version of me that Dawn Weston believes in,” respect. It’s amazing to think about how much more embarrassing this is than if he had just put “local bald guy thinks im losser should i do drugs yes or no” into ChatGPT or Yahoo! Answers or whatever.