I’m not afraid of these little guys!!!!
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Dennis the Menace, 10/27/24
The Sunday Dennis the Menace strips always come with a title in the first panel, and usually it offers little pun or light wordplay, but today it’s just … “Dracula”? Dracula, the name of the vampire Dennis wants to be for Halloween. Or at least it is for the first few panels, after which he kind of loses interest. I guess he does pivot to wanting to be a boss … the vampire who sucks the blood out of the working class! Ha ha, just kidding, Dennis’s mother doesn’t even participate in the wage economy. He just wants to tell her what to do, because he’s kind of an asshole, but it’s not a class struggle thing, honestly more primal and Freudian. Hmm, maybe the vampire metaphor could work after all. I’m going to workshop this and get back to you.
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/24
I like the idea that Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished that creating unique outfits that would only serve as a costume would be a profligate waste of resources, so on Halloween “Hallerween” the inhabitants simply wear each other’s clothes to celebrate the spooky season. Anyway, I’m not sure if Snuffy is using “borrowed” euphemistically here; if he isn’t, it probably means Granny Creeps is walking around right now in Snuffy’s comically tiny overalls, and if it is, her stripped body is lying face down in a creek somewhere nearby, which is slightly but measurably worse.
88 replies to “I’m not afraid of these little guys!!!!”
DtM:
“I’d like to be a tree! A big, colorful tree! — a majestic specimen among our cornucopia of fauna that no less a poet than Joyce Kilmer commended for its sweeping beauty in reverential — almost elegiac — verse!”
“What got into you, Joey???”
MW:
If the longtime pitchman for Gallo wine were to utilize a coupon to secure a case of it for 90% of its normal cost, would we say that “Peter used ten off“?
BG&SS:
Here’s guessing that Snuffy won’t be getting the understudy role of Elphaba in Wicked anytime soon.
Dennis the Menace-Dennis would like to be found not guilty for one of his many future crimes.
MW-“Listen, Ed, it’s either you or Wilbur. Mary Worth only left you two as options for me.”
RMMD-“I don’t know who some of these characters are.” Says the out of touch writer.
Dennis the Menace-Doesn’t matter what he does all Dennis wants to be is a grownup. He’s been stuck as a child for the past seventy-something years.
DtM: You can make all the lame non-jokes you want, Ketchum team. Just keep showing Alice in sexy ankle boots and I’ll keep reading.
Snuffy Smith: Seeing as Granny Creeps is canonically a witch, I wonder what curse will befall Snuffy from wearing it?
It’ll probably just turn him into a disgusting little creature and…. wait a second.
BG&SS: If Granny Creeps has any powers at all, it probably isn’t a good idea to piss her off.
MW:So, will Ed work less?
Will Estelle whine less?
Will Wilbur stop invading women’s
dreams?
Will Pierre and Libby finally get a full
night’s sleep?
RMMD: There’s something so, I don’t know, SQUIRMY about those kids.
DtM: Ha, it’s funny because Alice doesn’t have a ‘boss’ per se, as her ‘job’ is serving the men in her life. So in a way Dennis is already her boss, by virtue of the patriarchy! I guess that’s why she looks like she going to laugh and cry and scream simultaneously in that last panel.
BGSS: I like how Tater’s costume seems to to be an actual hollowed-out potato? Makes sense: they can still eat it afterwards (if he doesn’t soil it) and there’s no sense wasting good burlap.
DT: There had to be a better way to tell recount this tale of two firefighters losing their lives in the line of duty. I mean, if you’re only going to give them one sentence, at least don’t make them sound like complete bumbling idiots who were followed in life by the sounds of gongs and slide whistles.
JP: This isn’t the first time Neddy has made this “nothing was left between me and Declan” claim, and it’s only getting more baffling. The only way this makes sense is that Neddy took it extremely hard that Declan would ruin her most perfect and wonderful day by not inviting his family and thus slightly misbalancing the wedding guest list- actually, never mind, it all fits. Hell, it’s a miracle Neddy didn’t dump him for that alone.
MW: I don’t know if anyone other than me bothered guessing what “Estelle and Ed’s favorite spot” was, but everyone’s predictions would have been wrong, because it turns out the answer is some bridge we’ve never seen or heard about before. Anyway, it’s the end of the story, so now the characters don’t care about their unresolved problems anymore and everything is just fine. The End… will arrive after another six weeks of pointless epilogue.
Luann: Golf Uckyer’s elves, gray gun carin’.
CS: It just wouldn’t be enough to make a grandiose declaration of one’s creative audacity and later quietly reverse course later after the presumed prestige has been mostly milked. No, Tom Batiuk has to go that extra step and pronounce himself Walt Whitman-esque for doing so. Some doofus once said that someone most honors his style who learns under it to destroy the teacher, but Batiuk knows that it’s quicker and easier to learn nothing from your teachers, develop no skills on your own, and just search BrainyQuote for someone famous who said something about blatantly contradicting yourself (while chopping off the inconvenient bit about having done so as an accident).
So anyway, Lillian is painting over her fire damage with the help of Indistinguishable Blonde #5 and Indistinguishable Blonde #8, as noted by #8 as she asks about if that’s what they’re doing halfway through what they’re doing. Now, I’m not exactly the Walt Whitman of house painting, but I’m pretty sure this is all very wrong. At the very least, you’d think women who typically wear their hair long and loose might want to do something about it before getting on line with two other morons waving paint brushes around, but that level of detail would take a moment of consideration and distract from Lillian becoming a silhouetted otherworldly horror in one panel for absolutely no artistic reason.
DtM: Hmmm… maybe the twist was, Alice did have a boss at a job, a real tyrant/blowhard.
He worked his people to the bone for very little pay, no health benefits, and even mocked and ridiculed them whenever he could.
So Alice summoned the demons of the underworld to put a curse on her boss, transmogrifying him into a child, whom she took in (immediately regretting it)
@The Rambling Otter: I mean seriously I can’t imagine a pencil-neck loser like Henry actually getting it on with a hottie like Alice.
DtM: It’s always like 1955 in Dennis’s world, so if he wants to be Alice’s boss, wouldn’t he have to be her husband? Oh yes I went there. Uh huh. What would Dr Freud say?
@The Rambling Otter: Looking it up, Henry’s blandness compared to Alice’s hotness, was actually lampshaded in one comic.
Dennis (to Henry): How come everybody says you were lucky to marry Mom and nobody says she was lucky to marry you?
Kids: Treat or Treat!!!
Grown-up at door: What are you supposed to be?
Joey: I’m a Doctor.
Grown-up at door: Pfffft that’s not scary
Joey (Hits the guy’s kneecap with a baseball bat then hands him a 40,000 dollar medical bill)
Luann: What the flying f-…?!
JP: Somewhere she has to go first? I guess I was a day early in my prediction but I still think tomorrow we’re going to see Neddy in the ‘fluffy pancakes’ diner. The answer to your question Neddy, by the way, is ‘Because your a moron.’
CS: Gee, it’s almost like the whole thing never happened! Move along everyone, nothing more to see here! Stay tuned tomorrow when Crankshaft burns leaves and hilariously burns down the neighborhood!
Slylock Fox, Six Differences: Why in all that’s good and holy would one wear a necktie if one doesn’t have a neck?
Beetle Moses: I don’t get it.
DtM: I’m going to be honest, the “Doctor” costume looks vaguely like he’s wearing a turban.
As if the original draft was going to have Joey dressing up as a Swami or something, but then the Dennis team realized that that might be culturally insensitive and redrew it into a Doctor at the last second.
Dennis the Menace: It’s hard to find a Dracula costume? I don’t think so! It’s just that as a little kid, Dennis is too literal-minded to look for High-Society Older European Man With Cape and Two Sharp Teeth at the Spirit Halloween store.
Snuffy Smith: So I guess the residents of Hootin’ Holler aren’t too impoverished to buy candy to give out for trick’r treat’n, even though there’s no Riteaid or Costco in a hundred miles and they have to pay the highly inflated prices at the local general store. Or maybe Loweezy actually makes her own Snickers and Milky Way bars using molasses. sorghum, and crushed dandelion greens from her backyard? If she can bake that huge pile of cookies out of — I’m guessing — acorn flour, wild carob, and leftover corn mash from the still, she can do pretty much anything.
@jroggs: can’t recycle your clip art of the bookstore if you dont repair the fire damage
BG&SS — I guess Granny Creeps wasn’t protein deprived as a child. Looks like witchin’ pays better than chicken stealin’ in Hootin’ Holler
DtM — C’mon, Dennis, look a little harder. There must be a state legislator costume around there somewhere. . .
MW: I hope they changed out of their dress shoes to walk on the world’s only stone arch bridge with a dirt surface.
Has science discovered what is missing from the Hootin’ Holler diet that causes the goiter-like noses and lolling tongues? Or is everyone just too grossed out to bother studying this?
Dennis the Menace: If they had been driving through a different part of town at that moment Joey might’ve said “I want to be a lake!” or “I want to be a Batteries Plus store!” or “I want to be an expressway!”
What does Loweezy think she’s going to do with that wheel? Hootin’ Holler doesn’t have roads. The only means of locomotion are clambering through the underbrush and Parson Tuttle’s private helicopter (never shown).
I was going to say that we’ve never seen a road or even a dirt path in Hootin’ Holler, just the occasionally flat blackness when the gag requires people to walk, but then I found this strip which as Josh points out goes completely off-model for the Smif house anyway.
JP: so Neddy the Stupid has no idea about Declan’s side of the story and has no interest?
DtM: I somehow doubt a five year old would know about know about Dracula. No snarc I’m skeptical.
DtM: Is it really hard to find a Dracula costume? On one hand, I did the yearly Spirit Halloween run with the Divalings recently and it does seem that, where kids’ costumes are concerned, classic movie monsters have mostly given way to Disney Princesses, Minecraft, and Minions. On the other hand, “Dracula” is the kind of character that you can easily cobble together from dress clothes, fake fangs and a cape, unless Dennis is being extremely specific. “I want to dress as Gary Oldman in the Francis Ford Coppola cult classic Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I can’t find a large, elaborately rolled white beehive wig ANYWHERE!”
MW:
“Stell, let’s do a call-and-response with the readership here about those birds that are swimming underneath our bridge.
“Give me a D!”
“D!”
“Give me a U!”
“U!”
“Give me a C!”
“C!”
“Give me a K!”
“K!”
“What’s that spell?”
“Duck!”
“What’s that spell?”
“Duck!”
“What’s that spell?”
“Duck!”
“What’s that spell?”
“Duck!”….
CS: And Walt Whitman turns over and sobs in the darkness, “Why? Why couldn’t he just leave me alone? Why?”
MW: “Oh good! Now I want you to take tomorrow off and look at some leopard-print tablecloths I’m thinking about for our reception!”
Trick’r is actually a Halloween app. During the tech boom years an NGO visited Hootin’ Holler and handed out mobile devices instead of providing, like, food or plumbing.
BG&SS: The best thing about this strip is the fact that they put the legally-required “circle-R” inside the dot above the “i” in “Smith.” After that, it’s all downhill.
(Okay, Tater as a tater is kind of funny,)
Blondie: “….triple pepperoni, olives, and anchovies.” Oh, yes. The Super Sodium Special.
Top off your dinner with a bottle or two of hypertension medication.
Pluggers: Begging the artist never to draw the word BRRAPP coming out of a Plugger’s ass ever again. I thought the caption was going to be something like “Even when he’s not in his car, a plugger suffers from the gas crisis” or “There’s no such thing as zero-emission vehicle for a plugger” or “An eco-friendly plugger makes his own wind energy”.
C’shaft: “Also the HOA threatened to fine me if I didn’t get it fixed.”
So the results of the arson attempt can just be covered with a couple gallons of Sherwin-Williams? Lillian’s house probably sustains worse from Crankshaft’s regular grill and chimney fires.
DT: See, this is why gentrification is a bad thing! It provides a cover for mad scientists tampering in God’s domain!
Dustin: Because the only way she could have talked about “canvas” is if it literally applied to her vocation.
JP: Why is Neddy being so vague about this? Surely “I discovered my fiance was a con artist” would sufficiently explain the situation?
Luann: I do the New York Times Sunday crossword regularly, and this makes absolutely no sense to me. I think this says less about my puzzle solving skills and more about Clan Evans’ puzzle creating skills.
MW: So their special place is the footbridge from The Music Man.
Pluggers worry about the stupidest things.
RMMD: “I mean look at this! ‘The Phantom’? ‘Popeye’? ‘Prince Valiant’? Where the Hell are the Five Nights at Freddy’s characters?”
@28 TheDiva: “Elaborately Rolled White Beehive Wig” is a great name for a medieval folk rock band.
Dennis – You should go back to the vampire idea, Dennis. Because you suck.
Snuffy – Tater’s costume is not scary enough. He should be a french fry.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Our new milkman is handsome, isn’t he?”
[On truck: MILK]
“Yes, but we’re having a battle of wills”
“I’m trying to browbeat him into going metric!”
[Note: 3 LITERS OF MILK]
MW: In a final irony, Wilbur’s duck hunting decoys break free of their tether and float downstream adding just the right amount of charm to Ed and Estelles’ romantic denouement.
MW- And so they lived. Full Stop. Happily, the readers hope this finally over. Full stop. After, Fall comes to Calverton. Wash rinse repeat.
CS: “Ed says this durable lead paint will cover anything.”
Pluggers – The BRAPP made me think they were showing an adult Marvin on a bike.
DtM: Doesn’t Joey have a mother of his own who will help him with his costume? Just wondering.
Blondie: They had a three-way coitus with that pizza.
Frazz: This is a fart joke, right?
@Unca Bob: Fall is coming, but Neddy isn’t.
RMMD – I was expecting to see an exclamation point after “Halloween” in the narration box. Without it, NB sounds like an exasperated adult who’s had it with the whole concept. It should follow up “Halloween” with “stupid kids.”
Pluggers – I’m pretty sure I’ve read that kids only used the most common, valueless duplicate baseball cards for the bicycle-spoke trick. Plugger cartoonists have nostalgia for a time they don’t actually remember.
DENNIS THE MENACE: Joey: “Oh, I gave that answer because I thought youL were going as Barbara Walters.”
@Charterstoned: Joey, like Elmo in Blondie, is a feral child who just wanders the neighborhood looking for handouts.
@MKay: MW: No, no, no and no.
JP – Abbey is wrong. It IS you, Neddy.
Mary Worth – “Stell, I’m so happy we’re back together. Let’s celebrate by going to the clinic and euthanizing some kittens.”
Rex Morgan – Yeah, sure. By this time the costumes have been picked over, and the leftovers have been pushed aside to make room for Christmas junk. The boys will end up trick or treating as Generic Superhero, and Sarah will be Generic Doll.
S4th – The pumpkin will have a funnier routine than Shorty and Beanpole.
Crankshaft – The loathsome, pompous hag says that, but she’s really making the repairs because the building inspector threatened to shut down her store if she didn’t.
I bet that Walt Whitman would have won a Pulitzer Prize if they’d been around when he was writing.
MW: Hooboy, whatta night! They had to construct an entirely new set overnight to be The Favorite Place! The Charterstone walking path has been temporarily closed by the Board of Health, after Pierre’s bout of intestinal distress on their walk last week. And they’re blamin’ US for it! When it was all that repetitive dialogue he had to time correctly that caused the stress!
Anyway, we were able to provide a few Duck extras for ambiance. And the Doves o’ Love are doin’ an impromptu flyover, with a Plus 1 along. The Ladies said the extra Dove was to be “symbolic” – of either Mary leading the couple to the blissful conclusion, or Wilbur leaving them in a spiteful snit. You can make the call…
Arlo and Janis I feel seen.
Look at those trees, losing their leaves and none of the other kids are mocking them. They don’t have to visit the doctor all the time to find out what’s wrong, and they never come down for some water at night and see their mother crying in kitchen. Joey reached up to his last remaining lock of hair once again wistfully dreaming of how nice it must be to live as a tree and whispered a quiet curse to the malevolent god who did this to him.
“What was that, Joey?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Mitchell,” he replied, “I was just reminding myself to give Charlie Brown a call when I get home. My dad says there is some promising research in Switzerland for our condition.”
Joey let out of a soft sigh as he went quiet again, thinking of how glorious it must be to be a tree.
Wallace the Brave made me laugh today. That is all.
Apparently, not even Joey’s parents want to do things with him, like choosing an Halloween costume. What’s more menacing than being boring?
DtM “Dress up as a tree? Why Joey, there would be no ent to the laughs you would get!”
(apologies to Bob “Punmaster General” Tice for stepping on his material.)
You might think that all those cookies on the plate and trick-or-treating is out of character for an impoverished community like Hottin Holler. But remember, under subsistence agricolture the level of food varies depending on the month and just after harvest there is plenty. This makes the perfect season for banquets with neighbours or other form of food-based community events. These kinds of bonds are the only thing that will save you when at the end of winter you run out of food and you have to beg for some chaff to survive
I really do not get Dennis. Vampire costumes are stereotypically the most common costumes on Halloween, so it shouldn’t be hard to find one. Unless Dennis is a purist: “Mother, stop with this nonsense! Don’t you see that this Dracula costume is heavily influenced by the Bela Lugosi and Cristopher Lee portrayals? I am looking for something based only on the original novel with Bram Stoker vision, without the deformations of subsequent pop culture! And don’t even talk about that hack Coppola’s bastardisation!”
@The Rambling Otter: That’s the problem. She already did that and left herself no space to curse him further. And what’s worst? He’s living his best life because of it!
BG&SS:
We mourn the loss of Snuffy Smith, who, in costume, used the wrong restroom in Hootin’ Holler and was set upon by an armed mob dispatched by genital inspectors.
Dennis The Menace: Oh my God, actually good art in a Dennis The Menace strip! Pigs are flying and Hell has frozen over!
Snuffy Smith: That weird expression that the Hootin’ Holler characters make where they stick their tongues out is supposed to be laughter, but it’s honestly looks more like the people of Holler are some kind of near-human beings evolved from anteaters instead of apes and thus possessing long tongues they regularly eject to capture insects.
“I wanna be a tree!” “Do your duty, Ruff!”. Menace level: Marvin
Oh no Snuffy Smith’s Halloween costume is the trash bag alien that killed Tasha Yar. TOO SOON.
Luann: Diss trip Khan pissof.
I wish my kids wanted to be trees. Wear a brown shirt, duct tape some branches to them and there you go.
No, they always want to be obscure anime characters, or unusual minecraft creatures, or third-string Pokemon that no one has ever heard of. And don’t even get me started on how they want their pumpkins carved.
Luann-Twenty dollars for the solution.
Slylick Fox and Comix For Kinx: “Not everyone keeps their genitals in the same place.”- Marta, Star Trek IV The Undiscovered Country. Case in point, these two who keep them above their mouths.
William Shatner voice LLLLLIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMM!!!! Like a poor marksman you keep swiping the 69 position when I’m talking about alien genitalia!”
@Baja Gaijin: I can’t exactly comment as this is my first viewing of this comic, so I don’t know if it’s a gag-a-day or ongoing plot.
But I guess it’s spoofing when the villain disposes of another character into a pit or death trap, but the writer maybe thought “Let’s have someone fall into something utterly ridiculous”
Jokes on you Beetle Moses, Doctor Who already did that, with a guy falling into (and being absorbed by) a giant sentient brain.
Although, I did like the Futurama “what if” scenario, where if Leela was just a tiny bit slightly more impulsive. And had a scene where The Professor was feeding his ravenous anteaters in a pit below while telling Leela that if anything happens to him, she gets his entire fortune. Then she pushes him down into the ravenous anteater pit.
Professor (as he’s being eaten): You killed me!! You killed me!!
Leela: Oh my god, what have I done!?
Professor: I just told you! You killed me!!
@vince: I wish my kids wanted to be trees. Wear a brown shirt, duct tape some branches to them and there you go.
__________
Vince’s kids: “We wanna be trees!”
Vince: “Oak Kay!”
@Cleveland Mocks: CS: And Walt Whitman turns over and sobs in the darkness, “Why? Why couldn’t he just leave me alone? Why?”
______________________
“Surly, you’ve heard of a Whitman Sampler, Sherman.” “Up yours, Peabody!, and don’t call me Shirley!”
@GarrisonSkunk: “…..and now for something you’ll REALLY like: A boy force feeding a smart speck dog a box of chocolates!” “Die, Peabody,die!”
@72 The Rambling Otter: It’s a gag-a-day with no continuity. Typically the strip is less inscrutable than today’s entry.
Sunday Phantom: Yes, dahlings, I’m back for a second week here in the deserts of West Africa, in my new role as Phantom 2’s Horse! Still with the “moody” lighting! I thought this would be an upgrade from Medieval Times. But that *was* a flattering fire-lit butt shot of me in the last panel!
I don’t know yet just how much I’ll be able to “make” of this role. So far it seems I’m just part of the scenery, even showing up as a silhouette sometimes. But I’m sure there will be opportunities for me to be a commanding presence in the narrative, even if I have to create them myself! I’m trying to get “in” with the native Horses here – I’m always interested in learning about new cultures, their history, their favorite shopping places. I’m picking up some of the language – we all speak Horse, of course, but the dialects are a little tricky. I don’t want to say the wrong thing!
l didn’t have to go back to the Prince Valiant set this week. No Horses were involved in the “current” action. hahaha It’s a good thing – I haven’t had a chance to do much in swimming instruction for the Horse actors..
Tiger – If he had learned to use the library, he could have been forewarned by reading The Scarlet Trash Can.
CS: Like a coat of paint is a repair for fire damage.
PV: Ahh, poor, wittle Val won’t get his pwecious magic sword back. He’ll never be a whole man again.
PV: Think you’re up shit creek now, Val. Wait until they find out you lost Greg the magic spear too.
@TheDiva: #28:
“but I can’t find a large, elaborately rolled white beehive wig ANYWHERE”
Just ask the mushroom cloud haired HTT Keane Grandma where she shops for hers.
@vince: And don’t even get me started on how they want their pumpkins carved.
__________________
Every male crosses his legs.
The Familliar Mucus — Dolly: “I wanna be Lucy Van Pelt! Can I use Jeffy’s head as Charlie Brown’s rock?”
@Peanut Gallery: #49: When I was a kid I’d never put a Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron card in my bicycle spokes, but Bob Uecker or Joe Garagiola, no problem. Also, playing cards worked just as well.
@vince: And don’t even get me started on how they want their pumpkins carved.
__________
Weirdest euphemism for a circumsision,ever!- Comic Book Guy.
BG&SS: After he killed Granny Creeps for her clothes, Snuffy contemplated wearing her flayed skin and trick or treating as Ed Gein, but he figured Loweezy and Elviney wouldn’t get the reference.
@Guillermo el chiclero: Peanut Gallery: #49: When I was a kid I’d never put a Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron card in my bicycle spokes, but Bob Uecker or Joe Garagiola, no problem.
___________
“I must be in the front wheel”, Bob Uecker, Miller LITE commercial, 1979
@TheDiva: but I can’t find a large, elaborately rolled white bee hive wig ANYWHERE!”
_____________
Bleach a Marge Simpson wig!
@Guillermo el chiclero: I used Marvelous Marv Throneberry of the 1962 Mets exclusively.