“Speaking of narrative” … you fool, if you’re speaking of narrative, there’s already narrative happening
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Intelligent Life, 11/8/24
I can’t believe I’m saying this about Intelligent Life, a comic strip that’s usually about unpleasant bug-eyed people saying fandom words at each other, but today’s strip is actually based on fairly complex semiotic play. Rather than simply having a conversation, Skippy, and, uh, the other guy are talking about the sort of conversation they expect to have, while simultaneously undermining those expectations. Skippy’s reply being put in quote marks, indicating we’re at least one layer of metanarrative deep here, is a particularly effective device.
Hagar the Horrible, 11/8/24
Speaking of narrative, if they had put an eggheaded intellectual like me in charge of today’s Hagar the Horrible, it would’ve been about how the canonically illiterate Hagar believes that his people’s lore should be preserved via their ancient oral tradition of poetry, and is horrified to see Hamlet reading it out of some book. But you could also do a joke about how he’s afraid of spiders, I guess. I mean, why not, if you want to. I don’t like spiders either, for the record.
Mary Worth, 11/8/24
Incredible visual storytelling here: in panel two, we discover that this whole time Wilbur was standing just in front of these ladies, ready to start manically ranting about how great Mary and her food are, certainly better than the sad Lean Cuisine meals he microwaves every night and baptizes with his tears — but only the sudden pullback of our viewpoint reveals his face, in a real jump scare.
Dennis the Menace, 11/8/24
Wait, doesn’t the “world’s best dad” formulation imply that there aren’t any more like him? Does … does Dennis not know that other people have dads, or what?
72 replies to ““Speaking of narrative” … you fool, if you’re speaking of narrative, there’s already narrative happening”
MW-THC and a lot of it.
MW:
“You have to teach me some of your recipes one of these days, Mary!”
“Well, the one I’m most known for is what everyone calls me after encountering me for the first time: ‘a recipe for disaster‘ !”
Estelle needs cooking lessons from Mary? I mean, she’s not a dewy-eyed 19-year-old bride — she’s a middle-aged widow, right? This is just silly.
“does Dennis not know that other people have dads, or what?”
Do Joey, Margaret and Gina even have parents?
MW: And beige! Very, very beige!
MW: Thank heavens we are spared from a full body panel of Wilbur. We do not need to see his pantless outfit consisting of:
-Hellmans Mayo packet thong
Or
-No pants ala Wilburhood for all to see
MW: “Everybody” has a hard time seeing with Wilbur standing in front of them.
DtM: Doesn’t the fact that it’s Dennis holding the box the cup came in mean he gave it to his father? Perhaps he confused the possessive with a contraction: “The World ‘is’ best Dad.” Don’t be so smug about it.
FC: “Hi, Mommy, we just picked up these orphans from the workhouse.”
MW:
“My goodness, Estelle! — a partial solar eclipse is obscuring the lighting in here!…oh…no…wait a minute…that’s just Wilbur dominating today’s second frame!”
Henry’s smile fades as he realizes Dennis just lumped him in with a bunch of equally milquetoast middle aged fathers who ache for the confirmation of an impersonal coffee mug bought at a flea market for a quarter. Existentially menacing.
I do appreciate that even though it’s right in their field of vision, Estelle still takes the time to inform everyone that this is “the lunch spread.” After all, people who are unfamiliar with Mary’s cooking need to be reassured that no, this is not Libby’s litter box on the table.
MW:
At the reception, old tensions between Wilbur and Estelle simmer to a boil, and the happy event devolves into a muffin-flinging donnybrook that evokes Game of Thrones‘ Red Wedding.
DtM: I can’t help seeing that one box flap as a lolling tongue, and it’s really freaking me out. Too bad there’s not a joke to distract me.
DENNIS THE MENACE: Dennis: “You mean there are more like you?”
Alice: “Speaking of which, remember about 6 years ago, Henry, when you went away to some conference, and Ted the mailman came over while I was lonely and vulnerable….”
MW: Wilbur tramples the entire room on his way to some balls to the wall comfort eating.
I haven’t read Mary Worth in a few days, I didn’t know where they were or what they were doing (wasn’t the wedding over?) and seeing as no other characters are around to see, I assumed that the cast was literally talking to the readers… -shudder-
RMMD: “Well, there’s my age and the ex-wives and…” Truck’s voice trails off as spam filters the world over won’t let him mention his “little helper” drugs.
DtM: If you fail miserably doing your standard pun based nonsense you can always try again later to make a joke and salvage some dignity.
MW: Of course Wilbur would be the first person to shove himself to the front of the line.
Pluggers: Pluggers are medically decrepit meat sacks # 6492.
Forget all these other comic strips. Are the Gasoline Alley girls in space yet?
RMMD: And speaking of my ex-wives, you do know that practically every dime I make goes to alimony payments?
MW: Behind the Wilburbomb, we can see Mary frozen in fear at the prospect of being asked to share her muffin recipe… If she’s going to give up her exclusive knowledge of how to make the muffins, which are likely laced with a substance that opens people’s minds to meddling suggestions, she will only tell after being formally challenged to a duel.
Dennis: I think Dennis is commenting on the fact that the mug is clearly manufactured en masse (probably in China) and the slogan printed on it is, thus, meaningless. He therefor concludes that his ability to read has done nothing other than shatter the fragile innocence of his childhood. He’s ready to join Dagwood in the soulless drudgery of adulthood.
@Guillermo el chiclero:
Rhwanda: “And how much will I get once I dump your worthless ass?”
MW: Rarely, when we have a party, do we need to announce “Hey, everybody, this is food, please eat it.”
Mary Worth 1: “Wilbur, goddammit! We’ve been through this, the flowers aren’t part of the celebratory lunch spread!”
Mary Worth 2: Why can’t we see Wilbur’s hands? WHY CAN’T WE SEE WILBUR’S HANDS?!!
Mary Worth 3: Years later, in the aftermath of the Santa Royale mass suicide, the video would survive online, traded through image boards, memefied, a ghostly artifact tinged with sadness of cult members smiling wide-eyed and unblinking, inviting everybody, Everybody, to the celebratory lunch spread. It’s a self-serve buffet (with cyanide)!
(I guess I had a lot to say about Mary Worth today.)
IL: Godamnit, Skippy: if it’s a ‘fantasy’ football league then your joke should have been ‘Hobbits versus Orcs’ or ‘Targaryens vs Lannisters’ or something, not characters in a sci-fi universe! This nerd shit is mainstream now, try to keep up!
HtH: Ah yes, the Saga of Rolf the Strong defeating the Brown Recluse. Not the most popular tale, I’m surprised that made it in there.
MW: Ah, yes, the self-serve buffet, as opposed to the buffet that is served to you?
DtM: The fact that Dennis isn’t sure if there are other dads out there really underscores how much they try to limit his contact with other people. Frankly, I don’t blame them.
MW: Estelle would have called it a “reception” not a “celebratory lunch spread,” but then the focus would be on the newlyweds instead of the only important person here: Mary Worth.
Pluggers haven’t figured out how to use the calendar on their Jitterbug phones.
Mary Worth: Mary sure worked hard on that buffet! All you can eat… brown, beige, and roses! Dig in, everyone!
Intelligent Life: Romulans and Klingons are from sci-fi, not fantasy. If you’re going to make fun of fantasy football you’re supposed to say something like Elves vs. Dwarves or Riverlands vs. Westerlands or some suchness. This is really basic, you guys!
Mary Worth: This looks like one of those too-perfect scenes you see right before it’s revealed that the person experiencing it is actually in a coma.
Some children would rather not think about their parents having sex. Dennis is the opposite. He believes he is only product of copulation by a man and a woman, everyone else is the product of asexual reproduction
MW: Saying “It’s a self-serve buffet!” and making it as something everyone should be excited about when in reality it’s all the fun of eating at Golden Corral but in someone’s house is really MEH at best.
But also, I’m guessing they saw all the chafing dishes and sterno, even these rubes probably figured out it was a buffet. Look at Wilbur there, he’s so excited he’s CLEARLY pleasuring himself
@Ettorre: No one’s “too perfect” scene includes Manic Wilbur. No one’s. Not even in Mary Worth.
@pugfuggly: I hadn’t read your post yet when I wrote mine. It was just convergent evolution or something.
IL – The blind carpenter picked up his hammer and saw! Thank Jebus!! Then he cut off his thumb, but it was a clean cut and they could re-attach it…thank Jebus, again! And he got a decent Workers Comp payday – Jebus strikes again….
HtH – Book larn’in’ is dangerous – best stick ta rape an’ pillage, son….
MW – So…somebody slipped Wilbur an ecstasy mickey?
DtM – Well, I’m not sure how official all these ranking are.
Jerry Seinfeld
Adios Amigos, DJ.
DtM I read the caption before looking at the picture and figured
Why am I, bereft of any discernable talent, compositing better comics than a professional?
Intelligent Life – This strip might be more than surface level deep, but the odd phrasing make it feel like an Alien attempting to mimic human speech.
Hagar the Horrible – Hagar had Lucky Eddie write a biography of him instead of an epic saga, so he has no objection to personal or Viking history being contained in the printed word.
Being a Norse pagan, he is superstitious about spiders, which are associated with the Norns, the Viking equivalent to the Greek Fates, who weave tapestries of life. They are also considered tie closed to the Past, Present, and Future, so one appearing in a history text is extra concerning for a warrior like Hagar.
Mary Worth – “Celebratory Lunch Spread” sounds like an artificially flavored nutritional paste from the future that The Refugees get during The Holidays ( a series of old harvest and winter festivals back before climate change ruined agriculture and led to a rise in The State). Only well behaved Refugees get it, the rest are still subject to The Meddling and suboptimal rations until total submission.
Dennis the Menace – Dennis learns “World’s Best Dad” mugs are a commodity produced in mass, and that it is an opinion, without authoritative backing in fact. This means that he shouldn’t be restricted to merely seeking paternal approval from Henry, his mere biological Dad.
Perhaps, Dennis thinks, he could be the World’s Best Dad himself, a paternal figure for all to pay homage to. If these things are merely opinion, and the cost to maintain such a notion are cheap mugs and tchotchkes made in China, than the masses could easily become his “children”. Fused with his Sunday school learning of God (the Father), and suddenly a very menacing and megalomaniacal future awaits!
@The Rambling Otter: Indeed. I could be charitable and think Wilbur is talking to the food he is about to unceremoniously start shoving into his Dagwood-like maw, but there’s a non-zero chance this is more fandisservice. ‘Mary’s muffins are GOOD, readers! Take my word for it! YOU make all this possible!’
JP: Meanwhile, Ces seems to have decided that his strip needs a Wilbur too, hence Neddy’s giddy, singsong declaration about meeting Testor’s Glucas.
Zits: Jeremy is in high school and I don’t believe his homework is to figure out how to spell common words and use them in a sentence. Anyway he has a smartphone and he’d be asking Siri this and not his mother.
Marvin: Surprised this story hasn’t yet turned to the inevitable conclusion of Marvin peeing all over this cardboard boat as some kind of avant garde performance art.
Hi and Lois: That’s funny, Chip thinks his family is ever going to have the financial ability for him to attend college. Yesterday Lois was panicking over the cost of buying a school lunch.
Six Chix: You can in fact charge a phone while simultaneously using it to watch videos.
Beetle Bailey: Surprised that Beetle’s horribly deformed feet aren’t disqualifying him to serve in the military.
Normal people used to have a general idea of nerdom, but not the specifics. This is why there is the common idea that “Star Trek vs Star Wars” is a huge point of controversy among nerds. Star Wars and Star Trek are known even to the general public. Actual nerds are more interested in much more esoteric and specific questions — “what does the colour of a lightsaber say?” — but it is hard to explain to normies. Just like theologians do not really discuss about how many angels can dance on a pin, but they DO discuss whether Christ has one or two natures or whether he is “FROM two natures” or “IN two natures”, which is actually more complex. Anyway, the muscular guy knows that Skippy will make a nerdy reference but doesn’t know which one and doesn’t care to know. Good for him
@LTJpezcore1: Not me, but I agree
It could be worse, blonde guy. At least he’s just making a pointless Star Trek reference. If you asked me, I’d start moralizing about gambling on people who give themselves brain injuries for your entertainment.
***
He’s talking right at us? Oh fuck, they’re Deadpooling Wilbur.
Alice’s sly smile at hearing Dennis is from her secret knowledge of the boy’s actual paternity – she once drunkenly seduced George Wilson.
MW has a whole turkey on the buffet table. It’s self-serve. I usually say “This herd ain’t gonna cull itself”, but this time…
Pluggers remember a time when they could get free calendars from the bank, their insurance agent, and the drug store. But they usually didn’t have them until the end of the year, and there was always the chance some of the doctor appointment cards stuck to the fridge would get lost by then. So they joined the modern world and started *buying* their calendars six months ahead at the dollar store. The convenience and peace of mind is well worth the expense.
MW- You really haven’t been to a wedding until you’ve hade the requisite salmon squares and muffins
@Tabby Lavalamp: Wilbur Weston is the new Wade Wilson. Will Ian Cameron become Wolverine to boot?
@Ettorre:Whoopsiedoodle
MW: Wilbur will destroy that poor buffet.
@Philip: I can believe that in any type of dystopia Mary would be made Minister of Newspeak.
MW: Wilbur channels his inner Homer: “Self-serve?! Woo-hoo! . . . Mmmmm, graaaavy.”
Frazz: And by “force of nature” he means “flaming asshole.”
CS: If they willingly hired Crankshaft, why wouldn’t they hire this guy? He couldn’t be much worse.
Not being familiar with Intelligent Life (and make of that statement what you will), is Skippy supposed to be the office nerd? Until the second panel, the only clues were his hair, and his ordinary build compared to Blond Guy’s superhero proportions. The latter’s look of disdain in the third panel suggests the attitude of “you would follow sports if you were a real man.”
@26 Lord Flatulence: Rarely, when you have a party, do you serve things that don’t look edible but in fact are edible? Your answer to that question is “no” but Mary Worth’s would be “yes.”
@46 ValdVin: That’s not a roast turkey. It’s a giant turkey-shaped salmon square.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Let’s go skiing, girls!”
“Me first!”
“No! Me!”
“Don’t argue! On my yacht I always go first!”
“I forgot that the best view is from the back of the pack!”
@Ettorre:
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, if I made a comment like that, I’d expect:
25% of people to fully understand the reference (who the Klingons and Romulans are, this is inflated by running in the nerdy circles I do)
50% of people to understand I made some sort of Star Trek reference
25 % of people to be completely bewildered
I’d say the strip misses some chances to actually go for the “fantasy” joke and make some sort of reference to Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Game of Thrones, or the huge sci-fi/fantasy crossover universes of Star Wars or the MCU.
And obligatory “sportsball” joke.
From past comments I think Josh has a reasonable knowledge of Latin. The phrasing of the question in the middle panel of Intelligent Life is is the stuff of Latin students’ nightmares. Apparently it would be in “the subjunctive of the 1st periphrastic conjugation”:
https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/indirect-questions
So, long story short, the comment in panel three would be especially apt if the whole conversation was in a dead language.
There are plenty of stories of people trying to recreate their grandparents’ prized recipes, lamenting that the elders became so skilled that they didn’t bother writing down all the tricks and techniques they use. Wilbur senses that Mary is one such cook. So his diabolical plan is to hide cameras in her kitchen that feed into a custom-built AI, which will learn to duplicate her dishes perfectly. Then Mary will conveniently disappear and Wilbur will become an obscenely rich food magnate – he will move into a tackily decorated mansion and he’ll buy Charterstone, reducing its surviving residents to slaves for his greater glory.
RMMD: “Well tie me to a pig and roll me in the mud! Of course I’ll marry you, you old horse thief!”
GT: This is one of those magic moments when the art and the dialogue are equally incomprehensible.
I swear I see more of Wilbur Weston than I do of my own family.
Maybe this is on me for reading Mary Worth, but I still don’t like him.
LUANN: Wow, apparently Berniece was such horrible toxic R.A. that the university not only eliminated that position, but the entire campus housing department as well. That’s the only plausible reason why no one’s stepping in to stop this room-swapping silliness.
HtH: Far be it from me to try to teach a Viking about how to inflict overkill levels of violence, but … Did either of them consider slamming the book closed? Although I do see that the book is already closed in panel one, yet somehow still has a living spider in it in panel two. So Hamlet was either implausibly gentle when he closed it previously, or that is a spider we should likely all be in terror of.
“I’m having trouble with my Viking history. It says we never wore horned helmets!”
MW: Aren’t buffets self-serve by definition?
Obviously, Dennis recognizes that this is a mass-produced mug, and therefore there exists a considerable market of dads who want their impressionable children to think they have the “world’s best dad.” By “others like you,” Dennis means “pathetic frauds.” Not un-menacing, but I concede he has to work on his delivery.
@Dan: My perception is that some of those created worlds are considered by the larger culture as less nerdy, particularly Game of Thrones and the MCU. When the GoT series was running, I encountered many viewers who weren’t nerds, and at least some of the men seemed to treat it like a Mafia franchise except with dragons, beheadings and boobs.
MW: Well glad to see the creative team watched the latest episodes of “Bridgerton” with the whole “I just got married to a man but now I am attracted to another woman” theme. Estelle’s holding hands with Mary in the first panel and coming on to her in the second. Awkward….
MW – I find the food on this buffet far less disturbing than the brainwashed looks on Mary, Estelle, and Wilbur’s faces.
“Come to the bufffffeeeeeett. Partake in our salmon squares and muffins of our Great Leader.”
RwO: Wouldn’t ya know? NOW they want Fish talent – just when we’d declared Fishapalooza a bust and laid off most of our Piscean assets. But we were able to call back Grayson Generic-Fish to do a splendid chef portrayal! As well as a few extras we picked up down at the dock.
Yeah, Rhymes with Orange thought they were gonna get star power like Stellan or Willa for their little scene. Dream on. Too little, too late… the bandwagon has rolled.
Bacön: Things you’d rather not contremplate #2352.
MW: I’m beginning to think this is all about an MKultra experiment in mind control. The buffet is laced with something. That’s the why behind the insane Mary praise.