Wednesday quickies
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Blondie, 8/6/25
Look, obviously Mr. Dithers is an asshole, but also Dagwood is talking to his wife on speaker while standing like six inches away from Dithers while he’s trying to work? The dysfunctionality of this relationship goes both ways, is what I’m saying.
Dennis the Menace, 8/6/25
Alice cringing and saying “My cooking, which you notoriously hate … is that why you’re so angry?” while Dennis stares sullenly off into space: this is by far the most menacing this strip has been in quite some time.
Slylock Fox, 8/6/25
Max is roughly the same size as this goat kid and wants to play video games with him … is it possible that Max Mouse, assistant police detective, is a child? This entirely reorders how I think about his relationship with Slylock, and not for the better.
82 replies to “Wednesday quickies”
MW: Listen, I know that as a denizen of the Internet I am a sick-minded animal, but I still don’t understand how Moy is missing that all Mary’s dialogue in this arc reads as Groomer 101.
Blondie “Let you home early for dinner“? Jesus, has this strip ever had a gag about Dagwood trying to form a union?
DtM Actually Alice it was something you didn’t cook, and now Dennis has to learn to pronounce ‘trichonosis’ for his next darndest thing.
DtM: “C’mon, mom. It was toast for chrissakes.”
Slylock Fox: Are you seriously proposing that video games are only for kids?
Besides, a child mouse would be even smaller.
MW: Please don’t say “kindred spirits” ever again.
Slylock Fox:
I’m not sure, but I’m certain that Slylock will use his hippocampus to find out who or what the real culprit was.
Blondie: Ten thousand percent chance Dagwood is on speaker phone because whoever creates the clipart for this strip realised how hard it is to draw a human hand holding a phone. I’ve done it for strips a few times myself and it actually sucks and is very hard to do.
No celery in the grocery bag? Obviously this strip wasn’t drawn by Art Frahm.
Slylock: A tired Granny goat struggles to raise her grandkid on her own.
“Behave yourself when I’m at work. Those tin cans don’t grow on trees.”
Occasionally, I play a little game called Sometimes I Have Questions. And today, I invite you to play along with me: What in the circus-mirror fuck is up with Alice’s torso? Where do you source a dress for someone with a four-foot ribcage? Why are her arms so rubbery? If Dennis, the titular menacing child of this script, hated his dinner so much, why is the plate basically licked clean? Is… is there, in fact, a joke present in this “comic” strip? What about you, fellow readers– do you have questions? They will not be answered in this or any lifetime! Bye now!
Slylock Fox:
Well, let’s see. If Granny Goat lives in 1B and the hippo couple lives directly above her, does that mean that they live in 2B? Stated in another way — 2B, or not 2B: that is the question.
Slylock Fox:
“You two river horses are really starting to get my goat. So to speak.”
B. Bailey: These newborns must be at the zoo. The only ‘feet’ those booties would fit are typically called hooves.
@Lauralot: I’d be willing to bet that there are two reasons for why Moy doesn’t see this:
1. She has never once in her life seen any kind of media that discusses the warning signs of potential sexual abuse.
2. She doesn’t believe that women can engage in any form of abuse, particularly sexual abuse.
Blondie : …Isn’t Dinner the NOON meal? Shouldn’t that be SUPPER? Or are Dagwood and Mr Dithers ending the day early because Blondie’s cooking is THAT good? /pedantic linguistic nitpicking
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Luann :
1) Did Phil actually bring up the fact that he had had a previous girlfriend that left him, or is this a retcon?
2) …That story sounds a lot less like “My girlfriend left me” to “I had a crush on the girl-next-door my entire life, but when I worked up the courage to ask her out it turned out she had been in a steady relationship with another guy this entire time”.
In Phil’s defense, the strip is acting like the lesson here is “Phil shouldn’t jump to conclusions seeing Luann hang out with other boys just because of his past”, and not “Luann should probably stop denying she’s in a relationship with Phil all the time”.
***********
Slylock Fox : This isn’t the first time there’s a vague implication Max Mouse is young. Like, one case with Shady Shrew had Shady trying to set Max up with his niece (“she’s the same age as you!”), and I wondered whether the implication was that Shady was old or Max was young.
Max being Slylock’s kid/teen sidekick does make all those times they go on double dates with female counterparts hit differently, I’ll admit.
MW: It’s been a couple of weeks, and we’re still on Day 1 of Mary’s visit to her “kindred spirit” in New York. So far, it’s been well established that: Mary took a nap on her flight; everyone who knows Olive, including her own parents, avoids her; appliances and dogs are attracted to Mary—except not in a good way. It’s hard to see where this story is going. Wherever it’s headed, it’s just going there very, very slowly.
DTM: The comic strip adaptation of the classic “cornfield” episode of the Twilight Zone.
Blondie’s plans to surprise Dagwood with a nooner are dashed as she tells a bewildered Dagwood to pick up a bucket of KFC on the way home.
@Hibbleton: Dagwood, misreading the mood completely, shows up with Buckethead, hoping for the threesome of his dreams.
MW: If we set aside the icky innuendo (not easy, I know) exactly why WOULD they be kindred spirits? Mary has no preternatural skills. Olive shows no desire for meddling. There is their love of inane, repetitive conversation, but that’s already Mary and Jeff’s thing!
BG&SS: Seriously? There was a whittlin’ gag RIGHT THERE.
DtM: Mom is either a stone-cold masochist or has her memory erased every night.
@Bob Tice: SF- when I taught a course on HIPAA the first slide always said “It’s Not A River Horse”. Trying to get people to stop spelling it HIPPA. I’d ask them if they knew what a river horse was usually to blank stares. Thanks for the memory!
Blondie: The flat backdrop in panel one and floating screens in two and three indicate that we’re in some sort of theatrical production, possibly a musical adaptation of Neil Simon’s little-known Men Jumping From The 23rd Floor. Brace yourself for a hungry, despairing duet between Dagwood and Blondie, is what I’m saying.
Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids: Wait, are those Count Weirdly’s Converse in the front closet? It would explain a lot if Granny Goat were accusing the Hippos of the tango while she was doing the horizontal mambo. Well, except for how the holes got on the ceiling instead of the walls. We don’t need the solution to that mystery.
DTM: What would happen if Dennis acquired the powers of the kid from the classic “cornfield” episode of the Twilight Zone. I think it would go a little something like this…
MW: Oh…oh. Oh no. Oh no no no. Oh NO.
RMMD: The entire e-mail exchange was: “Hello. I am Truck Tyler’s ex-drummers’ biological son.” What does that make us?” “Absolutely nothing.”
Also Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids: “The Tango? Why, I never! Madam, we are hippopotamuses! We only perform our ancestral dance, the Watusi!”
Blondie: At first glance, I somehow mistook Mr. Dither’s slacks for extremely tanned, hairy legs. That’s enough Internet for today.
So many characters neglected, absent from today’s comics: Cora Dithers, Henry Mitchell, Moo Deng…
Go easy on the kid (eheh, goat kid!)! If he smashed his head on the ceiling several times and with enough strength to create holes, he probably has severe concussion and permanent damage
DtM — “You weren’t in a good mood at dinner. Was it something I cooked?”
This line fits either a battered wife or Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Either way, menace level:11!
DtM:
One meal makes you larger
And one meal makes you small
And the ones his mother gives you
Don’t do anything a’tall
Go ask Alice —
When she does crust, wrawl
And if you show baking habits
And you know you’re going to bawl
Tell ’em a gouda-toting platter filler
Has given you a thrall
Gall Alice
And she’ll just appall
When her men are obsessed, bored,
Fed up, and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of crushed gloom
And your mind is oozing woe
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll crow
When chopsticks and proportions
Have gallin’, sloppy bread
And her fright bite is rocking hacked gurds
And the dread fiend’s off in his bed
Re-emember what the bored spouse said:
“Feed your dread
Feed your dread”
@Powers: Yeah, must be difficult being a mouse in that sort of setting.
There was a videogame I played that had animal characters, the protagonist is a fox kid, and at one point he goes to a coffee stand and asks for a coffee. The barista is a mouse.
Mouse: It’ll stunt your growth kid
Fox kid: But I’m bigger than you are.
Mouse: Whatever… smartmouth.
Slylock: Oh Josh, did you know it’s a thing in fiction, for an older detective/professor/adventurer to take on a plucky young child as a sidekick?
-Professor Layton and Luke Triton.
-Professor Childermass and Johnny Dixon.
@Lauralot: is this the creepiest Worthverse storyline ever?
BB Blips and Buxley chuckle, getting back to enjoying their takeout hidden in container-cosies, using their favourite chopsticks. Knitting? They laugh as the general knows nothing about practical crafting – why, every stitch would fall off.
MW Sooo… you haven’t started *really* having fun. It starts now. All that it’s missing is for Mary to pull out a hotel room key and say Olive’s parents aren’t expecting her back right away… ewwww
Letting the upstairs neighbours take the blame while the damage is a series of two holes that are all the same distance apart is the new billy goat’s bluff.
SF: Come on, Mr. and Ms. Hippo, don’t let goat grandma put you down! I say own it! Get matching t-shirts that say “All We Do Is Tango!!”
SF: Even if the Hippos didn’t make the holes, I still imagine that their dancing would be very loud and annoying.
@The Rambling Otter: I think you mean ‘bait,’ not ‘sidekick.’
“Naw, food was fine, Mom. I was wondering – as I often do – why you have a portrait of Microsoft’s Clippy on the wall behind me. It’s weird, Mom, and the other kids make fun of me. I gotta ask – is Clippy my real Dad? It’s OK if he is, I just want to know.”
Blondie – The boob motorboating goes without saying….
DtM – Dennis hasn’t been the same since Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darnedest Things went out of print….
SFx – I love it when SFx gets topical like this! When will we accept that the nanny state can’t solve all our problems….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Anonymous: re: Luann – somehow I think that if you asked this “girlfriend” for her side, she’d rant about how they went on, like, *two* dates and it wasn’t some huge *secret* that she wasn’t exclusive and was dating others, heck later when he’d come hang out at her family’s house, she *tried* to mention her newly exclusive boyfriend, but it was like he’d just ignore the topic…
Pluggers don’t know much, but what they know isn’t worth knowing.
@Unca Bob:
This must be a really common misspelling, because there are actually articles on the Internet whose main topic is that it’s “HIPAA,” not “HIPPA.”
Slylock’s pickin’ up the prisoners
And putting ’em in a pen
And hippos just want to dance, dance
Kids been goats
Since I don’t know when
And all they want to do is bounce
Zambezi water’s
The local drink
And hippos just want to dance, dance
They tango all night
In the room upstairs
And the goats just want to bounce
@els: Adding to the game, where are Dennis’ feet and lower legs? Why is his head so enormous compared to the rest of him?
MW-“We can really enjoy ourselves.” Mary’s a groomer!
MW-At the world famous Tavern on the Green.
So Max Mouse is essentially Robin.
Blondie-Dithers is actually in Dagwood’s office correcting the mistakes in the latest contract.
CS: I called it yesterday. Shitcrank is going to end up on the field and it will be so wacky and goofy and hilarious, that this time Tom wins his Pulitzer for sure!.
My God Blondie is STACKED!
rex morgan =did shorty go in a time machine so he could join the band ? i thought he wanted to be a comedian and wheres beanpole
MW: This story has the “honor” of being the creepiest story with no involvement whatsoever from Wilbur. Is it Moy’s plan for Mary to get arrested for grooming Olive so that Wilbur can take over the script?
@Bob Tice: At the end of the presentation I’d put up a final slide intentionally misspelling HIPAA and ask if there were any questions. After several seconds of silence one person would eventually raise their hand and chide me for the mistake. I’d call out “Bingo!” and toss them a large Hershey bar as a reward. Nothing like chocolate as a reinforcement.
WARNING TO BAJA GAIJIN!
Don’t look at Rubes today.
@Tom: Mary Worth is the kind of comic where morals and ethics are firmly rooted in the Hays Code era 1950s, prices haven’t changed since the 1970s, and no one knows how to hold a smartphone let alone use it.
FC: Dolly needs to do a little trimming around the edges of the lower garment.
CS: Crankshaft will be mistaken for a member of the training staff and will end someone’s career.
Slylock – Sure, you’re innocent, but who GAVE the kid that pogo stick, hmmm? It’s well known that Flavio and Marita here have plenty of dough and don’t mind spreading it around.
Don Abundio, translated:
[Sign: COAT CHECK]
“The money these old boys spend on us is all stolen from the working classes”
“But… I thought that didn’t bother you”
“Yeah, you’re right…”
“But I despise a small-time thief!”
@Bob Tice: #6
*SHRIEK!!!!*
P.S. I could make some kind of wordplay out of “hippo + campus,” but you stole my thunder… :-)
@Bob Tice: #11
Man, you are on a roll!!! :-)
“Might be time for the goat kid to confess!” That’s just what they want you to think. Remember, what the National Lawyers Guild says: when talking to the police, shut the f*** up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWEpW6KOZDs
@Bob Tice: #12
Okay…that does it…
DtM: Making your mom dread being wished into the cornfield: extremely menacing.
SFx: The lines of prejudice are already drawn in the post-Animalpocalypse world, with the hippos being profiled as lumbering and clumsy. They will retaliate by waiting until Granny and her grandson are walking by the pond in the park, grabbing them in their powerful jaws, and dragging them to a watery grave.
MW: And the grooming just keeps getting groomier.
@MKay: #20
Actually, there was a scene in the original iteration of the “Olive” story years back where Olive, in a panic, runs outside toward the C’Stone pool and falls in. She can’t swim, of course. Mary awakens from a deep sleep with a gasp – “Olive!!!,” she cries!! And she runs outside, leaps into the pool and pulls a gasping Olive out of the water. So there’s that. Maybe they *do* have something in common, like tripping over things and falling into swimming pools.
Blondie – It’s sex, right? They’re actually talking in code about sex?
By this logic, anyone who works in an office with a landline phone, regardless of age, is a Plugger.
MW: Yikes! Getting very close to: “I think we’re alone now/There doesn’t seem to be anyone around/I think we’re alone now…”
Slylock Fox: Clearly, this Goat Karen was expecting Slylock to racially profile her “degenerate” hippo neighbors and get rid of them for her. Unfortunately for her, goats are lower in the caste system than hippos and thus Slylock will be taking her child into the station for damaging public property, where he’ll probably fall down some stairs and land on bullets. Total freak accident, you know how it is.
SFx – Anyone else have the urge to put “two hippos dancing the tango” into an AI prompt?… Just me, huh? Thought so.
Phantom/Flash Gordon: These storylines seem parallel… Are we getting a Defenders of the Earth crossover, where they explain that gawdawful “Strength of Ten Tigers” SHAZAM! manufactured plot point?
Curtis: I am genuinely surprised and gobsmacked. No, not that “King” is her dog, but that they went through with the reveal.
MW: No wonder Olive doesn’t have any friends her age or any friends at all considering she acts and talks like an old lady while also dressing like a kid half her age. And yet there’s no sympathy for her considering she goes from crying about not fitting in to humble bragging about how “special” she is at the drop of a hat. Like every Mary Worth character, she’s contrarian as hell and as pleasant to talk to as a root canal without pain medication.
C’shaft: “Centerville resident Ed Crankshaft was trampled to death today by a Canadian Football League team. His family and lov…er, fr…acquaintances are grieving that they were not present to witness his demise.”
Dustin: Helen smiled serenely. Yes, anything was good in moderation…as long as you didn’t have a severe nut allergy. Fortunately, Ed hadn’t bothered to look at his medical records in years ever since he found the sight of his increasing weight “too depressing,” and he hadn’t bothered to set foot in the kitchen since they were married. She’ managed to keep him from killing himself for this long, but the latest life insurance statements showed that this was the time to act. Her smile deepened as she imagined Ed clawing desperately at his throat, the cold look she would give him as she calmly dialed 911, letting him see the lack of concern in her eyes as all her radio experience enabled her to create the perfect note of distress in her voice: “Please help, my dear husband is having trouble breathing…”
JP: “Mom’s in trouble in with the feds again, isn’t she, Daddy? Just keep it down; I have kindergarten in the morning…”
Luann: “I feel so stupid for not seeing it! All that time spent hanging around her, going through her garbage, watching her through her bedroom window with binoculars…”
MW: “I’ll even let you have a sip of my wine! It’s okay, you’re so mature for your age, and I know you can keep a secret from your mom and dad….”
I mean, I know we shouldn’t expect much from the woman who thinks Wilbur Weston is endearing, but Christ on a cracker…
RMMD: I see Parker wisely gave up on their stand-up comedy ambitions and has turned to session music gigs.
@Daisy:
It is often said that a pun is the lowest form of humor. So it’s right in my wheelhouse!
Granny Goat could have referenced any other dance — probably tap dance would have been more appropriate for ruining the ceiling — but she chose tango. Why? Because tango is the sex dance. Granny Goat lives on the edge, constantly threatened by the shadow of raw hippo lust, like ethnic minorities were a threat to the puritanism of Wasps in the 1950s America (are Wasps after the Animalapocalypse just wasps? Must investigate further)
Today’s Slylock Fox answers the tail question: The tail comes out over the pants and under the jacket. This is perfectly modest because even when a fox is bipedal, his tail is above his butt. I’m sure a lot of information on the anthroporophic fox tail/butt question can be found on the internet, where I will not look for it.
You know, Phil, if takes you a year to notice your “forever person” is dating other people, you probably *should* feel stupid.
MW: A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with a group of people that included one woman who, after telling some anecdote, repeated the point of the anecdote five times. Rather than stand up and scream, I said, “Yes, I understand your point.” She looked at me funny. AITAH?
“Mother, they should call you Walter White, because what you cook is criminal!”
“No, they should call me Walter White because my first son is really ‘slow’, if you know what I mean”