Menacing birds/food/social relations
Post Content
Mary Worth, 1/18/26
Good news, everyone! Ian didn’t become some soft-hearted sap just because a parrot saved his life or whatever. No, he recognized that this destructive bird was also intelligent, which meant that his behavior could be molded and guided by someone clever and patient enough. That’s why Ian is showing Sunny Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds: he’s planting the “seeds” (get it?) so Sunny will eventually unleash his violent impulses on an outside world that never fully appreciated Ian’s genius, and hopefully recruit his bird friends along the way.
Dennis the Menace, 1/18/26
One of my several comics pet peeves is when strips don’t make use of the full set of space allotted them on Sundays to do something interesting and special. Margaret going to town on the ivories and Dennis standing nearby saying “She puts the no in piano” would be a perfectly serviceable daily panel. But this is a punchline that does not benefit from six panels of setup, and showing Dennis doing a passive-aggressive “Let me check my schedule” bit does not in any way add to it.
Herb and Jamaal, 1/18/26
I stand with Jamaal here. You wouldn’t question Dagwood Bumstead’s sandwich consumption, would you? What is the point of being a comics character, if you cannot devour foodstuffs in comical quantities and qualities?
34 replies to “Menacing birds/food/social relations”
MW:
“Word on the street is that my friend Henry David didn’t spend as much time on Walden Pond as he claimed to have done in his book. So authorities have demanded a ‘Thoreau‘ investigation!”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
MW:
I wonder if Emerson was named after Mr. Magoo’s hapless nephew Waldo.
Dennis the Menace-Dennis likes music when it’s played by those 9 Chickweed Lane people. They know how to put on a show.
Slylock Fox-The bill is clearly counterfeit because it doesn’t have Slylock’s face on it.
RMMD-I agree. The writing keeps getting worse and worse.
MW-Let’s change the next to the last panel to include the park scene from ‘High Anxiety’.
FC-“Haven’t I read this comic before?”
Eek!-Bridezilla of Frankenstein
MW:
“Aaaaagh! — this is worse than Don Johnson chasing after my daughter!”
Jamaal is not depressed, he’s just pregnant
DtM:
“Margaret puts the ‘sic’ in ‘harpsichord’ !”
“Huh?”
Mary Worth: I’m sure Moy meant it to be more funny than shocking that The Birds is on TV just as Ian has submitted to his feathered “friend.” But I think Sunny has somehow gotten hold of Ian’s credit card and paid the $3.99 to stream it on Prime Video, as a not-so-subtle warning. “Keep feeding me praise and sunflower seeds, or I’m gonna Tippi Hedren the heck out of you, your dumb wife and this entire condo complex of vulnerable oldsters!”
Dennis the Menace: “Hello, boys!” is the way a femme fatale would start a conversation in a film noir from the 1950s. Has Margaret finally decided to unleash her inner Barbara Stanwyck? If so, she’ll have to try harder — Dennis seems about as interested as Henry Fonda at the start of The Lady Eve. (While Joey continues to be as dumb as Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.)
Blondie: I guess it was inevitable that Dagwood would convince everyone he knows — including a couple of buddies I don’t recall seeing before — to refer to everything they care about with food metaphors. But that seems kind of dangerous — if you’re gonna survive the Big Sandwich lifestyle, you’d better have a Big Sandwich metabolism.
Mark Trail: Mark: “Did you know the greatest danger to come out of a storm is flooding?” Everyone else: Yes. Duh! Next topic, please!”
Mary Worth:
“So, do you like the still life that’s limned in our third panel today, Mary? — now, if they depicted one of those in Barney Google And Snuffy Smith, it would be a static rendering of a moonshine apparatus!”
The more Herb nags him the more Jamal spitefully adds ingredients which break dietary rules for every religion.
MW: And yet another storyline reaches its conclusion without Mary doing much of anything. This time she’s literally phoning it in…
DtM: No I’m sorry, any prepubescent boy is definitely going with ‘Pee in Piano’ given that set-up.
H&J: It’s funny because Jamaal is denial about his depression.
Mmmm….seeds…Looks like Sunny has become a big fan of Homer Simpson.
The most surprising thing about today’s Herb and Jamal isn’t the number of ingredients on the sandwich but the fact Herb called it “your sandwich” and not “your unspecified meal item consisting of bread encased food item.”
The third panel of Mary Worth could be isolated as “Still Life With No Brain Activity”.
MW: “Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are… just friends? Or do your birds fuck constantly?”
H&J: No, Jamaal is not eating a huge sandwich because he’s depressed. Don’t be ridiculous. He’s eating a huge sandwich, and just coincidentally also happens to be depressed.
DtM: Sorry, Dennis is 5. He does not have an opinion on piano playing ability or prefer some classical performances to others. The only music he likes is hyperspeed dance remixes of Mr Beast videos.
Of course I would question Dagwood Bumstead’s sandwich consumption! I hate him!
DtM – Before Margaret started playing, it was called the pia.
S4th: Phones up! PHONES UP!!!
JP: Why doesn’t the raspberry-haired brat just call CPS when she’s in one of her ‘adult brain’ modes like she is now? Do it fast, before you see a horsie and revert back again!
MW: I love how everyone’s dancing around the fact that Sunny was clearly being all destructive and annoying in response to Ian’s initial irrational rage at the mere sight of a pet in the house and subsequent doubling, tripling and quadrupling down. Now that he’s mellowed out, Sunny no longer senses a threat. No threat, no alpha male competition, no destruction.
Doesn’t make the storyline or the characters any less stupid, but at least it doesn’t credit Sunny with more intelligence than an animal would naturally have (as much as we wish Sunny did so he could bring death and destruction to Charterstone and all of its residents).
DtM:
“When Margaret plays, there’s no ‘tude in her etude; there’s a ‘ham‘ in her hammer; there’s ‘phony‘ in her symphony; there’s a ‘tic‘ in her articulation; there’s a ‘dent‘ in her mordent; there’s a ‘rot’ in her Grotrian-Steinweg; there’s an ‘ick‘ in her Chopsticks….”
“Okay, okay — I get your point, Dennis!”
MW- About this whole storyline- why?
DtM: In the first panel, Dennis and Joey look like a couple of hit men that Margaret is about to hire. (“Hello, boys — Mr. Wilson hasn’t been keeping up his protection payments. I wants you should…persuade him.”)
DtM: Since tomorrow is a school day and the recital is during assembly, you’ll be there anyway. I’m not even sure why I’m asking. Oh, yeah. “Is Dennis still a dick? Check.”
DtM: in 20-30 years Dennis will wonder why he gets so turned on by women taller than he who play the piano horribly.
MW: is Tippi Hedren screaming when Ian considers feeding Sunny sunflower seeds foreshadowing? If so, where will the storyline go? Will it be those aren’t sunflower seeds but rather something poisonous for birds/Sunny is allergic to sunflower seeds, so Sunny almost dies and Ian feels guilty and Mary has to meddle Ian out of any emotional complexity so he can remain the pompous professor the comic demands? Or will it be a lesson about how too many sunflower seeds too often is unhealthy for parrots?
MW – In a battle of wits for household dominance, my money was alway on Sunny….
DtM – Dennis puts the ass in asshole….
H&J – When I’m depressed, I smoke weed. When I smoke weed, I’ll eat anything….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: Ian comes home from the doctor and announces he has Chlamydiosis*.
Both Sunny and Toby say “I’m Sorry!” at the same time.
*Parrot fever
“…an outside world that never fully appreciated Ian’s genius.” That is a very common theme in the comics page, isn’t it? It’s almost as if the creators of these features have grossly inflated opinions of themselves, and are constantly creating Mary Sue characters who have this attitude. And writing stories where everyone else fawns over their genius, and throws lucrative contracts at them. Didn’t we just go through another round of “I wrote a book” in Rex Morgan MD?
MT “Take an ordinary radio and listen to the news” really? The July 4 Texas floods had their (various) evacuation warnings around 1 to 4am, and reports were that they went over cell phones which – guess what – actually had poor reception or were off for the night or weren’t allowed for the young camper kids.
It’s not “too soon” after a tragedy last summer, but it’s infuriatingly poor advice.
MW: Next up: “Big Bird: Behind the Street.”
RMMD: Under Sarah’s notoriously inept supervision, the boys will be removing each other’s organs with a melon-baller.
Mary Worth: We’ve all been there before, flailing around for the noun to cap off that adjective as the sentence is unraveling. “My two favorite. . .people? birds? creatures? men? beings? lovers? . . . uh, entities?”
H&J: He’s not depressed; he has the munchies.
MW: So…is today’s quote implying that Ian should have been on board with his wife bringing home a high-cost, high-maintenance pet without consulting him from the beginning? Or that Sunny should have spent less time destroying Ian’s possessions and crapping in his shoes and more time looking for dangerous situations to alert him to? Whatever, this is a disappointing conclusion for a story that featured a cat and a bird making peace just to drive Ian into teeth-gnashing fury, so let’s just move on to Wilbur shenanigans or whatever’s on deck.
@Maltmash3r: “ MW- About this whole storyline- why?”
Birds are great
Dustin: Congratulations, Dustmom, you’ve just invented “vanity sizing” which has been a thing for a very, very long time now.
JP: So, um, we just ignoring the fact that Ann was arrested for doing crimes despite being cleared for her boyfriends murder?
Luann: The Characters in Luann Are All Mentally Twelve Years Old, Part 5,060,216.
Pluggers: I’m sorry, but Boulder? Boulder? Boulder is the bastion of pot-smoking, tree-hugging, ivory-tower academics. It’s about as un-Pluggerish as you get.
@CanuckDownSouth: Thanks, I missed that this last episode was another of Jules’ clumsy ripped-from-the-headlines plots. Now I’m even more annoyed with it.
MW: Tomorrow (Monday, Jan. 19, 1926) will be Tippi Hedren’s 96th birthday. Surely she must be delighted to celebrate it by seeing that she is making a cameo appearance in Mary Worth. I mean, who wouldn’t be, right? Right???
MW: Now Ian just needs a supervillain name. I propose the Red Grouse.
DtM: “Is this going to be one of those ‘adult’ piano performances, like they have in New York City?”