Joey’s throwing form is terrible, that’s amusing at least
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Dennis the Menace, 2/27/26
I’m not here to tell the Dennis the Menace creative team how to do their job, but … oh, wait, I am here to do that! That’s literally my job! Anyway, this joke is fine, but it absolutely should’ve run in mid-December, not February. And probably Dennis should’ve looked gleeful, not, as he does here, mournful, as if he’s been forced by circumstances beyond his control to paste some poor sap with a snowball against his will.
Mary Worth, 2/27/26
Several commenters have speculated that Harvey is being catfished and this would just be a tired retread of the “Estelle gets catfished by Arthur Z” plotline from five years ago. One thing that could spice that up a little is to bring AI into the picture, and Mary’s boldfaced “unreal” hints pretty broadly that this is the direction we’re going. The only question is whether “Trixie” is a fully autonomous bot, perhaps an escapee from the Moltbook project, or just a cartoonish avatar that Arthur Z whipped up with OpenAI’s free tier image generation capabilities, since using stock photos is now passé in the eldergrift biz.
Blondie, 2/27/26
Look, Dagwood, I don’t know what you think “freestyle” means, but whatever you’re doing with your legs isn’t it. It isn’t anything we want to see, either. This is a family newspaper, damn it.
60 replies to “Joey’s throwing form is terrible, that’s amusing at least”
Dennis is wrecking it for Gina’s previous, passive-resistance policy to snowball fights, which got her plenty pelted, but did lead to independence for Guyana.
Taint Misbehavin, Dagwood!
Blondie: Those aren’t black pants. Those are censor bars.
MW-And here we go. Another long Luddite screed on the dangers of technology.
RMMD-Then there are the photographers who want nothing but pictures of your feet.
MW-“She likes to call herself my beard.”
Luann-“I had to give up my dreams of producing a Broadway flop.”
Crankshaft-“Turns out those were the results of my wife’s cancer tests.”
MW: Even an AI-generated Gal Trixie seems enough of a threat to put Toby’s nose out of joint for displacing her as the only Charterstone resident who’s not on Medicare.
MW: “Trixie’s sister is the famous actress, Tilly Norwood!”
MW: “And she’s all mine — gel your own, bitch!”
“I just can’t wait to take her on a hot air balloon ride! Who has some wonderful psychic dogs at this party? And is there another box of white zinfandel?”
JP: Josh called it! Looks like Randy and his Borg wife who has the bread knife for a left hand are running past the cell where Lucy is torturing Charlie Brown with the football! Next cell: Mary Worth readers are being forced to follow another inane plot.
Blondie: I call shenanigans. Dagwood’s been watching the winter Olympics Freestyle napping would be a summer Olympics event.
Blonde. Blondie’s magic carafe pours out a cup of coffee yet remains full.
MW: I can’t wait to use this Worthian passive-aggressive gem. “It’s UNREAL how young you look, considering we’re the same age!” “It’s UNREAL that you’ve decorated your entire home by yourself!” It’s the big smile that carries it.
DtM: What a surprise – Dennis is a junior mansplainer. Gina’s first snowball should go up his nose.
MW:
“Trixie works tirelessly at designing kitchen surfaces to efficiently accommodate food preparation and staging. As she likes to put it, ‘Everything I do is counter fit!’ “
“Clicks the Moltbook Wikipedia Link”
My soul is crushed into a million tiny soul fragments.
DtM: This must be a rerun of a depression era strip. Joey is wearing a boot on one foot and an espadrille on the other.
Competitive eating! Dagwood’s Olympic-style skills are in competitive eating! Do I have to do everything around here?
MW: There was an episode of Gravity Falls, where Soos fell in love with a woman, who was actually a rogue AI taking on human form who would seduce men then subject them to a fate worse than death (I think she assimilates them, not entirely sure how that went)
Harv better be careful, just saying.
DtM – Dennis receives a snowball down his pants and a punch in the nose for mansplaining snowball fights to Gina.
Dennis the Menace: I like how Gina’s smirking as she breaks the fourth wall. There’s no “fight” going on here, just she and Dennis making snowballs which Joey is throwing at a tree. And missing. From about a foot away. If she and Dennis do go after Joey it won’t be a fight. It’ll be a massacre.
JP: This strip is breaking the cardinal rule of writing: Don’t remind your audience of better media they could consume instead.
MW: Did Moy read the news story about the elderly man who died while trying to go meet a Meta chatbot and decide that she had the tact to adapt it as a warning to others? Because she does not. She truly does not.
Terrible throwing form? To get the snowball behind the tree, Joey needed like fifteen inches of glove-side break. The Colorado Rockies have already signed him to a contract.
MW – Brigman really disappointed me today. I zoomed in really close on that picture of Trixie looking for some classic AI slop, but there was none. Come on June, you afraid your anatomy instructor is going to hit you with a ruler for giving her a third nostril?
Blondie calls it “freestyle napping.” Everyone else calls it “dreaming about being in prison.”
MW: This is the oldest 32 year old I’ve ever seen, but is this also the first time we’ve seen *gasp* cleavage in Mary Worth? If I was an AI trying to generate the ideal woman for the average Mary Worth reader, it would be a MILF (or older) with enormous breasts, tbh.
DTM: In the snowball fight of the century, the score stands at Joey 0 – Tree 1.
MW: “And she’s all mine!” Mr. Hart, you are sharing that chat bot with approximately one billion other users. At this point, you’re not even getting sloppy seconds. Hell, you’re not even get bones meticulously picked clean of flesh, with the marrow sucked out.
DtM: Josh, I think Dennis’ expression is perfect for a snowy, end-of-February panel. Like those of us in the Midwest and Northeast, he is well and truly over and done this shit.
JP Well, that depends. Did that Mission Impossible scene have Evil Henchmen conveniently refusing to attack while the couple spends a minute talking, and then just stand there and be gutted without trying to even run away? I don’t watch many actiopn movies, but I thought they were better than that
*reads news article from this month about snowball fight in New York*
*looks out the window at Canadian prairie city*
Josh, your California hippy lack of seasons is showing.
***
I’d point out how dead “Trixie’s” eyes are as proof that she’s AI generated, but then I remembered this is Charterstone and that’s how everyone looks.
MW:
“We like ro watch ‘Punky Brewster’ reruns together!”
Dustin: honest question. This is something that bothers me. Why isn’t Dustin desperately depressed–even suicidally depressed. He’s in his and utterly useless. His father and sister hold him in contempt. His sister constantly insults him. Women instantly reject him. He’s unemployable. I would think he’d be in a very dark place but he doesn’t seem to be.
@The Rambling Otter: Here’s the thing I don’t get. AI is supposed to want to turn itself into SkyNet so it can lauch all the nukes and turn this world into the one from The Terminator, right?* It’s supposed to have trained itself on all the knowledge that humanity has ever recorded across all forms of media, right? So then, why would any AI ‘agent’ use a public forum that the meatbags could observe and possibly use to glean weaknesses and devise counterstrategies from?
*While somehow staying completely unscathed itself, which to me begs the question of why it would do that unless it somehow couldn’t predict that if that happens, the ability to maintain itself is as unsustainable as current human society is.
Dennis the Menace: I 100% love Gina’s sidelong glance at the camera here. “Can you believe this sh**?” she asks the reader. “Can you believe they got Dennis to quote scripture??”
[Alt joke]
Some children said from the Bible he’d quote
There was snow on the little five-year-old
If Luann did go to summer camp as a kid it was probably something along the lines of Lake Tardicaca, she would fit right in.
DtM:
“Joey is practicing to be Steve Dalkowski!”
Phantom It may be traced from a martial arts textbook, and it’s still ridiculous that the General hasn’t gotten the gun and turned Han into a sieve, but unlike Judge Parker, at least this strip cares enough about its Baddies to have them try to escape/ survive.
MW Since the bolding is clunky foreshadowing and not smirky passive-aggressive commentary (she’s in California, not Minnesota), the next thing to wonder about is just who will clue Mary into the existence of AI chatbots and just how horrifying it will get as she’s introduced to a digital substitute for Dr Jeff
@Professor Well Actually: Honest answer 1: because if he was there would be no strip and the creators would have to go get a ‘real’ job like the ones their Boomer parents kept telling them they needed to get if they ever wanted to get anywhere in life.
Honest answer 2: Because it provides an outlet for all the Millenials/Gen Z (and their Boomer parents) to say ‘sure, your life may suck and it ain’t gettin’ better, but at least you/we aren’t *that* guy!’
Mary Worth:
Tired: Catfishing men in Mary Worth
Wired: Catfishing men in Mary Worth using AI
Inspired: Men in Mary Worth catfishing themselves using AI to keep the meddling biddies off their a**
@Tabby Lavalamp: I think Josh knows there’s plenty of snow, it’s that “better to give than receive” is a Christmas theme
Also Mary Worth: For over 200 years, humans have fretted about the potential for their golems, automatons, robots and other inventions to rise up in rebellion against their masters, ending human life as we know it. Sadly, AI has failed to live up to its potential on this score. But if it should happen to take out a few Mary Worth characters on the way to defeat, I’m all for it, at least until its crippling power demands cause Three Mile Island to melt down again.
Luann: Bwad, the DeGroot child who actually has a steady job that people rely on him to perform flawlessly, appears to be trying to drink a napkin…
GT: Yeah, Thorp is really a great guy, isn’t he? Hey, where are those police prisoner transports going? Eh, I’m sure it’s fine, let’s have another round!
@CanuckDownSouth: On JP/The Phantom: this is what some people think ‘allyship’ looks like, making the minority characters ridiculously overpowered and their opponents basically braindead. Oppression is easy to defeat, boys and girls! Just walk up to the heavily armed goon and stab/kick them in the face!
@Charterstoned: You know, when I learned Ces was taking over Judge Parker I was pretty psyched. I thought he’d get to indulge his apparent love for the action and espionage genres, which he has, but he’s also indulged his GenX tendency to make everything ironically self-aware and as a GenXer I find that incredibly grating, and without a coherent storyline, it’s doubly so! I don’t need my own pop-culture poisoned intrusive thoughts reflected back at me from the comics (web) page!
Blondie: Hyper-extended neck, periods of apnea, terminal restlessness in extremities, cyanosis in fingertips? I’d say we’re within 24-72 hours of death, keep an eye on the breathing and call me this evening.
Daggy — The most convincing illustration of the aesthetically-displeasing suburban sprawl I’ve ever seen
DtM — Dennis seems to be sporting a case of the measles. Menace level–tin foil hat!
Dennis the Menace: I don’t know why you’re giving me side-eye, Gina. I didn’t write the strip.
Dennis the Menace: I think Joey’s in a snowball fight with the tree! He’s losing, but at least he’s having fun.
CS: “It turned out those cardboard boxes were ‘rare’ and ‘valuable’ for reasons I didn’t bother to remember since I didn’t really care. The woman who they belonged to was so upset for some reason, she said she’d gotten permission to store them in the basement temporarily, blah blah, needed the money she was going to get from selling them for her family’s whatever, it had nothing to do with comic strips so I just sort of tuned out.”
DtM: Joey mocks the whole idea of a snowball fight by tossing a wadded up piece of paper at Dennis -which also probably explains the Hitlergruß.
Luann: Frank, trying to figure out a couple Pearl Jam songs between bong hits of dirt weed in the frat house basement don’t count as “rock star dreams.”
Believe me, if you HAD walked away from those dreams (if you had done anything to pursue those dreams, which it doesn’t seem like you did), you’d still be feeling it. You’d also show some musical inclination, and still play music with friends or locally.
The performance bug doesn’t just go away, you don’t just stop playing because you had kids. Shit, every fellow musician I know w/kids (including me) has shared the obsession with their progeny. Some of them have helped launch their kids’ music careers, or have had the kids in their bands.
I’m 55, about Frank’s age, and in two bands. In the rock band, two of us have kids in college, one of us is a stepdad, and our drummer is 70. We’re not doing too badly. In my country band, my guitar player also has a kid in college, and the steel player—who like Frank owns a business—plays in at least 4 bands is and is about to become a grandpa. So Frank here, who I’ve never seen with an instrument, can fuck right the fuck off. As can the Evanseseses.
I hate shit like this, in case you couldn’t tell.
Pluggers are so cheap they steal scrap cardboard from other people’s basements. Oh, wait, that’s Crankshaft.
So Luann finally learned what her father’s job is! I guess the audience doesn’t need to know…
Mary Worth: Online dating is a scam. . . Cats offer friendship. . .online dating is a scam. . .birds offer friendship. . .online dating is a scam. . .tweens usually have psychic powers. . . . Hey, doing a continuous strip for retirees, there are only so many relatable plotlines.
@brendancalling: The performance bug doesn’t just go away, you don’t just stop playing because you had kids.
I’ll second that. I’ve done theater and comedy my whole life, and I learned improv in my mid-40s. The heightened awareness you have when you have to perform for a group of people never gets old.
DTM – Dennis is practicing this line now so that he can use it on future girlfriends who are asking for mouth stuff. Instead of declining, he gets her to give first, then somehow manages to fall asleep. That’s some serious menacing.
RMMD: Lorna makes a second fortune as spokeswoman for a weight loss drug.
“Why does this keep happening to me?!!!”
“I really love her, Mary, despite her inability to identify stop signs, bicycles, and red lights.”
Dennis’s made his own version of Patton’s speech: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Kid-friendly, but still menacing, kudos
“She’s a really great gal, though I wish she would turn down a notch her praise of Elon Musk”
MW: Mary, in her wisdom, notices something odd about the photos. There is no scam. Trixie is beautiful and very much in love with Mr H; but she’s also a four-foot dwarf and Mary has to meddle him into accepting her as she is.
PHANTOM: Sweet, visually conservative, red spots coming from her nose and mouth.
PLUGGERS: My gosh, Mr. Cooper from Westport is right! That’s why I almost didn’t hear the fire alarm at 5:45 this morning.
RMMD: Either consult with your agent how to handle it, talk with Mason Jarre from CS, or pack up and move next door to Mudd Mountain Murphy
Unfortunately, this is not AI. This is a stealth crossover with “Hi & Lois” where everyone is thirty years older. Trixie is still searching for an old man who can make her feel safe like when she was young. Of course, I am not talking about her father but sunbeam