I don’t use TikTok either, no shade, but still
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Shoe, 8/9/26
Hey, uh, Shoe, what’s goin’ on over there, kids-wise? You don’t like kids? You’re doing a comic for the last remaining old people who still read newspapers and counting on them being not doting grandparents, but the kind of old people who don’t like kids, possibly because they don’t have grandkids or have them but don’t get along with them, so nobody’s taught them how to use TikTok, which is why they’re still reading the newspaper?
Dennis the Menace, 8/9/26
I guess I don’t spend a ton of time with young people either, but I’m still pretty sure there aren’t a ton of zoomers out there named “Darian,” or people of any generation, really. Yeah, this girl is a zoomer, I know everyone in this strip looks like they were born in 1956, but Dennis’s family has access to computers and such, she was definitely born in the 21st century! And yeah, she’s named “Darian,” I guess!
Mary Worth, 8/9/26
Ha ha! Addicted to ice cream? Could you even imagine? A world where “compulsive eating” was a real thing, and indeed was something that recovering drug or alcohol addicts sometimes fall into as their addictive behavior shifts? What a laff!
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/26
Snuffy definitely bought a bunch of circus animals at fire sale prices and ate them and now is haunted by thoughts of their vengeance, c’mon, why are you lying to us about this
44 replies to “I don’t use TikTok either, no shade, but still”
DtM: I’ve only heard the name Darian once before, and that was OG Sailor Moon dub. Where Darian was clearly a guy’s name.
Maybe this person is transitioning? That would certainly be progressive for this comic.
(Which is why they won’t do it)
Also the fact that when the second woman appeared my first thought assumed she was her girlfriend. They look the same age. I imagine the “Mom” was tacked on at the last second by an editor who whined about “turning off the fanbase” or some s*** like that like it’s still freaking 1976
MW:
“That reminds me, Tommy — what’s the ‘scoop’ on your missing cashier pal Brandy?”
BG&SS — Snuffy is indeed dreaming if he thinks he can outrun any those animals.
Shoe: Isn’t this the kind of letter the Perfesser answers? Hey, were is the Perfesser anyhow? Did Shoe ‘book’ him a ‘hotel room’ in ‘another city’? It would explain why he looks so guilty in the throwaway panel.
DtM: Even in her own mind, Dennis is smirking at her pathetic attempt to to control him. You’ve lost the game before making a single move, Darian.
MW: Really like the penultimate panel where we get to see this scene from the ice cream’s point of view. It’s like if Jaws was staring frozen desserts.
MW: Wilbur’s “I’ve had my own history with addiction” really should have drawn a “No sh*t, Sherlock” from Dawn, after the cruise ship incident. Not to mention any number of karaoke nights.
“It’s hard to understand abbreviation unless you’ve experienced it.”
Shoe:
Shoe is reading this question off a piece of paper, but is replying to it on a computer. Did someone write to him the old-fashioned way? If so, it seems unlikely they’re expecting or equipped to receive a digital reply. Did they email him, but he decided to print it out for some reason? I suppose it’s possible they sent it to him on paper and he’s typing up his response before printing it out and sending it to them. Honestly that seems like far more effort than a question that is open-ended to the point of meaninglessness really deserves.
DTM: “Hey, I’m not out of touch. I know what young people today are like. Tough cynical and sarcastic teen girls with long brown hair. Like that cartoon, uh, the spinoff of Beenis and Bumface. I think it’s called Darian? Anyway, that’s what teenagers today are into, or were last time I checked, in 1998.”
MW: The camera slowly pulls back from everyone doing the sitcom laughing ending until it’s gradually revealed that this is Tommy’s hallucination as he lies twitching on the floor of his bathroom
BG&SS:
“An’ there’s Sheriff Tait, Parson Tuttle ‘n Doc Pritchart exitin’ an import — clowns comin’ outta a Volkswagen!”
“Mary Worth” is doing the “everybody laughs, freeze frame ending”. Unironically. I love it!
Recovering alcoholic here who fortunately didn’t fall into the “compulsive eating” trap. In fact, I lost weight to the point where I was (briefly) literally half the man I used to be.
Blondie-“Cat’s in the cradle, Mr. B. Cat’s in the cradle.”
MW-What’s this? No weeks of Wilbur’s wallet going missing and he violently accuses Tommy of stealing it? No delays on the way to the ice cream shop?
RMMD-“Did you bring me a carton of cigarettes?”
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith:
Look, for all my mockery, I understand that coming up with a punchline for your comic strip day in and day out can be challenging and even emotionally taxing. Sometimes you have to put some substandard stuff out there and remind yourself that they can’t all be winners. But when you create the setup for a great joke and don’t follow through, that’s a failure I have much less sympathy for. What I’m saying is that this strip should’ve just ended with Snuffy being fatally mauled by a lion, that would be much funnier than what we got.
MW:
“It’s an ice cream ‘Sunday’ !”
“Ha ha ha!“
Slylock Fox-“I had the oddest dream. I was kidnapped by a green guy and I had to be rescued by a red fox and his yellow mouse companion.”
DtM;
“Mom, how come you and Dad named me after a town in Connecticut????”
@Ettorre: you beat me to it. Now the credits roll and the whole thing resets with no change or character growth in the next story, just like a proper 70s show.
Why is a letter to the editor being treated like an advice column?
MW:
“Let’s revel in our all-consuming vapidity!”
BROKE: Young people are weak and soft because they need to prepare themselves before making a phone call
WOKE: Young people are weak and soft because they need to prepare themselves before babysitting such a menace-less entity as Dennis
MW: Since they all started laughing like Sunny the parrot, they decided to break into Ian and Toby’s apartment and soil Ian’s shoes.
DtM: In a much earlier strip, a babysitter for the Mitchell’s prepares by asking her Mom for one of her tranquilizers.
MW Wilbur is absolutely the type to get a triple-scooper, but I refuse to believe that he frequents an ice cream stand where they don’t make *all* their scoops ridiculously huge, not just the base one. That’s not even as much ice cream as my kids get with a double scoop at the beach! His tower of frozen deliciousness should be precariously teetering *or* he should be complaining bitterly and/or berating the staff. And no, he couldn’t have licked it down because those are still well-formed ball shapes, not smoothed out / together as would happen.
Mary Worth : Am I the only who finds the characters’ respective choices of ice cream interesting? I mean, not only that none of them went for soft serve, Wilbur went for three pretty unique flavors, Dawn went for pistachio, and Tommy went for “bland-but-less-bland-than-vanilla” chocolate.
…Oh, just me? Never mind then.
RMMD: They’re going to go ahead with it. There’s no fighting Stupid But Stubborn.
DtM: If the right people see this, it could launch a new baby name trend. Except, it would have to be spelled, “Daryan.”
MW: I can’t decide who makes my skin crawl more; despairing Wilbur or jubilant Wilbur.
MW: Missing dialogue box: “Note: Brandy died on her way back to her home planet”
MW – It’s hard to imagine a comb-over until you’ve seen one….
It’s true that zoomers wouldn’t be named Darian–Darian as a girl’s name peaked in the 1990s, she should be a millenial and too old to babysit!
@Anonymous: Well, Tommy’s and Wilbur’s brown scoops are the same colour so maybe Tommy went for coffee, hoping against all possible hope for some kind of buzz, even caffeine. Dawn’s green could be pistachio, but it’s a bit dark for that so I’d peg it as lime sorbet
Dennis is so menacing that his babysitter has to practice on her identical twin that she’s trapped beside a porthole, ’cause she sure ain’t looking straight at that mirror in panel 3.
With regret, I must acknowledge that the joke in BG&SS was OK. The punchline was unexpected and yet logical in a comedic way.
Today is to be commemorated as the day that Pluggers officially recognized the switch from “Pluggers are hardworking blue-collar folk” to “Pluggers are old and in constant agony.”
Mary Worth: What a fickle man! It wasn’t so long ago Wilbur was pledging allegiance to hamburgers.
“It’s hard to understand Leveling Up, unless you experienced it”
BG&SS: After seeing the throwaway panels, I was going to make an animal crackers joke. But then I saw that the writers had already done that (minus the “joke” part).
Slylock: And here Max learns the truth. Spinach is full in iron and nutrients but would give you insta- roid muscle power. These are also all hired mascot players from a local park. Slylock later explains to him about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
RMMD: the twins are lot more psychopathic or it sociopathic than Rene. “See Uncle Jimmy, the punch line is that after the Morgans pay we kill Sarah!” Like Schindler Rene realized he is a bad bad person and a total crook but he could not consciously cross the line and become evil.
Judge Parker: now we see why everyone has been avoiding. April does not like surprises.
Spinach won’t give… autocirrect
MW- Actually, Wilbur succumbed to compulsive eating years ago and everyone knows it, hence the laughing.
Shoe- now we know who writes “Ask Wendy” when Mary is too busy meddling.
MW: I’m not sure what’s more nauseating about Wilbur in today’s strip: the smug self-aggrandizing way he talks about his sobriety, or the bedroom eyes he’s giving his ice cream in the throwaway panel.
Shoe: Hotels (and resorts, and cruise lines) insist that there be at least one person over eighteen on the reservation. This usually isn’t a problem when the family is staying in the same place, because the parents can each be listed on one room and if the actual sleeping arrangements happen to fall out otherwise, well, that’s nobody’s business but their own, but would be a little trickier to pull off in different locations. So this is one of those jokes that works less the more you think about it, but few people apart from us are willing to think more than ten seconds about Shoe so they should be okay.
MW: I said Friday’s strip was the glurgiest glurge that ever glurged, but the last panel today is giving it some really stiff competition…
JP: Get ready for a week (maybe two) of the following:
‘You’re not my mommy!’
‘Of course I am!
‘Nohyernot’
‘Yuh huh!’
‘Nuh uh!’
DtM: Darian looks older than her mom.
RMMD by “we’ve planned it all out”, the Doublemint Dimwits mean they’ve planned out “snatch off the street” and nothing about where to keep her or what to do about ransom demands. I’m pretty sure they haven’t considered someone seeing them from the window, never mind how to ensure their victim can’t identify them. “Grab her” is the plan.
Now, this *is* a town where you can walk up to a store manager and with a laminated ID card from the local printshop and make off with merchandise for “corporate”. Repeatedly. But this is so stupid that even these yokels will be able to find and stop them. Heck, I’m revising my prediction from “Marti is extra-vulnerable and Sarah saves her from the scam” to “Marti figures out the clues and solves Sarah’s kidnapping” because extra chromosome or not, even Marti’s smarter than this.
C’shaft: Besides, every insurance company in the area has Crankshaft’s picture with “DO NOT SERVE” printed under it, like the people who passed bad checks at a convenience store.
DT: If I could hack into Amazon’s database, I’d use the power for a lot more than and elaborate porch pirate scheme. Like sending a lot of embarrassing and potentially incriminating merchandise to Jeff Bezos’ house.
Dustin: Two minutes later: “A (gasp) heart attack (grunt) is really…good…exercise…(urk) (thud)”
JP: “Janet!” “Dr. Scott!” “ROCKY!”
RMMD: Do prisons conduct visitations in an open cafeteria with one guard watching everyone? I mean, I have no personal experience and I know better than to trust movies and television to provide an accurate picture of our penal system, but the glass partitions with phones and small rooms with one-way mirrors installed do make more sense…
Mary Worth continues to have its finger on the pulse of what young women are eating these days. What kind of ice cream do they prefer? Salad flavor, of course!