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Mary Worth, 8/11/15

I moved to Baltimore in 2002, and, as was the style at the time, subscribed to home delivery of the local print newspaper, which had four glorious pages of comics, including the soap opera strips, which I had never really read before. The Mary Worth storyline in progress at the time involved a cantankerous old man named Smitty Smedlap, who was in the midst of a dinner with Mary and Jeff at the Bum Boat that, I swear to God, lasted for weeks, much of which spent with him complaining that he didn’t like fish (or, as he called it, “feesh”). I found it riveting, not least because, as the dinner unspooled day after day, I wasn’t sure who, if anyone, I was supposed to like. Was this dinner unusually comically full of mutual irritation for the strip, or was everything like this? Thus, I have high hopes that this meal will go on interminably as well, with Ian increasingly desperately trying to convince his boss to move into his condo complex for the most tenuous of reasons; in this case, though, any newcomers wondering how exactly they’re supposed to understand what’s happening will be helped out by Toby’s “can you get a load of this shit” facial expression.

Dennis the Menace, 8/11/15

Dennis the Menace has definitely crossed some kind of line today by having a panel in which Dennis isn’t present and Mr. Wilson says a cranky old man thing that isn’t Dennis-related at all. Is America ready for this feature to slowly become entirely Wilson-centric, with each day’s “joke” consisting of Mr. Wilson angrily informing his wife or some unfortunately passerby that things today are bad, especially things that involve or cater to young people? I’ll bet it is!