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?
60 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?”
Looks like the Dennis The Menace Clip Art Trust has run short of “dennis necks” once again.
Herb and Jamaal: “Tell me again what’s in your sandwich.”
Again? Who is this imposter?
I can’t imagine Herb listening to a list of specific sandwich ingredients once, let alone requesting an encore! If he hears anything more precise than “protein” and “condiments” he breaks out in hives!
Luann: That’ll teach her, Bets! Your act will make her reflect on her egocentricity, and, uh, force her to print another copy to hang up.
CS: Crankshaft will raise an army of killer birds. What could possibly go wrong?
9CL: One would think Brooke has heard of garbage strikes in his beloved city, but there are quite a few things he doesn’t know about it.
FC: It’s a metaphor for the comic strip, Family Circus.
Dustin: I really hate to say this, but stick to your day job, Ed.
Beetle Bailey: Sometimes the limited art of a legacy comic is best. I really don’t want to see Plato’s ahegao face.
Slylock Fox is right about the counterfeit bill but doesn’t care that the quarters all have Franklin Pierce on them. If you’re not on Slylock’s list of criminals you can get away with petty thievery.
Gasoline Alley:
“If this is anybody but Uncle Cap’n, you’re stealing my bit!”
–Slylock Fox.
Lockhorns: Who said anything about paying? Leroy’s been secretly working out for the 200m Dine & Dash–he doesn’t have to outrun the waitress, just Loretta.
HtH: Considering all the anachronisms, why doesn’t that Hang In There poster have a housecat?
Blondie: Who the hell are those other two guys? Are they even in the carpool or at Dithers &Co?
Zits: If Jeremy were brighter, I’d accuse him of doing this to get Sara’s approval for Axe.
Mary Worth: Starting to think Sunny is some kind of psychic parasite who latched onto Toby, found her mind lacking and switched to feeding on/controlling Ian.
Herb And Jamaal: Aw, c’mon, Jamaal, that’s a rookie giant sandwich. You can do better than that! Add at least a few more layers, enough that you’d have to unhinge your jaw like a snake to eat it. Be a real man!
DTM: Margaret puts the pee in pee-ano.
FC: Jeff ponders the prospect of immortality in a universe where even clipart degrades with bit shifts from cosmic radiation.
MW:
‘I am of the view that all tooth cleaning and cavity filling should take place on the flat or slightly curved surface that forms the stern of a boat. This philosophy is known as Transomdentalism.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Crank: “It looks like someone is going to be feeding the birds!” This has a strong stench of “Looks like someone has a case of the Mondays!” from Office Space. In that anyone uttering it in my presence would risk a painful beating.
OTOH, it would be amusing to BE the Annoying Grocery Checkout Lady. “Looks like somebody is having lamb chops tonight!” “Looks like somebody is seeking relief from a painful rectal itch!” “Looks like somebody is having a solitary evening on the sofa eating cookies and drinking way too much beer!” Is this an “Ohio Nice” thing?
DtM:
“Dennis, you should cool down and embrace the exhortation of Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano!”
“What exhortation is that?”
” ‘Joey, I’m not angry anymore!’ “
What is a “near fire tragedy?” Asking as someone close to people who lost their house in a fire and never once said it was tragic, just incredibly inconvenient.
DT: “Who doesn’t work for Endless Mahoney?” asks Sam, apparently on the basis of having met exactly one person who works for Endless Mahoney, twice.
DtM: Also, if this were a weekday panel, it would just be an unsolicited Darnedest Thing Dennis was saying. Whereas this way, Joey has to ask why Dennis doesn’t want to sit through a piano recital as though that’s surprising. I mean, I’m usually annoyed by the comic strip trope of “the Average Guy is forced into attending classical music events by his wife and hates it”, but a little kid with undiagnosed ADHD? He should totally be uninterested in the piano recital just because it’s a piano recital!
HtH: Speaking of kids in the comics abandoning their established characterisation for the sake of setting up the joke, I guess Hamlet is practicing his use of deadly weapons now? And Hägar is mad about this?
Phantom: Oh, hey, remember how all this nonsense started, way back in April? No? Well, it started with this kid and her parents, having exactly the same conversation in reverse as they approached the village. This would be some neat bookending, if the story we got had had literally anything to do with the contrast between city life and tribal life.
SFx: Solution: Slylock knows that human-on-human conflict isn’t his problem, so he left them to it.
RMMD: Yes, indeed, gone are the days when anyone was allowed in the viewing gallery on the payment of a small fee, and the operating theatre was actual theatre. Was the practice of medicine better in those days? Well, it’s before Rex’s time, so probably!
MW, Monday night:
Ian: “You know, this isn’t real football. We play real football in Europe.”
Sunny: “[Soccer! Soccer!]”
Ian: “Toby doesn’t get it though. You don’t know what I suffer with that girl.”
Sunny: “[Not so smart! Not so smart!]”
Ian: “She’s good for one thing though, if you know what I mean, heh heh.”
Sunny: “[Say no more! Say no more!]”
Ian: “My first was a temptress named Helen. But that’s a long story.”
Sunny: “[School management! School management!]”
Ian: “How about you?”
Sunny:”[Raquel Macaw! Ooh la la!]”
Ian: “Awesome! Well, the game’s about to start. Pass the chips, mate.”
Sunny:”[Want a beer? Want a beer?]”
Pop! Fizz!
Hang on….am I just now understanding that WaPo has been throwing away perfectly good throwaway panels? Is this a new development? And, since we’re all reading them on line, what’s the problem with including them? There’s plenty of space. Just another reason to dump Bezo’s Post.
“Well Mary, Ian was not enthusiastic about a pet, but then he found out Sunny could be trained to suck his seed”
“I thought you liked music”. Oh yeah, Dennis’ appreciation for the arts of [whatever Muse would be the patron of instrumental music] has long been established! Decades of runs of this strip have built a strong characterisation based on details such as this! Did you think these people have stayed the same flat characters since before the armistice in Korea?
“Well Toby, it’s great that everything turned out fine! Glad to be helpful!”
“Umm, Mary, you didn’t do anything!”
“Didn’t I? Who has systematically broken the will of every person living in this condo for years, to the point that they willingly accept a stupid resolution as divine providence even if I have not explicitly suggested it?”
“Mary, you mean…”
“Like the Bene Gesserit, my work is measured in centuries”
MW:
“You’ll never believe what Sunny and I just saw on TV, Toby! — first we watched Melanie Griffith’s mom in a movie; then we saw a commercial for a designer perfume; and then we watched a documentary on the 10th President of the United States!”
“No. Don’t say it, Ian.”
Yep. Tippi, Kanu and Tyler, too!”
Phantom: Uh oh, traditionalist home-fire stoking parents, you’ve blown it. Lost that girl of yours forever. She LOVES Mawitaan! Teevee sitcoms, designer jeans, pickup trucks, video games, frozen pizza. How can a sarong made of wildebeest skin and poking in the mud with a stick all day compete?
A wool turtleneck, Ian? With your hair and beard and a parrot on you shoulder? The guys at the bar by the docks still aren’t going to accept you. You’re still a college professor, no matter how much you try to hide your effeteness.
***
Avocado spread? I thought, don’t you just mean guacamole, Jamaal? Before I make a fool out of myself, I’d better check (a remnant of when the internet was a useful place, despite the water wasting, power draining ways they’re trying to take that away from us too) and sure enough, that’s a thing. Huh. I never heard of avocado spreads that aren’t quac before and now I want to try one. But not for an up charge.
***
Margaret knows better than to invite two young kids to a piano recital. She particularly knows better than to invite Dennis, for crying out loud. I don’t know what kind of long con she’s up to here, but I’m curious and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. Probably better than her piano recital, because holy crap, who wants to go to one of those except for the parents who pretty much have to? Unless one of them is too busy with work, leading us to family movie shenanigans.
Luann – back to the dorm, this part the Evansii got right. You put this type of sign up and people will “modify” it.
Dustin – don’t women’s clothing lines do this already with their “size” ranges? Strange how many women wear a size 2!
Dick Tracy -So someone is trying to kill the Gun Czar and might be the Mirror who might be his wife Endless Mahoney copying her sister as the blank?
Judge Parker – Charlotte knows what is up. She has been shunted and dumped before. She knows the feel and stink of being tossed out. Forgive me, but is that the wayward JP daughter or Charlotte’s mom or both?!
Mary Worth – in the struggle between Parrot (Sunny) and Bellicose Dumb Man (Ian), the PARROT HAS WON and achieved TOTAL VICTORY. Not only does Ian accept Sunny as a member of the household, but serves the parrot since he is the inferior in station!
The Emerson quote is funny because he might not have been the best sort of friend in real life. He got into disputes with people like Thoreau and Whitman.
Phantom – so the Sunday Phantom’s action reset time by preventing the crash and brought his poor guy into the modern world with a bunch of fresh corpses in an old war bird. That B-17 is flyable and in an excellent condition relative to modern times and hasn’t been modified so probably worth a mint!
RMMD – The kid should pester Rex to ask for his cataract to be given to him, so he can take it to “show and tell” tomorrow!
Slylock Fox – It would be interesting to see the quality of those prints. More likely to get a print of the Slick Smitty on the phony one dollar. And who counterfeits one dollar bills? Usually it is $100 isn’t it otherwise it isn’t worth the time and effort.
@Maltmash3r: re MW: ” About this whole storyline – why?”
“You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say, ‘Why not?'” — GBS
Free your imagination, and consider what seems impossible! Embrace audacity! And consider how many more clicks and comments this story got than some bland two-legger glurge. Remember Keith Hillend? Probably not. But all the Animal Stars will continue to live in our collective memory. Not to mention their enhanced performance bonuses.
Herb and Jamaal: I believe this is the first time that I’ve ever seen this comic in color.
I mean not that it changes anything.
Although I did find it mildly funny today (just mildly)
Dennis the Menace is meant to be a humor comic, so in turn the “I have to iron my dog” trope should be in full effect. What kind of over-the-top ridiculous excuse will Dennis come up with…?
“I’ll have to check my calendar”
Wow… I’ve seen excuses in N.C.I.S that were funnier than this.
Lockhorns has a limited cast of non-white characters to work with, so on Sundays they’re obliged to pull double shifts. Hawk-nosed Colombian lady playing Monopoly with her husband on the lower right is clearly also on the sofa with Loretta on the lower left, and is really not pleased that Leroy is drunkenly dancing with her hot teenaged daughter in the belly shirt.