The Comics Curmudgeon

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106

Troubled youth

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Dennis the Menace, 8/27/26

As my readers well know, part of Dennis’s whole deal is that he hates his mother’s cooking and will insult it at any opportunity. Today, though, he ruefully admits that, even though his mother is bad at cooking, he doesn’t know anyone who’s better at it. Presumably he knows what good food tastes like as a result of his parents’ occasional attempts to bring him to fancy restaurants, but he doesn’t know any other cooks personally because his parents’ occasional attempts to make friends end in disaster when Dennis repeats their catty insults, so they never get invited over to anyone else’s house for dinner.

Daddy Daze, 8/27/26

Uh oh! The Daddy Daze family’s car is being fixed, but the garage won’t take credit cards, and the Daddy Daze daddy doesn’t have enough cash. What is he going to do? Follow the Daddy Daze baby’s suggestion, and … steal money from a carnival bathroom, I think?

163

A dog’s life

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/26/26

The Goofy/Pluto paradox is a situation many comics and cartoons that feature sapient animals find themselves in, whereby some animal characters (like Goofy) are clearly supposed to be standins for people while others (like Pluto) are clearly supposed to be standins for animals, even if the animal-animals seem to be a lot smarter than real animals are. Mother Goose and Grimm has a truly baroque case of this, where Mother Goose (a bird) clearly has an owner-pet relationship with Grimm and Ralph (dogs), in that she wears clothes and drives a car and is in charge of the house while they go around naked on all fours and drink out of the toilet, but also they have conversations with her in English and call her “mom.” Anyway, today’s strip is particularly unpleasant when you think about it in those terms, as it features a bird with human-like levels of intelligence, authority, and prestige taking two dogs who are also sapient but kept in a subservient “pet” role to watch their enslaved (?) kin race around a track, and then the bird says “These dogs aren’t that fast, you know who’s fast? The dogs in Alaska, because there aren’t many places where they’re allowed to go to the bathroom. Their poor bladders! Their lives are agony!”

The Phantom, 8/26/26

Hey, remember how Ignis Vindicta sent a bunch of armed drones to free, and also control, the Python? Well, the Ghost Who Shoots shot the drones with a couple of handguns and, uh, that seems to have worked, I guess. Tip to anyone fighting in one of several ongoing wars where drones are playing an increasingly important part: just shoot at them! You don’t even have to use particularly fancy guns, it turns out!

170

Those second-degree burns … truly epic

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Zits, 8/25/26

As I recently noted, Zits is only running new strips on Sundays now, with the dailies being reruns from its deep library, and I assume that this one came from those heady days in the early ’10s when you could get away with simply saying “bacon” and expecting people to accept it as a punchline, or indeed as a self-contained joke. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see some truly disturbing aspects of this trend that we might have missed during the pro-bacon frenzy of the times; in this case, we can see that Jeremy, no doubt driven by the bacon-mania running rampant in his peer group, has simply grabbed bacon right out of a still-smoldering pan sitting on a red-hot stovetop burner, which means that surely the bacon fat is burning him severely, and the smell of the cooked bacon and the lad’s own sizzling flesh must be mingling horribly in the kitchen air.

Mary Worth, 8/25/26

If you think panel two of Jeff lounging casually against the side of a sports car with his sleeves rolled up looks familiar, that’s because it’s identical to one that ran during a different phone call with Mary back in February. I think we can assume, then, that this is a reliable fantasy sequence that Mary keeps stashed away in her mind palace for her to enjoy instead of trying to accurately visualize whatever presumably less sexy stuff Jeff is doing in real life right now. In that context, the fantasy car’s hood, popped open and clearly too large to fit properly into a closed position, takes on an obvious significance.