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Dennis the Menace, 10/4/14

Sure, I make fun of Dennis the Menace, particularly when it comes to Dennis’s lack of menacing, but if there’s one thing I really respect about it, it’s that Mr. Wilson has never stopped being angry, has never softened into a likable character. His trademark single bead of anger-sweat is here, but his hands are also clenching into fists — not because he plans to hit anybody, because Mr. Wilson is not at heart a violent man, but because his whole body is just clenching up involuntarily at the thought of so many naps ruined. So is he going to die of a massive coronary event, and soon? Yes, probably! But he will have never compromised his truest self.

B.C., 10/4/14

Remember the innocent bygone days of this strip, when the main thing you could say about clams was that clams got legs? Well, now clams got a terrible addiction to prescription medication.

Beetle Bailey, 10/4/14

I’m guessing that panel two here is a result of someone saying “Hey, let’s maybe mix up our simplistic art a little and actually show the back of someone’s head for once” but in actually it looks like someone’s saying “Guys guys guys how many tabs was I supposed to take how many tabs OH MY GOD EVERYONE’S FACE IS A CLOUD HOW DO I UNCLOUD YOUR FACES”

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Sally Forth, 10/3/14

True Story: Sally Forth is the comic strip that first got me thinking seriously about comics time, the phenomenon by which characters in a long-running comic stay basically the same age, but the cultural signifiers surrounding them also stay current which implies that not only their present but their past is slowly moving forward through the space-time continuum. Because it’s hard to notice that strip-time present is changing to match real-life present, you tend to notice this most during flashback sequences, as I did when an early ’00s Sally Forth storyline about Ted and Sally meeting in college featured Ted wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. I’d been reading the strip since I was a child, and so obviously Ted and Sally were my parents’ age, and this blew up everything I thought I knew.

Anyway, something about this particular storyline, about Sally and Alice meeting for the first time twenty years ago, has been nagging at me all week, and I finally put my finger on it: Alice is in fact sporting 1994’s hottest haircut, the Rachel, which works great for the milieu but makes the fact that her current-day character model still has the same Mid-’80s Business Lady Hair that she’s always had seem even stranger.

Spider-Man, 10/3/14

SUPERHERO: “I’m trapped! I’ve got to use my superpowers to escape!”

[SUPERHERO tries for, like, thirty seconds]

SUPERHERO: “Well, that didn’t work. Time to resign myself to death!”

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!!!!!!!!!!!

Beetle Bailey, 10/3/14

It’s funny because you can tell the chili is too hot because it’s on fire and also Beetle is literally cringing in pain and his face-flesh is covered with horrible burns

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Beetle Bailey, 10/1/14

I like the looks of surprise in panel two not just on Miss Buxley, but on the faces of the two passers-by at the bottom of the panel. There’s no particular reason they should be showing sudden horror at the gaping, angry Sarge-maw, but their epiphany mirroring Miss Buxley’s fits in with the dream logic of the whole strip, and by “dream logic” I mean “Jesus Christ this is a Freudian bonanza of sublimated psychosexual squick.”

Spider-Man, 10/1/14

Last week, Spider-Man battled Doc Ock the only way he could: by not battling him at all, but letting another villain he accidentally set free from jail do the battling for him. Today, he’s getting actively annoyed at this thrilling super-powered combat getting all up in his personal space while he’s trying to just relax a little.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/1/14

“The floors are cover’d in bird shit, jes’ like our house, though!”