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Dick Tracy, 5/31/18

Oh, right, they tried to kill Dick Tracy last year by tying him to a tree and letting him freeze to death? It was both ineffective and so boring that I seem to have not covered it at all on this blog, and you have to admit it isn’t necessarily the most obvious way to kill a guy when you’re hiring a man named “Sawtooth” with razor-sharp metal teeth to do the killing. I mean, you’d think you’d want the guy to, like, bite him, right? Bite him with his deadly metal teeth? Anyway, Sawtooth is working on his own now, which means he does it his way, which, I assume, means the whole biting-to-death thing. Ha ha, look how excited he is! Gettin’ all sweaty and worked up thinking about all the biting he’s gonna do!

Blondie, 5/31/18

The thing I can’t get past in this cartoon is Elmo’s opening line: “Mom made me wear this for graduation, Mr. B.” I can’t decide which possibility I like more: that Elmo, whose extremely bad attitude is on display throughout this strip, didn’t want to dress like a damn square the way the man says you should for your graduation, but his mom forced him to conform to social norms for at least the length of the afternoon; or if Elmo’s graduation from, like, second grade or whatever is rightfully not being run by his school with any particularly degree of ceremony, but his mother is insistent that her child and each of his milestones, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are of utmost importance and should be treated accordingly.

Dennis the Menace, 5/31/18

Ha ha, we make a lot of jokes on this blog about what is or isn’t menacing, but I think we can be serious for a moment and say that a guy sitting by himself in the park telling little kids about all the fucking he’s doing overseas is pretty bad news.

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Blondie, 5/26/18

There’s really no circumstance under which this joke would’ve “worked,” but it would’ve not worked less if Dagwood had been wearing something vaguely cool or even interesting. Still, as a not-particularly-hip incipient old person myself, only the extreme out-of-touchness oozing from every pixel of this image prevented me from briefly wondering if wearing polo shirt tucked into black slacks had, against all odds, suddenly become fashionable.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/26/18

It’s kind of interesting that Hagar’s reputation as an illiterate precedes him, and not, say, his reputation as a wanton, destructive plunderer.

Beetle Bailey, 5/26/18

We interrupt our usual military antics for this nightmare vision of the human race as nothing more than a buffet of flesh and blood to be devoured by eager, ravenous parasites!

Pluggers, 5/26/18

If I’m interpreting this correctly, these plugger dudes are definitely going to have no-strings-attached sex on that filthy, filthy couch.

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Beetle Bailey and Blondie, 5/14/18

You know, I’ve spent the [consults notes, pauses a little bit as the unsettling realization sinks in] majority of my adult life shitting on the hard work of legacy syndicated newspaper comics and the mostly anonymous hired hands who toil on them, but I’m going to start my week by announcing that I really enjoyed these two strips today! And not in the “lol, this joke is stupid and for rubes but here, allow me to weave a 500-word essay on how, if you read it on a much deeper level unintended by the artist, which anyone who’s familiar with the Death of the Author theory of literary criticism knows is the only way you should read things, it’s actually good” sense that I usually go in for. Nope, these are just two solid and well-executed gags that combine text and visuals perfectly to make maximum use of comics as a medium. So kudos to Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC and whatever hedge fund acquired the Blondie intellectual property at fire sale prices after the whole sandwich shop bankruptcy and fraud thing!

Crankshaft, 5/14/18

Huh, that got a little mean-spirited towards the end there, didn’t it? Apologies, but speaking of mean-spirited, let’s see what Ed Crankshaft is up to! Oh, look, there’s a rude sign at the bank. I know I just said that I go in for the Death of the Author theory but I’m still genuinely trying to figure out if the intended joke here is “ha ha, banks sure are rude” or “ha ha, everyone hates Ed Crankshaft and wants to avoid interacting with him if they possibly can.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/14/18

Now that I’m fully back on my bullshit, I’m going to try to figure out what the real menace in today’s Dennis the Menace is. I can’t decide if it’s “Dennis loudly extols his mother’s gendered position in the household” or “Dennis has already internalized society’s unrealistic beauty standards and is fretting about getting fat.”