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Dennis the Menace, 4/27/22

I guess you eventually get bored revealing your parents’ shit-talk in front of their guests and have to move onto some real hardcore menacing, like playing sick mind games with your pets. Hot Dog has always been by far the secondary Mitchell critter, but Dennis knows how to turn his fickle charms on a dime to real cause emotional chaos. Dennis’s praise boils down to “I like you because, like me, you don’t have emotional attachments,” but Hot Dog clearly is overjoyed to briefly be the center of attention. Ruff, meanwhile, is utterly devastated by this development.

Blondie, 4/27/22

Look, obviously comics are a visually whimsical medium and part of the gimmick of Blondie is the contrast in the cartoonish proportions of tall and gangly Dagwood and short and stumpy Mr. Dithers. But for some reason I think it’s pretty jarring to make it very obvious that Dithers’s shoulders are level with the countertop, and somehow putting a photorealistic coffeemaker on that countertop just makes it worse.

Dick Tracy, 4/27/22

Ha, yes, if there’s one thing the cops are always very concerned about it’s the violent drama among marginal criminal characters. “Well, we let the guy who kidnapped your girlfriend back on the street,” says Dick, “but if he causes more trouble, have you considered calling the police? The non-emergency number, please.”

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Blondie, 3/28/22

I honestly kind of respect how Blondie is just absolutely committed to doing jokes about whatever big pan-cultural event is on the calendar, and in a way that doesn’t engage with the specifics of said event at all, instead just acknowledging that it exists at an extremely surface level, so that the jokes could theoretically be reused for years to come (though amazingly I’m pretty sure they never are). The cultural net is pretty wide, too, and I’m not sure if that’s meant to make sure that there’s a little something for all the Blondie-heads — “the folks who weren’t into our generic March Madness gags last week will surely appreciate the generic Oscar gags this week” — or if the Blondie creative team truly believes that almost everyone has a certain amount of interest in a core set of cultural touchstones. If it’s the latter, they’re probably the last real idealists left in America.

Anyway, I do wonder about the creative process that led from “how can we cash in on America’s Oscar fever” to the punchline “he just gave it … 3 flames up!” It seems clear that this is a reference to the thumbs up/thumbs down movie-rating metrics made famous by Siskel & Ebert 30 years ago, which is an acceptable cultural horizon for Blondie readers, no argument there. And flames instead of thumbs, sure, because of the comical exaggerated flames coming out of Dagwood’s mouth. But why three? Because if two is good, then three is better? Have they forgotten that the origin of the system was two movie critics who either agreed or disagreed, and now they’re simply treating it like a simple star rating scale? I have to say I’m pretty disappointed in this one.

Dennis the Menace, 3/28/22

Dennis, you’re … you’re looking at the TV right now! You know what he’s watching! Are you precisely attuned to Mr. Wilson’s emotional state and know what in his media diet triggers him, but can’t tell the difference between sports being played and the news being reported? Because that’s profoundly menacing, and not in a good way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/28/22

Oh no, Rene’s got to go on the lam again before Raymond (?) hears the news! And just when he finally figured out a way to make money legitimately (selling high-quality oil paintings to foot fetishists).

Crankshaft, 3/28/22

I’m very excited for Crankshaft to become a hard-core anti-pharma “natural living” influencer guy, mostly because I assume he’ll be dead by the end of the week due to his various untreated ailments.

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Blondie, 3/24/22

This is not the first time I’ve griped about this, but at one point unseen off-screen characters in Blondie used to be named things like “the Glambasters,” just for fun, but now they all have to have incredibly on-the-nose names that explicitly tell you what their deal within the comic is, like “the Clockers” who hate it if you’re late or, in this case, “Winona Braggart,” who likes to brag. Where has the creative energy that used to be put into the names gone? If today’s strip is any indication, it’s going into incredibly detailed drawings of curled up cold-cuts, which, while on-brand for this strip and no doubt of great interest to its readership, really saddens me.

Mary Worth, 3/24/22

Look, I’ve never said that Toby is a genius, exactly, but it seems like it should be obvious even to her that a mostly treeless hillside facing your workplace’s enormous plate-glass windows is the last place you’d want to pick for a makeout session with a student that your coworkers are already criticizing you for flirting with. Just walk to the other side of the hill! Think for once in your life!