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Dennis the Menace, 4/4/16

The Mitchells strike me as an extremely 1950s respectable upper middle class types, which means that they’re probably high church Episcopalians. Certainly they’re not going to be Catholics, or members of one of those “ethnic” Orthodox churches. (Yes, I know other denominations have bishops, but I don’t think any of them wear mitres as in the picture here.) Anyway, this panel suffers the same problem of a lot of Dennis-says-the-darndest-things-in-class gags, which is that it’s not clear at all what the correct answer to this extremely open-ended question is supposed to be. Are these eight-year-olds supposed to describe the bureaucracy of church governance, or talk about Apostolic succession or the long struggle in the 16th and 17th centuries over whether the English church should have an episcopal or presbyterian structure? Give me a break. Also, a child demonstrating knowledge of how chess works is one of the least menacing things I can think of.

Spider-Man, 4/4/16

Oh, shoot, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on Spider-Man, because it’s been all about the mildly superheroic tussling amongst Spidey, Steve Strange, and the sinister Xandu, and not about, say, supervillains memorializing their triumphs via selfie. My favorite part is how the mind-controlled Spider-Man is desperate to stop Xandu from uploading this photo to Instagram, but cannot. What would he do if he weren’t under Xandu’s spell? Post a 2,000-word screed to Medium about how selfies are a symptom of a narcissistic civilization in decline?

Crankshaft, 4/4/16

Have you ever wondered about the sexual scenarios that Crankshaft claims to be disgusted by and yet can’t stop visualizing? Then today’s strip is for you, my friend.

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Family Circus, 3/29/16

I’m usually pretty meh on the art in the Family Circus. Still, the trailing shoelace in today’s panel is a nice idea, despite the fact that those shoes look to be loafers and the lace is sort of emerging out of nowhere. It gives a nice air of childhood whimsy and innocence to the drawing; it also gives hardcore Billy haters like myself hope that he’s soon going to trip and break a tooth, or, even better, his watch.

Crankshaft, 3/29/16

Tom Batiuk famously writes Funky Winkerbean almost a year in advance, which I assume is also true for Crankshaft. So it’s actually just a total coincidence that this storyline is running the same week a guy in North Carolina was stopped because he had a broken taillight and then literally handcuffed and taken to jail for not returning Freddy Got Fingered to his local video store in 2002. (The local video store, I think it goes without saying, closed down years ago.) Anyway, if we live in an absurd world where decades-old civil judgements for very small amounts of money can lead to actual arrest, maybe you should be careful, Lillian! The cops in the North Carolina case were nice enough to let the guy drop his daughter off at school first, but they didn’t have to! Probably they could just drag Lillian off to jail and leave the twins in the car, miles from anywhere. (Is Lillian even supposed to be driving these kids around?)

Mary Worth, 3/29/16

Looks like Dawn’s starting to make a bolder personal effort at school! Step one: just don’t do things you don’t want to do! If she were being a little bolder, she just would’ve said “Nahh, not my scene. Later, blondie!” But this is definitely an improvement over signing up and pretending to enjoy it.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/16

“…what if I looked him up … on the Internet? And so I did. He’s got a Wikipedia page. Turns out he’s dead! Cool story, huh?”

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Crankshaft, 3/25/16

Oh, hey, whoops! It turns out Crankshaft wasn’t being coy at all about the year in which takes place yesterday. Crankshaft happens in 2016, which means Funky Winkerbean happens in 2026, which means that the next ten years are going to pass by in escalating gloom in order to achieve the full-on miasma of despair that permeates the future-strip. Lucky for Lilian, she’s suffering a massive heart attack in the final panel here, and so won’t have to live through any of it.

Judge Parker, 3/25/16

Call me a big government liberal if you must, but I think if you’re going to build your business model on squeezing the last drops of usuable labor out of the old and feeble, you should at least make a good faith effort at keeping them alive.

Crock, 3/25/16

Good to see Crock has given up on jokes entirely and is now just focusing on characters staring out at the reader while sassily spouting nonsense. He gave him the hump, if you know what he means! Do you know what he means? You don’t. Nobody does. But you can tell it’s supposed to be funny, from context.