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Dennis the Menace, 2/27/26

I’m not here to tell the Dennis the Menace creative team how to do their job, but … oh, wait, I am here to do that! That’s literally my job! Anyway, this joke is fine, but it absolutely should’ve run in mid-December, not February. And probably Dennis should’ve looked gleeful, not, as he does here, mournful, as if he’s been forced by circumstances beyond his control to paste some poor sap with a snowball against his will.

Mary Worth, 2/27/26

Several commenters have speculated that Harvey is being catfished and this would just be a tired retread of the “Estelle gets catfished by Arthur Z” plotline from five years ago. One thing that could spice that up a little is to bring AI into the picture, and Mary’s boldfaced “unreal” hints pretty broadly that this is the direction we’re going. The only question is whether “Trixie” is a fully autonomous bot, perhaps an escapee from the Moltbook project, or just a cartoonish avatar that Arthur Z whipped up with OpenAI’s free tier image generation capabilities, since using stock photos is now passé in the eldergrift biz.

Blondie, 2/27/26

Look, Dagwood, I don’t know what you think “freestyle” means, but whatever you’re doing with your legs isn’t it. It isn’t anything we want to see, either. This is a family newspaper, damn it.

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Mary Worth, 2/23/26

Yes Yes! YES!!! We did it, we endured the parrot storyline and its aftermath and have been rewarded by a near-forgotten Mary Worth plot-shifting staple: a pool party! And this pool party features an exciting new character: a dapper widower whose year-long period of mourning is now over so it’s once again legal for him to speak to a woman. “I wonder how he’s doing,” Toby says idly. “I wonder what he thinks about parrots. I wonder if he has more money than, say, an English professor at a second-tier state university. I mean, you don’t go around wearing an ascot in public because you’re poor.”

Dennis the Menace, 2/23/26

I feel like Dennis the Menace may be spending too much time on Dennis insulting his mother’s cooking and harassing his elderly neighbor and not enough time exploring the reasons why the Mitchells are apparently bouncing from denomination to denomination. It seems like Alice in particular is on a spiritual journey and Henry is getting sick of it. “Look, I don’t care if we’re Presbyterians or Unitarian Universalists or snake-handlers or whatever,” he told her, “but I’m not coming until you settle on one.”

Pluggers, 2/23/26

There’s a lot to think about here. My initial instinct was that this plugger had to be at home — pluggers don’t work in front of a computer, they have real blue-collar jobs that involve, like, tools or something — and so this plugger has come home from a hard day’s work and is exemplifying proper life-work balance by dozing off while reading the headlines on Yahoo! News. But then I began to suspect that, in our fallen, post-industrial age, even a plugger’s professional life is dominated by the glow of a screen, and so this plugger is supposed to be “working” and after eight hours of this will head home to watch sports from his recliner, where he’ll also fall asleep. Which interpretation is correct? Sound off in the comments!

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Marvin, 2/12/26

A thing about Marvin is that over the years it has strayed further and further from the one thing that made it unique — a comic strip? about a baby? — and made Marvin more of a generic child of indeterminate age who goes to school and speaks in complete sentences. In order to “get back to its roots,” the strip is doing a flashback sequence to show us what Marvin was like when he was really a baby, like a really tiny young baby, and it turns out what he was like was infested by vermin.

Dennis the Menace, 2/12/26

You guys know I am not a fan of the “Dennis insults his mother’s cooking” Dennis the Menaces, but I gotta say I kind of enjoy this one, because (1) Dennis’s insult is fairly silly and actually the sort of thing a small child might say, and (2) we get a reaction panel showing us that Dennis is realizing how extremely sick of his shit his parents are.