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Archive: Dennis the Menace

185

Take the middle way, neither ho ho ho nor humbug

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Dennis the Menace and Curtis, 12/19/24

Well, I guess yesterday’s Curtis is the start of an arc about how the kids today celebrate holidays differently, using technology, and I like that Greg’s exhausted facial expression tells us what he thinks about this but he still will only say philosophically that the only constant is change, all is vanity, etc., etc. Dennis the Menace put cyber-Christmas advocacy in the mouth of its most annoying character as well, but otherwise doesn’t outwardly condemn it. And if they won’t, I will. This is tacky and it sucks! Curtis, that app was a trick to get you to download cryptomining malware onto your phone, and Margaret, you are texting with a scammer in Southeast Asia who will convince you to send him your parents’ credit card and Social Security numbers by the end of the year.

Gearhead Gertie, 12/19/24

Speaking of celebrating Christmas differently, I’m not actually that interested in the fact that instead of enjoying classic modern-day Christmas tales Gertie would rather — surprise! — consume NASCAR-related content. I’m more curious about who the other two people on this couch are. Do Gertie and her increasingly alienated husband have [squints] a daughter and a grandson, or perhaps two grandchildren, and they’re staying together for their benefit? Or are these just two people they recruited off the street because they needed a “rule of three” setup for Gertie’s punchline? (Fun fact: Gertie thinks the “rule of three” is when Dale Earnhardt descends from heaven and implements his thousand-year kingdom on Earth).

Hi and Lois, 12/19/24

Remember: due to the oddnesses of comic-book time, we’ve been enjoying Trixie’s antics since the Eisenhower Administration, but she’s been alive for less than a year. This is the first time she’s ever experienced winter. She thinks Sunbeam, her only friend, is old and dying. Pretty bleak!

152

Wednesday is for dumb kids

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Hi and Lois, 12/11/24

Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold the damn phone, six months ago Hi seemed genuinely depressed to not receive golf gifts for Father’s Day, back when the kids unilaterally cancelled Father’s Day. Anyway, if Ditto is going to try to do some “turnabout is fair play” on gifts, Hi’s move should be to say “Hey, remember when you cancelled Father’s Day?”

Dennis the Menace, 12/11/24

OK, I’m just genuinely flummoxed by this one. Only thing I’ve got is that Dennis has the Benjamin Button disease and he used to be much taller, and his shrunken, aging brain is vaguely remembering this? I feel menaced in my confusion, but not in a fun way.

Mary Worth, 12/11/24

Mary has had a lot of experience interacting with Dawn, so she knows she has to remind Dawn that she recently became vegan to set the stage for the meal. That girl has a lot of fine qualities, but object permanence simply isn’t one of them.

153

The dog smells the chicken and wants to eat it, simple as

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/2/24

I had never really thought about it, but if you had asked me before today, I would’ve told you I was pretty sure that the chickens Snuffy steals from his neighbors by stuffing them into a patchèd sack in the dead of night were still alive when he got home. Like, obviously they get killed eventually but, I dunno, I assumed it was right before the Smifs ate them. But surely if the lumps in that bag represented a live chicken, it would’ve been prompted to move around and squawk a bit by all the commotion in today’s strip, so I guess Snuffy just strangles the birds before they even leave the coop he’s stealing them from, the better to make a silent getaway. Not sure why that makes this whole scene so much grimmer, but I think you can agree that it really does.

Dennis the Menace, 12/2/24

I’m on the record as hating the running joke where Dennis slags on his mother’s cooking all the time. I thought I hated it because of its underlying gender politics, but it turns out I hate it even more because it set up today’s panel, in which Margaret is acting out an ambiguous wife/mother role as she and Dennis “play house” and Dennis experiences good cooking for the first time ever, and it’s so baffling to him he doesn’t even have a coherent vocabulary to describe it, which will change the nature of their relationship forever.

Hi and Lois, 12/2/24

Ha ha, we all know that regular guys (old) are constantly avoiding listening to their wives by watching the “big game” on TV. But what do younger guys (45 and under, a demographic into which Hi Flagston falls) do when their wife wants to “talk about her feelings or experiences that are meaningful to her” or whatever? What if I told you that they avoid all that by watching the “big game” on their [record scratch] PHONES????