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Dennis the Menace, 5/31/26

I know that “Dennis isn’t being menacing at all in this one” is one of my (hopefully) beloved running bits, but I’m really not sure how they’re gonna top today’s installment, in which Henry is clearly starting to panic and Dennis with childlike innocence calms him down and offers a practical solution that quickly solves their problem. Dennis The Very Helpful Child would not be a very popular comic strip if marketed in that way but here we are!

Mary Worth, 5/31/26

Aw, isn’t that sweet! Mary is like a second mother to both Tommy and Dawn, which means they can’t hook up, that would be incest, please do not allow them to hook up. Anyway, “self-abuse” is usually a euphemism for masturbation, right? He’s running to make up for years of jerking off? I don’t think this is something I would tell to my newly discovered spiritual sister or a girl I was trying to hook up with. I think that would be bad either way.

Blondie, 5/31/26

Contemporary masculinity is constricting in really odd and unfortunate ways. Like, I think for most of the last 50 years or so we would’ve accepted a guy who likes to loudly sing old Dean Martin songs in the bathtub as being well within the boundaries of manhood, but apparently now we need to establish that Dagwood is using an extremely masc shampoo during this whole process. It doesn’t smell good, like shampoo a woman would use! Its odor is truly unpleasant. That’s how you know it’s for men!

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Mary Worth, 5/29/26

Oh, I guess I haven’t really mentioned that Tommy and Dawn are falling in love or whatever. You know how last week I was like “Why does Dawn, who as far as I can remember has never really interacted with Tommy before, have such beef with him?” Well, I think the Mary Worth creative team learned about the concept of an “enemies-to-lovers arc” and decided to do one with Dawn and Tommy and then realized they had to make them enemies first. Or at least make Tommy an enemy to Dawn. Tommy would never view anyone as an enemy! He’s too pure! He’s like a golden retriever, if a golden retriever completed a 12-step program!

Gil Thorp, 5/29/26

In other soap opera romance news, it turns out that Gil’s hot younger fiance is secretly a nerd who doesn’t have any friends, and is currently speed-running a gender-swapped version of the beloved 2009 bromantic comedy I Love You Man. She’s trying to rope Coach Cami into being one of her bridesmaids and honestly? It’s not going well! Cami doesn’t look like she’s having fun at all!

Dennis the Menace, 5/29/26

I think the joke here is that Dennis is proposing that he could “play” the cassette tape like it’s a harmonica? But it kind of just looks like he’s going to eat it, which is frankly much funnier. And menacing, too!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/29/26

“I had really forgotten how difficult working a regular job is, ha ha. Anyway, turns out my fan base still loves me, so I can probably go back to being a celebrity now. Smell ya later!”

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Family Circus, 5/2/26

A thing about one-panel comic strips is that it can be hard to tell what order things are happening in, and a thing about the Family Circus is that I actually don’t have a strong sense of how Big Daddy Keane feels about basic gender stuff. What I’m saying is that I don’t know if his little smile is a reaction to what Dolly is saying, and he’s thinking “Heh, it’s true, we both love our pretty little baubles, I hadn’t thought of that,” or if it’s a glimpse of the last moment of his good mood right before his daughter’s observation ruins the whole rest of his day.

Dennis the Menace, 5/2/26

Most of the time you can pretend that Dennis the Menace more or less takes place in the 1950s, but I do kind of enjoy the dissonance this causes when they jam some reference to modernity in there. Yes, Henry Mitchell lives in a world where making electronic payments via smartphone apps is an everyday occurrence that a child would be well aware of, and yet he’s still wearing a tuxedo to church.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/2/26

Hey, Jamaal, fun fact: if you’re not going to send it, you don’t even have to be online! You could just purge all your negative energy into a Word doc or something. Just saying it would be an extra layer of security, I know from experience that “send” button can be tempting!