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The Phantom, 10/5/24

One of the more, uh, problematic aspects of the Phantom lore is that the Phantoms have been resident in Africa for 23 generations but have maintained their power over the superstitious natives by keeping contact with their ancestral Europe and bamboozling the poor locals with advanced Western science and technology. That’s why today’s strip, in which he refuses to believe that this robot could possibly be a robot and starts banging on the outside with a rock demanding that the guy inside come out, is pretty funny. On the other hand, the real Elon Musk had a big reveal of a humanoid robot that turned out to be a guy in a robot suit, and then later did a big reveal of another humanoid robot that turned out to have a guy just off screen operating it by remote control, so maybe I shouldn’t be quick to make fun.

Gasoline Alley, 10/5/24

By saying “the black one’s best” but also “the grey tabby’s mine”, little Ava Luna, or possibly Aubee or Sophie, who can tell, is submitting to the patriarchy’s dictates that male siblings should have first choice of everything. This isn’t the sort of girl-power pluck and gumption she showed back when she time travelled with the help of an evil talking doll!

Dennis the Menace, 10/5/24

Uh oh, it appears we’ve made an error over here at Dennis the Menace HQ! This was supposed to be the punchline for a panel showing Margaret and Dennis dancing. But then we realized that that would never happen, so we replaced it with a panel of some kids standing around and holding books while looking at Dennis. But then we never wrote a new punchline for it. Our bad!

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Mary Worth, 10/4/24

Look, Stell, you’re clearly a vibrant, attractive woman with an active romantic and sexual life. Nevertheless, you’re a woman of a certain age, with “certain” meaning “not young,” as evidenced by the fact that you fell for an extremely common elder scam not that long ago. There’s nothing wrong with being on the older side, of course, but it’s important to have some self-awareness and not try to deploy unfamiliar youth slang, OK? Take “ghosted,” for instance: this describes a situation where you’re seeing someone with various possible degrees of seriousness, or are at least gearing up to do so, but then they abruptly cut off contact with you and stop replying to your texts/emails/DMs/other communication attempts. It very much does not describe a situation where your fiance cancels on you for a social event at the last minute, but does so by sending you a text at the time explaining why he’s doing it. You used the word wrong and that’s just how it is! Mary doesn’t know any better, but the youth of today do, so please choose your words more carefully next time in case they overhear you. We would’ve allowed the use of “ghosting” in this context if Ed had died (for instance, by doing emergency surgery on a corgi while exhausted and accidentally slicing his femoral artery with the scalpel and bleeding out on the floor of his own clinic) and, desperate to still make the engagement dinner, he showed up as a ghost. That’s not the usual use of the term but I don’t think anyone would’ve given you trouble. But he didn’t do that either, he did the first thing I said (didn’t show up but explained why and then you saw him not long afterwards, which is also antithetical to the whole “ghosting” concept).

Dennis the Menace, 10/4/24

Ha ha, it’s funny because Mrs. Wilson is admitting the sad truth: she and George are just going through the motions, living but going no further, not experiencing the style and verve that make life worth living. It’s like it only took a few minutes of respite from Dennis’s low-key menacing for them to look the true existential menace square in the face.

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Dennis the Menace, 9/26/24

Here, in no particular order, is a list of possible menacing reasons why Dennis is wearing street clothes in this exchange when you’d expect him to be in a baseball uniform, some mutually exclusive and some not:

• Dennis has a general policy of refusing to wear a uniform while playing baseball due to the oppositional defiance disorder that his parents and coaches have never been able to overcome.
• Dennis has a general policy of refusing to wear a uniform while playing baseball because he understands that red overalls over a striped shirt are his #brand, which he is very keen to maintain and promote.
• Dennis isn’t even playing baseball today; he’s just wandered onto the field to harass the umpire.
• The creators of Dennis the Menace are not confident in their ability to draw the title character of their comic strip in a way that would be recognizable to the readers if he weren’t wearing his trademark red overalls over a striped shirt.
• The creators of Dennis the Menace do not have access to clip art of the title character of their comic strip in which he is not wearing his trademark red overalls over a striped shirt.

The Phantom, 9/26/24

A fun thing about the Phantom is that he dates from the very earliest days of superhero comics, so his outfit is your basic weird skintight body suit and cowl but, when it comes to a fight, his main “power” is the pair of pistols he keeps handy most of the time. Anyway, today the big purple guy has caught up with one of the out-of-control robots unleashed by fake Elon Musk’s crashed rocket, and he’s just going to straight-up shoot it to death, with bullets. Probably it’s not going to work and he’ll need to do something more clever, but it would be pretty funny if it did, right? “Well, Hero, Devil,” he’ll say to his faithful animal companions, “that problem is solved. Thank God for guns, the best friend a superhero can have!”