Archive: Dennis the Menace

Post Content

Mark Trail, 10/4/19

I don’t exactly blame Mark for not being active on social media, what with it being a terrible nightmare cesspool that broke humanity’s collective brain, but as a guy who has a bit of a social media presence myself, I have a word of advice for Mark: you can’t just join Twitter and then immediately start tweeting about how you’ve got exclusive photos of the yeti, because nobody’s going to believe you! You should have spent years tweeting out links to your boring diatribes about lizards or whatever, in order to build up credibility.

Dennis the Menace, 10/4/19

I’m assuming that this young guy is a relatively new arrival in the neighborhood, and that upon meeting him Mr. Wilson was like “Oh, watch out for the Mitchells … they have too many kids” hoping that the guy would ask how many they have, but he instead he just changes the subject because that’s actually an incredibly weird and rude thing to say to a near-stranger and it made him uncomfortable to hear it, and probably Mr. Wilson repeated it several times and the guy just never bit, and now, finally, despite the new guy’s best efforts, they’ve bumped into each other by the Mitchells’ fence, and Mr. Wilson says, smugly, “There’s Dennis, the Mitchells’ only kid,” and finally the guy has had enough, and he sighs heavily then says this. You’re all with me here? That’s the only logical lead-in to this exchange, right?

Beetle Bailey, 10/4/19

“But he asked for it,” Spc. Gizmo yelled, being dragged from the courtroom after he was found guilty at his court martial for crimes against humanity. “He requested the procedure. He requested the procedure!”

Mary Worth, 10/4/19

Oh no, oh no, the Mary Worth creative team is aware of the concept of “Netflix and chill,” threat level alpha, repeat, threat level alpha

Post Content

Mary Worth, 9/25/19

“You must feel like you’re on a roller coaster of emotion, dear! Me, I like to keep it on an even keel. If something bad — or good — happens to me, I use the power of my mind to to smooth that memory down until it’s just one more in a series of low-impact incidents in a calm, orderly life. Feelings are for the young and the poor, I always say!”

Dennis the Menace, 9/25/19

I think we need to admit to our selves that Dennis’s menacing, despite being right there in the name of the strip, is really an an informed attribute — something the other characters claim to believe without any evidence within the narrative to back them up. Today’s panel, in which Mr. Wilson declares “That Mitchell kid is more dangerous than the nuclear arsenals that can wipe out the human race with a simple press of the button! He’s an extinction-level event in red overalls, I tell you!” while Dennis flops goofily around on his lawn, is perhaps the clearest evidence of this yet.

Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 9/24/19

Dennis not understanding common English turns of phrase is a key part of the Dennis the Menace mythos, but it seems the current strip creators have forgotten why that is. The point is that Dennis is supposed to use his (feigned?) ignorance as an excuse to reveal that something shitty his parents have said about one of their acquaintances in private, e.g., “You said there’d be an old battle axe coming over but all I see is this late-middle-aged woman with a bad personality.” All today’s garbage joke does is make it clear that Dennis is stupid, and somebody needs to take it over to the Family Circus where it belongs.

Family Circus, 9/24/19

The Family Circus really needs that joke, to be honest, because I have no idea what’s going on here. Who is this random teen, and why is Billy hanging around with him talking about math? And why are he and Ma Keane giving each other a knowing glance? “It’s algebra,” they’re saying to one another, wordlessly. “He doesn’t know the word for it, but we both know he’s talking about algebra.”

Zits, 9/24/19

So it turns out the terrible thing Jeremy learned yesterday was that he has to repeat freshman P.E., and I know I almost never talk about Zits here so it’s weird that I’m talking about it two days in a row, but I think it’s kind of interesting that a strip that used to get in trouble with the syndicate for using the word “sucks” can now do jokes where the punchline is that Jeremy is mad because his dick isn’t getting any bigger as his adolescence progresses.

Hagar the Horrible, 9/24/19

Hagar and Lucky Eddie can’t bear to look at themselves in the mirror, probably because of guilt from all the horrible murders they’ve done.