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Between Friends, 5/24/24

For my sins, I must occasionally fulfill my oath and keep you up to date on the Between Friends gals, so: the dark-haired Between Friends gal is working temporarily in Paris, and has a flirty relationship with her boss Benoit and a weirdly antagonistic relationship with her coworker Louise, and today we’re finding out why. I bring all this up because, maybe I’m crazy, but I find the phrasing in panel two here very weird? Like: do I think your wife’s sister’s daughter is your niece? Absolutely. Would I still call her your niece if you and your wife got divorced? More of a grey area, but I still think of my dad’s brother’s ex-wife, who I’m friends with on Facebook, as my aunt, and they’ve been divorced for 20 years, so it’s not unreasonable. But the formulation “his niece on his ex-wife’s side!” just seems deranged and unnatural to me. Do we have nieces and nephews on … sides? I am imagining her co-worker here saying it in a really heavy French accent and then explaining what he thinks it means. “‘Niece’ is what you say in English for a woman you’re sleeping with who isn’t your wife, non? And ‘on your wife’s side’ means your wife knows about it? My English is, how you say, not so good.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/24

I honestly love the vibe Dennis is giving off here. He genuinely is being good, just calmly sitting on the chair and reading a book, like he’s been doing for the last three days, and it sucks! It sucks ass and he hates it! He’s doing it because he has to but he will never like it.

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Gasoline Alley, 5/17/24

OK, see, I get that Assistant Mayor Elbert Imeswine was the villain of the “Electric Acres” arc, but he doesn’t seem to be based on any particular real-life person and was dispatched without ever having been very threatening. But still, the way he haunts Walt’s dreams as this truly vile vampire pig caricature implies a level of vitriol held by the very artist who created him that I honestly find puzzling. This looks like the way you’d draw a local politician you were in the midst of a decade-long feud with if you were the political cartoonist on the staff of the local paper, or the way you’d draw a representation of some ethnic group that you were extremely racist against.

Dennis the Menace, 5/17/24

Normally, I’m fine with Dennis the Menace’s weird quirk where they think a tuxedo is normal workware at Henry’s engineering (?) job. But today it actively detracts from the joke, which is about how Dennis thinks his spirit will remain free forever despite arbitrary punishments, but eventually he’ll be chained to a eight-hour day and a paycheck, just like his father. This would work better if he were wearing normal business casual or even a suit, but in this getup, he looks like he’s coming home from his job as a butler or as James Bond, either of which would have a different vibe to it in my opinion.

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Blondie, 5/11/24

Look, obviously saying anything against mothers and motherhood is a swift ticket to getting abruptly cancelled — and rightfully so! [laughs nervously] — but I refuse to believe “mom’s week” is a thing, even if you use the not-actual-Mothers-Day part of the week to make a nice gesture to the non-relative woman whose house you spend all your time in for ill-defined and probably not great reasons. It’s long been clear that a substantial portion of Blondie gags are generated by a big calendar with all the holidays on it, and today’s strip shows how reliant the writers are on this crutch, with the daily strip crew refusing to cede Mothers Day to the Sunday writers room.

Gasoline Alley, 5/11/24

“I looked, and there were four wheels beside the cherubim, one beside each cherub, and the appearance of the wheels was like gleaming beryl. And as for their appearance, the four looked alike, something like a wheel within a wheel. When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved, but in whatever direction the front wheel faced, the others followed without veering as they moved. Their entire bodies — backs, hands, and wings — were covered with eyes all around, as were the wheels of the four of them. As for the wheels, they were called in my hearing the wheelwork. Each one had four faces: the first face was that of the cherub, the second face was that of a human, the third that of a lion, and the fourth that of an eagle. The cherubim rose up. These were the living creatures that I saw by the River Chebar.” That’s the testimony of the prophet Ezekiel, and I hope for these things for Walt! I hope he’s borne up to heaven on wings covered by eyeballs by beings who seem like living creatures but are like no living creature you’ve ever seen! If he cannot be blessed by a natural death, after more than a century of toiling in the funny pages for our amusement, let him have this, instead!

Dennis the Menace, 5/11/24

I genuinely find it funny that Alice seems confused by the perpetrator of this prank. “It’s our asshole neighbor, honey. The one who’s done this before, repeatedly? It’s two in the afternoon, are you drunk already?”