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Mary Worth, 11/3/17

OK, I know I touched on this briefly before, but for real, I went back and checked, and there have been literally only two Mary Worth plots since the great Zak-Iris romance of late ’16/early ’17: “Dawn The Accidental Summer-Internship Adulterer” and “The Sexy, Dangerous Cruise,” and neither of them by their own internal logic could have taken more than a few weeks of in-strip time. That means that we’re expected to believe that Zak spent maybe a summer developing his game and then getting enough venture funding to build a company around it. This is theoretically possible, but it sure doesn’t speak well of his business acumen that he chose to give both his game and his company a name that sounds like “Zak? Ick!”

Dennis the Menace, 11/3/17

A little kid gushing about how pretty his mom is in vaguely Oedipal fashion? Kinda menacing. A little kid learning pick-up artist techniques from Reddit and “negging” his mom? MENACE LEVELS OFF THE CHARTS

Six Chix, 11/3/17

“He’s a gross young man and I spend as little time with him as possible!”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/30/17

Gosh, maybe if your strip’s main character is a weird tiny gnomish person who, unlike the other characters in the strip, looks like he’s half old man and half baby, and there’s never really any explanation of why … maybe don’t draw attention to that fact? Maybe don’t!

Dennis the Menace, 10/30/17

“So you’re tellin’ me you hate the fact that your body and mind are slowly but surely breaking down as you age, threatening to leave you a feeble, confused shadow of your former self … but you fear death?” Today’s menace game is extremely strong.

Judger Parker, 10/30/17

EVERY TIME APRIL LOOKS AT A PICTURE OF HER BABY

SHE HAS TO SHIV SOMEONE IN THE YARD

EVERY

SINGLE

TIME

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Dennis the Menace, 10/25/17

There are no recurring adult characters in this strip other than George and Martha Wilson. Instead, we see an endless parade of one-off adult visitors to the Mitchell home, with the implication that Henry and Alice are desperately trying to normalize their lives by making friends more or less their own age, only for Dennis to alienate them by saying the darndest things — or, more often, repeating a darndest thing that one of his parents said behind their acquaintance’s back. If that’s starting to give you a picture of the real reason for the Mitchells’ stunted social life, consider today’s installment, where Alice, hungry to sup on human misery, has brought Dennis to some random new mother’s house, so he can make fun of her parenting skills just because her little kid does what little kids do. And sure, Dennis is kind of a dick about it, but whatever! He’s, what, five? Look at Alice in the background in the second panel, a subtle but cruel smile on her face. The menace doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Marvin, 10/25/17

Like many sassy cartoon characters, Marvin goes through life with a heavy lidded expression meant to convey detachment and ennui. In panel two, we learn what it takes to snap him into a state of alertness: the possibility of being prosecuted for war crimes.