Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 7/16/18

Wait, so this is a repeat wrong-number caller? Who admits to Dennis right off the bat that he knows he’s calling the wrong number? What exactly is going on here? Dennis’s pushback is entirely legitimate! He’s the one who’s being menaced, by some phone-creep!

Family Circus, 7/16/18

It’s really a fine line between “Ha ha, our children, being young and unlearned, do occasionally say the darndest things!” and “Oh, Christ, our children are dumb, just dumb as posts, they’re too old to be displaying this level of ignorance, this is humiliating for everyone concerned,” but the Family Circus has just blown right past it today!

Slylock Fox, 7/16/18

Plus she’s … right there? Right there at the bottom left of the panel, in plain sight? That’s Bertha Bear, right? I’m not going crazy here?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/16/18

I mean, guys, you’re, uh, you’re all sitting with each other

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/18

Those of you who are longtime OG Joshreads dot com trufans remember how in the early days of this blog we had a great deal of fun with the Canadian soap opera-ish comic strip For Better or for Worse, and one of the days we had the most fun with it was January 26, 2005, when the strip came up with an inexplicable and hilarious series of words a Canadian tween might use to denigrate a classmate for her promiscuity, the most absurd of which was “roadside.” What I’m trying to say is, the two Hanks have been doing their tour of roadside attractions for weeks, and now Hank Sr. has finally encountered a “roadside” “attraction” in the form of Millie Gray! Sorry, Lefty Gillis, your gal’s about to be swept off her feet by her first love, a big shot horror comics artist who has an RV and everything! Sorry, Hank Jr., you’re gonna have to find a non-RV place to sleep tonight! If this RV is rockin’, it’s a sign that it’s a little unbalanced, so don’t come a knockin’, as it could tip right over!

Mary Worth, 6/24/18

Brandy: A woman haunted by a vague, intrusive fantasy that she’s desperately fleeing from the faceless adversaries trying to track her down and kill her, a woman comforted by the white noise of crashing waves on the beach. Is she the perfect match for a ex-con pill fiend who was wildly incompetent at every aspect of being a drug dealer? Looks like we’re going to find out!

Mark Trail, 6/24/18

Mark Trail wouldn’t be my first guess as to which soap opera strip character would show up with a cherry-picked anecdote to explain that, sure, spicy foods from weird foreign countries are becoming increasingly popular, but they’re probably detrimental to the health of God-fearing Americans and we should stick the flavorless boiled meat dishes our Anglo-Saxon ancestors enjoyed, but, you know what? It’s definitely not a surprise or anything.

Dennis the Menace, 6/24/18

Summoning a pack of neighborhood dogs of all shapes and sizes to do his bidding? Pretty menacing, I would say!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/24/18

“Prototypical persons with NPD present with many interpersonal problems and comorbid disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder, with consequent increases in risk of suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, and eating disorders” is a sentence from the Psychiatric Times that I’m just going to leave here for no reason!

Post Content

Spider-Man, 6/4/18

There are of course plenty of different schools of thought on storytelling. Some people will say that every detail should point towards the eventual resolution of the narrative, and if that’s the template Newspaper Spider-Man is going for perhaps this angry cabbie will show up up at a crucial part of the climax, out for revenge. But many writers like adding little grace note details to their stories, which make the world of their tales feel more filled out and lived in, and clarify the nature of their characters, without really pertaining to the plot. I assume that’s what’s going on here as Peter Parker is berated by a cabbie as a cheapskate. While Peter himself doesn’t make much money, his wife is a successful actress and, honestly, he doesn’t even attempt to beg poverty. “Sorry. Didn’t have that much money on me,” he says casually. “I just didn’t think ahead, and now you have suffer for it. Oh well!”

Dennis the Menace and Pluggers, 6/4/18

Here we have two men in the twilight of their lives evaluating their priorities in very different ways. Mr. Wilson rejects Dennis’s extremely non-menacing nutritional advice, for a number of obvious reasons: he’s already lived a good long life, and why not enjoy the time he has left, or at least use the fleeting joy of a sugar rush to distract from the fact that what should’ve been his golden years are being spent constantly feuding with the child who lives next door? Then there’s our elderly dog-man plugger, whose house and body are in equal states of disrepair. He could try getting out the toolbox and fixing up the house — he is a plugger, after all, and that’s the sort of thing they do — but, you know, he’ll be dead soon, so why bother? The stair will outlive the knee, at least, and soon he won’t be able to walk down the steps anymore to hear the squeak. Then it’ll be somebody else’s problem.