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Archive: Dennis the Menace

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Briefly kind Monday

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Beetle Bailey and Blondie, 5/14/18

You know, I’ve spent the [consults notes, pauses a little bit as the unsettling realization sinks in] majority of my adult life shitting on the hard work of legacy syndicated newspaper comics and the mostly anonymous hired hands who toil on them, but I’m going to start my week by announcing that I really enjoyed these two strips today! And not in the “lol, this joke is stupid and for rubes but here, allow me to weave a 500-word essay on how, if you read it on a much deeper level unintended by the artist, which anyone who’s familiar with the Death of the Author theory of literary criticism knows is the only way you should read things, it’s actually good” sense that I usually go in for. Nope, these are just two solid and well-executed gags that combine text and visuals perfectly to make maximum use of comics as a medium. So kudos to Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC and whatever hedge fund acquired the Blondie intellectual property at fire sale prices after the whole sandwich shop bankruptcy and fraud thing!

Crankshaft, 5/14/18

Huh, that got a little mean-spirited towards the end there, didn’t it? Apologies, but speaking of mean-spirited, let’s see what Ed Crankshaft is up to! Oh, look, there’s a rude sign at the bank. I know I just said that I go in for the Death of the Author theory but I’m still genuinely trying to figure out if the intended joke here is “ha ha, banks sure are rude” or “ha ha, everyone hates Ed Crankshaft and wants to avoid interacting with him if they possibly can.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/14/18

Now that I’m fully back on my bullshit, I’m going to try to figure out what the real menace in today’s Dennis the Menace is. I can’t decide if it’s “Dennis loudly extols his mother’s gendered position in the household” or “Dennis has already internalized society’s unrealistic beauty standards and is fretting about getting fat.”

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Death-haunted Friday

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Dennis the Menace, 5/11/18

This is definitely one of the most menacing things Dennis has ever said, as it’s exactly what he’d say if the police found, like, his collection of human skin trophies.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/11/18

Pretty sure you’re never going to have to worry about third grade if your husband keeps giving the kid extremely swallowable puzzle pieces, Loweezy!

Mary Worth, 5/11/18

She says she wants him to come to the car but … she’s definitely beckoning him over the cliff, right? That’s what’s happening in panel two? Just coaxing him into the comforting arms of death?

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Mostly terrible children

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Dennis the Menace, 5/2/18

Ha, yes, Dennis, we do exist in a world of corruption and decay, where we ingest not only the cooked and dismembered corpses of our fellow beings but also the dead microorganisms that once hitched a ride on, and in, their bodies, a slurry of organic matter from a thousand different ecological niches, most of it invisible to us. This is what being an animal is, of course: you eat other things that used to be alive. Like most of Dennis’s menacing, today’s incident is just ripping the polite mask off of our brutal, grotesque, and complex reality.

Pluggers, 5/2/18

One thing that I will always say when I try to explain why Pluggers annoys me (and I seem to annoy other people when I say it, but so it goes) is that it’s smug. Not always, but often! The not-so-subtle implication is that these salt-of-the-earth folks are better than you, you big-city elitist, somehow simultaneously simpler but also smarter. Today’s a great example: A plugger just sleeps on an ordinary pillow filled with feathers and not … some presumably much more suspect alternative to this? Yes, if you’re like me, you had to Google “My Pillow” to discover that it’s a poly-foam pillow heavily advertised on late-night infomercials, marketed by a company that was forced by numerous lawsuits to stop making various specious claims about its health benefits. Anyway, who’s morally superior? Pluggers, who are extremely smug about not having been taken in by the “My Pillow” scam that they’ve seen advertised endlessly? Or me, who’s never heard of it in the first place because I don’t watch infomercials but instead spend my aimless late nights reading articles about subway systems and 18th century wars on Wikipedia???? CHECKMATE PLUGGERS!!!!!!

Marvin, 5/2/18

So Marvin is sucking the life force out of his grandfather so he can remain forever an infant, un-potty-trained for all eternity? Sounds about right!