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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!

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Dennis the Menace, 4/28/18

I was gonna make some crack about Henry taking Dennis all the way to France and how extremely menacing that must have been for literally everybody involved, but then I looked it up and it turns out there are actually tons of casts of The Thinker all over the place, including several in the United States. So I guess the Mitchell men didn’t have to drive very far to look at a great work of art that Dennis interpreted as a guy taking a massive shit, which, for the record and in the interest of full disclosure, is a punchline that I laughed at wholly unironically.

Beetle Bailey, 4/28/17

Can’t wait for General Halftrack’s war crimes trial! It’s gonna be lit.

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Mark Trail, 4/26/18

Rusty had to get the sign-off from his teacher to go on this trip to Mexico, so I guess that he attends school, not that you’d know from the strip, where he always seems to be hanging around the isolated forest cabin he shares with his family. But presumably this is a tiny one-room schoolhouse that he shares with a few other stunted forest youths who are kept equally safe from “big city ideas” or the wider culture generally. That’s one explanation for Rusty’s laughable misunderstanding of the economics of civil aviation. The size of an airport isn’t related to the distance flown by any individual scheduled flight departing from that airport, you foolish boy! It instead depends on the population and economic output of the region it serves, so the real question you should be asking yourself is why the backwoods Lost Forest zone merits a sizable international airport. (It’s also possible that this is a tiny two-gate terminal and yet it’s still the largest building Rusty’s ever been inside.)

Dennis the Menace, 4/26/18

“Get it? It rhymes, you see! Anyway, it sounds like your eight-year-old son’s wandered off and you have no idea where he is, so good luck with that.”

Mary Worth, 4/26/18

Ha ha, remember when Dawn was overwhelmed with memories of her ex, while she stared at one of the greatest works of art in the Western canon? Well, you know what Marx said: “All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”