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Dennis the Menace, 8/14/24

Despite the fact that she’s a long-running fixture in a 73-year-old comic strip, I don’t think Margaret has a particularly consistent set of characterizations — she’s usually whatever she needs to be in the “vaguely prissy” range to annoy Dennis — but today’s panel honestly feels tonally off to me. I don’t buy that she would be expressing overt jealousy of Taylor Swift, and I don’t buy that she would just call her “Swift.” (I also don’t buy that as a drawing of Taylor Swift, but that’s neither here nor there.) Dennis in his interactions with Margaret similarly seems to take on whatever qualities are necessary to antagonize her, but I am intrigued by the implication that he’s set off Margaret’s rant because he’s such a dedicated Swiftie.

Gil Thorp, 8/14/24

Traditionally we have been treated to Gil Thorp’s thrice-annual ritual recitation of the names, so we can all pretend to know who the players are as their season develops. But in this new fast-paced era, the kids just get little floating labels instead. I’m particularly intrigued by “Torch,” who I assume is an X-Men-style mutant who has the power to control fire, or possibly just a notorious arsonist. Either way, seems like an exciting football season is ahead of us!

Alice, 8/14/24

A lot of middling comics could do a strip where two people talk about how modern appliances today have too many features and none of them work right, hur hur hur. But to have two people talking about how modern appliances today have too many features and none of them work right, while said appliance sits between the two people and makes direct and coquettish eye contact with the audience, with its weird creepy face? That’s the deranged Alice difference that keeps me coming back.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: haha whoops I screwed up the days for several posts this week, here’s Wednesday’s if you haven’t seen that yet

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/24

Look, I respect the effort here — the fundmental underlying joke is pretty good, Alice’s indignant facial expression is funny, and Dennis looking genuinely hurt in the background is a nice touch. “Lived to tell about it.com” isn’t a great URL, though, because it honestly sounds like a site for something a lot more traumatic and kind of spoils the mood, and a much bigger problem is that it’s a website at all. A group of modern young baby sitters is simply not going to go to the trouble to buy a domain name and then set up a WordPress account for a group blog or whatever. They’d set up a community on social media somewhere — Facebook, maybe, Facebook groups have had a little bit of a comeback with younger people, or maybe whatever the TikTok equivalent is. Or a private Discord server! There probably isn’t a TikTok equivalent, now that I think about it, not that I would know, because I don’t go on there. What happens on TikTok is none of my business. The important thing is that I know that I don’t know, which Socrates would say makes me smart. I’m going to run with that. Anyway, nice try but botched execution, Dennis the Menace, I give this 6 out of 10 stars.

Gearhead Gertie, 8/8/24

I’ve decided that my favorite kind of Gearhead Gertie panels are the ones where she’s antagonizing her husband. This one is great because you could imagine that the joke is that this is the thinnest of pretenses over her attempts to establish a throuple, but it’s actually much more wholesome (or, depending on how you see it, more perverse): it’s all exactly as it seems, she just loves NASCAR that much, and it makes her husband crazy. The cable guy, despite his unconventional new living situation, doesn’t seem to notice this drama, or care about it if he does. He’s just happy to be there!

Pluggers, 8/8/24

These two pluggers aren’t just romantically smiling at each other after dinner. Obviously they are doing that — those tight faces and bugged out eyes simply scream “romance” — but there’s aslo something more to it. Thanks for cluing us in, Pluggers!

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Alice, 8/7/24

The thing is that your boy Josh came down with COVID-19 last weekend, and while I am currently on the mend it made my brain a little loopy this week (this Alice strip is here to show you what it was like inside my skull for a while) and also apparently interfered with my ability to operate the ol’ time travel machine. This meant I posted Thursday’s strips on Wednesday and (briefly) posted tomorrow’s (Friday’s) strips Thursday (the day on which I am writing this Wednesday post). Ooops! I’ve corrected the dates on everything on the site (so it goes in the right order), but here’s a short Wednesday post, for completeness!

Dennis the Menace, 8/7/24

Sure, Mr. Wilson, I get it. There are lots of times when I think up a joke, but doing it right involves figuring out some specific pieces of information, like “What’s a typical amount that a child Dennis’s age weighs” and “Wait, how old is Dennis supposed to be, actually,” and then I just don’t bother. This is frankly the most relatable this man has ever been to me.

Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, 8/7/24

Oh no, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has learned what “influencers” are and will be making jokes about them, code red code red