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Dennis the Menace, 2/10/17

I’m not going to claim that making dick jokes about Mary Worth is like digging ditches or anything, but writing this blog does take a certain psychic toll on me! For instance, I bet that for your job today you didn’t have to sort through the Google Image Search results for “Angry Hitler” to find the one that matched best:

Anyway, Mr. Wilson sure is “hot under the collar,” ha ha ha! By which we mean that the very presence of his innocent neighbor tyke is driving him into a state of blackout rage that, while it may not result in an immediate crippling stroke, is probably wearing years off his remaining life. But since he’s incapable of finding relaxed enjoyment in his own home, death will no doubt come as a blessing.

Shoe, 2/10/17

Shoe is a strip that started out being about a bunch of talking anthropomorphic birds to be “funny,” I guess, but has long sense lost any sense of its birdness to the extent that it makes bird-jokes unrelated to its bird-characters. Thus, it actually comes as sort of a relief to me that there’s enough internal logic still at play to make the town mortician a buzzard, even if the implication is that Mort has taken on the job of arranging the funerals of his fellow citizens primarily so he can feast on their corpses.

Speaking of corpses, isn’t Loon employed by the local newspaper? I guess he figures he should get out of the media game while he still can and get in on the one industry that will never, ever lose its market.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/8/17

My friend Ruth Graham recently wrote a fascinating story about the fact that huge swaths of Americans reached adulthood thinking that Eli Whitney was black. She goes into some of the reasons why. For one thing, the cotton gin helped make cotton a more lucrative crop, which increased demand for slave labor in the American south, and so it’s an invention often discussed in schools during Black History Month, around the same time that other actual black inventors are also introduced. The irony that a black person might’ve set the chain of events that ramped up cotton cultivation in motion seems to make the idea hard to resist (in many versions of the story, this alternate history black Eli Whitney gets screwed out of the profits from his invention, natch). I think this Dennis the Menace illustrates the process by which these kinds of mistakes can be made, since a lot of the way we’re taught history in elementary and high school involves rote memorization of isolated bits of data, leaving our minds free to fill in the substantial blanks around them.

In other news, one of Dennis’s neighbors is a big drunk! But, you know, not a day drunk. That’s how you know he’s not talking about Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson’s retired and can drink whenever he wants!

Hi and Lois, 2/8/17

It’s Trixie’s thought balloon that really makes clear the profound strangeness here: Lois, mother of a teenager and thus presumably on at least the verge of middle age, is expected in this suburban gender-normative milieu to worry about wrinkles, so we accept her use of “4 Ever Young” face cream without much thought. But Trixie’s burning desire to advance past infancy — a desire that we know can never be fulfilled — really hammers home the Flagstons’ nightmarish endless-now existence. Just as Trixie eagerly anticipates milestones she’ll never reach — walking, speech, autonomy — so too does Lois experience eternal youth that she cannot enjoy, instead living in constant terror of the crow’s feet that never quite appear at the corners of her eyes.

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Dick Tracy, 2/7/17

If ’00s Dick Tracy was a continuing exploration of how many insanely violent ways a newspaper comic strip could kill off its villains, ’10s Dick Tracy is a long-running experiment in how far up the asshole of obscure comics history a newspaper comic strip can get, which is … not better? It’s different, anyway. Let us remind you that the “Moon Maid” in the current run of the strip is actually some genetically modified and mind-wiped gangster’s daughter, and so while the Tracy family has taken her in, she isn’t really Dick’s son’s wife, leaving her free to flirt shamelessly with hunky crossover star The Spirit. The Tracys’ guest is regaling everyone with the plot of a comic book from 1952, because why not, and while his words say “of course we didn’t visit the dark side of the moon where Moon Valley [the home of Moon Maid’s Lunarian people] is,” the knowing expression he’s giving the reader says “of course we did visit the dark side of the moon, where I learned the sexual techniques that bring the most pleasure to the inhabitants of Moon Valley!” Or, uh, maybe it’s just me? Maybe it’s just me.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/7/17

Look, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, you came into your current phase of existence in the 1930s when your original concept, about a ne’er-do-well horse-racing aficionado, lost its lustre and the decision was made to pivot into the then-lucrative realm of making fun of hillbillies, and ever since then, that’s been your shtick. If you wanted to, say, shift the tone and start exploring real issues of poverty in isolated rural communities, or maybe have your characters provide an outsider’s perspective on mainstream American urban and suburban life, then I think we’d all accept it and actually be pretty impressed. But don’t think you can just wedge in whatever generic jokes you’ve got rattling around in your head, à la “What’s the deal with energy drinks?” Leave those to other, non-hillbilly-based comic strips. Yours is a higher, or at least more specific, calling.

Dennis the Menace, 2/7/17

So, who’s the real menace here? The innocent child, who, like more and more of us young and old, occasionally enjoys eating traditional breakfast foods like pancakes or scrambled eggs in the evening? Or his mother, who’s asking this question having clearly already prepared the meal, presumably as part of her plan to reply to whatever he says with “tough shit, kid, you’re getting whatever’s in this casserole dish”?

Judge Parker, 2/7/17

“She’s a qualified mental health professional, with a speciality in adolescents and trauma! I’m … honestly surprised this hasn’t occurred to you already?”