Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 11/7/16

• September 28, 2008: Dennis is illiterate
• April 2, 2012: Dennis is literate, but pities Joey’s illiteracy
• November 7, 2016: Dennis attempts, in his own idiosyncratic way, to teach Joey how to read

I can’t decide if Dennis’s personal journey, followed by his decision to invite his best friend into the wonderful world of reading, is sweet and not menacing at all, or extremely menacing. Why do they need to be able to write and read messages to each other? What are they up to?

Dick Tracy, 11/7/16

Vic the zookeeper sure took a quick turn from “you’re a hood and your political career is evidence of that” to “holy gee, look at all them simoleons!,” and now we know why: he has a terrible gambling problem! I’m not really sure how this high-stakes kitchen card game relates to proposals to put American citizens with alien DNA in internment camps, but, you know, maybe Dick Tracy is about to abruptly shift to a narrative style like Richard Linkletter’s Slacker, where we follow a character from one setting to another and then follow a new character from that setting to the next, and so on. Like, maybe after the game’s over we’ll find out about the beardy dude’s home life, and then see what drama his tween daughter is dealing with at school the next morning. It’d be a nice change of pace, honestly!

Hi and Lois, 11/7/16

Oh man, Lois looks furious. That black armband is a clue: one of her fellow scrapbookers was recently killed in a vicious drive-by stitching, another casualty in the seemingly endless Craft War, and she’s still in mourning. That glue gun was intended to be turned against the quilters, but it looks like the first victim will be much closer to home.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/31/16

On today, Satan’s favorite holiday, Snuffy Smith makes a big show of his contempt for God!

Crankshaft, 10/31/16

Crankshaft serves a vital role in his community, but he’s so bad at his job that some of the people who depend on him angrily vandalized his house!

Dennis the Menace, 10/31/16

Mr. Wilson has no qualms about telling Dennis that he believes the child to be a literal demon, from hell!

Hi and Lois, 10/31/16

Dot and Ditto are trying to bring a divided nation together politically, but their candy-based tax proposals will lead to economic ruin!

Mary Worth, 10/31/16

Wilbur definitely will not be regretting spending the next year far, far away from his sad sack daughter and his girlfriend who wants to spend all her time closely monitoring her pill-popping son!

Post Content

Spider-Man, 10/25/16

Let’s be real, guys: the “relative strength of a spider” aspect of Spider-Man’s origin story has always been kinda dopey, right? I mean, there’s a whole bunch of inverse-square-law problems with this, which equally apply to Ant-Man, who was launched by Marvel Comics in 1962, just like Spider-Man. I guess it was a banner year for bug-men in the comics? Bug-men with bug-strength? Anyhoo, it’s nice to imagine that these costumed morons themselves have only the vaguest understanding of what their abilities really entail and how they work, so it’s very exciting to me to see Spider-Man declare that he can defeat a spider with his spider-strength, only for him to be immediately pinned by its monstrous spider-jaws (the relative jaws of a spider) and then killed by the actual spider’s deadly spider-venom (the relative venom of a spider, which you think would come in handy for a superhero, but no, just keep working that “strength” angle, guys).

Six Chix, 10/25/16

One of the more unsettling visual tropes that has been fully absorbed into the collective comics unconsciousness is “trees and fire hydrants are the equivalent of bathrooms to talking comic-strip dogs!” I feel like people love to play with the implications of this joke but lose touch with its origins which lie in the fact that dogs like to pee on said objects. This, I think, is the case here: probably the tire swing is just supposed to represent “what would a really tricked out tree look like,” but now I can’t stop thinking about how dogs maybe like to pee on tires? Or, like, through the hole in the middle of tires? Because they like the challenge, or something?

Dennis the Menace, 10/25/16

A year after the Great Agricultural Collapse, Alice and Henry are still gamely pushing forward, sculpting their daily ration of Nutrient Slurry into a cake-shaped pile in an attempt to remember what it used to be like in the Time of Plenty. Dennis is having none of it. Dennis’s refusal to keep a stiff upper lip in the endless dystopia is a genuine menace to humanity’s ability to cope.