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Dick Tracy, 2/20/25

Dick Tracy is a comic strip that operates in an exaggerated storytelling mode, entertaining us with outlandish plots about corpse theft and so forth. But it can also touch on very real, down-to-earth issues, like the problem of inadequate nephews. Are your nephews good-for-nothings who don’t even have the skills and/or gumption to properly steal a dead body? Dick Tracy sees you, and hears you, and knows you are valid.

Pickles, 2/20/25

Another comic I’ve added recently to my rotation is Pickles, a low-key strip about old people. I appreciate today’s installment because it avoids the cliche of making an adorable little moppet the resident computer genius and instead identifies the “generation [that’s] pretty handy with modern technology” as the children of old people, who are, let’s be extremely real, getting pretty old themselves. Sure, assigning tech support to a 52-year-old with bad knees may not get your strip cut out and hung on refrigerators, but you have to respect the commitment to verisimilitude.

The Lockhorns, 2/20/25

“Why doesn’t this person use the opportunity given to him to inflict violence on the one who has wronged him?” is Loretta’s takeaway from what she’s learning about soccer, and that should be concerning to Leroy, probably.

Dennis the Menace, 2/20/25

Mr. Wilson, they’re going to try to cancel you for this, but you’re right. Dennis Mitchell is a five-year-old child and just in general should not be spending extended periods of time at other people’s homes outside a formal arrangement; today he’s banging on a pot like a drum in a very irritating manner and you shouldn’t have to put up with it. I support you in your quest for a common sense resolution of the Dennis issue!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/25

Hey, here’s a fun fact for you: did you know that ventriloquists don’t “throw” their voices anywhere? They just learn to speak with their mouths closed while working a puppet to match their speech, which creates the illusion that the voice is coming from elsewhere, because our sense of vision is much more precise than our sense of hearing and we tend to lock on to the moving puppet and assume that’s where the sound is coming from (and it’s generally not too far from the puppeteer anyway). Advanced practitioners can alter their voice to be softer so it seems to be coming from far away, but nobody can actually make it sound like it’s coming from a completely different direction. And yet there are so many comics and cartoons that imply otherwise! Much like this one! I attribute it to comics and ventriloquism emerging from the same milieu of popular entertainment and so cartoonists felt they would be violating kayfabe if they let on how it worked, but it’s also possible they didn’t know either because you couldn’t just look stuff up on Wikipedia back then, and now we’re stuck with the tropes. Anyway, my point is that as a child, I, like I assume many of you, had wildly incorrect ideas about ventriloquism, so thanks a lot, comics. And don’t even get me started on quicksand!

Heathcliff, 2/15/25

Oh, are you saying a robot and a cat can’t be friends, Grandpa Nutmeg??? I guess this really is the last acceptable prejudice, huh. (Not going into the details of what “this” might refer to, please write some fanfic about it if it interests you.)

Dennis the Menace, 2/15/25

I’m not sure what exactly Dennis is blathering on about — like is he saying that he did a bunch of sins over the past week because he hadn’t heard the good news about how he shouldn’t or something, maybe? — but I don’t actually think that’s important, because he’s only talking to distract the minister so he can get close enough to deliver a solid punch to the nuts. And the minister knows it! That’s good defensive use of the Holy Bible there, rev, I know they don’t teach that at seminary, you learned it from hard experience.

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Mary Worth, 2/14/25

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Mary Worth would like to take a break from Dawn’s romantic crisis to show you what real love looks like: it looks like two old people who haven’t experienced drama or conflict or strong emotions of any kind in years going to the same restaurant they always go to and then maybe home for six to nine desultory minutes of hand stuff.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/14/25

Speaking of romance, I’ve decided to duck in to Mother Goose and Grimm again and discovered that Mother Goose’s love life is in a tailspin. Did her boyfriend Hiram leave her for her hairdresser? Has she decided to go to the bar the two of them used to hang out at together to find a new lover? Can birds and humans have sex, in the world of Mother Goose and Grimm? Do birds have teeth there? Do dentists see patients in their own homes, rather than an office dedicated to the practice of dentistry as they do in our world? Has Mother Goose, a bird, put in false teeth specifically to attract the sexual attention of this handsome human dentist? Honestly lots of questions here that I’m not sure any of us are prepared to learn the answers to.

Gil Thorp, 2/14/25

Oh yeah, I’ve been lax in keeping you up to date on Gil Thorp developments, which are as follows: Mudlark semi-superstar Rodney Barnes agreed to let some students make a short documentary film about him, and he came across like a real egotistical jerk in it, so now everybody hates him and won’t pass to him. I like the last panel here, and I assume we’re supposed to imagine “I’m open” echoing sadly as Rodney realizes the enormity of his various blunders.

Dennis the Menace, 2/14/25

Dennis, this is just deep stupidity that would make every single Keane Kid — yes, even PJ — ashamed. The only person you’re a menace to is … yourself.