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Curtis, 2/21/14

Remember when that dolphin swam into Brooklyn’s extremely polluted Gowanus Canal and then died, more than a year ago? The creators of innumerable parody Twitter accounts, along with the creators of Curtis, hope you do! Curtis has been sad about these poor trapped dolphins all week, but now Magical Caucasian Gunk will rescue them with his Flyspeck Island powers, after stripping to the waist! I’m mostly just relieved to learn that Gunk’s nipples, unlike his eyes, are configured in the usual way.

Crankshaft, 2/21/14

Speaking of half-naked people in the icy cold, it looks like Crankshaft has somehow managed to lock himself out of his house wearing only a towel and set off the burglar alarm trying to get back inside, ruining his family’s vacation in the process! Thanks to Big Government, we’re not allowed to print a drawing of Crankshaft’s exposed junk in the newspaper, but panel three uses a clever reaction shot to illustrate what an unpleasant experience it would be for you if we were.

Dennis the Menace, 2/21/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because literally nobody wants to spend any time with Dennis! Looks like the person he’s really been menacing has been … himself.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/19/14

To the extent that anyone anywhere thinks about third-tier characters in Dennis the Menace, they probably have Gina pegged as “vaguely tomboyish but not gender-binary-threateningly non-feminine girl who Dennis finds to be an acceptable companion and maybe nascent crush object, in contrast with Margaret.” But panels like this give us a glimpse at what one must assume was her other traditional role in the strip: as a symbol of the changing face of middle-class America, a sign of the times circa 1960 when the white people of suburbia found that other, slightly different kinds of white people wanted to be their neighbors. And Dennis is on the forefront of this bold social experiment! Papists are A-OK by him! Don’t worry, Joey, this Italian cheese-butter-noodle glop may have a crazy name that ends in a vowel, but it’s pretty much the same cheese-butter-noodle glop we enjoy right here in the USA.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/19/14

I was going to compliment this Snuffy Smith for really getting at something profound and intriguing about the nature of human memory. When I try to remember what my classmates from elementary school look like, even when I feel like I can visualize them pretty clearly, they don’t look like children in my head, and when I look at old yearbooks I’m shocked by how young everyone is. However, I think that’s probably giving the strip far too much credit, and it’s really more likely this is just an ill-fated attempt to launch a Hootin’ Holler Babies spinoff.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/8/14

Implying that Almighty God might not be all-knowing and all-powerful, that there might be limits to His ability to hear prayers from His mortal creations, that He is somehow constrained by the passage of time as perceived by us puny beings, that He must occasionally rest? Menacingly heretical! It is perhaps ironic that Dennis is courting divine wrath only if he’s wrong.

Pluggers, 2/8/14

This is … a joke about the metric system, I guess? Pluggers are glad that we don’t use metric time? Pluggers are relieved that the most radical phase of the French Revolution burned itself out before the icy tide of Jacobin rationality could wash away all of our long-standing traditional institutions, like the division of time into sixtieths that dates back to ancient Babylon? Sure, why the hell not! Let’s hear it for sexagesimal chronometry!