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Dennis the Menace, 12/11/12

One of Dennis’s core menacing shticks is repeating things he doesn’t fully understand in a way that causes embarrassment to his parents, usually because it’s something insulting they’ve said about someone behind their backs. Unfortunately, Dennis has now become a self-aware menace, and he now knows that he can get a rise out of people this way; but since the whole thing revolves around him not knowing the meaning of the things he’s saying, he’s sort of blundering around in the dark, latching onto phrases he’s not familiar with in the hopes that someone will be humiliated when he spouts them off. “So it’s a doggie bag, but it’s not for the dog, right? Eh? Eh? I’m saying what everyone’s thinking? Is anyone in trouble yet?”

Pluggers, 12/11/12

The games whose outcomes were so important to pluggers in their youth — grown men, scrambling around in the dirt after a ball! — seem meaningless now. Pluggers know that there’s only one game left in town: survival. They don’t care how many pills they have to choke down, how agonizing it is to carry their creaking frame from chair to chair; the biological imperative carries a thrill all its own. Those names and faces in the obits section belong to family and friends, some of them very dearly missed, and yet in a real sense, just being alive to see the pictures and read the pocket biographies is a victory.

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/28/12

Is “boiling in oil” one of those phrases that only survives in occasional use because it rhymes? I mean, if you’ve heated up some form of oil to the boiling point, and put any variety of organic matter into it, you’d call what you’re really doing “frying,” right? Even if that organic matter is, you know, a dismembered human corpse. Ha ha, these knights are threatening Hagar and his men with a gruesome fate out of the most violent and depraved slasher flick, right here on the funny pages, in front of the children! Yet neither I nor anyone else can take the threat particularly seriously. Look, the colorists have even given everyone wooden swords. Nobody’s getting hurt in this battle!

Beetle Bailey, 11/28/12

And yet I find this Beetle Bailey grim beyond description, despite Beetle’s shaky reassurance that his mangled body will be restored to health tomorrow by narrative artifice. Still, imagine Miss Buxley gasping out “Oh, Beetle! You’re all broken!” in an exaggeratedly childlike Marilyn Monroe-type voice and try to tell me you don’t get the creeps. David Lynch directs!

Dennis the Menace, 11/28/12

Dennis is using an awesome book about bad-ass pirates to illustrate safety lessons for his younger friend. Menace levels: Undetectable by even the most powerful instruments.

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Apartment 3-G, 11/27/12

There’s trouble in paradise, if by “paradise” you mean the weird workplace romance between Margo and Evan. Evan thinks that he can be cold to our gal Magee just because he’s used her sexual jealousy to steal away her clients for his aunt’s agency and has thus achieved all his goals. He’s about to learn that Margo only makes time with betas when they provide sexy massages and other benefits, and when they decide to withhold those benefits, Margo decides to withhold their paychecks and/or oxygen.

Spider-Man, 11/27/12

Spider-Man, meanwhile, is undercover in Las Vegas, trying to figure out what crimes Kraven the Hunter is plotting. His patented detective technique has mostly consisted of lurking around Kraven and sulking while Kraven practices his animal act, foils purse-nappers, and does other non-criminal things. It’s not particularly sophisticated! Thus, even though Kraven has introduced two monkey with names that make it so obvious that a third will appear soon that he might as well just call them “Monkey 1” and “Monkey 3”, we need Peter to thought-balloon this information, because otherwise we readers might worry that he’s failing to pick up on it, as he fails to pick up on most things.

One aspect of Peter being sullen about Kraven’s fantastic life in Las Vegas has been Peter being sullen about Kraven’s success with the ladies. This is kind of ironic because the very first Spider-Man storyline covered on this blog featured Kraven trying and failing to woo the one lady dumb enough to marry Peter Parker! They’re like an ourobouros of loserdom, these two. (Note from the commentary on that old post that I was still trying to grapple with just what Newspaper Spider-Man was all about back in those days.)

Dennis the Menace, 11/27/12

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