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Dennis the Menace, 11/11/12

“Not right now, Dennis. You see, I’ve been very, very naughty and now I have to sit here in this corner until your Mom comes back with the carpet beater for my spanking. Say, why don’t you walk down to the candy store and buy yourself a treat? Here’s a twenty — take the long way back.”

The Better Half, 11/11/12

OK, this is some kind of Six Differences thing, right? Dress, earring, meal, hair, chair, … dammit! One thing that never changes is Harriet’s stunned reaction to her friends’ romantic complications: I betcha boring old Stanley is looking pret-ty good to her right about now.

I’m also a little intrigued about the redhead’s idea of catch-and-release sport-dating. It sounds like something Henry and Alice Mitchell might want to check out.

Curtis, 11/11/12

The most expressive characters in Curtis are the animals. From faithful basset-hound Trinklet to the Evil Dr. Horsehead, the animals are invariably more sincere and deeply engaged than all the heavy-lidded humans sleepwalking around them. I mean just look at Unnamed Sheepdog racing from despair through alarm to ecstacy in about three seconds there — who wouldn’t want to come home to that?

Still, I don’t think boyfriend is playing this at all well. Maybe the passion of the lovers’ reunion was judged too intense for a family strip? Maybe boyfriend is just putting off introducing Naomi to his new wife Kashmala, waiting in the car? Or maybe he caught a glimpse of Curtis and Barry and decided on the spot that wife and family was not the life for him?

— Uncle Lumpy

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Apartment 3-G, 10/23/12

“I’ll miss her. She was mighty handy with a taser!” says Margo, referring to a character who tried to tase one of the girls’ nemeses three and a half years ago and has been seen maybe three or four times since. Thus, Margo looking directly out of the panel at the reader and referencing Mrs. Bloom’s one wacky distinguishing characteristic is the equivalent of someone on a sitcom mugging for cheap audience applause, except in this case nobody can hear the applause because we’re all reading at home alone, and really the only people who remember a three-and-a-half-year-old one-day gag from Apartment 3-G are probably the people who read this blog. So let’s all applaud! The good folks at Apartment 3-G central deserve it! The rest of the world is no doubt just slightly but measurably more baffled by Apartment 3-G than usual.

Judge Parker, 10/23/12

Bubba seems quite receptive to Avery’s plan to become a “partner” to Bea in the operation of her fishing lodge, and also possibly in other ways (nudge) (wink) (I’m talking about a sex partnership, in which they have sex with each other). He hasn’t exactly given Bubba a reason not to dismember him with a chainsaw, though, unless he’s trying to weave a sense of “Look, I very much don’t want to trouble your harmlessly massive marijuana grow operation.” The only obstacle to a happy ending for all is Sam, who, among his many fine qualities, is a reliable prig who won’t let illegal things like massive marijuana grow operations go unreported to the authorities. Chainsaw dismemberment is still a possibility, is what I’m saying!

Dennis the Menace, 10/23/12

Hmm, Dennis offering to turn snitch? I rate this: mildly menacing.

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Shoe, 10/20/12

I have no information one way or another as to whether the art and writing in Shoe are done by different people who barely speak to each other, but it sure would explain a lot about this cartoon, in which a mild joke one step removed from the classic “seafood diet” gag is paired with a scene of spectacular gloom. “If you’re ‘watching’ what you eat, I guess we’ll need to schedule an eye exam, because you seem to be eating pretty poorly! Hahahaha! Get it, it’s a play on words! So, anyway, like I said earlier, you’re dying of colon cancer.”

Herb and Jamaal, 10/20/12

“Uh … hello, Michelle, this is Jamaal — I was wondering if you’d be interested in going on a date with me. Could you say that again? This comic has four panels so we need to pad things out a bit. Yeah, we could redraw them, but that’d be tons more work than it’s worth.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/20/12

“Yep, ‘prone to over-the-top, irrational violence when frustrated over trivial matters,’ that’s what they say about the Mitchell boys!”

Family Circus, 10/20/12

Billy has come to the conclusion that the only way out of the hellscape of institutionalized education is suicide.