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Dennis the Menace, 3/18/13

Oh, man, the knowing glances Dennis and Mrs. Wilson are exchanging here speak volumes. Mr. Wilson’s look of peaceful repose, hands crossed contentedly over his chest, can only mean one thing: he’s been dead for months, and Mrs. Wilson hasn’t told anyone so she can keep collecting those sweet Postal Service pension checks. Dennis found out, naturally, but just as naturally is happy to keep her secret, as long as Mrs. Wilson keeps the cookies coming. Preserving Mr. Wilson’s corpse through some no doubt ghastly home mortuary science was not strictly necessary for running the scam, of course; that’s just to allow Mrs. Wilson and Dennis to glory in their satisfaction at the old crank’s death.

Curtis, 3/18/13

Seeing as 90% of Curtis strips are variations on the same five or six jokes, I would not have picked it as the first newspaper comic to use the resignation of Pope Benedict as fodder for a punchline. Only five weeks after he quit, too! In the world of syndicated comic strips, that’s an amount of time that can only be detected with the most delicate of scientific instruments.

Slylock Fox, 3/18/13

More haunting evidence of the terrible cataclysm that wiped out humankind and left Earth in the hands paws of sentient beasts: although New York survived more or less intact, elsewhere whole mountain ranges were submerged by massive flooding. Typically, these creatures may be wearing hats and sailing boats and thinking they’re the ones in charge, but they’re still very keen to dig up some of the valuable remnants of the far superior civilization produced by the late lamented Homo sapiens.

Crock, 3/18/13

This camel is outraged that a bird wants to use his hump for sex.

Heathcliff, 3/18/13

It’s nice to see that Heathcliff and his owner went through the trouble of putting up a festive banner in their living room, to create some holiday context for just staying home and getting bombed out of their skulls.

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Pluggers and Dennis the Menace, 2/4/13

Yup, it’s true: somethings “just happen,” no matter how much you’d like them not to! Take nudity, for instance. Some people are just “born that way,” and by “some people” we mean “literally everybody, every single person ever is born completely naked, with their genitals just out there for anyone to look at.” So filthy! So disgusting! So hard to understand. Eventually, we get old enough to understand the concept of shame — “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” — and we look back at our early, exposed days in horror, but we can’t blot them out with a crayon, no matter how hard we try. The Fall of Man, Dennis: that’s the most menacing thing there is.

Apartment 3-G, 2/4/13

I had a good laugh over the idea of a generic “Manhattan General Hospital,” but it turns out it’s a real thing! Or was. Was a real thing. It merged with Beth Israel Medical Center, in 1964. So I’m assuming that these nurses in their archaic caps are looking for Tommie to warn her that she’s fallen victim to some kind of space-time wormhole and she needs to be very careful not to alter the course of history based on her future knowledge, lest she cause universe-destroying paradoxes.

Mark Trail, 2/4/13

Look, Rusty, you’ve finally gotten to go on a fishing trip with Mark! Too bad it’s a “working trip,” which means you’ve got to scramble around taking pictures for Mark’s article, in violation of all child labor laws! Also, you’re probably going to be kidnapped by “Catfish”, FYI.

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Mary Worth, 1/25/13

You guys, John and Mary aren’t just practicing baking a cake. That’s only a part of the elaborate stagecraft that goes into Santa Royale’s elite cake-baking contest! They also have to carry their cake from one place to another, and are thus quite sensibly going through a trial run of that as well. Probably in real life the reason this stack of tins is the exact same color as the practice cakes Mary and John have been making is because the colorists can’t be bothered to distinguish among the various cylindrical objects the strip’s been featuring over the past few weeks (additional data point: freestanding set of cookbooks, all the same dull steel grey), but I’d like to believe that John carefully painted each tin after filling them with odds and ends, for added verisimilitude.

Dennis the Menace, 1/25/13

Good lord, Dennis is one of those people who go around smugly informing everyone that they don’t watch TV. Menacing factor: Increased!

Pluggers, 1/25/13

COME ON PLUGGERS YOU HAVE MULTIPLE CHARACTERS THAT AREN’T DOG-MEN WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US