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Dennis the Menace, 6/16/10

I have to admit that I find today’s Dennis the Menace funny. No cutesy puns, no adorable kid antics, just Dennis straight-up gettin’ pissed as he realizes that he’s been bamboozled into dressing nicely and going somewhere boring. And he’s being genuinely menacing towards adulthood’s veneer of politeness, the pretense that we put up purporting that we want to be doing the things we have to do, even when we don’t, that keeps civilization from collapsing into chaos. Henry’s tiny smile seems to indicate that he approves of his son’s agitation. “Ha ha, yes, nothing ever good happens to you when you put on a tie, kid! But don’t worry, your belief that you can change your life to make it more like one you want to live will be broken, soon enough.”

Family Circus, 6/16/10

Today’s Family Circus is also funny to me, though much more difficult to get a handle on. Was a sleeping Jeffy attacked by a suddenly wakeful Kittycat, leaving his blanket in shreds and his tiny mind fixated on etymology? Or is he just wandering around the house in his underwear spouting groggy cat-related nonsense for no reason?

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Dennis the Menace, 6/6/10

Let’s pass over for the moment the fact that if, as I’d guess, Mr. Wilson is around 75, he himself would have grown up with the first generation of comic book superheroes, and thus would not find Dennis’s own media consumption choices to be so sneer-worthy; let’s ignore too his seeming assumption that Dennis would view a world where basic services were performed by humans to be baffling and alien, as if he lived in a culture where people were tended at all times by advanced robots. Instead, let’s focus on the middle panel of the bottom row, in which Dennis imagines Mr. Wilson’s mail-delivery alter ego as a wild-eyed psychopath, who presumably used his job dealing with the public and the protection of his public employees’ union to go on a years-long killing spree that no doubt held the entire city in terror.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/10

When comics strips lavish loving energy on the depictions of the ass-cracks of adults, it can be kind of sexy! When they lavish the same amount of attention on the ass-cracks of prepubescent children, it’s just disturbing.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/19/10

Oh, Funky Winkerbean, I’m glad you’ve finally decided to give in and just embrace emotional devastation as the engine for all your drama. Today’s strip, both in form and in content, could be the basis for some bleak avant-garde art film that would play tiny, pretentious cinemas in New York and LA for two weeks before being released in a Criterion Collection DVD. For those of you not familiar with all the ins and outs of the strip’s depressing backstory: the brown-haired lady who is attempting to bust in on Les’s budding sexless romance with Cayla is Susan, who, pre-time-jump, was one of Les’s students who developed a crush on him for some incomprehensible reason, and who tried to kill herself (the incident depicted in the second panel) when her advances were spurned. Thus, what we have here is pretty much “mild low-level flirting mild low-level flirting INTRUSIVE SHARED BUT UNSPOKEN MEMORIES OF HORROR mild low-level flirting,” which is pretty hardcore. The kicker, for me, is the panel two’s “sepia-toned photo in an old-timey album” motif, which serves as a visual cue for flashbacks in the Funkyverse. In this case, it colors a grim, painful moment with a sort of ghastly nostalgia, as if Susan and Les will be laughing about it in retrospect after the consummate their mopey love.

Also, I know that the time jump wasn’t supposed to move us a decade forward in absolute time, but I’m not sure which prospect I find more unsettling: that big shoulder pads will be back in style for ladies by 2020, or that they’re coming back into style now.

Dennis the Menace, 5/19/10

Since I basically just egged Funky Winkerbean on to whatever Grand Guignol emotional excesses it might dare to achieve, I guess it’s OK for me to express my disappointment that we’ve missed Mr. Wilson’s loving descriptions of all the tortures Dennis the Menace’s damned soul will be experiencing, in hell.