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Dennis the Menace, 5/22/07

Dennis the Menace rightly gets flack on this site for his repeated failure to menace anybody, and today’s installment, in which he and his pal Joey take a whimsical trip down memory lane on the family footstool, would seem to be even less menacing than most. But think about it: Dennis is well aware of the fact that Alice, who used to have a name, and, moreover, an identity of her own, has now, by the very fact of his whelping, become merely an adjunct to his own larger-than-life personality. She’s no longer Alice Mitchell, and she’s definitely not Alice Whatever-Her-Maiden-Name-Was; she’s just “mom,” and, more to the point, she’s mom to the most hated child in the county. And Dennis looks pretty damn smug about this state of affairs. That sound you hear is millions of women across the country opening the cases that hold their birth control pills, double-checking to make sure they haven’t missed a day.

Hi and Lois, 5/22/07

I like the fact that Hi is not charmed by his twins’ antics, but rather stares at their handiwork in goggle-eyed panic. The lawn is shaggy enough that he can’t really care that much about the damage to the landscaping; rather, he sees that his golf dates, which were his only chance to get away from his hated family, will now be replaced by sullen putting around his backyard to delight of his squealing kids, followed by his suicide.

Crock, 5/22/07

Today we learn that the characters in Crock are in fact parasites who live their days wandering around the bright yellow flesh of some unimaginably huge being. If you had told me that somehow they’d find a way to make this strip even more unsettling than it already is, I wouldn’t have believed you, but there it is.

Momma, 5/22/07

Today we also learn that Momma’s Francis is into watersports, or maybe scat play. This revelation really ought to make the strip even more unsettling than it already is, but after I found out that Francis surfs for Internet porn while sitting right next to his mother, frankly nothing he does could possibly shock me.

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Blondie, 5/13/07

The saddest thing is that the central joke of this strip — that Blondie has been utterly charmed into an aroused frenzy by her pampering, and is eager to discovery what other surprises her husband has prepared for her, while Dagwood has one foot out the door as he’s planning to head out for a “men’s foursome” — is so in keeping with the well-established dynamic of the Bumstead marriage that I barely noticed it. The thing that really disturbed me is the heart that’s drifted up into Blondie’s word balloon in the final panel. I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent semantically. I suppose it could be “love” as a noun and term of endearment, rather than “love” as a verb, which it usually stands for — but then it ought to have a comma after it. Really, the fact that it’s sitting after a comma just makes it all the more anomalous to me. Mostly I’m worried that Dag and Blondie have ingested some kind of potent hallucinogen and now believe themselves to be conversing using abstract symbols rather than normal human speech.

Family Circus, 5/13/07

This strip is a subtle but powerful reminder of the strict laws of patriarchy that govern the Family Circus. Note that Dolly wonders who their mother would be if her parents hadn’t met, not who their father would be. On Mother’s Day, she assumes that her mother is just an interchangeable womb who could have been replaced by any number of other females from other times and places and their family would have remained pretty much the same.

I really enjoy the fact that all the other comics moms in Billy’s thought balloon are just sort of idly looking off into the distance, except for one. FBOFW’s Elly is looking straight at the eldest Keane boy in goggle-eyed horror, as if contemplating how excruciating it would have been to pass that enormous melonhead through her birth canal.

Doodles by Mac & Sack, 5/13/07

Someone’s kind of fixated on the idea of being crushed to death by a boa constrictor, and it makes me uncomfortable. I’m also disturbed the puffed-out cheeks of “the Doughboy” in the Doodle Zoo: they clearly indicate that he’s dying horribly as the smart-ass little koala cracks wise. I am kind of amused that the Doughboy seems to have lost his “Pillsbury” moniker at the last minute due to trademark infringement concerns, though it does bring to mind the notion of an American infantryman, having survived the hell of combat in the trenches against the Hun’s forces on the Western Front, being felled by an unexpected snake attack.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 5/13/07

I’m not showing you the rest of this strip, because these panels perfectly set up the Dennis the Menace strip we’d all like to see, the one where Mr. Wilson murders Dennis with a pair of garden shears.

Panel from Mary Worth, 5/13/07

Since Vera’s so angry at Von, it’s ironic that she’s remembering him at the height of his glory: all decked out in his yellow suit, shirt, and facepaint, standing in front of that blue door, and disco dancing like nobody’s business.

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Mary Worth, 4/27/07

WOO-HOO, VON’S HERE, YEAH! And he’s … well, he’s kind of underwhelming, actually. Typical boring WASPy Mary Worth dude. More intriguing is Vera’s immediate deployment of karate moves against him — she’s clearly been taking classes in physical and emotional self-defense. Also, now that Vera’s had dinner with Mary and received the old biddy’s tentative stamp of approval, she’s permitted call upon the creepy, silent cast of Charterstone extras for protection. Von’s right to cower; the close-mouthed creeps will shuffle at him wordlessly and then smother him with their poorly drawn hands unless Vera calls them off.

Dennis the Menace, 4/27/07

It’s also possible that George has just quietly died sitting up. In which case Dennis wouldn’t be so much “menacing” as “creepily affectless.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/27/07

So here’s an odd little story: faithful reader Bob Byrd actually forwarded this strip to me a week ago. Apparently it appeared in place of Tank McNamera on the Yahoo comics page last Wednesday, which is pretty bizarre because the two strips are handled by different syndicates and Yahoo doesn’t even carry Rex Morgan. You’ll note that this is not the usual King Features in-house coloring job: the color palette is more muted, the flesh tones more realistic, and there’s not a bit of electric blue in sight. The graphic is also bigger than what King usually syndicates.

Anyway, it’s been fun sitting on this for a week and watching the strip feebly setting up Rex as having something like a shred of integrity, since I knew he would throw his highfalutin’ moral qualms to the wind as soon as he got rubbed the wrong way by some rich Brit. The good Dr. Morgan is a pillar of the community and he’ll thank you not to forget it; he doesn’t like being treated like a common chauffeur even if he shows up at the airport with a sign bearing the name of his passenger and doesn’t identify who exactly he is. Rex doesn’t really care about his friendship with Heather or even his stock portfolio, but treat him like the hired help and he will fuck you up — in this case, by driving you around reeeeaaal slow-like, which should be thrilling to watch.

Gil Thorp, 4/27/07

Oh man, not only does Clambake have vaguely obscene batting advice to offer, but vaguely obscene pitching advice as well! Yes, Mark’s big hands will be perfect — especially the left one, with its long, pretty fingernails.

It’s interesting to note that, while it took months of hectoring from the stands to get Lisa Wyche’s mom an unpaid position as an assistant coach for the girl’s basketball team, Coach Thorp has pretty much handed over his team to this deranged old coot in only the second week of practice. Gil is presumably hanging out under the bleachers smoking a joint or something while Otha Yancy holds hands with his pitching staff.

(By the way, unbelievably only one person has purchased Clambake gear so far. WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE? HE’S CLAMBAKE, FOR GOD’S SAKE! CLAMBAKE!!!!)

DIck Tracy, 4/27/07

That look of bug-eyed ecstasy in panel three comes from the feeling of climax that America’s greatest detective only gets from killing a perp with his bare hands. (The stiff, uplifted angle of his tie is suggestive here.) You might think that falling head-first into a smokestack and presumably being scalded to death is a particularly convoluted and gruesome way to go, and you’d be right, but you have to keep in mind that Dick Tracy has been leaving a trail of villainous corpses in his wake for 130 years or however long he’s been in the newspaper, and it’s hard to not repeat yourself. This is a strip that, in its first appearance in this blog, featured a pair of folks dying as a flaming wind generator plummeted to the ground, so expect the bizarre.