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Six Chix, 6/29/23

The verb scoff, dictionaries will tell you, means to speak derisively about someone or something, or treat them with scorn, and that’s how I’ve used it pretty much my whole adult life. But recently I began to have a panicked feeling that I’ve been wrong, because in closed captioning for most movies or TV shows, the word is often put in brackets to indicate that a character is making a dismissive little noise like “tcha” or thereabouts. Was the noise scoffing, and I had incorrectly extended it to metaphorically describe the attitude that the noise conveyed? I had not, but was primed to worry about this because it would be the opposite trajectory of a habit I had in my youth, when I read Peanuts anthologies obsessively and correctly understood from them that “sigh” was an expression of melancholy, but didn’t understand that in those strips it was standing in for a nonverbal sound so I just went around saying the word “sigh” aloud when I was sad or wistful. No adult ever corrected me on this, presumably because it was very, very funny. Anyway, that’s what I always think about when I see the word “sigh” in a comic or indeed anywhere else. I have no idea what today’s Six Chix is getting at.

Dennis the Menace, 6/29/23

I absolutely love the look on this lady’s face. She just met Dennis and has already determined that she has zero time for his shit. Honestly, more people should take this attitude towards him, it might improve his behavior considerably.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/23/23

So it seems that Niki is going to turn down the college scholarship he earned by helping Rex recapture some escaped prisoners, because he’s found a new passion — auto mechanics! And indeed, this is a line of work that can be quite lucrative, though I’m a little worried that he’s cut his teeth on classic cars and is going to show up on his first day at his new job and start panicking when he sees how many computer chips are involved. Anyway, I love panel three because Kelly has just reached that point in a Big Relationship Talk where the other person starts waving their index finger in your face, which you know means things are going great.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/23/23

I’m sorry, there is no way on earth that Snuffy Smith is going to utter the phrase au contraire. Absolutely fucking not. It’s days like today when I really come to terms with what a crushing burden it is to be the last person alive who cares about consistent characterization in newspaper comics that are literally more than a hundred years old.

Dennis the Menace, 6/23/23

Dennis casually looking at his phone as he delivers this line is in fact quite menacing and extremely funny, and I have no choice but to respect it.

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Hagar the Horrible, 6/13/23

Look, it’s fun when I do jokes about how Hagar the Horrible, as a Viking warrior chieftain, would realistically be responsible for an endless list of violent horrors perpetrated as he and his band pillage their way across the North Atlantic. But when the strip itself explicitly does a joke that makes it clear that Hagar’s own clothes are canonically drenched in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers, villagers, and monks who stood in the way of his rapacious greed, I have to say I find it a little off-putting.

Dennis the Menace, 6/13/23

OK, today’s Dennis the Menace gets ten points for acknowledging that even someone of Mr. Wilson’s advanced age is fairly likely to have been using computers for decades now. However, I must subtract several thousand points for the ongoing attempt to turn Dennis the Menace into Mr. Wilson’s Technological Gripes, which, no matter how ambivalent my opinion about Dennis and his menacing quality might be, I feel honor-bound to resist at all costs.

Dustin, 6/13/23

Do you think that the members of Dustin’s family are emotionally stunted nightmare people because they never receive any affection from one another? Or do they all (correctly) perceive each other as unlovable, emotionally stunted nightmare people and that’s why they never express any affection? Discuss.