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Archive: Dennis the Menace

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Sadly for Dennis, this guy actually works in safety engineering

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Dennis the Menace, 4/7/23

Last month I speculated on Henry Mitchell’s career status, based on my half-memory that he might be an engineer, and readers pointed me in some intriguing directions. In the 1950s/60s TV show, Henry works for Trask Engineering; on the fan-maintained Dennis the Menace wiki, we’re told that he’s a “a workaday aerospace engineer,” whereas on actual Wikipedia it says he’s “a workaday teacher at Dennis’s school,” which is clearly wrong (also I am desperate to understand why “workaday” appears in both those descriptions but I think I need to apply for a research grant so I can fully analyze the situation). Anyway, I’m going to take the preponderance of evidence here and accept that he’s an engineer, which makes Dennis turning to this total stranger for engineering advice all the more menacing, though based on Henry’s sidelong glance I assume these two are coworkers and he’s basically saying “See? I told you what a moron he is.”

Hi and Lois, 4/6/23

When I was in high school, our debate team hosted a tournament one year, and I was in charge of getting the trophies, and the time spent tracking down a trophy store and picking out the design and getting the orders in really rearranged the way I think about accolades like this. You can just buy a trophy or a medal that says anything you want! They don’t necessarily mean anything! Still, I appreciate today’s Hi and Lois as a corrective to this attitude, as it shows that if you get into buying and handing out trophies as a bit, your loved ones will get sick of your shit almost immediately.

Crock, 4/6/23

OK, fine, usually just slipping “[LATEST TECH FAD]” into a sentence at random and claiming it’s a punchline is something that sends me spinning into a rage, but this one somehow loops around all the way into being funny again. Like I’m laughing just imagining some callow teens that exist entirely in a boomer’s imagination brought to the brink of starvation and sullenly gnawing on their phones. “I love phone,” the teens say, refusing to make direct eye contact with adults in a forthright and masculine way. “Phone good.”

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Young people annoy their elders

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Gasoline Alley, 4/6/23

Oh, hey, Ida Knoe the evil talking doll who can travel through time, wild that you’re only now worried about the consequences of disrupting the spacetime continuum! Maybe you should’ve thought of this before you time travelled with a bunch of children, who are notorious for being idiots. I’m talking about all children, not these ones in particular, and maybe “idiot” is a bit harsh but if you’re looking for someone with both the mental acuity to understand what will and what won’t change the course of history and the self-control to act on that understanding, a bunch of seven-year-olds is not your best bet.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/23

One of the funnier possibilities in this storyline is that Mud Mountain Murphy and Dr. Mirakle are entirely sincere and have just picked the worse possible venue for a long-established artist to unveil an entirely new repetoire/personality. Like, I don’t mean to talk smack about the great pastime of going on cruises, but I think the cruise lifestyle largely caters to people who want a certain nonthreatening consistency out of a vacation, and if you try to “mix things up” you will end up with patrons like Yvonne in panel three, literally praying to hear just one song she already knows the words to, just one.

Dennis the Menace, 4/6/23

Look, kid, the swinging can’t start until you go to bed already

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I don’t think putting a camera into a ceramic frog makes it a “robot”

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Slylock Fox, 4/3/23

I genuinely love how flabbergasted Count Weirdly looks here. “Oh my god! Slylock Fox? The detective who foils literally every one of my dumb schemes? The one who I specifically set up a camera in order to detect? Here? Now?”

Dennis the Menace, 4/3/23

With those theatrical hand gestures and that hilarious wordplay, the only people these two will be menacing are the other players on the vaudeville circuit, as their old man/little kid double act takes the world by storm! (EDITORS NOTE: There is no more “vaudeville circuit” as such and has not been for many years)

Blondie, 4/3/23

I’m excited to see Blondie just give up on telling “jokes” altogether and instead become a comic presenting slices of life so mundane that the strip becomes a work of avant-garde art. I certainly hope that the entire remainder of the week consists of three panels a day of Dagwood staring at the microwave in silence, to really hammer home how long 90 seconds can last if you’re reasonably hungry.