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Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/15/22

One of the last pure pleasures of social media is when some bizarre bit of pop culture ephemera from decades past gets surfaced and passed around, and last summer many of us had some good fun with “Inhalants,” a song from McGruff the Crime Dog’s 1987 anti-drug album that, as a viral tweet put it, “sounds like New Order.”

So, I have one note on this otherwise amazing song, which is that “inhalants” is a pretty technical term and probably most kids don’t know that it means, like, huffing paint or sniffing glue, but otherwise this a banger of a track that manages to pack a lot of emotions in to the gimmicky McGruff voice, and I immediately thought of it when I saw today’s Mother Goose and Grimm. This McGruff? The one with the thousand-yard stare and a barful of empty shot glasses in front of him? That’s the guy who sings “they can break you in two” about inhalants and you can tell he knows exactly what he’s talking about.

Family Circus, 1/15/22

Guys, I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at this Family Circus, in which Billy eagerly stares at his mother in a low-cut dress and talks about people getting their eyes knocked out, and trying to come up with an Oedipus joke and I just can’t quite make the pieces fit together. I feel like I’ve let you all down on this one and promise to do better in the future.

Dennis the Menace, 1/15/22

A child amazed by the number of screens in a multiplex but angry that no Western films are on offer? The only menace he represents is one to the integrity of the space-time continuum if he ever returns to his native year of 1953 with knowledge of the future!

Mary Worth, 1/15/22

“Well, he didn’t jump, exactly … here, let me show you the video, but hold on a second while I queue up ‘Yakety Sax.’”

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Dennis the Menace, 12/22/21

I’m sorry, I absolutely refuse to believe that a kid who goes to church on the regular would know what a “manger” is but also think Jesus’s name was “Wayne.” The only menacing thing here is Dennis’s obvious cognitive deficits.

Hi and Lois, 12/22/21

I guess the joke here is supposed to be that because Foofram Industries didn’t have a holiday party last year, this year’s is extra lit, and horny? I have a hard time squaring Thirsty’s line about not needing to spike the punch with the little bubble and asterisk things floating around amongst the partygoers, which are generally used in the comics to denote drunkenness, though I suppose in this case they could be representing the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/22/21

“They’ll find something soon enough, because — and we’re married, so I know what I’m talking about here — you’re not actually very interesting.”

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Gil Thorp, 12/16/21

Oh, boy, the basketball season storyline of Gil Thorp is already more promising than this fall’s snoozefest because it looks like it’s going to do one of my favorite Gil Thorp things: grapple with a Very Serious Social Issue! Remember back in 2009, when we learned that “‘sexting’ is a serious problem” that’s “been in Time and Newsweek“? Remember how the strip’s version of sexting was “a girl wearing a an extremely non-revealing bikini made out of soda cartons?” Anyway, I’m assuming that sportsduke dot com is the Thorpiverse analog to the sports betting site draftkings dot com, which has gone mainstream now that the Supreme Court said sports betting is A-OK a few years back, and Pranit is about to come down with a Serious Gambling Problem. Or maybe he’s going to make a bunch of money and then start acting as a bookie for his little friends! Maybe Milford athletes are going to bet on games they’re playing in! I demand maximum drama, darn it!!

Dennis the Menace, 12/16/21

I’m going to give Dennis the benefit of the doubt here: the way he’s cupping his hand next to his mouth is a little too theatrical for this to be an entirely sincere expression of anxiety, which is good because it’s frankly the sort of thing we’d expect from Jeffy Keane. No, I’m guessing that Dennis is trying to start some kind of mass panic among the children, either out of a simple desire to stir up shit or because he has devious schemes in play that will be furthered by a scene of screaming chaos. At any rate, I tentatively deem this to be adequately menacing.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/16/21

Wow, look at Tater and Jughaid, eating their cookies off plates like little liberal fancy boys! Snuffy is modeling the only way a real man eats: just letting your jaw hang slack and your tongue loll out grotesquely so you can shove the whole cookie in at once.