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Blondie, 1/17/24

I gotta say, “In honor of Kid Inventors Day, I created an alarm clock app that doesn’t work” is probably the funniest sentence I’ve ever read in Blondie, and I’ve read Blondie more or less every day for the bulk of my life. Anyway, it’s all downhill from there, and I honestly wouldn’t bother reading the rest of the strip if I were you.

Dennis the Menace, 1/17/24

Dennis has learned to draw a distinction between basic reactive pleasures and the higher-level emotion of pride, which derives from pleasing other people he respects or society at large. Not sure if that’s menacing or not. Guess it probably is, given today’s evidence of how he’s making sense of his own complex emotional landscape.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/17/24

Anyone else accidentally read that final word balloon as “th’ noose awaits !!” at first? No? Just me? Just me fantasizing that King Features is about to end its longest running strip in the most shocking way imaginable?

Beetle Bailey, 1/17/24

Wow, Beetle Bailey has portrayed an actually relatively recent trend — movie theaters with big reclining seats! Don’t worry, nobody on the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC staff has actually been to one of these places, but a friend of theirs had it described to them by one of their grandkids, so they’re pretty sure they have a good idea of what one probably looks like.

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Mary Worth, 1/13/24

There’s been a few complaints from the commentariat that I haven’t been covering the end (?) of the Keith-Kitty-Brad-Sonia saga. The reason I haven’t is because it’s been dumb as hell, but to summarize, Sonia warmed up to Keith even though he’s The Man and not a fake vegan in a dumb hat because he knew how to play at least one Stevie Wonder song on the guitar. Has Kitty also picked up some hidden talents in the last 20 years that Keith is going to learn about? You know, like sex tal–no, you know what, I’m not doing this, this plot is ending so lamely it doesn’t deserve my attempts at ironic ribaldry.

Dennis the Menace, 1/13/24

I know Margaret is cursed to be this strip’s resident scold, but I’d honestly like to know how exactly these two landed on this topic of conversation. I assume that Dennis has just finished an extended riff about how his parents put him in timeout again and it’s not fair, man, which is somewhat menacing, assuming you consider “annoying” to be a kind of menacing.

Gil Thorp, 1/13/24

“Wait, we’re supposed to be playing to win?” thought Rod to himself. “Shit! I haven’t been doing that at all! What sort of leader am I?”

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Dick Tracy, 1/12/24

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, Tess is a private investigator and her agency deals with different aspects of the same shadowy underworld that her husband fights against and now it may cost her life, but get a load of panel two, which contains the most ominous and noir instance of someone taking a piping hot loaf of bread out of the oven in the history of baking. Dick knows that no matter how delicious fresh bread is and how satisfying and surprisingly easy it is to make it in your own home, the human heart is inherently rotten and no society can ever be free of the crime and corruption that only violence wielded in the name of the state can keep at bay.

Gil Thorp, 1/12/24

Now that Coach Hernandez has been tamed into friendship with Gil, we need a new bad guy, at least for this basketball season. Should it be this guy, a basketball coach with a perm? Yes, absolutely, 100%. Even during the brief heyday of perms on men in the ’80s, an NBA coach getting a perm was a pretty automatic indication that he was leaning into his role as a sinister villain. A bepermèd high school coach? In the year of our lord 2024? This guy’s a monster, a maniac. You’re making a deal with the devil, Howard!

Dennis the Menace, 1/12/24

Dennis dropping random malapropisms Family Circus-style is the weakest of menacing weaksauce, but it gets even weaker when those “malapropisms” are actually real words that people use in everyday life. I guess some people, such as the current creative team behind the legacy newspaper comic strip Dennis the Menace, had the privilege of not growing up in Buffalo, New York, and so the sort of weather conditions we endured several times a year sounds like something only a child could come up with in their wildest fatasies. Hope you enjoy heading out to the links in Palm Springs any time of year after sending this kind of bullshit to your editors! (Yes, I live in Southern California too, but I haven’t forgotten my roots.)