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PROGRAMMING NOTE: haha whoops I screwed up the days for several posts this week, here’s Wednesday’s if you haven’t seen that yet

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/24

Look, I respect the effort here — the fundmental underlying joke is pretty good, Alice’s indignant facial expression is funny, and Dennis looking genuinely hurt in the background is a nice touch. “Lived to tell about it.com” isn’t a great URL, though, because it honestly sounds like a site for something a lot more traumatic and kind of spoils the mood, and a much bigger problem is that it’s a website at all. A group of modern young baby sitters is simply not going to go to the trouble to buy a domain name and then set up a WordPress account for a group blog or whatever. They’d set up a community on social media somewhere — Facebook, maybe, Facebook groups have had a little bit of a comeback with younger people, or maybe whatever the TikTok equivalent is. Or a private Discord server! There probably isn’t a TikTok equivalent, now that I think about it, not that I would know, because I don’t go on there. What happens on TikTok is none of my business. The important thing is that I know that I don’t know, which Socrates would say makes me smart. I’m going to run with that. Anyway, nice try but botched execution, Dennis the Menace, I give this 6 out of 10 stars.

Gearhead Gertie, 8/8/24

I’ve decided that my favorite kind of Gearhead Gertie panels are the ones where she’s antagonizing her husband. This one is great because you could imagine that the joke is that this is the thinnest of pretenses over her attempts to establish a throuple, but it’s actually much more wholesome (or, depending on how you see it, more perverse): it’s all exactly as it seems, she just loves NASCAR that much, and it makes her husband crazy. The cable guy, despite his unconventional new living situation, doesn’t seem to notice this drama, or care about it if he does. He’s just happy to be there!

Pluggers, 8/8/24

These two pluggers aren’t just romantically smiling at each other after dinner. Obviously they are doing that — those tight faces and bugged out eyes simply scream “romance” — but there’s aslo something more to it. Thanks for cluing us in, Pluggers!

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Alice, 8/7/24

The thing is that your boy Josh came down with COVID-19 last weekend, and while I am currently on the mend it made my brain a little loopy this week (this Alice strip is here to show you what it was like inside my skull for a while) and also apparently interfered with my ability to operate the ol’ time travel machine. This meant I posted Thursday’s strips on Wednesday and (briefly) posted tomorrow’s (Friday’s) strips Thursday (the day on which I am writing this Wednesday post). Ooops! I’ve corrected the dates on everything on the site (so it goes in the right order), but here’s a short Wednesday post, for completeness!

Dennis the Menace, 8/7/24

Sure, Mr. Wilson, I get it. There are lots of times when I think up a joke, but doing it right involves figuring out some specific pieces of information, like “What’s a typical amount that a child Dennis’s age weighs” and “Wait, how old is Dennis supposed to be, actually,” and then I just don’t bother. This is frankly the most relatable this man has ever been to me.

Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, 8/7/24

Oh no, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has learned what “influencers” are and will be making jokes about them, code red code red

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Dennis the Menace and Hagar the Horrible, 8/5/24

Ha ha, bagpipes, amiright folks? It’s, uh, it’s honestly pretty slim pickings in the comics today so that’s what I got. I was thinking recently (ok, fine, it was when I was watching the incredible Weird Al biopic Weird) that accordions get a bad rap, like for decades they were the butt of jokes and the epitome of dorky music when in fact accordion music can be really cool and interesting! Am I willing to go out on a limb and say the same about bagpipes? Maybe not, they are pretty screechy and annoying if not done right, but they can be good too sometimes, I dunno. Anyway, mostly I’m interested in geography here, with Hagar the Horrible accurately depicting the Scots as one of the primary victims of Viking depredation and inaccurately depicting the bagpipes as sonic weapons, and Dennis the Menace depicting the cute little historic downtown of Dennis’s suburb (?) where fun civic events like the Bagpipes Festival happen, or maybe that’s just Margaret’s uncle wandering around imposing his musical and sartorial tastes on everyone without their consent, who can say.