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Dennis the Menace, 1/8/21

I feel like over the years Dennis the Menace has spent less time on Dennis’s actual menacing more on everyone’s second-order reactions to said menacing, or their perceptions of him as a menace, which may or may not be based in reality. Like, be honest: who’s the real menace here? The kid who’s playing fetch with his dog? Or the guy who’s buttonholed a total stranger and appears to be deep into a conversation along the lines of “You’d think with a nightmare specimen like this you’d be dealing with a deeply tainted bloodline, just generation after generation of idiots and defectives, but no! I guess it turns out that true evil can arise from the seemingly innocent! Sinister horror lurks below the surface of our every day life, and indeed inside each one of us!”

Marvin, 1/8/21

I guess maybe this joke would’ve landed better if the Miller household weren’t a largely featureless void consisting mostly of a blue rug and a enormous expanse of white wall. But even so, it’s still a little off! Marvin refused to sit in the corner, so here he is sitting … not in the corner, ha ha? It’s like someone’s been told that they can’t do poop jokes anymore, and so they’re trying to reason out what other kinds of jokes might look like from first principles, and this was their first stab at it.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/8/21

We saw a glimpse of the exterior of Chez Winkerbean in a strip just before Christmas, and I was too busy focusing on the negative to take note of the frankly enormous house that Funky and Holly live in. This is curious, considering that their income derives from managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor for its fickle absentee owner, and not long ago Funky sunk his savings into a failed attempt to franchise Montoni’s shitty pizza in New York City, a metropolis noted for its pizza-snobbery. Admittedly, the real estate market in Northeastern Ohio is not exactly booming, so maybe my radar on what a 5,000-square-foot suburban McMansion would go for is off, but today we learn that the Winkerbean family has the means to drop on the order of four grand on a TV without that even being noteworthy enough for Funky to remember. What I’m trying to say here is that managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor may actually be actually pretty lucrative, in the sense that it makes a great front for money laundering for organized crime.

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Dennis the Menace, 12/22/20

Which interpretation of this scene do you find more menacing? That Henry and Alice put Dennis up to this, thinking “Ha ha, here’s this mall Santa probably hasn’t heard before! 2020, amiright?” Or that they put Dennis up to this, thinking “Well, we’ve tried everything else. Maybe that guy down at the mall really is Santa, or maybe he can talk to the real Santa, like he always tells Dennis. It’s worth a shot, right? Anything’s worth a shot at this point! Haha, 2020, amiright?”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/22/20

When Harry Dinkle finally, inevitably, dies — an event that will no doubt be equal parts mawkish, ironic, and ham-handed — I certainly hope that Becky stalks into his room at the hospice and hisses “Whatever else I’ve done, old man, at least I was never a Hitler to your Bismark,” to the confusion and consternation of his assembled family and loved ones.

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Gil Thorp, 12/21/20

Ahh, one of my favorite occasional Gil Thorp bits is when they introduce a nerd character, to balance out the jocks, although because of this strip’s relentless focus on jocks, the plot is always that the nerd must enter the jock realm! Like Remember Bobby, the stats nerd who weaseled his way into an unpaid quasi-assistant coaching gig but gave fake adderall to one of the basketball players and got fired, only to come back a few years later to attempt to humiliate Gil via billboards, except that he was ultimately humiliated himself by Marty Moon? Or remember Steve Luhm, who was technically a jock because he played basketball but also was a nerd because he was a feminist and couldn’t use street slang appropriately, and then he came back a few years later to work as a janitor at Milford High? If you’re detecting a pattern here, it’s that, despite what pencil-neck English teachers might tell you, nerds don’t actually do better than jocks after graduation, so suck it, nerds, an while it’s true that some nerd characters didn’t get a post-Milford comeuppance but just saddled with hilarious nerd dialogue instead, my point is: how will poor Vic Doucette’s hubristic desire to replace Mr. Staley as the basketball P.A. announcer (?) result in his inevitable, and justly deserved, fall from grace?

Dick Tracy, 12/21/20

A friend of mine is the daughter of a vineyard owner, and once I was talking to her dad about how the Napa wine industry survived prohibition, and he told me that one thing some vineyards did was to ship all the raw materials needed for winemaking to customers along with a very detailed instruction set that began with “Now that you have received these innocent items, no matter what you do, don’t take the following steps or else you’ll have created wine, and that would be illegal.” What I’m trying to say is that Dick Tracy, a comic strip that I feel safe in saying been historically anti-crime, seems with this storyline very eager to offer us plenty of nuts and bolts tips on how to run a narcotics distribution ring.

Dennis the Menace, 12/21/20

You know what we can all agree is extremely menacing? Munchausen syndrome by proxy!