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Dennis the Menace, 12/1/17

Despite the strip’s occasional acknowledgements of modernity, a large part of the appeal of Dennis the Menace, to the extent that such a thing could be said to exist, lies in its depiction of a retrograde, bygone world that is comforting to its elderly readership but would be wholly alien to actual five-year-olds. This is a neighborhood, after all, where children of various ages are allowed to roam unsupervised seemingly at all times, which must seem very weird to any children reading it (fortunately no actual children are reading it). Today’s panel has a whole series of anachronisms:

1. A door-to-door salesman
2. A door-to-door salesman arriving in the middle of the day
3. A door-to-door salesman arriving in the middle of the day wearing a suit and a bow tie and saddle shoes
4. A five-year-old-child allowed to answer the door for a total stranger
5. A door-to-door salesman arriving in the middle of the day and at least appearing to entertain the thought that a five-year-old child might have been left in the house alone

Anyway, I guess the joke here is that Dennis has blown his mother’s cover when she’s trying to avoid talking to a salesman, which only makes sense if we find #5 there believable, and which I guess makes Alice the true menace, since she’s sent her child to the door to run interference with some rando while she stays upstairs in the bedroom huffing laudanum or whatever. I think a more modern and menacing version of this joke would be Dennis saying he was home alone and asking the salesman to call Child Protective Services, just because he wanted to go for a ride in a car.

Pluggers, 12/1/17

Today’s Pluggers fascinates me: it tells a whole little story in its caption, but in the panel itself depicts the moment before the denouement, the moment when its plugger protagonist allows herself to briefly entertain the idea that someone might find her desirable, before it all comes crashing down in a moment of internalized embarrassment. In its own quiet way, this is just as grim and heartbreaking as that crushing Pluggers classic, “Rhino-man hocks his TV.”

Family Circus, 12/1/17

Family Circus has a reputation for being one of the most Christian comic strips in the newspaper, and yet here it is depicting a child confusing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with the pagan fertility god whose iconography has, through the corruption of this world, been grafted onto what should be the subdued celebration of His birth, and then playing it for laughs. I guess this is just meant to show us that children really are born sinful and ignorant, doomed to Limbo without the interceding grace of Christ, working through the Holy Mother Church and its variety of reasonably priced educational programs.

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Dick Tracy, 11/28/17

Dick Tracy is starting a new storyline this week, as usual bringing back beloved grotesqueries from the strip’s long history, and, you know, can you imagine how awkward it must be to have to make small talk in Mr. Bribery’s waiting room. “Sooooooooooo … your mom was called ‘Ugly Christine,’ huh? I guess there’s no real chance that was, like, ironic or anything, huh? Ha ha, obviously not. I mean, I’m the only black character in this strip and my name is ‘Lee Ebony.’”

Shoe, 11/28/17

Parallel evolution is an amazing process! It’s how animals as distantly related as the shark and the dolphin have come to look so much alike, and why the civilization of sapient birds in Shoe functions so much like our own. They have clothes, and corrective lenses, and even corporate media mouthpieces that cover for the crimes of the capital-holding class!

Family Circus, 11/28/17

Billy is definitely going to jail, right?

Mark Trail, 11/28/17

The sheriff is definitely going to feed all these people to the bear, right?

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Family Circus, 11/27/17

It’s hard for me to really conceptualize how old and how far along on the path to adulthood the Keane Kids are supposed to be, partly because they have to be a little unrealistically precocious to do all the darndest-things-saying, partly because they’ve been around for longer than I’ve been alive — and also, let’s be real, partly because I’m not a parent and have a hard time keeping track of how kids at particular ages are supposed to act or look like! Like, I have a friend who has a six-month-old baby and she was talking with another mom about how much her son weighed and the other mom was like “Oooh, wow” so I knew it was unusual but in which direction??? Turns out he’s a big old baby, but the point is, sometimes I forget that Jeffy is, I guess, a toddler. Right? Like, he’s too young to school but he’s old enough to walk around and talk? Is that a toddler? I assume that there’s a stage you go through in toddlerhood where your sense of self really gels and asserting your identity becomes very important, which is why Jeffy is furious at being called Mo and also is wearing a shirt with his name on it, which he can’t read but probably he’s been assured it says “Jeffy.” Either that or Jeffy knows full well that the “Mo’s” are abandoned at the bus station, and the t-shirt is there to tell whoever collects him what his name is. Why aren’t any of the other kids wearing name t-shirts? Because Mommy knows where to start “eeny”-ing in order to “mo” on Jeffy. She’s not dumb. Not like Jeffy.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/27/17

The Alps were one of the few parts of Europe that were unscathed by Norse raids, and the League of the Three Forest Cantons that would eventually become the nucleus of the Swiss Confederacy wasn’t established until 1291, long after the Viking Age had ended. Still, shoutout to the artist here for accurately setting the scene with a Swiss flag fluttering above the parapets, with newspaper readers being free to imagine it in its accurate white-cross-on-red coloring. And further shoutout to the syndicate colorist, who instead created a green cross on a white background, which in California at least is universally recognized as the symbol of a medical marijuana dispensary. It explains a lot about the way comics get colored, anyway.