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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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Gearhead Gertie, 7/18/24

Frank Sinatra died in a hospital with his wife by his side, which, when it comes to ways to die, is not the worst by any means. But consider: what if instead he had died onstage because he sang a song that was far too dangerous and lost control of it, while thousands of his fans looked on, horrified but deep down inside thrilled, because isn’t the possibility of death, no matter how slim, just the far edge of the same space of drama that brought them there in the first place? Obviously that’s not what pulls in concertgoers, that’s not really what live music is about, but also that’s why Gertie is still robust and full of energy, feeding on the visceral noise and violence and risk of NASCAR, and her husband is a pencil neck listening to his little records, a man whose requests to fly a giant Sinatra flag out front once in a while have been repeatedly nixed.

Family Circus, 7/18/24

Look, you can try to prevent your children from learning anything about sex and reproduction all you want, but eventually, in the absence of information, they will try figuring out how it all works on their own from whatever they can glean from their environment, and the results will honestly be much more disturbing than you can imagine.

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Happy 4th of July, everybody! It’s the day when everyone, Americans and non-Americans alike, comes together to celebrate America. How are you spending the holiday?

Mary Worth, 7/4/24

Are you doing it the “right way” — by contemplating the legal and administrative aspects of the termination of the American-British colonial relationship, while silently watching fireworks?

Gearhead Gertie, 7/4/24

Or are you doing it the “wrong” way — by contemplating the forcible displacement of your ideological and cultural enemies to a faraway place? Remember: one of the potential drawbacks of a mass ethnic cleansing campaign is that you may one day decide you also want to possess the area where you exiled your opponents to. Think of how spectacular bank turns and car crashes would be in Mars’s lower gravity! Can we afford to leave this beautiful, exciting planet in the hands of anti-NASCAR scum?

Judge Parker, 7/4/24

You might remember a throwaway line from a few weeks ago when Sophie claimed that she had “no romantic drama in [her] life.” In fact, there’s a Lucas, a guy who has feelings for her that she doesn’t reciprocate (or maybe does, but she feels like she can’t be in a romantic relationship because her last one ended in that whole car accident/kidnapping situation), but she told him she still wants to be friends and they’re still hanging out, and I realize that Sophie is just in college and not wise in the ways of love yet, but I regret to inform her that the situation I just described does in fact constitute a certain kind of romantic drama, and a not a fun kind. Anyway, this boy is also super rich, and has invited Sophie and her friend to his family’s compound on Long Island and let them go to their private beach unattended, neglecting to mention to them that the adjacent waters are shark-infested. This will be just like the movie Jaws, which took place over 4th of July weekend!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/4/24

Sorry, I don’t have a 4th of July tie-in for this one, but I do want to point out that the Rex Morgan bully has a dumb dad who looks almost exactly like him, but older. How do I know he’s dumb? Because he clearly doesn’t know who’s calling him in panel one and doesn’t want to talk to them but answers the phone anyway. It’s 2024, buddy! You can just send it straight to voicemail, except you never set up your voicemail, so the person calling you can’t even leave a voicemail!