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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.)

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The Lockhorns and Blondie, 1/11/24

The word app, as a shorthand for application in the computer programming sense, was as attested as early as 1992, which was 32 years ago. However, it probably didn’t really penetrate into the public consciousness until the dawn of the smartphone age, when Apple started using it to describe the small, self-contained applications running on its new iPhone platform and sold through its App Store, launched in 2008; by 2010, the term was used freely by iPhone and Android users alike, and had become so prevalent that it was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. This was 13 years ago, which, I regret to inform you, is quite a long time, actually, and the window for doing a strip where the punchline is just the word “app” has long closed. Comics creators: please make a note of this.

Gil Thorp, 1/11/24

How do you think Marty Moon’s recovery journey is going? It seems that he’s reached that long plateau, where a dry life extends endlessly before him and, while he’s not in immediate risk of backsliding, it’s hard to shake off the lethargy and emotional numbness. Oh, it’s in from midrange. Oh, Leo Atazhoon is going to be interviewed on the podcast. Ho hum. Nothing exclamation point-worthy. Look at these young men celebrating. Marty used to be like that once. Marty used to feel things. This strip needs to do right by our boy Moon and give him a wild and wacky subplot, something that’ll get him to snap out of it!