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Dennis the Menace, 9/2/20

Dennis using some gross small animal to drive away Margaret, who has only ever wanted to love him, is the typical level of menace we expect from this strip. However, the fact that he’s dressed in an extremely fancy magician’s outfit to do it, complete with bow tie and pocket square? It’s dorky enough to seem less menacing on the surface, but speaks of a commitment to the project that is in fact quite menacing indeed.

Gil Thorp, 9/2/20

And speaking of bodies, despite the fact that we’re living in the futuristic year 2020, we’re still trapped in our sad meat prisons, forced to lift slabs of metal endlessly over a period of months just to gain a slight advantage on the football field where we slam our flesh-husks against one another, risking permanent damage in the process. Imagine the day when we’re able to upload our minds into a virtual world, freeing ourselves to exist as beings of pure thought! Imagine how transcendant our competitions will be then! Mudlark football is a mere placeholder until that blessed day, a pale shadow of what is surely to come.

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Gil Thorp, 8/31/20

Man, remember when I had cautious but high hopes for a wacky Gil Thorp summer storyline? Well, it’s pretty much the end of summer, and I haven’t talked about Gil Thorp at all, but I can summarize what went down like this: star quarterback of yesteryear True Standish came back, having graduated and been inexplicably drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays, which is a baseball team, and the sassy and vaguely beloved Corina Karenna, who played catcher on Mike “The Mayor”’s ragtag baseball team from the bad kid school, was recruited to help True work out his arm. If that sounds like it might’ve been vaguely wacky, keep in mind that most of the eight weeks was spent talking about True and Corina’s mothers, who have both battled depression, which was very serious and not wacky at all. But now Corina is attending Milford, it seems, which will … help her mom in some way I didn’t really follow, so I hope that the upcoming fall will feature less of her fiercely but tenderly caring for and defending her beloved family (SNOOZE) and more of her defying authority or at least sassing back at authority at a rate at least 10% higher than the usual Mudlark would.

Dustin, 8/31/20

The point of Dustin is, of course, to turn the battle between Dustin’s dad and Dustin into symbol of the Boomer-Millennial struggle. Of course, thanks to comic book time Dustin’s dad is now Gen X and Dustin is probably a Zoomer, but the point is that Dustin is lazy and can’t hold down a job or find a girlfriend so that’s evidence that young people in general suck. But here’s a young person who works at Dustin’s dad’s law firm and wears a suit and everything, but apparently he still sucks because, uh, phones? Anyway, since it’s clear that young people in general are fully capable of holding down a job, Dustin’s dad might want to consider that his kid sucks because he did a bad job raising him, just putting that out there.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/13/20

Hey, remember how this is the second attempt to make a movie out of Lisa’s Story, and the first one actually got to the point where filming had started and everything, and Les somehow managed to both derail the production and get paid for doing so? And the only reason Mason managed to talk Les into signing off on another go-round was to promise to do it the “right way“? Well, now we know what “the right way” means, because unlike last time, Mason’s production has bothered to fit the actress playing Lisa with a Lisa-like wig, and it has utterly blown Les’s mind. I certainly hope he goes into a complete meltdown like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, becomes convinced that Marianne is Lisa, and begs her to come home with him, leading him to be ejected from the set, and, ultimately, committed to a mental hospital. The ensuing publicity makes Lisa’s Story an unexpected hit as everyone wants to see the movie that drove its own screenwriter mad, and Mason dedicates his Best Actor Oscar to Les, but he’s not allowed to watch the ceremony.

Gil Thorp, 7/13/20

You know what used to be a tradition around here is that Gil Thorp would do a completely bonkers summer storyline, but in recent years instead there’s just been boring bullshit about golf, so I certainly hope Gil is going to “shake things up” by ditching this new, dumb tradition in favor of the older, better one.

Dick Tracy, 7/13/20

Oh, he doesn’t have two heads? He’s just a guy whose shtick is that he likes ice cream cones, and his name is Coney? BOOOOOOOOO