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Dennis the Menace, 5/28/25

When you have a long-running strip like Dennis the Menace, where one of the main characters is a child who never grows up and another is an old man who never dies, it does force you to contemplate how comic strip time operates for the two of them. Are we meant to understand that they are locked in an eternal, changeless struggle? Or is Dennis just a kid who’s only started wandering over and annoying his neighbor in the past few months? Mr. Wilson’s reaction today points towards the latter: clearly he’s never even thought about the fact that Dennis will have his days free during the summer, much less experienced it. “Ah shit! Ah fuck!” is his immediate, visceral reaction.

Wizard of Id, 5/28/25

The idea of this joke — “two armies must fill out paperwork with the owner of the battlefield before they hack each other to bits” — is solid enough, but I have a quibble with the execution. Specifically, we’re in a faux medieval setting, so you could just put this guy in vaguely medieval peasant garb or something and people would easily follow everything thanks to the dialogue. Instead, the logic seems to be “we’re saying field so it should be a recognizable farmer, let’s put him in overalls and a hat from the early to mid 20th century,” which doesn’t work at all, in my opinion. The fact that the colorist decided to make said overalls the exact same shade of brown as the ground doesn’t help.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/28/25

TIRED: Herb and Jamaal uses weird circumlocutions to avoid proper nouns so as to make the strips “timeless” and reusable in the future

WIRED: Herb and Jamaal takes place in an extremely specific alt-timeline where Star Wars-style droids are real and the subject of political controversy that elected officials need to field questions about at press conferences

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Herb and Jamaal, 4/19/25

I wonder if Jamaal knows that Rev. Croom, who to all appearances is just over there quietly enjoying his coffee, is actually musing on the fact that those who fail to call on God will eventually be present with Him, presumably at the final judgement when their beliefs and faith will be found wanting. He’s looking right at Jamaal while he’s contemplating this, so maybe he’s thinking about Jamaal in particular! “There’s a guy who’s going to be cast down into the lake of fire,” he thinks, smiling, before taking another sip.

Shoe, 4/19/25

I feel like there was a first draft of this strip that ran afoul of the editors, or maybe a version that would’ve run in the ’80s or ’90s, in which the dialogue would’ve been exactly the same but the setting was shifted to the local fern bar and the Perfesser was being silently handled a cocktail. Would that be more or less depressing than this one? Discuss.

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Suburban Fairy Tales, 4/9/25

I made a fairly embarrassing error in my post about Suburban Fairy Tales a couple days ago, in which I implied that the second little pig built his house out of straw, when any idiot knows that that was the first little pig’s thing, and the second little pig built his out of wood, which is a more normal way to do it but apparently still leaves you vulnerable to wolves. Anyway, this has me really second-guessing myself when it comes to fairy tale lore; like, I don’t think there’s a beloved hippie sheep character named “Sir Lambelot” that we all learned about from bedtime stories growing up, but can I really be trusted about this sort of thing anymore?

Herb and Jamaal, 4/9/25

It’s true, Jamaal: when assessing the viability of a business plan, you need to take into account the price of production inputs! Not sure if that’s “funny” per se, but at least it’s educational.

Dennis the Menace, 4/9/25

So Dennis thinks that chairs, and maybe other pieces of furniture, are weird fucked-up-shaped animals, that we kill and then sit on? And most but not all of them are vertebrates? Pretty menacing. Ignorant, but also so unsettling as to be pretty darn menacing.