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Dennis the Menace, 2/8/17

My friend Ruth Graham recently wrote a fascinating story about the fact that huge swaths of Americans reached adulthood thinking that Eli Whitney was black. She goes into some of the reasons why. For one thing, the cotton gin helped make cotton a more lucrative crop, which increased demand for slave labor in the American south, and so it’s an invention often discussed in schools during Black History Month, around the same time that other actual black inventors are also introduced. The irony that a black person might’ve set the chain of events that ramped up cotton cultivation in motion seems to make the idea hard to resist (in many versions of the story, this alternate history black Eli Whitney gets screwed out of the profits from his invention, natch). I think this Dennis the Menace illustrates the process by which these kinds of mistakes can be made, since a lot of the way we’re taught history in elementary and high school involves rote memorization of isolated bits of data, leaving our minds free to fill in the substantial blanks around them.

In other news, one of Dennis’s neighbors is a big drunk! But, you know, not a day drunk. That’s how you know he’s not talking about Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson’s retired and can drink whenever he wants!

Hi and Lois, 2/8/17

It’s Trixie’s thought balloon that really makes clear the profound strangeness here: Lois, mother of a teenager and thus presumably on at least the verge of middle age, is expected in this suburban gender-normative milieu to worry about wrinkles, so we accept her use of “4 Ever Young” face cream without much thought. But Trixie’s burning desire to advance past infancy — a desire that we know can never be fulfilled — really hammers home the Flagstons’ nightmarish endless-now existence. Just as Trixie eagerly anticipates milestones she’ll never reach — walking, speech, autonomy — so too does Lois experience eternal youth that she cannot enjoy, instead living in constant terror of the crow’s feet that never quite appear at the corners of her eyes.

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Hi and Lois and Blondie, 2/5/17

Is there anything more embarrassing than making a big, public gesture of your affection for someone else and having it not just rebuffed, but completely ignored? For their Super Bowl party, Hi and Lois have failed to invite any of their fellow damned souls from the Walker-Browne universe; Beetle Bailey, lest you forget, is actually Lois’s brother, and the Hagar the Horrible gang is probably … the Flagstons’ distant ancestors? Anyway, the point is, if it’s possible to bring the Bumsteads, a family from an entirely different intellectual property spacetime continuum, in for the Super Bowl, they easily could’ve done it with Sarge and Lucky Eddy or whoever. But nope, screw their actual family, the Flagstons would rather social climb with Blondie and Dagwood and … Mr. Dithers? Jesus, they invited Mr. Dithers to their party. Probably because he’s rich. Maybe this is like when Tom Cruise pretended to befriend his fellow Scientologist Leah Remini just so he could invite Remini’s pal J-Lo to his wedding in Italy and … where was I? Oh, right, the Flagstons are a bunch of phonies. Meanwhile, in his own actual universe, Dagwood is watching TV with his dog. Enjoy the game, everybody!

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Mary Worth, 1/14/17

OH SNAP GUYS THIS IS A METAPHOR! A metaphor for Iris’s current romantic dilemma, where she has to choose between Zak and Wilbur! It might not be obvious at first, but once you look at the details I think you’ll find it’s pretty clear:

• Zak is a simple grad student without much money, so his activities with Iris will be limited to things like bowling and cheap concerts for local bands. Iris is satisfied by her sexual encounters with Zak so consistently that they’ve almost become routine.
• Wilbur, meanwhile can afford the go-go world travelling lifestyle that only a lucrative syndicated newspaper columnist career can subsidize, voyaging to exotic Antarctica and Japan on a whim. However, due to Wilbur’s age and constant mayonnaise consumption, his heart could go at any time, meaning that any relationship with him could lack longevity. Zak, by contrast, is healthy and twenty years younger than Iris, and thus unlikely to predecease her.

It seems like a difficult choice! I don’t envy her!

Hi and Lois, 1/14/17

I really appreciate the amount of care that’s been put into the accoutrements of Thirsty’s sloth here. I’m particularly fond of the fact that there are two sock but only one shoe in evidence, that there’s a can of PBR on the floor and pint and shot glasses on the coffee table (no coasters, natch), and that there are multiple books strewn about, since just because you’re a slob doesn’t mean you’re a philistine. But the best for sure is Thirsty’s big smile as he naps on the Flagston’s couch. He hasn’t been this happy in years!

Gil Thorp, 1/14/17

“Aaron, your teammates overheard you talking about taking drugs. This is extremely serious.”

“But what if … I don’t offer you any explanation, and you wait until the end of the week when I reveal the truth in a dramatic fashion at the game against our biggest conference rival?”

“Enh, that’ll work.”

Marvin, 1/14/17

Ha ha! It’s funny because Jeff is happy to let Marvin stew in his own feces, as long as he doesn’t have to smell it!