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Dennis the Menace, 11/7/16

• September 28, 2008: Dennis is illiterate
• April 2, 2012: Dennis is literate, but pities Joey’s illiteracy
• November 7, 2016: Dennis attempts, in his own idiosyncratic way, to teach Joey how to read

I can’t decide if Dennis’s personal journey, followed by his decision to invite his best friend into the wonderful world of reading, is sweet and not menacing at all, or extremely menacing. Why do they need to be able to write and read messages to each other? What are they up to?

Dick Tracy, 11/7/16

Vic the zookeeper sure took a quick turn from “you’re a hood and your political career is evidence of that” to “holy gee, look at all them simoleons!,” and now we know why: he has a terrible gambling problem! I’m not really sure how this high-stakes kitchen card game relates to proposals to put American citizens with alien DNA in internment camps, but, you know, maybe Dick Tracy is about to abruptly shift to a narrative style like Richard Linkletter’s Slacker, where we follow a character from one setting to another and then follow a new character from that setting to the next, and so on. Like, maybe after the game’s over we’ll find out about the beardy dude’s home life, and then see what drama his tween daughter is dealing with at school the next morning. It’d be a nice change of pace, honestly!

Hi and Lois, 11/7/16

Oh man, Lois looks furious. That black armband is a clue: one of her fellow scrapbookers was recently killed in a vicious drive-by stitching, another casualty in the seemingly endless Craft War, and she’s still in mourning. That glue gun was intended to be turned against the quilters, but it looks like the first victim will be much closer to home.

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Hi and Lois, 11/6/16

This is one of my weird comics fixations and maybe it’s a cultural blind spot for me, but: is there anywhere in suburban America, like where the Flagstons or the Bumsteads live, where people regularly let their dogs roam about, unfenced and unleashed and unsupervised, at night? I get that this is a thing that happens in rural areas, but Hi and Lois don’t live in a rural area. I get that this is a thing that happened in, like, the ’50s, maybe, but Hi and Lois don’t live there either. Is this just some ossified institutional memory thing, where Dawg has always wandered free at night, and Walker-Brown Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC doesn’t want to change the continuity now? Or have I somehow magically managed to live only in the parts of the country where keeping your dog indoors at night, or at least fenced in a yard, is the social norm? (For what it’s worth, in my current neighborhood there’s an extra incentive to do so, what with the roaming coyotes.)

Judge Parker, 11/6/16

In the aftermath of her extremely public humiliation, Neddy has done the only sensible thing: flee to Alaska with her hunky lover, refusing all communication with her shattered family! It would be a hilarious narrative shift if, after a few weeks of rapid plot developments under new writer Ces Marciuliano, we just spend the next six to eight months with Neddy sipping coffee, looking wistfully out over the permafrost, and not answering her phone.

Crankshaft, 11/6/16

Ahhh, Crankshaft in a nutshell: Ed loudly subjects a room full of people to his opinion, talking to nobody in particular and neither noticing nor caring that nobody’s talking back to him!

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Mark Trail, 11/2/16

Mark Trail UPDATE: in addition to rickety log bridges and enraged wild boars and freakishly huge ant mounds, Mark and Abbey now also have to deal with an earthquake, or maybe a volcano, or maybe an earthquake caused by an erupting volcano, which is undeniably exciting! The tangle of flailing limbs in today’s final panel also reminds of an earlier vision of Mark tackling a person, which makes me wonder if Mark Trail isn’t secretly catering to someone’s very specific fetish.

Curtis, 11/2/16

Ha ha! It’s funny because Curtis is just old enough to know he needs to hid the bleak reality of adulthood from his younger brother, for just another few years!

Hi and Lois, 11/2/16

Ha ha! It’s funny because Trixie is a preverbal infant but she’s already being driven into a spiral of anxiety by the thought of her own inevitable death!

Mary Worth, 11/2/16

Yes, let’s spin the wheel of fate, shall we? Who will be lucky enough to be the next person who has to make polite talk with Wilbur about his travel plans? Will it be Dawn? Will it be Iris? Will it be some other person who has even less reason to care? Ian, maybe? Will Wilbur run into Ian in the hall and babble excitedly about his new adventure, with Ian’s contempt growing more and more visible all the while? That sounds great! I vote for Ian!