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So ends the 2022 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser. As much as the blog depends on its regular subscribers, it’s one-off, “drive-by” contributions from nonsubscribers that have kept The Comics Curmudgeon a sustainable project for more than eighteen years. If you enjoy this site every day but haven’t hit the Tip Jar in a while, consider doing so now. And thank you, generous readers one and all!

Dennis the Menace, 9/3/22

“Kid, did you somehow forget I’m married to Alice Mitchell? Go bother Dagwood or something.”

Menace level: pwned!

Crankshaft, 9/3/22

Hannah is smiling because she’s going to follow her boss’s instructions exactly and compress eleven years of 26 30-minute episodes each into a single 4GB MP4. Channel One viewers will be treated to 143 hours of nine flickering gray squares, accompanied by tiny squeaks every half hour or so. Sure beats the original John Darling Show!

Gil Thorp, 9/3/22

Welcome to Oreintation for the Milford School of Mines. The crew team’s Oarintation is across the hall.

With Funky and now Gil, the comics seem to be introducing their trans characters in alphabetic order; this puts Hägar‘s Hamlet (→ Ophelia, obv.) up next, followed by Dot and Ditto from Hi and Lois (they could just switch). Meanwhile, Tobias, welcome to Milford Football: what’ll it be, fullback or defensive tackle?

Lockhorns, 9/3/22

Leroy’s gut blocks the strike zone, so whether walked or hit by a pitched ball, he always reaches first. He celebrates because walks don’t hurt as much.

–Uncle Lumpy

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The Lockhorns, 8/13/22

The thing about the Lockhorns is that, while in one sense they’re millennials, in another sense they’re trapped in an eternal present in which they never age but their hateful marriage extends indefinitely into infinity, and so they’re always having to upgrade their mutual loathing into ever more baroque forms. It’s no longer enough for Leroy to just look at Loretta’s cooking and say something cutting with dead eyes; now he has to come up with some pretext to drag her to the tent section at REI and say “Look! No kitchen! Wouldn’t it be great to live here? To forage for mushrooms and berries, maybe trap small game, like our primitive ancestors did? Agriculture was a mistake, Loretta, a mistake, because it gave rise to cooking, which led to your cooking in particular. I’d rather get parasites from eating raw rabbit, Loretta! I really would!”

Dick Tracy, 8/13/22

Wow, this Lunarian supremicist faction within the Antarctic Lunarian colony really knows how to put on a show! Remember, having having a guy on stage ranting about seizing power and starting genocidal wars may have worked for Hitler, but in this day and age, people want to feel more connected to their despots. That’s why you want to have plants in the audience asking the questions whose answers reveal the true evil of your plans, making your bloodthirsty diatribe feel more like a bloodthirsty conversation among friends.

Pluggers, 8/13/22

Well, if you’re in Iowa, it’s probably a dizzy spell? Maybe go see a doctor, sir! A doctor can diagnose this better than a syndicated newspaper comic strip that illustrates reader jokes with folksy furries can, trust me on this!

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Mary Worth, 8/10/22

A relatively recent and welcome addition to the Mary Worth storytelling canon is the wacky dream sequence, in which the characters confront whatever their current dilemma is in a series of images that are simultaneously hallucinatory and extremely on the nose. Anyway, it’s already Wednesday, so we’d better get full week and half of whatever Weston chimera, half-Dawn and half-Wilbur, is going to be the horrified and horrifying subject of this next nightmare. Not sure if Dawn’s “AUGGGH!” is meant to indicate that we’re already in the dream and she’s beginning to experience the awful physical transformation into Wilburdom, or if it’s just because her lower GI tract is firing on all cylinders thanks to that chili.

The Lockhorns, 8/10/12

Absolutely loving the contrast between Loretta’s whimsical flotation device and her utterly dead facial expression here. Maybe she thought this would get Leroy’s goat more than it actually ended up doing, or maybe she thought they’d both have a little laugh about it. But you can tell that she realized it would just make her look dumb before Leroy even saw her. It was too late to change course, though. A Lockhorn always commits to the bit.

Hi and Lois, 8/10/22

“Ha ha, it’s funny because he’s a known alcoholic, and we’re using beer, the very thing to which he’s tragically addicted, to convince him to take care of our house! We’re drinking wine, because we’re sophisticates. Hey, have you seen the kids? Did we forget to bring them?”