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Sunday is for family time!

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Dennis the Menace, 6/6/21

Ha ha, it’s another Sunday strip where Dennis does some menacing without even showing up! He’s interfering with his parents’ marriage — not by doing anything specific, this time, but just by existing. By being so much. What room is there for Henry and Alice? Dennis is all anyone can think about. Dennis is all there is.

Marvin, 6/6/21

Marvin, meanwhile? His parents aren’t even thinking about him at all! Their inability to relate to one another and indeed their increasing mutual animosity is completely unrelated to their terrible baby, and is much more about how terrible they are, separately and together. Anyway, it’s funny because Marvin’s mom thinks Marvin’s dad is dumb, and he’s sensitive about it!

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Try to tell me it makes sense, I dare you

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Dustin, 4/23/21

So the last time I tackled wordplay in a Sunday Dustin comic strip lots of people got mad at me because apparently they think hanger and anger rhyme, so maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate again, but whatever: I can tell by looking at it that this punchline is supposed to be wordplay, but I have no idea what the wordplay is supposed to be. I guess we’re meant to believe “takes it out on approval” is a well-known English phrase we all know and love, maybe? Well, it’s it’s not, but I’m sure a bunch of people are going to chime in telling me it is actually and I’m wrong. Anyway, one of the things about Dustin is that it’s about a generational war between two unlikeable characters, and you have to kind of admire how it makes you dislike whichever one is in the strip on any given day.

Marvin, 4/23/21

Get it? “Cry-Fi”? Because instead of communicating via a local wireless arean network defined by the IEEE 802.11 standards, he’s just yelling? Mercy! That’s pretty funny, of course, but let’s not let it distract us from the main thing here, which is that Marvin’s parents have locked him outside to die of exposure and starvation.

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Josh gives up, mostly

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Marvin, 5/16/21

I was going to go on a real sarcastic riff here about how great it was that comics were a rich, visual medium so that we could get literally seven near-identical frames of Marvin reacting to something happening that we can’t see. But then I realized: do you actually want to see two boring middle aged people arguing about the purchase of a smart speaker (brand unspecified)? That honestly doesn’t sound interesting at all, and while seven near-identical drawings of Marvin aren’t more interesting, at least I feel confident that no energy was needlessly wasted in their creation.

Blondie, 5/16/21

Guys, do you ever think Dagwood might have a serious problem? Like, he didn’t so much fall asleep as violently pitch forward out of his chair. Did he have a stroke or what?