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Beetle Bailey, 9/10/18

General Halftrack is of course old, feeble, and slow-moving, so it had to be pure surprise that allowed him to land a sharp, shattering blow to Sarge’s face. You can still see the shock in Sarge’s eyes. Usually he’s the one who dishes out disfiguring physical punishment to the soldiers under his command in flagrant violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not the other way around.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/18

Gasoline Alley is in the midst of rambling bit where a bunch of hundred-year-old cartoon characters are discussing their inability to make jokes that people would enjoy, which seems a little on the nose to me.

Mary Worth, 9/10/18

“Oh no! Mr. Wynter’s beloved dog, his only companion, has died, which may force him to finally open up to social overtures and make new friends? What a completely unexpected development!” said Mary, watering her freshly planted bed of extremely poisonous plants.

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Mary Worth, 9/5/18

But if he were Dale Carnegie — if Carnegie faked his 1955 death, if he managed to still walk among us today at the age of 130 thanks to the dark spells written in blood in his forbidden necromantic tome How To Stop Worrying And Start Living Eternally, if he travels the land in disguise as a wounded and angry man to try to discover the chosen one who can win any friend, influence any person, and if that chosen one turned out to be Mary — well, I’m not saying that’s at all likely. But it’d be a pretty cool scenario, you know?

Dennis the Menace, 9/5/18

Ah yes, it appears that Dennis is finally figuring it out: the reason he’s always been allowed to run wild, been indulged as he harasses Mr. Wilson and blurts out rude nonsense in front of other adults and antagonizes his teachers, is because his mother thinks it’s funny. It doesn’t matter how many people he alienates, that he’s sabotaging his education and his future, as long as she gets some droll anecdotes about what a little shit he is that she can share with her similarly jaded friends. The facial expressions here — Dennis’s of mounting, horrified realization, Alice’s of cruel amusement — make it clear that the menacing dynamic has shifted, or perhaps more correctly that we’ve been wrong about their power relations all along.

Gil Thorp, 9/5/18

“Woo-hoo, bro! Total lack of intellectual curiosity fist bump!”

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Dick Tracy, 9/4/18

Dick Tracy’s approach to depicting crime has always been cartoonish, but usually that means “criminals have hideously deformed crania that could only exist in drawings” and not “drug gangs have laughable names and stake out territory by gently shoving rivals across the street.”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/4/18

Seems pretty mean to joke about your brain-injured pal‘s mental deficits, but I guess if you’re recovering from a massive stroke, as this guy clearly is, you’re “allowed” to say it.

Shoe, 9/4/18

I really appreciate that, in today’s installment of “the bird-men of Shoe hate their lives and themselves,” the Perfesser sighs audibly but only thinks about his deep-rooted desire for a total annihilation of self, because if you speak a wish out loud it won’t come true.

Mary Worth, 9/4/18

HELL YES MARY IS GOING TO FIND MEAN OLD MR. WYNTER SOME FRIENDS AND MAYBE A PACK OF FERALS FOR HIS DOG TO JOIN, NOBODY HAS ANY CHOICE IN THE MATTER, MARY HAS SPOKEN