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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/8/22

Do you think the various bird-women with glasses that Mother Goose talks to in Mother Goose and Grimm are all supposed to be the same character, or do subtle differences in hair color and beak shape indicate that they’re a mostly interchangeable but still distinct series of interlocutors? I ask because if this strip is taking place less than a week after the one where Mother Goose wistfully said she wished her boyfriend shared her desire for a big church wedding, it would be quite poignant, but if she’s talking to same woman her boyfriend wants to have sex with, it just got a lot darker.

Mary Worth, 2/8/22

Just like Mary Worth, the character, tries to browbeat all her friends into tolerating Wilbur despite the fact that he’s obviously a monster, Mary Worth, the comic strip, is trying to get us to accept his continued existence by showing that his assholery can serve as a prompt for exciting new non-Wilbur storylines. It’s honestly working on me a little, as today’s second panel absolutely perfectly captures Toby just as her carefully buttressed emotional superstructure shatters into a million pieces, hopefully presaging a truly hilarious downward spiral in the weeks to come.

Dennis the Menace, 2/8/22

The only way I can understand Dennis the Menace doing a “Dennis teaches Joey that it’s OK for a man to cry when he’s sad” panel is by assuming that King Features has an entire lab dedicated to making the least menacing Dennis the Menace panel possible under the laws of physics as we understand them.

Pluggers, 2/8/22

You know, a lot of people think I’m a little too hard on the plugger demographic on this blog, but even I couldn’t come up with anything as mean as the plugger-identified reader who contemplated the characteristics that make up the plugger identity and then submit an entry that boils down to “pluggers sure take a long time to shit!”

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/5/22

Just in case you need more evidence of what the typical newspaper comic-reading demographic is, the joke here is that the elderly gent they’re gossiping about caught mumps from his young bride, which is funny because mumps is a disease associated with children. Or, I guess I would say that it was associated with children until the MMR vaccine became near-universal in the early 1970s, which — and it gives me no pleasure to report this — was fifty years ago. Anyway, a fun fact that you may or may not want to think about in terms of our current epidemiological situation is that mumps traditionally was thought of as an annoying but not particularly worrisome disease that most kids got and got over, but we started developing a vaccine during World War II, when it started spreading on military transport ships and when adults caught it, it made their balls swell up real big.

Dennis the Menace, 2/5/22

Mr. Wilson’s trademarked single bead of sweat has never been so poignant. He wants to say “ass” so badly — so badly he feels like he might explode — yet something beyond his control prevents him! What kind of suffocating universe does he live in, where the release of even the mildest of curse words is forbidden to him?

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Gasoline Alley, 2/1/22

Folks, for a long time I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that there’s a movie coming out called Gasoline Alley. As near as I can tell, it has literally zero connection to the comic strip, as its Wikipedia entry informs me its tagline is “Justice Gets Dirty” and it stars Bruce Willis as “Freeman,” Luke Wilson “Vargas,” and “Devon Sawa” as “Jimmy Jayne,” none of that tracking to our beloved comic strip, which is about [thinks long and hard about what you might describe Gasoline Alley, the comic strip, as being “about”] scrapbooking. Anyhoo, I don’t have the energy to do any research on copyright law, but since Gasoline Alley is 103 years old, I’m going to guess that the title, at least, is now in the public domain, and so all the strip can do in revenge for a movie with the lesser-known Wilson brother and “Devon Sawa” in it stealing its name is put out a long, rambling shaggy dog plot involving these two Hollywood producers that will ultimately go absolutely nowhere.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/1/22

I honestly couldn’t tell you what Mother Goose and Grimm is “about” either, but up until today I would’ve been very sure that what it wasn’t about was the seething, unrequited lust its elderly bird-person characters had for one another. You learn something new every day, in the funny pages!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/1/22

One of the great mysteries of Snuffy Smith: how old is Snuffy Smith, exactly? On the one hand, he and Loweezy are young enough to have an infant son; on the other, as we learned today, Snuffy is entirely toothless. I guess it’s possible that, at some point when Snuffy was in his late 20s or early 30s, Doc Pritchart found a rotten tooth or two and decided just to pull them all to “get ahead of the game.”

Dennis the Menace, 2/1/22

“We live in a degraded, fallen world, Mr. Wilson! Don’t bother getting dressed up for it, they’re just going to put you on TikTok and then do a cancel culture on ya.”