Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 10/10/24

Not to brag, but I’ve eaten some tamales in my day, ranging from pretty good to great. For those not “in the know,” a tamale is made up corn meal, often stuffed with cheese or meat or the like, steamed inside a corn husk, and while it’s almost always served inside the husk, you have to unpeel it to get to the actual delicious tamale. I usually eat one with a fork, but you can partially unpeel the husk and eat it by hand, sort of like a banana, or you can just bite right into the husk like Gerald Ford did, which would be gross and unpleasant and will make you look stupid. If you completely take it out of the husk and try to hold it in your hand like Joey and Dennis are doing here, it will just crumble apart, so I … assume they’re doing the “bite through the husk” thing? Because it doesn’t look like they’re peeling back the husk? And Joey doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe the bad mouth sensation that’s resulting, so he’s just calling it “hot,” in the way that some languages only have three color words and call anything that’s not black or white “red”? I dunno, I’m just spitballing here. What the heck are they actually holding, do you think? Are they churros? Do the Dennis the Menace artists not know the difference between tamales and churros?

Shoe, 10/10/24

Yes, we all like to make fun of old people for eating early. By “we all” I mean, like, society, mind you: I myself embraced the “lunch at 11, dinner at 5:15” lifestyle for workdays in my mid 40s and am never going back. But still, yes, “Haha, old people and their early dinnertimes, amiright?” is a joke that reliably elicits a chuckle. Unfortunately, by its nature it invites ridicule of those older than the chuckler, and the median age of a newspaper comics reader is distressingly high, which means you get punchlines like this. “Haha, centenarians and their early dinnertimes, amiright?” is no doubt something literally hundreds of healthy, active 70-year-olds are saying to themselves before chuckling and turning to the sports page.

Post Content

Judge Parker, 10/6/24

You might recall my earlier irritation that both Sophie and Neddy were involved in family romance drama structurally similar enough that I thought maybe they were falling in with the same dramatic family? Well, it turns out not, but after Sophie experienced some family drama and rejected her initial suitor for his hunkier (?) older brother, we’re now entering a scenario where Neddy, attempting to repair her fiance’s family drama, is discovering that Things Are Not All They Seem, and also that said fiance’s older (?) brother is also hunkier (??). More on this story as events warrant! (So not very soon, honestly.)

Shoe, 10/6/24

You know, you’d think that after spending literally 20 years complaining about how the comic strip Shoe has more or less forgotten that all its characters are birds, I would’ve pretty much mentally explored all aspects of the Shoeniverse’s whole bird-person deal. But this strip made me realize that until today I had never contemplated an extremely key question: Are the Shoe bird-people characters the size of people, or the size of birds? Because a spider big enough to seem menacing to a bird is still scary, I guess, but significantly less scary than a spider big enough to menace a person (or a person-sized bird).

The Phantom, 10/6/24

Speaking of lore you’ve never thought much about, do you think of superheroes as having exactly one costume that they wear all the time (or at least all the time when they aren’t in their secret identity), or multiple instances of the costume, like a closet full of them, so they can clean them and reduce wear and tear? Today’s revelation that the Skull Cave has a “Costume Chamber” doesn’t explicitly answer this question, but it does imply that in an “only one costume” scenario, each Phantom begins his tenure by ritually stripping the outfit off the corpse of his predecessor, which honestly I wouldn’t put past them.

Post Content

Shoe, 9/27/24

I guess if all you want to get out of the daily comics is to briefly linger on each little joke and then move on to the next one, you might be satisfied with today’s Shoe, where they spin up “disagree with” as a metaphor for indigestion into a matter of geopolitical importance. But me? The Comics Curmudgeon? The guy who’s blogged about comic strips for decades? I hopefully do not have to explain that I am the kind of person who wants more than that, and after lingering on this joke slightly longer than most would, I have decided I do not care for it. I think it’s the “not only” at the beginning of the first word balloon, which implies that that the second half of this sentence is going to be something new, rather than just an extension of the metaphor. Plus it invites you to contemplate how the peppers got there, suggesting the “ramming [X] down my throat” formulation that is one of the least pleasant phrases in political discourse. So, sorry, Shoe, I’m not on board today. Do better.

Blondie, 9/27/24

Easy for you to say, Dagwood: unlike your wife, who only puts on her formal clothes before a big date night with you, you go through the trouble of putting on your elaborate tuxedo in the morning, before leaving for the office, a place where you wear a tuxedo, for some reason! I guess making your carpool wait for you is preferable to making your spouse wait for you, in terms of keeping the marital peace.