Comment of the Week

Maybe it's just that the standards of menace have been so raised by the likes of Calvin and Hobbes or Bart Simpson but I can't remember ever seeing Dennis engage in behavior that would make him a poor children's party guest. He wears a tiny suit to church for goodness sake! He's really just a menace because the strip is called Dennis the Menace but who told the inhabitants of the strip that? Who is going around badmouthing this precocious kid who at worst doesn't always live up to 1950s standards of etiquette? I ask but we all already know it's Mr. Wilson, Mr. Wilson is making the neighbor kid a social pariah out of a sort of misplaced dissatisfaction and inadequacy that his pension wasn't enough to settle him in a gated community with no children.

BananaSam

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Six Chix, 11/9/18

Normally, as you know, I do not come to praise the art in Six Chix. But I actually sort of like the depiction of the facial expression on the right here? Like it’s not what you’d call … technically skilled but I do think the crinkly smile captures the emotion that they’re trying to sell us. “Ha ha, yeah, I do sometimes do that! Ya gotta love life’s little foibles!”

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/18

Actually, I think the pedant Hagar is hitting on/scamming out of liquor is a better example of the same thing. I love how he’s chinless in a way that if drawn realistically would be grotesque but here is kinda cute, and the way you draw a crooked frown on him is just by giving him a crooked upper lip dangling over the space where his lower jaw should be.

Spider-Man, 11/9/18

There’s a lot going on here, sartorially. Like, I know it’s kind of a trope for this strip by this point, but how comfortable can Peter’s spider-suit (the proportional suit … of a spider) really be? Would he really leave it on while lounging casually around the house, making phone calls? And then there’s MJ, who, if I’m following the sequence here correctly, was sound asleep in her hotel room in her sexy underwear, butt protruding gently towards the TV, when Peter called. But let’s not let this distract us from the important thing, which is that Peter called MJ to fess up that he accidentally destroyed the theater/their livelihood, and then she tells him she heard about it “collapsing” without mentioning his involvement, so he immediately changes the subject.

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Family Circus, 11/8/18

Ha ha, I love how smug that frog looks. “That’s right, buddy, you better back the heck off. There’s no way to be sure about my royal status. Unless you want to kiss me? No? You don’t want to kiss me? Guess I’ll be on my way, then. See ya, chumps!”

Gil Thorp, 11/8/18

Oh wow, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the Gil Thorp football season, huh? I guess it’s because it’s been super boring, with the month since we learned that Tiki is often late for mysterious sister-related reasons mostly taken up by two of Tiki’s less dim teammates slowly piecing together that Tiki seems unfamiliar with the major landmarks around his supposed residence and may not live in Milford at all. Anyway, today the Gil Thorp creative team apparently noticed we’re more than a week into November and we need to start wrapping this up, because suddenly we got a lot of exciting info, maybe implying that Tiki isn’t really who he says at all! An imposter! A changeling! A 32-year-old investigative reporter who’s writing a longform piece on America’s most mediocre high school football programs! The possibilities are endless and really quite cinematic, which makes it too bad that the other football season plot, the one about the irritating cineaste punter, is going nowhere just as fast.

Judge Parker, 11/18/18

Oh, wow, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker, huh? Well, here’s what’s going on in Judge Parker: Judge Parker Senior is going to jail, finally.

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Mary Worth, 11/7/18

Oh, actually, I guess this week isn’t going to be about the special care you need to take when adopting a traumatized dog. Nope, it’s just an elaborate metaphor, where Greta the bow-tie wearing dog is a stand-in for the bow-tie wearing Saul, who was shutting out the good along with the bad mere hours ago. Probably Greta will come around just as quickly, with help from a little roast chicken skin! Did Mary consider just luring Saul out of his apartment and/or emotional shell with some roast chicken skin? Might’ve saved everyone a lot of time.

Dick Tracy, 11/7/18

Remember when Dick Tracy was about truly horrific and violent deaths? Well, it’s about people faxing documents to other people now. Funny how things work out in this world!