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Dennis the Menace, 2/10/17

I’m not going to claim that making dick jokes about Mary Worth is like digging ditches or anything, but writing this blog does take a certain psychic toll on me! For instance, I bet that for your job today you didn’t have to sort through the Google Image Search results for “Angry Hitler” to find the one that matched best:

Anyway, Mr. Wilson sure is “hot under the collar,” ha ha ha! By which we mean that the very presence of his innocent neighbor tyke is driving him into a state of blackout rage that, while it may not result in an immediate crippling stroke, is probably wearing years off his remaining life. But since he’s incapable of finding relaxed enjoyment in his own home, death will no doubt come as a blessing.

Shoe, 2/10/17

Shoe is a strip that started out being about a bunch of talking anthropomorphic birds to be “funny,” I guess, but has long sense lost any sense of its birdness to the extent that it makes bird-jokes unrelated to its bird-characters. Thus, it actually comes as sort of a relief to me that there’s enough internal logic still at play to make the town mortician a buzzard, even if the implication is that Mort has taken on the job of arranging the funerals of his fellow citizens primarily so he can feast on their corpses.

Speaking of corpses, isn’t Loon employed by the local newspaper? I guess he figures he should get out of the media game while he still can and get in on the one industry that will never, ever lose its market.

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Mary Worth, 2/9/17

Oh, hey, by the way, Iris has been dumping Zak in slow motion this whole week, and he still hasn’t realized it’s happening! I certainly hope this draws out as long as possible:

“We had some great times together, and I don’t regret any of it!”

“Neither do I!”

“I realize, though, we live very different lives…”

“We sure do! They say variety’s the spice of life!”

“It’s just … I think we maybe should see other people.”

“Ha ha! I’m seeing another person right now! He’s right behind you! Hi mister, I see you!”

Blondie, 2/9/17

Dagwood immediately effacing his identity out of self-loathing and shame over his own wholly merited reputation for workplace incompetence is probably the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do in this strip, and I’ve seen him breakdance with joy because he didn’t have to go eat at someone else’s house.

Slylock Fox, 2/9/17

The deranged, half-starved castaway in the drawing on the left wants to eat the bird. In the drawing on the right, he wants to make love to it.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/8/17

My friend Ruth Graham recently wrote a fascinating story about the fact that huge swaths of Americans reached adulthood thinking that Eli Whitney was black. She goes into some of the reasons why. For one thing, the cotton gin helped make cotton a more lucrative crop, which increased demand for slave labor in the American south, and so it’s an invention often discussed in schools during Black History Month, around the same time that other actual black inventors are also introduced. The irony that a black person might’ve set the chain of events that ramped up cotton cultivation in motion seems to make the idea hard to resist (in many versions of the story, this alternate history black Eli Whitney gets screwed out of the profits from his invention, natch). I think this Dennis the Menace illustrates the process by which these kinds of mistakes can be made, since a lot of the way we’re taught history in elementary and high school involves rote memorization of isolated bits of data, leaving our minds free to fill in the substantial blanks around them.

In other news, one of Dennis’s neighbors is a big drunk! But, you know, not a day drunk. That’s how you know he’s not talking about Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson’s retired and can drink whenever he wants!

Hi and Lois, 2/8/17

It’s Trixie’s thought balloon that really makes clear the profound strangeness here: Lois, mother of a teenager and thus presumably on at least the verge of middle age, is expected in this suburban gender-normative milieu to worry about wrinkles, so we accept her use of “4 Ever Young” face cream without much thought. But Trixie’s burning desire to advance past infancy — a desire that we know can never be fulfilled — really hammers home the Flagstons’ nightmarish endless-now existence. Just as Trixie eagerly anticipates milestones she’ll never reach — walking, speech, autonomy — so too does Lois experience eternal youth that she cannot enjoy, instead living in constant terror of the crow’s feet that never quite appear at the corners of her eyes.