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Blondie and Dennis the Menace, 2/5/15

Characters in long-running comic strips exist in comic-book time, a fact that I’ve had fun with as recently as yesterday, so I certainly can’t fault the actual comics artists for playing around with it. I particularly enjoy the panels here that do purport to show earth-shaking changes — look, Blondie’s employed! Dagwood used to ride the bus, like a poor person! The Facebook logo in the first panel is rendered so lovingly that I suspect this is some of kind of cross-platform promotional deal going on.

At first I assumed that Dennis the Menace was playing the same sort of game here — look, Mr. Wilson is old in that picture, becuase he’s always been old! — but the line about “before you met me” really thew me. Dennis is young, guys. Like, he’s supposed to be seven, maybe eight, tops? Mr. Wilson is an old enough old man that he’d have been an old man seven years ago. Seven years is not very long. Dennis is younger than this blog. I’m old. I’m Mr. Wilson. Oh god, I’m so very, very old

Mark Trail, 2/5/15

Man, look how sad Mitchum and Justin look! They really weren’t prepared for the emotional journey they’re on right now. You know what they say: never go into business with anyone if you’d be real broken up when you eventually have to murder each other.

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Curtis, 2/4/15

This week’s Curtis has features Curtis’s dad going on and on about this collection of music “I grew up with” as performed by extremely non-specific “legendary” artists, who, we learn today, are not rappers. One assumes that these legendary artists are never named so that this plotline can be trotted out every few years while keeping Greg the same age, but the whole thing already seems on the edge of believability: with a couple of pre-teen kids and a wife not notably younger than him, it seems unrealistic to have Greg be much older than his mid-40s, which would mean he hit his musical stride right as hip-hop was starting to enter the musical mainstream. Ten years from now, it will be actively strange if he grew up not listening to rap, although who knows, maybe it’ll be just as strange if Curtis is listening to it.

Pluggers, 2/4/15

See, Curtis? Even Pluggers is admitting that most people in the plugger demographic in 2015 were filthy hippies in their youth. Just admit that Curtis’s dad likes old-school rap already.

Judge Parker, 2/4/15

Any chance that this angry fellow, who claimed earlier to have some pull with important politicians, might actually have pull with important politicians has just gone out the window as he used “the fed” to refer to some random non-Federal Reserve government agency. Sam, whose returns on capital vary between the staggering and the completely flabbergasting based on Fed decisions on interest rates and quantitative easing and such, is very much not impressed. It would be fun if this guy really were talking about the actual Fed, though. “We need the Fed working on this! Do you think fiat money can clear that road? Only a strong gold-based currency can restore our nation’s highways!”

Crankshaft, 2/4/15

In today’s fractured media landscape, there are still specialized audiences who aren’t being catered to — fans of watching angry, unsympathetic old men being sexually humiliated in public, for instance. One bold comic strip aims to meet this need.

Momma, 2/4/15

For a brief moment, Francis catches a glimpse of what it might be like to feel real human joy — and sees just enough to know that the experience is completely beyond him.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/3/15

You know what, you try coming up with a cute-but-not-too-cute joke-utterance to put into the mouth of a menacing-but-not-too-menacing little kid, day in and day out, for decades, OK??? It’s not easy! Sometimes you want to do something else. Sometimes you might want to put in a joke written by grownups, for grownups. Like that diet food, amiright? There’s fewer calories, but it costs more money! What’s up with that? Dennis’s exaggerated grimace at his dad’s comedic stylings is actually one of the more subtly menacing things he’s done lately.

Crock, 2/3/15

I’m used to thinking of Captain Preppie as having been rendered largely harmless by his own relentless self-absorption, but panel one completely upends that impression, rendering him as a wild-eyed predator, attempting (and, thankfully, failing) to recruit others into a band of sex maniacs.