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Dennis the Menace, 4/7/14

OK, so I get that if you came up with a joke about “what if the Venus de Milo wanted to do some texting, but she couldn’t? eh? eh? because she hasn’t got any arms? eh?” and you had a nationally syndicated comic panel where your jokes could go, this would be hard to resist. That said, there’s a lot of setup to this joke that has to be glossed over, with the most important aspect being that the Venus de Milo is in the Louvre, which means that the Mitchells, who have never been seen before doing anything more exotic than driving to tourist traps in their station wagon, have packed up Dennis and taken him to France. I feel like we were deprived a number of potential gags of various menacing levels here — Dennis sullenly resists Margaret’s attempt to teach him even a rudimentary amount of French, Dennis announces at the TSA checkpoint that he’s packed something dangerous and/or alive in his suitcase, Dennis loudly says “But dad, he doesn’t look like a frog at all!” in front of a Frenchman Henry is trying to impress, etc. Honestly, the fact that they’re standing in front of a topless statue means that a Dennis-makes-reference-to-human-sexuality-and-everyone-is-uncomfortable is a much more likely and entertaining scenario here than some dumb texting joke.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/7/14

So it appears that, while concubinage was common in early Norse society, Vikings didn’t really practice polygamy except at the very top of the social pyramid, and certainly Hagar, the leader of a smallish and incompetent war band, doesn’t qualify. Nevertheless, this strip is an interesting look at how attitudes might differ in a culture where marriages are thought of not primarily as a romantic attachment between two people but as a basic unit of economic production.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/7/14

Oh, it looks like Jess is going to take another stab at making a movie about her dad, John Darling! She has to refer to him as “my dad, John Darling” whenever she brings him up, because she only brings him up every year or so. Anyway, today she acknowledges that all human endeavor is basically a race against the final destruction of our planet, a race that can seem easy to lose when you’re smothered under a heavy blanket of depressive torpor.

Better Half, 4/7/14

At last, Stanley has found a phone sex line that caters to his fairly specific needs.

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Momma, 4/6/14

Usually Momma focuses on Momma as an overbearing, controlling monster who insists of being negative about every aspect of her children’s’ lives, and to my mind, the strip doesn’t spend enough time exploring another aspect of her personality: her bottomless greed. She’s often distressed that Francis doesn’t have a good job, or (because of her strict adherence to traditional gender roles) that MaryLou’s suitors don’t have good jobs, and this is generally presented as being an aspect of the whole controlling-her-children’s-lives thing. But as this dream sequence reveals, Momma also just straight up wants money, and since she’s old and unemployable and presumably living on some combination of Social Security and her late husband’s meager pension, her only hope of accessing money comes from her children. I mean, look at this! She’s literally sitting in a boat full of money with dollar signs floating over her head sailing towards what appears to be a gold-plated mansion and she’s never been happier in her life. It’s like she’s in a rap video, for pete’s sake.

Crock, 4/6/14

None of the Crock characters have anything resembling psychological depth, and Captain Preppie, whose whole personality can be summed up as “Handsome, cartoonishly narcissistic ladies’ man”, is shallower than most. Still, today’s strip is intriguing, exploring what happens to someone like this forced to live for years in an isolated desert fortress. The throwaway panels demonstrate his slide from garden-variety egotism to madness, as his love for his own handsome mug summons up eerie visions of dozens of identical Preppie-faces, grown in petri dishes in some awful lab somewhere. Only marginally less disturbing is the main action, in which the crazed Captain obsessively combs the sand around the fort for imperfections, ranting about “clutter,” while his soldiers look on.

Spider-Man, 4/6/14

Awww, looks like J.J.J. has decided that Spider-Man is too pathetic to kill! This won’t be the lamest victory Spidey has ever scored, but it’s definitely in the top decile for lameness.

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Mark Trail, 4/5/14

Kinda sad Mark is ENDING THIS today, though it’s hard to see how anything could have topped the first panel of today’s strip, as Mark forcibly tackles Marlin into the shallow waters where sea turtles will now be able to frolic without fear of having their eggs poached. I certainly hope that the copter-borne police got a good look at that squirming mass of bejeaned legs, protruding from the lake like some kind of denim-clad sea anemone.

Judge Parker, 4/5/14

At first glance, this seems like a touching conversation between the fathers of two young people who are about to get married — until you find out that what they’ve been talking about over the course of this week’s strips is that April’s dad wronged some Romanian arms dealers, who are even now bearing down on this heavily armed jungle compound in a helicopter gunship, determined to kill everyone. Alan wants to know even more, though! What sort of ordinance do their enemies carry? How many civil wars has April’s dad helped perpetuate through his arms-dealing business, and how profitable has that been over the years? Has the ability to manufacture powerful weapons relatively cheaply ended the nation-state’s monopoly on violence forever?

B.C., 4/5/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Secret Service agents have repeatedly gotten in trouble for paying for sex over the past few years! This is the sort of thing that angry parents would be writing into papers about demanding to know “How am I supposed to explain this to my children?” if anyone young enough to have young children still got a newspaper delivered at home. Anyway, in related news, Secret Service agents are very much not in the military.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/5/14

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is about how life is an endless series of bland, mind-numbing experiences that we undertake to stave off death, which honestly makes me nostalgic for the jokes about piano-fucking.