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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Mary Worth, 8/19/11

Gruesome mob-related killing, everyone! That … that’s why Gina can’t truly love? Because of the mob? Not because of some kind of freak skateboard accident or anything. Mobsters! This is … I gotta say, it’s pretty disappointing. I admit that for most of my life if you had said to me “gruesome mob killing in Mary Worth!” I’d have been intrigued, but the strip already did a drive-by killing last year, and frankly it needs to up its weirdness quotient if it intends to keep my attention. Are you sure there wasn’t any synchronized skateboarding involved in this gruesome mob killing, Gina?

Archie, 8/19/11

I’ve always kind of enjoyed the comics convention whereby flying droplets of sweat represent a character’s surprise/bafflement/disbelief (at least in non-Cathy contexts). The fact that Betty is completely out of our field of vision, leaving only her three sweatballs to fly into the frame in the final panel to indicate her bemusement, charms me all the more.

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Gil Thorp, 8/18/11

So, just as Kenny helped Molly with her golf swing by filming her so she could see the problems with her technique, so too will he help his mother by showing her detailed footage of her drunken swoons. I like it! Because so far, Kenny’s mom’s alcohol problem has been strictly amateur hour. “See, mom, look at this … you made it all the way to the couch before you passed out, and you even set the wine glass down on the end table before you lost consciousness. If you had fallen just a few steps earlier, you could have spent the night on the carpet surrounded by broken glass; pick a red instead of a white, and you’d even have a permanent stain on the rug for which you’d have to come up with an embarrassingly transparent excuse. And here, in this video, you’re semi-conscious and clinging to the toilet bowl as you puke up all that merlot. If you had some guts, you’d have have just konked out the bathroom floor on your back, upping your chances of choking on your own sick. Are you committed to this drunken lifestyle or not?”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/11

Oh my God, I really thought at this little soliloquy, in which over the course of the last few days Les has described the good times he had in this park, like when he took summer strolls with Lisa, but also the bad times, like when Lisa told him she was date-rape-pregnant, or when she found some cancerous lumps, couldn’t get more insulting to Cayla, but then … this happened, holy crap. Les’s smug eyebrow-waggle is definitely the best part, if by “best” you mean “most urgently demanding a punch in the face.”

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Apartment 3-G, 8/17/11

“That’s just her style, Paul. Not liking you! Not liking people is Margo’s style.”

Beetle Bailey, 8/17/11

Fans of “Sexy Miss Buxley Wednesday” are no doubt disappointed to find this week that it’s overlapped with “The depressing moment when the veil is torn away and we can see the full-on awful extent of General Halftrack’s alcoholism and self-loathing, a moment that can happen any day of the week without warning.”

B.C., 8/17/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because the turtle’s shell is covered with a toxic chemical that will eventually seep into his bloodstream and kill him!

Mark Trail, 8/17/11

OK, so we want to focus on Kelly’s eyes, so we can get a sense of the sexy plotting going on in her mind … closer … closer … AUGGGGH TOO CLOSE ABORT ABORT ABORT