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Sadly for Dennis, this guy actually works in safety engineering

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Dennis the Menace, 4/7/23

Last month I speculated on Henry Mitchell’s career status, based on my half-memory that he might be an engineer, and readers pointed me in some intriguing directions. In the 1950s/60s TV show, Henry works for Trask Engineering; on the fan-maintained Dennis the Menace wiki, we’re told that he’s a “a workaday aerospace engineer,” whereas on actual Wikipedia it says he’s “a workaday teacher at Dennis’s school,” which is clearly wrong (also I am desperate to understand why “workaday” appears in both those descriptions but I think I need to apply for a research grant so I can fully analyze the situation). Anyway, I’m going to take the preponderance of evidence here and accept that he’s an engineer, which makes Dennis turning to this total stranger for engineering advice all the more menacing, though based on Henry’s sidelong glance I assume these two are coworkers and he’s basically saying “See? I told you what a moron he is.”

Hi and Lois, 4/6/23

When I was in high school, our debate team hosted a tournament one year, and I was in charge of getting the trophies, and the time spent tracking down a trophy store and picking out the design and getting the orders in really rearranged the way I think about accolades like this. You can just buy a trophy or a medal that says anything you want! They don’t necessarily mean anything! Still, I appreciate today’s Hi and Lois as a corrective to this attitude, as it shows that if you get into buying and handing out trophies as a bit, your loved ones will get sick of your shit almost immediately.

Crock, 4/6/23

OK, fine, usually just slipping “[LATEST TECH FAD]” into a sentence at random and claiming it’s a punchline is something that sends me spinning into a rage, but this one somehow loops around all the way into being funny again. Like I’m laughing just imagining some callow teens that exist entirely in a boomer’s imagination brought to the brink of starvation and sullenly gnawing on their phones. “I love phone,” the teens say, refusing to make direct eye contact with adults in a forthright and masculine way. “Phone good.”

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Young people annoy their elders

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Gasoline Alley, 4/6/23

Oh, hey, Ida Knoe the evil talking doll who can travel through time, wild that you’re only now worried about the consequences of disrupting the spacetime continuum! Maybe you should’ve thought of this before you time travelled with a bunch of children, who are notorious for being idiots. I’m talking about all children, not these ones in particular, and maybe “idiot” is a bit harsh but if you’re looking for someone with both the mental acuity to understand what will and what won’t change the course of history and the self-control to act on that understanding, a bunch of seven-year-olds is not your best bet.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/23

One of the funnier possibilities in this storyline is that Mud Mountain Murphy and Dr. Mirakle are entirely sincere and have just picked the worse possible venue for a long-established artist to unveil an entirely new repetoire/personality. Like, I don’t mean to talk smack about the great pastime of going on cruises, but I think the cruise lifestyle largely caters to people who want a certain nonthreatening consistency out of a vacation, and if you try to “mix things up” you will end up with patrons like Yvonne in panel three, literally praying to hear just one song she already knows the words to, just one.

Dennis the Menace, 4/6/23

Look, kid, the swinging can’t start until you go to bed already

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Don’t worry, Ed, therapists rarely euthanize their patients

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Mary Worth, 4/5/23

Ah ha, we’ve finally arrived at the big dramatic twist in this storyline: Estelle has to convince Dr. Ed to go to therapy! I look forward to the next several weeks in which she gently overcomes his emotional reserves and lets him know that admitting he needs help isn’t a sign of weakn–oh, wait, what’s that? He said he’d be into it literally the first time she mentioned it? Ah. Well. I guess I look forward to the next several weeks in which he tries to figure out if Estelle’s therapist takes his insurance.

Family Circus, 4/5/23

Look, Dolly, I get that your whole job is saying the darnedest things, and there are only so many darnedest things available to say in the relatively limited space of a Family Circus caption, but I feel it’s very important that you not imply some kind of appliance vore fetish scenario here, because this panel will get posted in some web forums that none of us will be comfortable with.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/5/23

I think there’s something of a divide between people who say “fucking” to mean any kind of sex stuff generally, and people who say it to mean specifically p-in-v or -a intercourse. We know Eddie’s had a longtime romantic relationship with a mermaid, and today I guess we’re learning that this relationship’s sexual component has fallen into definition one but not definition two above — at least so far. I mean, that’s what this strip’s about, right? The prospect of penetrative sex with a mermaid? It’s not a strip with another joke that also slyly makes reference to “how exactly would it work for a guy to stick his dick in a mermaid?” Like that’s pretty explicitly what this one’s about?