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Dennis the Menace, 3/7/23

You don’t spend [mumblety mubelty] years as The Comics Curmudgeon without endless little bits of comics trivia ending up jumbled up in your brain, to the extent that you don’t even know which are real and which your brain spawned on its own accord. Like, for instance, my first thought on reading this was, “Wait, isn’t Henry supposed to be an engineer of some kind? Or an architect? I’m pretty sure we’ve seen a drafting board in his office.” Maybe it’s true! Maybe one of my smart commenters will find the link to the relevant panel that I cannot. But even if it is, clearly such established continuity is less important than taking the opportunity to have Dennis menace his father’s masculinity vis-à-vis his class status.

Gasoline Alley, 3/7/23

Ida Noe is a creepy talking doll who is not a longtime aspect of Gasoline Alley continuity, but rather has just been around for a few months, which is just a blink on the geological timescale on which we measure developments in Gasoline Alley. Still, despite her shockingly recent introduction, hardcore Gasoliney Alley residents apparently need to be reminded of what her whole deal is, which is why she’s delivering the instant classic line “Ida Noe’s my name! Time travel is my game!” Last time Ida Noe used her powers of time travel, she brought our gang to Santa’s beach vacation, which I … guess is time travel? Of a sort? Anyway, maybe this time around she’ll take the kids to the future, when Walt has woken up from his nap.

Gil Thorp, 3/7/23

“But most importantly, no one got hurt. Which is definitely a thing that could’ve happened, when you have a bunch of teenagers competing to see who can lift more weight, showing off in front of a hooting audience of their peers! Ha ha, we really dodged a bullet there.”

Hi and Lois, 3/7/23

Good lord, these two women look exhausted. Sorry maintaining the basics of socially acceptable politeness while having a vaguely unpleasant interaction is so trying, ladies, but that’s the price of civilization!!!

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Mary Worth, 3/6/23

I have been a Star Trek dork since I was a wee lad in the early ’80s, and one of great joys of having lived as long as I have is that I have now lived through multiple instances of whoever the Star Trek IP rights holder was at the time saying “Oh, remember Star Trek? The thing you thought we were never going to make any more of? Well, guess what: we’ve decided to make more of it. Enjoy!” Anyway, the current set of shows, which I will watch every episode of because I’m a huge slut for Star Trek, are something of mixed bag, just like every other iteration of the franchise has been, but I have to say that my biggest gripe about them is that they follow the modern-day arc-driven 10-to-12 episode season format, which basically means every episode is almost entirely about the overall season plot. This means that there’s no room for episodes like “Kirk and Spock go undercover on Planet Al Capone” or “Dr. Crusher hooks up with a ghost” or “The DS9 gang challenges some Vulcans to a baseball game,” which were never anybody’s idea of the “best” episodes at the time but which anyone who was watching then looks back on with great fondness.

Anyway, this all has a lot to do with the shifting economics of television (and I’m also pleased to say that Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks manage to do classic standalone episodes to a certain extent), but weirdly I feel like a similar shift has happened to another franchise that I will never stop being a fan of no matter what, which is to say Mary Worth, despite the fact that nothing about the structure of the soap opera comic strip has changed in years. But we’ve gotten so used to the storylines all being about core-cast-adjacent characters (mostly Wilbur and women who for reasons nobody can explain have sex with Wilbur, let’s be honest here) that we forget that a lot of our most beloved plots used to be about one-off grandstanding oddball characters who would come and go, people with sibling inheritance problems and shopping addictions and ill-advised flirtations with erotic art collectors and such. So I personally would be pretty psyched if this current storyline was less “What’s up with Wilbur’s ex’s love life” and more “How can this uncle/nephew veteranarian team overcome unfair Yelp reviews?”

Dennis the Menace, 3/6/23

OK, I’ll admit it: it’s pretty menacing to make a big mess when you have guests over and then immediately say “Clean up my mess? That mess happened in the past, Gina. The past! I’m moving forward, not backwards! Why are you dwelling on this?”

Shoe, 3/6/23

Now that marijuana is legal-ish in most of the U.S., even the core Shoe demographic is ready for jokes about it! That doesn’t mean that they would recognize the names of more than one famous person who enjoys using cannabis recreationally, however.

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Mary Worth, 3/5/23

Ah, it looks like Estelle is finally coming to the conclusion that it’s not that she has bad taste in men, exactly, it’s just that she can’t afford to make any one man her be-all and end-all. Looks like she’s going to explore ethical non-monogamy and rely on each of her suitors for what they do best: Ed, when she wants to be with someone who’s handsome and charismatic and a good kisser; Wilbur, when she wants someone who’s available at all times because he doesn’t have much of a social life or even a real job; and Arthur, for … phone sex? As a skilled romance-scam artist targeting the elderly over the phone, Arthur was good as phone sex, probably?

Gasoline Alley, 3/5/23

As America’s last living veteran of World War I, Walt could probably give Gertie a pretty good explanation of what hyperinflation is like, since he was actually around for the last serious bout of it in the Western world. Unfortunately, Gertie made the mistake of saying “shell shock” in the final panel, so she’s going to be dealing with his PTSD all afternoon instead.

Marvin, 3/5/23

What would Jeff’s prize have been if he had won this staring contest? That Bitsy would agree to pee in the house? I know the Millers are trapped in a unending hell of poop and piss, but I’m beginning to suspect it might be at least a little their fault.