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Dennis the Menace, 7/23/24

I’m on the record as saying that “Ha ha, Dennis’s mom can’t cook” is one of my least favorite Dennis the Menace running bits, but honestly this is a pretty good take on it. The fact that Dennis is drooling is what makes it for me, like he’s just completely lost control of himself because he’s experiencing taste pleasures beyond anything he imagined possible. He’s not, of course, but leaning into the bit just makes the performative cruelty extra menacing.

Hi and Lois, 7/23/24

I love how everyone is pleased with this arrangement except for Chip, who looks gobsmacked. He’s a romantic, kind of! Maybe he’d like to see the tender performances from [INSERT THE EXTREMELY ON-THE-NOSE NAMES OF UP-AND-COMING YOUNG ACTORS IN THE WALKER-BROWNEIVERSE HERE, LIKE, I DUNNO, “HUNK HANDSOME” AND “PRISCILLA PRETTY”] in Love Saga instead of the violent, puerile CGI slop of Missile Extreme, you ever think about that???

Blondie, 7/23/24

“Food-FOMO”? The actual abbreviation is clearly the much funnier “FOMOOF,” you clod, not that I expect anything better from a journalistic outfit that thinks a question mark with a hamburger as the little dot is somehow an appropriate graphic for this non-story. You make me sick.

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Dustin, 7/22/24

To me, this feels very much like a strip that was originally going to do some kind of wordplay on the polysemic nature of “alarmed” — “it was alarmed” … “the door was alarmed?” … “no, [something funnier] was alarmed” — but then gave up on figuring out what [something funnier] might be and just did a “quiet quitting” joke instead with out even going back and reworking the dialogue that led up to it. Frankly, I kind of enjoy the idea that the narrative voice for Dustin (the comic strip) has boundless contempt for Dustin (the character) and yet both do the most half-assed job possible in any situation.

Mary Worth, 7/22/24

Love the way Mary is holding her hands at the ready in the second panel. She’s prepared to clap if these two manage to actually do a good job with this song, but she hasn’t been fully convinced yet.

Suburban Fairy Tales, 7/22/24

Don’t worry, Little Pig #2! Hay fever is the layperson’s term for allergy-induced rhinitis, and it is not contagious. I guess this sort of ignorance of the respiratory system explains why you built a feeble house made of out of sticks despite your primary predator using his powerful lungs as a hunting mechanism.

[HA HA WHOOPS I MISREAD THIS BECAUSE MY BRAIN WAS ALREADY WRITING THIS JOKE AS I WAS PROCESSING THE SENTENCE, SORRY EVERYBODY I AM ASHAMED]

Gil Thorp, 7/22/24

I think we can agree that doctors and cops are, if not jocks, then at least jock-adjacent, which it was why it was groundbreaking when characters from Rex Morgan, M.D. and Dick Tracy did the nerdiest thing possible (go to a comics convention). But now, with this wacky Gil Thorp summer storyline, we’re going to see pure unadulterated jock-nerd convergence. God help us all!

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/24

One of the many smarter-than-me commenters on this site pointed out that it’s actually pretty grim that Hagar and Eddie are the only recurring characters in Hagar’s war band. One assumes that the others are all killed off and replaced over time — sometimes one by one, and sometimes all at once in the disastrous encounters that presumably lead to the occasional desert island strips. Anyway, today’s strip is a good reminder that whenever your new boss tells you that their workplace is “like a big family,” you are definitely walking into the most dysfunctional company you’ve ever seen, but at least these days it’s usually not going to literally kill you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/21/24

A combination of neoliberal ideology and deep-rooted Calvinism has made the modern United States a place uniquely obsessed with constant productivity. In such environments, only “holy fools” — like, say, the weirdly ossified early 20th century fake hillbilly stereotypes in a syndicated legacy newspaper strip — are free to proclaim that maybe laziness is good, actually, and getting things done isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/24

Sorry to find two funny things in a strip about an abusive father who beat his son so badly he needed surgery, but two very funny things in this strip are (a) Buck being completely flummoxed as to why two best friends with a love of old-timey-style comedy, one of whom is tall and thin and the other short and round, would refer to themselves as “Shorty and the Beanpole,” and (b) Rex being like “We all need to do our part. My part is fixing up the broken meat; minds and feelings are completely foreign to me and frankly somebody else’s problem.”