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Dennis the Menace, 10/27/24

The Sunday Dennis the Menace strips always come with a title in the first panel, and usually it offers little pun or light wordplay, but today it’s just … “Dracula”? Dracula, the name of the vampire Dennis wants to be for Halloween. Or at least it is for the first few panels, after which he kind of loses interest. I guess he does pivot to wanting to be a boss … the vampire who sucks the blood out of the working class! Ha ha, just kidding, Dennis’s mother doesn’t even participate in the wage economy. He just wants to tell her what to do, because he’s kind of an asshole, but it’s not a class struggle thing, honestly more primal and Freudian. Hmm, maybe the vampire metaphor could work after all. I’m going to workshop this and get back to you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/24

I like the idea that Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished that creating unique outfits that would only serve as a costume would be a profligate waste of resources, so on Halloween “Hallerween” the inhabitants simply wear each other’s clothes to celebrate the spooky season. Anyway, I’m not sure if Snuffy is using “borrowed” euphemistically here; if he isn’t, it probably means Granny Creeps is walking around right now in Snuffy’s comically tiny overalls, and if it is, her stripped body is lying face down in a creek somewhere nearby, which is slightly but measurably worse.

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Blondie, 10/26/24

Look, clearly I’m not as young as I was when I launched this blog back in 2004, and if I had a chance to tell that 29-year-old what what aging would be like, I would say that it really fucks with your sense of time: things that you think of as happening just the other day may, in fact, have happened literally years ago. But writing about the legacy comics definitely helps “keep you young,” not in the sense that comics are a medium for children or anything, but rather in the sense that the legacy strips are all churned out by old guys, so you get a lot of cautionary examples of how not to be a clueless old guy. For instance, no matter how novel something seems to me, I would do a little research about it before committing to print the declaration that it constitutes a “hot craze.” Did you know that Starbucks has been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2003? That they are, in fact, even older than this blog? I’m just saying. Making wry commentary about Mary Worth may have once been a hot craze, but it is no longer, and neither, I regret to inform both Elmo and Dagwood, is pumpkin spice.

Beetle Bailey, 10/26/24

I actually really like how happy all the officers are in the first panel. It would’ve been easy, given the joke, to make them sullen or angry that their team is losing, and expressing their rage in a nonstop stream of obscenities. But they’re havng a great time! They’re exuberant swearers! That changes the whole dynamic.

Hi and Lois, 10/26/24

OK, so earlier this week I made my occasional reference to the occasional colorist mistakes that you see in the comics, but this is definitely the funniest one yet. Just imagine some unfortunate, underpaid soul, possibly working in a country where baseball is not a well known pastime, squinting at Ditto’s hat and thinking, “So … ‘Sox’? That’s short for Red Sox, right? Great, I have this one covered.”

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Here it is! Your comment of the week!

“You know land lines are becoming archaic when even comic strip artists forget how you’re supposed to hold a handset when talking. Are Blondie and Dagwood trying to FaceTime each other?” –Tabby Lavalamp

And your funny runners up!

“What these stupid kids don’t know about autumn leaves could fill a book. Which really doesn’t matter, because apparently none of them has ever read one.” –BigTed

“We begin with our observers paying lip service to the notions that their subject is behind the times and requires reform. This is quickly met with reluctance and denial and insistence that its content is still good, even though many related enterprises have failed. Sentimentality and sluggish inertia then causes them to push that the art is still charming and the once-positive responses still hold. Leaving no allowance for anything new, be it fresh ideas, improvement, or openness to current feedback, they smugly decide to leave things just as they are and do nothing to solve their obviously apparent problems, determined to instead wallow in fruitless nostalgia. Hmm … are we really talking about a corkboard here?” –jroggs

“I sincerely hope that today’s Mary Worth is the beginning of a new storyline where every character has nightmares about Wilbur. Even the animals. Even Wilbur himself.” –Craig!

“No, Hi and Lois aren’t looking directly at us, the readers. They’re looking directly at you, Josh. This is their response to all the times you’ve called comic strips out for still having dogs living outside and whatnot. ‘It’s a time capsule. You should leave it as it is.’ They’ve become aware of you and don’t want you to interfere. Not that this should scare you — what should scare you is the fact that Wilbur’s also become aware of you, and the way you keep putting him down is turning him on.” –likeagrapefruit

“Cheers to Zits for having the courage to tell parents it’s okay for them to have a frank talk with their kids via text about what said kids should do when they’re horny! Jeers to Zits for forgetting that the only people still reading newspaper comics are retirees whose children are in their 40s, and who have never been given their grandchildren’s cell phone numbers, possibly to avoid this exact scenario.” –Briane Pagel

“Look, the joke in Crock wouldn’t work if the shovel was colored golden from panel one. On the other hand, it doesn’t work anyway. Hm.” –matt w

“I had to rack my brains to work out who ‘The Cueball’ and ‘The Stoner’ were, but you know what? The idea that Elon Musk would teach his shitty AIs to call Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson mean names is the most plausible thing in this story so far. If anything, these names aren’t cruel enough — the real Elon Musk literally tweeted that Bill Gates looks pregnant and made him lose an erection. Ian Mollusk’s robot should be saying things so libelous that the strip gets banned by English courts.” –Schroduck

“Dagwood’s insatiable appetite makes a lot more sense when you realize he’s trying to fill the void left by his professional and personal life.” –TheDiva

“Man, I don’t know if my heart can take any more of this wild, roller-coaster ‘handshake might hurt my finger a bit’ action right on top of the already pulse-pounding ‘friends reunite and everything turns out great’ drama in Rex Morgan. Let’s dial it down a little, people! It can’t be constant thrills, all the time!” –Chance

“Coach Martinez might lack Coach Thorp’s leadership skills or natural understanding of his players, but he compensates for this by inflating his neck like a tree frog.” –Ettorre

“Mary Worth is almost there in accidentally recreating the myth of Freyja.

✓ Husband absent.
✓ Frequent weeping.
✓ Can shape-shift into a falcon (see the 5/7/1972 strip, true believers!)
✓ Slept with four dwarves for a fancy necklace (see upcoming honeymoon storyline)
X Has a sled pulled by two cats (so close! Keep trying, Mary Worth.)” –Voshkod

“Pierre is staring straight ahead in wide-eyed terror. ‘Damn, she’s still talking about this crap! I can’t handle the pressure of trying to figure out the correct moment to weigh in with woof!’” –Weaselboy

“It looks like Mud’s album is called ‘Mud in Your Eye?’ Honestly, that’s great. No irony, that rules. I hope he has a whole discography of mud pun titles, like ‘Clear as Mud’ or ‘Happy as a Pig in Mud’ or his post-cancellation album, ‘Drag My Name Through the Mud.’” –Dan

“Yes, this will render them helpless … three at a time! Surely they will all wait patiently in line for food that their compatriots will, to a man, audibly opine is terrible, and none of them will simply walk around this undefended little hut to, like, the front door! Also, are we implying that Grossie lives in the hut? That the hut is her home? Where she’s cooking the meals? For an entire army? I just hope those guys on the tower understand that the enemy isn’t taking their diarrhea home with them, is all I’m saying.” –els

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