Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 4/30/21

I spent way too long trying to parse Henry and Alice’s facial expressions and how they line up with Dennis’s tattletale claim to the bored and irritated cater-waiter. They both seem to be having a good time looking at art! Are they thinking, “Gosh, we didn’t come for the art but we are enjoying ourselves. The Municipal Art Museum audience development team really knows what it’s doing when it runs these free-to-the-public art-and-wine nights!” Or is it more, “Ha ha, this art is shit but we’re on wine glass number four and have gotten blotto on the dime of the Municipal Art Museum’s corporate sponsors. Can’t wait to drive home!”

Blondie, 4/30/21

One odd result of comic book time is that Dagwood is canonically a guy in his late 30s or early 40s who’s probably been in his job in his own internal timeline for five years or so, and maybe even took the job as a stepping stone to other things, whereas those of us in the real world know that he’s been DithersCo’s office manager since before we were born and will continue to be long after we’re dead and in the ground. Thinking of things in those terms brings an interesting perspective to Blondie’s frankly horrified face in the final panel, as she realizes that Stockholm Syndrome is setting in and maybe her husband really is going to be working for that awful man indefinitely.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 4/29/21

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief that goes into enjoying a comic strip like Mary Worth, and sometimes I can pull it off and sometimes I can’t. For instance, I absolutely refuse to believe that Drew has managed to become mildly Instagram famous without ever letting slip in one of his captions that he’s a doctor, and yet immediately upon being presented with his meal blurted out “It looks better than the hospital cafeteria food that I’m very familiar with because of all the time I spend in a hospital — and not as a patient! [wink wink]” That sandwich looks like shit, by the way, and also the side of slaw Ashlee so grandly announced is nowhere to be seen, so I’m assuming Northview’s cafeteria is of particularly low quality.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/29/21

If you know me, you know that few things exercise my deranged mind like trying to figure out the socioeconomic/political situation of Hootin’ Holler, so today I’m less interested in Uriah unicycling the mail all over the region than I am in the fact that Silas, who is not a government official but the proprietor of the town’s only store, is paying for his transportation. My current theory: the Post Office was violently ejected from the town decades ago, possibly in reaction to its attempt to impose the “number of the beast” in the form of zip codes. Silas, who needs to maintain a connection to the outside world in order to keep his store of manufactured goods stocked, is the only person still receiving mail, and he’s set Uriah up as his private delivery man, charging townsfolk outrageous markup over regular postage rates. For legal reasons, he refers to his delivery service as the “Newnited States Post Office.”

The Phantom, 4/29/21

I make fun of soap strips all the time when they’re inadvertently funny, so I feel obligated to point out when they’re successfully funny on purpose, like when Heloise begins a Heloise-centric storyline by describing her dad as “off somewhere punching a guy,” an incident I hope we never hear any more details on.

Post Content

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/28/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Grimm wants to murder a cat! No, wait … it’s funny because … Grimm is doing mafia cosplay, and has announced his desire to murder a cat using gangster patois? There’s no wordplay or anything, it’s just funny when a dog pretends to be a gangster, to lend a thin veneer over the murders he already wants to do?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/28/21

Remember a couple years ago when we learned that war hero amputee Jordan actually did a little light stolen valor? Anyway, I’m excited to learn soon that Michelle wasn’t working with COVID patients at all, just doing regular checkups, but really any patient these days could have COVID, if you think about it, oh, and also she was doing all her sessions on Zoom.

Gasoline Alley, 4/28/21

Incredibly, these two met just eight weeks ago and are already married! That’d be a quick courtship in any context, but is especially crazy in Gasoline Alley, given that the strip once spent eight weeks explaining how cool scrapbooking is.