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Dennis the Menace, 1/8/21

I feel like over the years Dennis the Menace has spent less time on Dennis’s actual menacing more on everyone’s second-order reactions to said menacing, or their perceptions of him as a menace, which may or may not be based in reality. Like, be honest: who’s the real menace here? The kid who’s playing fetch with his dog? Or the guy who’s buttonholed a total stranger and appears to be deep into a conversation along the lines of “You’d think with a nightmare specimen like this you’d be dealing with a deeply tainted bloodline, just generation after generation of idiots and defectives, but no! I guess it turns out that true evil can arise from the seemingly innocent! Sinister horror lurks below the surface of our every day life, and indeed inside each one of us!”

Marvin, 1/8/21

I guess maybe this joke would’ve landed better if the Miller household weren’t a largely featureless void consisting mostly of a blue rug and a enormous expanse of white wall. But even so, it’s still a little off! Marvin refused to sit in the corner, so here he is sitting … not in the corner, ha ha? It’s like someone’s been told that they can’t do poop jokes anymore, and so they’re trying to reason out what other kinds of jokes might look like from first principles, and this was their first stab at it.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/8/21

We saw a glimpse of the exterior of Chez Winkerbean in a strip just before Christmas, and I was too busy focusing on the negative to take note of the frankly enormous house that Funky and Holly live in. This is curious, considering that their income derives from managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor for its fickle absentee owner, and not long ago Funky sunk his savings into a failed attempt to franchise Montoni’s shitty pizza in New York City, a metropolis noted for its pizza-snobbery. Admittedly, the real estate market in Northeastern Ohio is not exactly booming, so maybe my radar on what a 5,000-square-foot suburban McMansion would go for is off, but today we learn that the Winkerbean family has the means to drop on the order of four grand on a TV without that even being noteworthy enough for Funky to remember. What I’m trying to say here is that managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor may actually be actually pretty lucrative, in the sense that it makes a great front for money laundering for organized crime.

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Blondie, 1/7/21

Blondie and Dagwood have matching “best friends” in their next-door neighbors Herb and Tootsie; while Dag is occasionally seen interacting socially with others — his carpool, his coworkers, the guy at the bird store for some reason even though he never buys a bird — he doesn’t really seem to have any other deep friendships, the troubling case of Elmo really being in its own category. Blondie’s social circle is even more limited, as just about the only person we ever see her with outside her family is Tootsie, who is not only Blondie’s friend and neighbor but also her business partner, which seems like a lot of emotional labor to put on one person, frankly! Anyway, today we get a little glimpse into why Blondie and Tootsie only hang out with each other and not anybody else: they’re terrible people who love to cruelly exclude people for minor transgression but love vicious gossip even more.

Mary Worth, 1/7/21

“Jeez,” you’ve probably been thinking, “I know Mary Worth can be slow at times, but how are they going to wring drama out of a couple of old people going on a date to the mall?” Well, you owe me, King Features Syndicate, its parent corporation Hearst Communications, and really the entire Mary Worth-industrial complex an apology, as today the sight of a headless mannequin has triggered Eve’s deep post-hypnotic conditioning and prompted the traumatic emergence of her true identity: a ruthlessly efficient assassin for a shadowy international terrorist organization. (Her signature move was beheading people.)

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Mary Worth, 1/6/20

Good lord, these two unmarried persons are loitering together … within touching distance … at the mall … without their dogs being there as chaperones? Like a pair of whores? I certainly hope Mary doesn’t hear about this, or they’ll return to Charterstone to find their pathetical belongings piled up on the curb!

Pluggers, 1/6/20

In big cities and small villages, most elderly people can walk to the store for basic errands, or take public transportation, so they can live independently even when they’re no longer able to drive a car. But in modern America’s increasingly socially atomized and sprawling suburbs, many must resort to offering sexual favors just so they can leave their subdivision and access basic services. Sad!

Beetle Bailey, 1/6/20

My initial thought reading this was that there’s no circumstance where you get a phone call saying “We have detected a problem with your computer, send us your password and we’ll fix it” and the caller isn’t a scam artist, but then I realized that this strip still falls under today’s “eldersex” heading, because the reason nobody can fix the General’s computer is all the extremely dodgy porn sites he looks at.

Curtis, 1/6/20

I judge this year’s Kwanzaa storyline to be pretty good based on the freaky animal factor alone, though it has wrapped up with the somewhat banal conclusion of “the real magic is friendship, and also listening to good advice.” It’s also wrapped up on a … Wednesday? … so I hope that we at least get a few days of Curtis complaining about the story’s initial premise failing to pay off in truly weird fashion.