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He’s beating them all up with his, uh, shaking powers

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/20

Just to show you what it’s like to be me, a guy with a head full of random trivia, I read “homeowner’s rates” and thought Alice was using the British term for property taxes, which made me wonder if the Mitchells had relocated to the UK so that Dennis could take on his actually much more menacing rival. But a little Googling shows that sometimes people say “homeowner’s rates” when they mean “what I pay for homeowner’s insurance,” which sounds very strange to my ear but feel free to sound off in the comments if this is part of your everyday speech and you think that I, personally, am an idiot. The important thing here is that Dennis would not have any possible impact on the Mitchells’ property taxes, but could very well be the source of their skyrocketing insurance premiums, because he breaks so much stuff.

Dick Tracy, 2/12/20

Good news, everyone! Mysta escaped from Mr. Robot’s clutches and defeated him using her Lunarian powers, so now we’ve got a new story, about the origins of a bad guy called “Shakey,” because he shakes. Few things in recent comics history have made me laugh more than today’s Dick Tracy, in which the narration box says little Shakey “quickly learned the Golden Rule” and depicts him beating the shit out of other kids and stealing their money. There’s not even an attempt to make some kind of pun or wordplay on “Golden Rule!” “Here’s your Golden Rule, kids: just absolutely terrorizing people with violence is a great way to make a lot of cash.”

Mark Trail, 2/12/20

Ah, yes, it’s an all-too-common story: a sad, isolated person — say, an newly disabled man who isn’t sure who he is anymore — gets big on Twitter and gets a chance to reinvent himself — say, as a guy whose leg was eaten by a yeti. How often do we have to hear this tale before we learn its lessons? Anyway, Minga and Pemba are watching all this from afar, probably wondering if anybody is going to be able to pay them, now that the guy who hired them is dead.

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Tuesday is for tweens

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Crankshaft, 2/11/20

Ahh, who could forget Butter Brinkel, the silent-era film comedian in the Funkyverse whose career was ruined when a starlet died under mysterious circumstances at one of his parties? Well, due to the Crankshaft/Funky Winkerbean chronological disjunction, the shocking documentary revealing that the real murderer was a talking chimp is still a decade off, which means that Butter Brinkel is still universally loathed at the time of today’s episode. Maybe holding this comedy festival was a bad idea, and not just because you scheduled it for mid-February in northeast Ohio! But thank goodness Crankshaft is here. I was going to say that Crankshaft doesn’t care if some movie star is “problematic” but actually, Crankshaft cares quite a lot. Crankshaft is frankly only interested in art created by murderers. Being that close to death makes him feel alive, which honestly explains a lot about why he still drives a schoolbus despite being demonstrably bad at it.

Blondie, 2/11/20

Hey, would you like to do a joke about how Kids Today are soft, with their lawsuits and their trigger warnings and their asbestos-free lungs, but also want to do a joke about how kids today have access to dangerous technology like drones, and you worry that they don’t really go together in the same strip? The wildly popular newspaper comic strip Blondie would like to urge you not to overthink it and just go for it. That’s what they’d do!

Curtis, 2/11/20

Or you could do a strip about modern-day technological culture that both pokes fun at its foibles but also recognizes the real warmth and human connection it can foster, like a coward.

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It’s very true to life that the Robo-Weirdly would just stand there grinning like an idiot instead of trying to escape

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Slylock Fox, 2/10/20

You ever think how lucky Slylock and the Glorious Animal Regime are that their rogues gallery never uses its resources to their full potential? Think of the havoc that you could wreak with the ability to create an android so lifelike that a policeduck could extensively interact with it and still not be able to tell that it’s artificial! Weirdly could be building an army of android warriors, as intelligent as any human (or animal) but indestructible and willing to destroy his enemies and make him a god-king, but instead he’s just deploying them as decoys while he goes on the lam. Anyway, the real reason you can tell that’s not a bio-Weirdly is that if it were a bio-Weirdly, that cave would be full of Weirdly poop.

Mark Trail, 2/10/20

“Look, Mark, I just want to make this absolutely clear: yes, I indulged and even helped promote Harvey’s bizarre, delusional story that his amputation, which had an entirely normal and reasonably explanation, was the result of a yeti attack, but we weren’t fucking, OK? Do you think I’m a weirdo or something?”

Six Chix, 2/10/20

Ahhh, it’s time to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Six Chix-style: Getting wine-drunk and vomiting up an entire box of chocolates so violently that you completely jam up your toilet! LOVE IS IN THE AIR, people.