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Comment of the week? Comment of the week!

“You can tell Mike Nomad is a seasoned pro. He doesn’t need to ask what this armored car driver’s name is, or who he works for, or why he didn’t come forward sooner, or how he has Mike Nomad’s phone number, or why he’s calling him instead of the local authorities. Sure, a mysterious individual called him to bait him and his friend into a murderous trap yesterday, but that was yesterday, man. Pros don’t live in the past.” –jroggs

Hilarious runners up? Hilarious runners up!

“This is so unrealistic! I refuse to believe that someone who has never even seen a lightbulb would have one over his head when he has an idea.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Has anyone gone to a rock concert in a small club over the past few years? I have, and 90% of the audience looks like peers of George and Martha — that is, aged baby boomers out to revisit the classic music of their youth. So, I guess what I’m saying is that the real menace is time, and always was time.” –Where’s Rocky?

“There are very few ways in which a comic strip — a dying art and industry — can produce actual change and help save democracy. A salute Dennis the Menace for finding the perfect way: making fedoras even more uncool.” –Ettorre

“What is up with Vitamin’s face in that first panel. It’s like he’s getting blown by a succubus or heard a joke that is so funny it kills you.” –toxic

“So Alexa drinks her coffee in the car, wears noise-canceling headphones throughout the drive, and waits till she gets to school to work out and shower. If nothing else, this is one teenager who’s really figured out how never to talk to her parents.” –BigTed

“Dagwood opening his eyes wide to consume an improbably high stack of video subscriptions” –ambignostic, on Twitter

“I beg of you not to do this thing. If Garfield gets hold of this lasagna, there’ll never be another decent meal cooked in this kitchen. He’s already got charge of the manicotti. He’s got the stuffed shells. He got the garlic bread! And now he’s after us. Joe, you had one of those Garfield veal parmesan, didn’t you? Well, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten how long you were in the bathroom afterwards? Here, Ed. You know, you remember last year when things weren’t going so well, and you couldn’t make your spaghetti alla puttanesca? You didn’t lose your lunch, did you? Do you think Garfield would have let you keep it? Can’t you understand what’s happening here? Don’t you see what’s happening? Garfield isn’t cooking. Garfield’s eating! Now, we can get through this thing all right. We’ve got to stick together, though. We’ve got to have faith in each other. Otherwise we’ll be the meat in the lasagna!” –Voshkod

“Mr. Nomad, I know a place where you can get top quality turtlenecks cheap. And in every shade you can imagine — rust, bronze, tan, harvest gold, you name it.” –Joe Blevins

“Henry is clearly looking at a drawing by the Dadaist Paul Klee and speaking into the Notes app on his phone. The only thing left in his life that makes him truly happy is working on that art history thesis for the degree that he abandoned when he had to get a more menial job to support his family. Dennis, meanwhile, having grown up in the age of the internet, just sees everything as porn. The menace here is abundant.” –Spunky The Wonder Squid

“Does that dude in the middle panel normally wear that hat, or is he just getting into character for his call. ‘Ok, I’m Sam. I’m an armored car driver, and I collect stamps in my time off. I’m … an only child, and I grew up feeling closer to my mother. Yeah … yeah, I think i’m getting this.’” –pugfuggly

“Well of course the ‘Book Fair’ room is empty — everybody’s down the hall at the ‘Book Terrific!’ room.” –Uncle Lumpy

“It’s not a great book signing when nobody attends your event. Have I got the gist of this week’s installments about right?” –Just John

“Listen, if we’re going to talk about ‘menacing,’ let’s talk about that teacher’s midsection, and what her obvious corset fetish has done to it.” –pastordan

“‘You are fettered,’ said Funky, trembling. ‘Tell me why?’ ‘I wear the red trucker hat I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it gripe by gripe, and malaprop by malaprop; I refused to take it off of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’” –Mighty Sean Young

“And that’s how Funky discovered the true meaning of Christmas: inventory management.” –GeoGreg

“‘Spontaneous‘ might apply to abruptly quitting a job you spent years in school preparing for because three weeks of Dennis are more than you can abide. Given that his teacher is never the same person twice, that’s about as menacing as it gets.” –cheech wizard

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Dennis the Menace, 12/13/19

Gotta respect the way today’s panel menaces our narrative expectations. Normally you’d think the punchline is going to be some wordplay on “spontaneous,” or that there would at least be some reason why that word was picked for the setup, but nope, it’s a red herring as Dennis just boldly devalues the very concept of “vocabulary words.” “C’mon, lady,” he says, “our brains don’t need to be walking around with so much data stored inefficiently; we can just look everything up in the cloud now! Try to keep up!”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/13/19

“Oh, but also, we don’t have any mozzarella now, and that’s, like, a pretty important thing a pizza restaurant needs, so in a larger sense, none of us are OK.”

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Gasoline Alley, 12/12/19

You know, I don’t talk about Gasoline Alley a ton here but I really have come to respect its utterly shambolic narrative style. Like, none of the other continuity strips are what you’d call tightly plotted, but Gasoline Alley lurches from event from to event without any clear sense of purpose or direction, much like real life itself, in a style normally associated with European arthouse movies from the ’70s. Over the last few … weeks? months? time has no meaning in this context, honestly, so let’s just say “the last little bit,” the town’s resident psychic physician’s assistant diagnosed the diner’s waitress with a heart condition so she had to take time off, and then a tough-talking sailor woman wandered through town and took the job, and then a train full of little kids on their way to see Santa broke down near the diner, so then they got Slim to dress up as Santa and come entertain them, and now it turns out that the little kids are … mostly assholes? And the tough-talking sailor woman, in her crusty, non-PC way, is threatening to murder them? Not really sure if this kid is claiming his father actually is a gamma radiation-mutated superhero or just a guy with a terrible anger problem, and honestly, in classic Gasoline Alley fashion, we’re probably never going to find out for sure! This is just one in series of vaguely connected things that happen, and will keep on happening, forever.

Crankshaft, 12/12/19

Crankshaft has been doing a whole series of strips this week about hawking your book at a book fair and nobody buying it, maybe because print media is dying or maybe just because nobody likes your book or maybe a little of both, and the whole thing has a definite “pulled from real life” vibe. Anyway, I’m a particular fan of today’s strip because of the Christmas decorations, which really create a mood, you know? These people could all be spending precious time around the holidays with their families, but instead they’re here, in what appears to be a hallway of some sort, staring at their phones, not selling books.