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Maybe it's just that the standards of menace have been so raised by the likes of Calvin and Hobbes or Bart Simpson but I can't remember ever seeing Dennis engage in behavior that would make him a poor children's party guest. He wears a tiny suit to church for goodness sake! He's really just a menace because the strip is called Dennis the Menace but who told the inhabitants of the strip that? Who is going around badmouthing this precocious kid who at worst doesn't always live up to 1950s standards of etiquette? I ask but we all already know it's Mr. Wilson, Mr. Wilson is making the neighbor kid a social pariah out of a sort of misplaced dissatisfaction and inadequacy that his pension wasn't enough to settle him in a gated community with no children.

—BananaSam
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Burn baby burn

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Mark Trail, 4/24/20

Oh, hey, sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what’s been up with Rusty and Kevin’s big walk in the woods. What’s happening is this: the woods are on fire! You can tell how pure of hearts these two lads are because they’re worried about how everyone else is doing as they run through the flames. Isn’t that cute? They’re all gonna die!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/24/20

I’ve been staring at this strip for a while now, growing increasingly upset both at it, for not having having any joke in it, and at myself, for either somehow missing an obvious joke or spending too much time staring at a strip that doesn’t have a joke in it and trying to will one into existence, with my mind. I feel like it has the rhythm of wordplay — like, “close to the action” should have one obvious, straightforward meaning, and then also have some punny double entendre implication, but it doesn’t have either. It’s not even a single-entendre. It’s a zero-entendre. Plus nobody refers to the Hollywood ‘Hills’ with some kind of implied quote marks around them. THEY’RE LITERALLY HILLS ARGH ARGH ARGH

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“Also we won’t have to look at you, so there’s that”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/23/20

As near as I can tell, I think this tale of Truck and his persistent dry cough has always been a coronavirus story that, what with publishing lead times and slow-moving soap opera plots being outpaced by real-world developments, will just keep feeling a little behind the curve, so to speak, in the sense that suddenly we’re at the “oh no, people should be wearing masks!” stage of things. But what if it weren’t? What if this was written months ago, and it’s just a story about how Rex realized that he’s got a bunch of sick old people in his office, which is pretty gross when you think about it, and wouldn’t it be better to give them masks to wear? Just as a first step towards eventually not letting them in at all, of course.

Family Circus, 4/23/20

Well, the Keanes have already let their children read non-gender-specific literature, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re starting to learn about punctuation, aka “the Devil’s letters.”

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They are the night (or in this case, the day)

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Crankshaft, 4/22/20

Crankshaft is once again returning to a favorite (?) theme, “Boy, people at Book Fairs sure are annoying, aren’t they?” Annoying enough to … murder? Maybe, if Lillian’s book title is any indication! Why would you antagonize someone at a book fair who specifically wrote about murdering people at book fairs? Move along to the next table, annoying lady, before it’s too late for you!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/22/20

But boys! Without this moment of mind-shattering terror you can never go through the transformation that causes you to become the Bat-Man! You’re abandoning your project just when you’re at the precipice of the psychological shift crucial to the character you’re trying to emulate! I sure hope you haven’t gone to all the trouble of having your parents murdered in front of you only to back out of this now!