Comment of the Week

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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Judge Parker, 4/10/20

Oh, shoot, let’s catch you up on some Judge Parker storylines I’ve been neglected: Toni is indeed working out her political irritations by running for mayor, and Sophie, who was already looking for a non-Alan campaign to latch onto in order to irritate her family, is volunteering for (and possibly running?) Toni’s campaign, and also Neddy and Ronnie’s Netflix show about April has started filming in Cavelton. Today we learn that, despite all the narrative excitement of the mayoral race being focused on the Alan vs. Toni battle, there’s apparently an incumbent mayor who’s also running, who under normal circumstances would probably be heavily favored! Now, I’m not a data-obsessed geopolitics expert like Sophie, but if I were running an ex-newscaster’s insurgent mayoral campaign, I’d be advising her to leverage her regional fame and media contacts to get her message out rather than, apparently, having her teenage campaign manager yell things to disrupt a TV production that’s probably making a bunch of local hires and boosting the town’s economy.

Hi and Lois, 4/10/20

Damn, Hi and Lois, climate change is old news — it’s all about global pandemics now! Try to keep up with the depressing, depressing times, won’t you?

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Kevin and Kell, 4/9/20

Welp, it turns out that I started reading Kevin and Kell, a strip about horny furries who kill and eat each other, more than a year ago, but then almost immediately lost interest in it. But rest assured, gentle readers, I am always going to let you know when a comic strip that I have to assume appears in a certain number of family newspapers features gaily skipping animals festooning a maypole with long strings made up of the viscera of (I think we have to assume) sapient squirrels.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/20

I think she’s probably more incredulous about you trying to put the moves on your friend’s widow just a few weeks after he killed himself by driving off a cliff! I think it’s a pretty safe bet! I’m pretty incredulous about it myself!

Mary Worth, 4/9/20

I mean … do you have to tell him? You definitely haven’t told Hugo about Jared! Why do you feel like you have to start telling your various boyfriends the truth about things now?

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Gasoline Alley, 4/8/20

“Josh,” said nobody, absolutely nobody, nobody real and nobody you could even conceive of as being a vaguely believable fictional character, but for this bit imagine that there might, in some bizarre parallel universe, be a person or persons who would ask the following question, “What’s going with the thing in Gasoline Alley where they were going to save the farms or whatever?” Well, the save-the-farms meeting has devolved into absolute chaos, and not even the fun kind, just the kind where nobody’s really in charge and they’re definitely not sticking to the ostensible topic, which is probably fine because none of these dopes has any idea about how to save the farms, that much I can guarantee. Anyway, the strip’s extremely non-beloved wacky parrot character is here stirring up shit, and is today apparently stealing valor! The nerve! Can’t wait for him to go to prison.

Pluggers, 4/8/20

Despite the contempt I regularly shower onto Pluggers, I would be very sad if it went away! And yet I can’t really see where it has to go after today’s installment, “Pluggers sure plug up the toilet a lot, with their poops.”