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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/9/18

“Haw, haw! Guess I’m just a simple orphan being raised by my aunt an’ uncle, who resent my presence and are likely to snap into a rage if I intrude into their routine in any way!”

Dennis the Menace, 10/9/18

Dennis is about to explain podcasts to Mr. Wilson, and pretty soon Mr. Wilson is not going to be able to shut up about Serial, much to the annoyance of everyone around him. This is Dennis’s most subtly effective menace yet.

Mary Worth, 10/9/18

“Should I give him a project to distract him by driving my car through the wall of Charterstone and into his living room, destroying the vehicle in the process? No, that would be foolish. I’ll drive Jeff’s car into Mr. Wynter’s living room.”

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Blondie, 10/8/18

If there’s any single ingredient we associate with Italian food like delicious lasagna, it’s tomato sauce, so it’s kind of ironic for the purposes of today’s joke that tomatoes are one of the plants that went from the Americas to Europe in the Columbian exchange. All that mass-produced Italian food, slathered in red sauce and dropped under the heat lamps on the buffet of some terrible gigantic cruise ship, would be entirely foreign to poor Columbus, though certainly wouldn’t be the thing that most left him unmoored and terrified by changes in technologies and social attitudes. Good luck, Chris! And though he’s a problematic historical figure, I think Dagwood could use some of his yen for exploring the unknown, as he’s apparently happy to just eat canned lasagna at Lou’s, the only lunch spot he ever goes to, rather than driving the extra five minutes to the Olive Garden that’s inevitably at the next strip mall over.

Slylock Fox, 10/8/18

Ugh, Slylock, water-powered interstellar travel is within your grasp! Finally, you and your compatriots will surpass the human civilization that you’ve been mindlessly imitating ever since you overthrew it! You don’t just hand over the ice and let them leave! And if your animal scientists aren’t smart enough to figure out how this alien craft works, this is the moment where you show up at the prison where they’re holding Count Weirdly and make a deal with the devil.

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Six Chix, 10/7/18

I get what this comic is going for here, I really do, but part of my job (“job”) as the proprietor and namesake of the Comics Curmudgeon is to spend more time than usual thinking about the premises of comic strips, and my friends, when you do that with this one it starts to get dark. Like, sure, it seems that your dog is sitting in your living room, watching squirrels scamper around outside for entertainment, and maybe at some level that’s true. But when you, a human, watch acrobats or lion tamers, you do it out of appreciation of their skills, and maybe get a thrill from imagining yourself in their place. A dog’s emotional arc in that scenario is very different, and when you factor that into the change of setting here — not one dog but a whole uncountable pack, not sitting in some domesticated space with a glass between them and the squirrels but out on the side of a country road in the middle of the night — well, you can’t help but wonder when the moment will come when, by some unspoken agreement, the audience descends on the performers in a howling frenzy and tears them to bits.

Dennis the Menace, 10/07/18

It’s pretty much absolutely necessary for the core Dennis the Menace shtick that he be allowed to wander around through the neighborhood unsupervised, as I’m given to understand that children of earlier generations were, so it can be difficult to remember that he is, canonically, five years old, and so probably in kindergarden. In the bygone days when five-year-olds were allow to roam freely and hassle the neighbors, were they also taught science and history in kindergarden? Anyway, another reason we often forget Dennis’s true age is because he’s so darn precocious, and you have to admit that telling your parents that your failure really represents their own shortcomings is some advanced-level menacing.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/07/18

Look at that pelican bait shop attendent, grinning like a big idiot! He doesn’t even realize that the only reason he isn’t being hauled away to an internment camp without trial right now is because Slylock happened to remember some nature facts about tides or whatever.