You Know What's Weird?

Dennis the Menace's mom is pretty hot.

According to Fred Hembeck (whose site I found by way of Greg), there was a running gag in Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace strip where Dennis would constantly walk in on his mother in the bathtub, often bringing in friends and telling them how hot she was.

Now that's creepy.

The point, however, still stands. Alice Mitchell is pretty hot. It's a weird convention of the old Comics Page that doesn't stop with her, either. Take, for example, the cast of Blondie.

Dagwood Bumstead is barely recognizable as a human being. He's got those big, soul-less eyes like those weird, unwatchable Warner Brothers cartoons that pre-date Bugs Bunny and feature characters like "Bosco." And what are those things, whiskers? Antennae? He's like the freakin' Terror. No wonder he has to drown his feelings of inadequacy in comedically huge sandwiches, the guy's a morlock.

And yet his wife is a stone-cold fox. She's even got that beauty-mark thing going on there. At the very least, she's got pupils, which is something most of the other folks in her four-panel world seem to lack.

And don't even get me started on Cookie. She makes Miss Buxley look like Mrs. Lockhorn, am I right, fellas?

I apologize. There's really no point to this whole thing, but hey, I've been out of bed maybe four hours today, and it's not every day you get to see Dennis the Menace's mom's cleavage.

Deal with it.