The menace and the menaced

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Dennis the Menace, 9/26/24

Here, in no particular order, is a list of possible menacing reasons why Dennis is wearing street clothes in this exchange when you’d expect him to be in a baseball uniform, some mutually exclusive and some not:

• Dennis has a general policy of refusing to wear a uniform while playing baseball due to the oppositional defiance disorder that his parents and coaches have never been able to overcome.
• Dennis has a general policy of refusing to wear a uniform while playing baseball because he understands that red overalls over a striped shirt are his #brand, which he is very keen to maintain and promote.
• Dennis isn’t even playing baseball today; he’s just wandered onto the field to harass the umpire.
• The creators of Dennis the Menace are not confident in their ability to draw the title character of their comic strip in a way that would be recognizable to the readers if he weren’t wearing his trademark red overalls over a striped shirt.
• The creators of Dennis the Menace do not have access to clip art of the title character of their comic strip in which he is not wearing his trademark red overalls over a striped shirt.

The Phantom, 9/26/24

A fun thing about the Phantom is that he dates from the very earliest days of superhero comics, so his outfit is your basic weird skintight body suit and cowl but, when it comes to a fight, his main “power” is the pair of pistols he keeps handy most of the time. Anyway, today the big purple guy has caught up with one of the out-of-control robots unleashed by fake Elon Musk’s crashed rocket, and he’s just going to straight-up shoot it to death, with bullets. Probably it’s not going to work and he’ll need to do something more clever, but it would be pretty funny if it did, right? “Well, Hero, Devil,” he’ll say to his faithful animal companions, “that problem is solved. Thank God for guns, the best friend a superhero can have!”