Messed up punchlines have an impish feel

Did a couple of Dennis the Menace comics in The Gazette the last week of November seem odd to you? They did to some readers who follow the comic in The Gazette.

Here was that ageless scamp Monday morning, Nov. 30, sitting in a chair in what appears to be the same corner he was being sent to when I read this comic strip as a boy, looking back and saying, “I can explain it to you, Joey, but the understandin' part is up to you.” Seems funny enough. He's talking to the equally ageless Joey over his shoulder, right?

Then on Tuesday, Dennis is out in the yard with pal Joey, digging up the yard. “Playing house is getting more difficult,” Dennis is telling Joey. “I have to juggle a family, marriage and a career.” The joke must be two kids, talking like grown-ups but within the context of children.

Guess again. The punchlines for those two comics were wrong, the result of problems at the service that lays out The Gazette's weekday comics pages. The service, Reed Brennan Media Associates, reports that its server went through a meltdown that wrote over some of the server's files. Workers there thought they recovered all of the lost content but did not. They learned about the lost content after comics went to press.

You can find the correct cartoons from this link, but you'll need to subscribe to at a link provided on the Web site.

The correct comics also are published with my column in the Sunday, Dec. 6, Gazette.