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Beetle Bailey, 8/16/22

Feel like it’s been a long time since I saw someone actually smoking a tobacco cigarette in a newspaper comic strip, and while I hadn’t thought about it much, I think I unconsciously assumed there was some kind of Hayes Code-style agreement that we wouldn’t depict such a thing in a medium intended for children. But maybe I’m wrong about that, or maybe there was a collective recognition over at Beetle Bailey central that nobody cares anymore and definitely no children are reading Beetle Bailey, so why not be free, for certain limited definitions of “being free,” which is to say free to depict Rocky, the camp’s resident “bad boy” (non-sexual division), enjoying a cigarette held at arm’s length and Beetle being weirdly passive aggressive about it.

Mary Worth, 8/16/22

Part of being a true alpha predator like Mary is knowing when to sit back and let your prey come to you. Dawn is wasting absolutely no time in flinging herself emotionally prostate at Mary’s feet, and Mary, as you can see in panel two, is sitting absolutely still, with a fully neutral facial expression, to allow the maximum emotional purging to take place on its own before the meddling process begins. I assume she’s about to lift that lemonade to her lips and make the quietest sip humanly possible as Dawn spirals into a vivid description of her hateful emotional inheritance.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/16/22

Oh, sorry, I guess we’re gonna be spending this week doing a wellness check on all of this strip’s elderly characters. How is this dynamic duo of pinball maniacs doing? Well, I guess I hope to one day live to be quite old, and maybe by that time I’ll have earned the right to answer innocent conversation starters like “How’s it goin’, pop?” with musings on my own mortality that are faux cheery and also reveal that I don’t really understand how aging and dying works.