Sexy beasts
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Beetle Bailey, 10/2/24
Hello, faithful readers! You might recall that last week I opined that Beetle Bailey had abandoned the spirit, though not the letter, of Miss Buxley Wednesday by producing technically Buxley-inclusive content that nobody could possibly be aroused by. Well, it seems that the bigwigs at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC have listened to my reasoned critique and delivered two panels of Miss Buxley in all her miniskirted glory. Sure, she’s as crudely drawn as ever, but she’s waving her arms around frantically and yelling right next to a laser printer that’s going crazy and spewing out paper, and I’m reasonably sure that a sizable minority of you could talk yourselves into getting off to that, if you really put in the work.
Pluggers, 10/2/24
I had always assumed that actual short-order cooks are plugger short-order cooks? I mean, I guess I haven’t been keeping tabs on the hierarchies, but do you mean to tell me that this underpaid, manually demanding profession is coastal elitist-coded now? That real pluggers are at home seething with class resentment at short-order cooks because they use fancy stoves to cook? By god, pluggers just eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they like it! They don’t even toast the bread! Do you toast the bread, like some kind of communist? I’d blame Hulu’s hit show The Bear for this change in attitude, as it shows short-order cooks having aspirations beyond their station, but (a) no plugger subscribes to a “streaming service” and (b) if they did, as horrible man-animal chimeras, their primary reaction to the show would be confusion that nobody on it is actually a bear.
62 replies to “Sexy beasts”
Beetle Bailey: I keep pressing the “humor” button but nothing happens!
I could have a long rant about how the idea that women are incompetent with technology indicates that “Beetle Bailey” continues to perpetuate sexist Boomer stereotypes… but the fact that printers suck and never work is a staple of Millennial humour, so I cannot complain. Well played
BB: If you gave a printer a handjob to completion, would it ejaculate ink or paper? Today’s Beetle Bailey answers that question at least.
Pluggers: A Plugger’s “Watching The Bear on streaming” is obsessively searching for porn of hairy gay men, telling yourself it’s just to prove to yourself you’re definitely straight.
BB – Try rocking the boat with the little man in it….
Plugger – Fine dining – Plugger style….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
I checked on Wikipedia and “Indiana, Pennsylvania” is a real place and not the product of a Russian hacker trying to pass as an American. I am glad that “Pluggers” has escaped becoming a tool of polarisation and division by foreign powers. The strip will always drive reactionary resentment and dehumanisation of the other half of the country ON ITS OWN terms!!!
When I want to print something on my printer, I press the print button that is right there on the printer. That is how printing works.
@Ettorre:Of course, Millennial humour would make the printer look like a little desktop HP model or something, not the kind of rattling electromechanical beast last used by Bell AT&T to print phone bills circa 1973.
BB I really like Beetle Bailey‘s conception of a copy machine,which seems to be a couple of stacked cardboard boxes with a gaping hole in one side. Presumably Gizmo is sitting inside the larger one, frantically writing out copies by hand with a pen light in his mouth.
Pluggers I’m not sure why, but i find those extra m’s on ‘yum’ really off-putting. Ita a sandwich, man,get a grip.
MW: I wonder, if Mary and Estelle get high on muffins and murder Ed, will Jeff be willing to donate his boat again for the disposal?
GT: When a comic strip’s theme is medicine, a finger cramp spawns an epic. When the theme is sports: Cardiac event? Walk it off!
@Schroduck: Did you someone The Bear with peanut butter and jelly? (This, plus that picture of the main character who’s name I don’t know sitting with a cigarette, is the sum total of my knowledge of The Bear. Which means I know more about it than the Beetle Bailey writers know about laser printers.)
Hagar the Horrible : has traveled backwards in time, met his past self, and gave himself a transparently fake name to protect the timeline and his identity.
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Phoebe and Unicorn : this isn’t a big mystery in a setting where
a) time travel is real (“My sister must have just decided to go back in time to visit you on that day… Though, looking at her in that picture more closely, it is ‘WILL decide’…”)
b) the “Shield of Boringness” exists (“Phoebe, You, my sister and I all live in the same small area, and there was a magic spell that prevented you from noticing unicorns existed, while we unicorns ignored humans because you are not as awesome as us. It is not THAT unlikely we ‘bumped into’ each other several times before we ‘first met’.”)
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Pluggers : is this a “Pluggers are lazy” or a “Pluggers are stupid” thing?
…It’s a “Pluggers are fat” thing, isn’t it?@Ettorre: Indiana, Pennsylvania is the birthplace of Jimmy Stewart. Stewart’s father ran the local hardware store and thought his son’s “Anatomy of a Murder” was a dirty movie. So, yeah, their “Plugger” cred is well-earned.
Pluggers, 10/2/24: “I’m had always assumed…”? So, ‘You am had always ASSUMED…’ ‘eh? ASSUME; To make an ASS of U not ME! Bet you PR00FREAD and STILL GOT IT WRONG DIDN’T YOU?
@Schroduck: Admittedly I’m an Xer, but the printer at my (academic) job looks kind of like that with several more protrusions, because it’s also a scanner and copier and stapler and probably it makes toast but it it does it burns it. And “You send the print job several times but the printer is paused so when you reset it you get way too much” is something that happens. But you send print jobs from a separate computer. Team Beetle was unable to figure out how to visually convey that there were two devices involved so they gave up.
And as pugfuggly points out Spc. Chip Gizmo is the character who is supposed to do technology things, they introduced him with a lot of fanfare and a contest to name him and everything. And in panel one Beetle is holding his mop under his shoulder like a swagger stick. And even if this were done right it would be mildly relatable rather than funny. Even for a legacy strip this is offensively slipshod.
B. Bailey: Having no need for a cord or power outlet sounds good on paper but the six lead-acid car batteries in the base negates the whole idea of portable printer.
@Pozzo: Lee Remick sans foundation garments! Hubba-hubba….
No true plugger would call a sandwich a “short order” meal, Jones, you dilettante. You don’t bake your own bread?
CS: Oh no, is Lillian going to have a Scout Finch moment and shame this riled up mob, or is she going to read from the book and somehow win them over? It would be so hacky.
MW: “I’ve…I’ve been eating too many pints of ice cream, Mary. I think…I think I’m an addict…oh and I blew up my engagement because my fiancé should have just let a dog die instead of showing up to my dinner.
GT: “Yes, just like the Take On Me video, except…no, wait, a couple of drivers did try to murder me for beating them in a race in a comic-book world.”
@Ettorre: Yes, confusingly, there is a University of Indiana, Pennsylvania.
A Plugger stays true to his radical 60’s roots by not cutting his sandwich in half. “Up yours!, Emily Post.”
Beetle Bailey: 10/2/2024: the day Josh encourages his readers to jerk it to a malfunctioning copier. What that’s you say? Josh actually was suggesting people could get off to Ms. Buxley? Well, I suppose, it’s all about the same level of sexy.
BB: That printer is just chugging along.
Pluggers: Like male Pluggers know how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Pluggers: The worst thing about plugger short-order cooks isn’t their limited repertoire of dishes but rather that they appparently tend to eat the food themselves.
Blondie: “Please like our Scrappy Doo.”
CS: This is the closest we’ve gotten to hearing the opposing side of the issue, and the best Tom Batiuk could come up with for his strawmen is that they dislike banned books because they’re banned. Unintentionally, they have a fairly reasonable albeit tautological point: things banned by the school should not be at – or distributed by representatives of – the school. So then why are these people not protesting the school? And Les specifically? And, frankly, Les generally?
MW: Coloring blueberries brown does not make them cinnamon apples.
RMMD: Oh wow, who out of all the one other guitar-playing characters could it be?
Also Beetle Bailey: [Stares in mute 9 Chickweed Lane horror]
JP: Give this strip credit for originality and creativity. “What angle are you . . . playing at?” is phraseology that no one has ever uttered before. Well done.
MW: Estelle thought balloon: “Oh Christ, just what I need. Mary Frickin’ Worth.”
CS: Uh-oh, you protestors are in for it now. Lillian’s about to give you a stern talking-to! Meanwhile, Crankshaft is there to . . . uh, he’s there to . . . um, try to appear relevant?
Pluggers:
…And continuing with the foodstuff theme, you know you’re a plugger when you think that ‘plugola’ is a granola that pluggers eat for breakfast.
I’m sure the reason that printer looks like that is that it is military-spec and therefore has a chassis built out of 8ga welded titanium alloy with bulletproof metal panels, three redundant power supplies and a print head that is shielded against sand in the desert.
Whereas normal printers cost $149 at Costco, these were sourced from a specialized contractor built out of Bulgaria with a 35,000 page manual sealed in Cosmolene. The thing came in smelling like the inside of a Harbor Freight and has a complex and Byzantine user-hostile user interface that only makes sense to the kind of person who touches themselves furiously when reading government policy and procedures rules. And when they’re in a hurry go straight to the tax code.
@Schroduck: They writing might be up-to-date (twenty years old) but the iconography is at least fifty years old
Frazz: Later, Mrs. Olsen will ask the class to write an essay on things that bother them, and this girl will flail her arms and complain about it.
Luann: I have to give the Evanses credit for their effortless ability to write hateable characters.
CS: I hope someone in this crowd gets the bright idea to throw stuff at Lillian.
9CL: But I thought Amos was Edda’s one and true eternal love forever!
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: I guess this is like one of those trick questions with which they caught German spies in WWII
“Pluggers eat sandwiches”
I would say slow day for pluggers, but really every day is a slow day for pluggers.
@jroggs:
On Crankshaft, and how this whole situation is actually Les’ fault : It’s wild; Batiuk somehow managed to write a Crankshaft storyline where the audience would actually prefer if Les was given more focus than the actual Crankshaft characters! (because everything is actually his fault, and he should be made to directly face the consequences of his actions)
Again; Batiuk actually wrote a storyline where we WANT to see more Les Moore! (so he gets his comeuppance)
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Speaking of comic strip Les, Leslie Knox from Luann is having a cameo in today’s Baldo.
“Pluggers” is trying to break out of the confines of the strip! Sorry “Pluggers”, but sandwich-eating is “Blondie”‘s turf!
DT: Mike Curtis just loves these hardcore criminals who collapse immediately and completely under police questioning and never ask for lawyers. They make quick closure in storytelling so easy. Meanwhile, I’m not doing a deepdive into researching posse comitatus regulations but I’m pretty sure it requires at least some level of necessity, whereas Dick appears to have deputized Mysta entirely for pointless funsies. I also think a claim of “attempted bribery of an officer of the law” probably requires the perpetrator’s foreknowledge that the individual is an officer of the law, so maybe Dick and Mysta will soon get to find themselves behind bars right next to Ro-Zan for a variety of false crime reporting and abuse of authority charges.
JP: The nefarious
AidanAidenHayreddin finally appears with a glorious barbarossa and an inability to remember details from previous comic panels. Is Adeyn a simpleton? Is Aydin merely mesmerized by the way Neddy’s sunglasses keep dematerializing and rematerializing, often at different locations on her head? Or maybe Eydun’s just already mentally switched off out of boredom thanks to Marciuliano’s endless footdragging.DT: Pretty chintzy, Ro-Zan. In a situation like this you should have offered her a continent, at least. And one of the good ones.
MW: Meddlegasm!
Zits: To be honest, this is not where I expected this “Jeremy and Pierce procreate” story to go.
FC: Time to dump Jeffy off into a forest.
Edge City repeats on CK, not the repeats on GC: “Taxidermied Banjo-Playing Woodchuck” carries a strong odor of “bread products” and “china hutch.”
FG: Dale does not understand all your hostility towards her.
Jp: Neddy is truly the dumbest character in newspaper today… that includes people from the real world
GT: Yikes, the change in artist has not been kind to Beth. Ugh, just look at that mug.
Blondie: Having a difficult time digesting the layout of the Bumsteads’ living room. Is there a hall of mirrors in there or something? Or did M.C. Escher design it?
I would have preferred if it was Andy Bear eating a peanut-butter and honey sandwich, because he’s a bear after all…
But the Pluggers’ team still would never acknowledge that he is actually a bear.
Then I think, associating bears with honey and porridge, is that generalizing? I’d better be careful once the animal uprising starts….
“Slylock arrives at the bar, where a human was beaten to a pulp by Bruno Bear. Bruno had ordered a Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey Whiskey and the human said ‘Oh, because you’re a bear?’ what clears Bruno Bear of all charges?”
Answer: Bruno is innocent because the human is clearly racist and deserved to be beaten up, once his bones heal he’ll be arrested and trialed for his crimes.
MW: “You sound terrible.” Usually thought balloons are in the third person. Is Stell one of Mary’s multiple personalities? Makes sense if you believe Charterstone is an asylum and all the characters are patients.
Doctor to nurse; “Patient 2143’s goldfish died. Up his Thorazine.”
Luann: ‘Bosslady’? ‘BOSSLADY’??? For crying out loud, Karen Evans, just put Dez in a kerchief and have her start singing ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ already! Do you also imagine Bets sounding like Butterfly McQueen when she talks?
JP: Yeah, Neddy’s been a dunce throughout this, and double yeah, DRAMA! and all, but I feel genuinely uncomfortable that this is the first time we’ve seen this character and it looks like he’s about to start whaling on these two stupid, but still innocent, women while mama Diane Keaton looks on approvingly.
MW: ‘Y-yes… I-I’m trapped in the walk-in freezer, l-like in that one episode of ‘I Love Lucy’! C-can you come l-let me out, pl-please?’
Sometimes you have to appreciate how some comics are just a job that you have to churn out by a deadline when the artist has blank pages being spit out by the, sure, we’ll accept that’s a printer. A few lines on the papers to indicate something is actually being printed? That’s precious golf time!
Buxley’s giant-pearl necklace reminds me of Wilma Flintstone.
Ah, there it is.
RMMD-We all know it’s going to be Mud Mountain.
MW-“You sound terrible,” Mary says trying hard to hide her obvious delight.
FC-Jeffy wants to watch the world burn.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: I believe it’s termed Indiana University of Pennsylvania, known to the locals as IUP. Curiously enough, there is also a California, Pennsylvania which used to house a California University of Pennsylvania until recently, when it was restyled Pennsylvania Western University–a move which was roundly denounced by the American Obfuscation Society
BB — I was unaware that Beetle was now a member of the Camp Swampy IT department
RMMD: Isn’t Mud busy with his seminars? Or his cartoon? Or whatever else he’s gotten involved in during Beatty’s desperate attempts not to feature medical plots in a medical comic?
JP: These characters go from zero to one hundred in a millisecond. It’s like reading a Chick tract.
BB – “Oh my god! It’s turned into a train engine!”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Pennsylvania also has a “California University” located in California, PA.
@and address: Go away troll.
love is... not having a clue what a love seat is.
CS: Would somebody please light Les Moore on fire already?
Two comments on today’s Plugger cosplay. First, the bear does not have the body type to pull of cosplaying the Jay Garrick-era Flash, and that peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t helping. Second, the Jay Garrick-era Flash has wings on his helmet, not glued to the side of his forehead. C for effort, F for overall effect.
Beetle Bailey – With Dilbert booted from every proper newspaper due to Scott Adams’ racist rants, Beetle Bailey is hoping to divert the “old libertarian IT guy” attention from old white guy political grievances toward imagined heroism of saving a tech illiterate blonde. Sadly, it will probably work, and HR can’t technically write you up again for posting “IT humor” no matter the sexual undertones.
Pluggers – Pluggers may not be with pop-culture, but they are aware of it, including The Bear being about chefs. Pluggers themselves don’t like food that requires for than three ingredients to make. Granted, they also consider canned pasta or microwave meals one ingredients, since ingredient is just a proxy for the amount of effort involved.
The Family Circus Spanish to English.
GT: “NOK NOK”?! So that’s how it’s gonna be, is it?
MW: Sadly, if those muffins were even slightly brown, they’d have to leave Charterstone.
Crankshaft-Join us tomorrow as Lillian and Ed are at the bottom of the stairs.
BB: I’m trying to make this funny by imagining “Yakety Sax” played over the second panel, but some things even “Yakety Sax” can’t help.
Pluggers eat like five year olds.
Pluggers: Reading this is the worst possible time for me to be eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
@Liam: Seriously, this overlong story could have been written better by actual high schoolers than Batiuk being self-congratulatory about how he’s opposed to censorship using the most obvious book about it. God help us is anyone gives him the CliffsNotes to The Crucible and he realizes the use of metaphor
BB/Pluggers: Mashup: Closeup of Miss Buxley in Panel 2 of BB, followed by Plugger.
JP/DT: Can we get Mike Curtis to wrap this up, with Declan in jail for scamming, and move on into Halloween?