Ambivalent feelings about a man in uniform
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Shoe, 4/30/25
I dunno, the genuinely freaked out expression on this guy’s face, plus the fact that he’s wearing makeshift combat gear, including an outdated helmet, right here in Roz’s restaurant seems less “Ha ha, this dummy joined the ARMY and he doesn’t know what the army is even FOR” so much as “the front lines have collapsed, the enemy is pushing towards Treetops at a rapid pace, the desk-job soldiers who barely remember basic training are allowed one last meal before being rushed into a last-ditch defense with inadequate gear,” so I really wouldn’t look so smug if I were the Perfesser.
Alice, 4/30/25
Oh, sorry, I realize I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what Alice has been up to. What she’s been up to is apparently yelling at her mother’s (?) grave, which has been carved at her mother’s request to indicate that she’d rather be dead than be around listening to Alice.
Heathcliff, 4/30/25
Hmm, I endorsed it when Heathcliff began to impose his will on others by forcing them to dress in uniforms that matched his own fur patterns. But donning such a uniform himself, over his fur? That just seems weird. Not sure I approve. I guess you can’t argue with results, but still.
102 replies to “Ambivalent feelings about a man in uniform”
Is Alice walking away and looking back over her shoulder? If so, what the hell’s going on with her boobs?
MW:
“I…just…saw…Caspar!”
“The Friendly Ghost? Why do you appear so frightened, then? — I mean, he’s ‘friendly,’ after all.”
“No, no. Caspar Weinberger — the late chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Director of the Office of Management and Budget!”
Heathcliff: I like the detail that this is the “Elite Fish Market”. Today’s comic reminds us that our so-called elites are just as prone as anyone else to falling for cults, and their mannered belief in the importance of good form just makes them more at risk of coming under the sway of authoritarians.
Alice: The “Oh well!” caption really changes the interpretation of this strip. The death was no great loss, apart from the chicken marsala recipe.
Something of a theme here. Soldiers, uniforms, visiting graves — did all three writers mess up and think Memorial Day was the last day in April?
It might be worse than you think- according to the star, they’ve thrown generals into combat.
Heathcliff: I imagine this line spoken in the same Southern accent Rue McClanahan had, particularly as Blanche Devereaux in The Golden Girls. And I’m pretty sure that she was also swindled out of more than just a fish by a man in uniform.
MW: Dawn’s face is less traumatized by the knife and more by the fact that Wilbur has decided to drop all sense of modesty and give Belle a back door sample of his pickling cucumber right in the kitchen in full view of Dawn.
There’s no minimum for the IQ scores of today’s Army recruits, or today’s creators of Shoe.
Alice:
“Your having done so is consuming all of my waking thoughts! — which, in a way, is good, because it makes me forget about the fact that I’m basically an anthropomorphized Picasso painting!”
Alice: That could be anybody’s grave.
GA: Gertie, numismatry will get you nowhere.
MW: This is my pet peeve. That is a honing rod, not a sharpening tool. It straightens the blade. It doesn’t make it less dull.
Shoe: That a man joined the army without knowing its basic function and still rose to the rank of one-star general is only slightly less believable than that man is also a bird.
@Lauralot: Well you wouldn’t expect the creators of Mary Worth to know about making something less dull BAM!
Heathcliff: Heathcliff shows his cult of personality that he is a
mancat of the people by dressing as they do.@matt w: Truer words were never spoken.
Anyway allowing myself to hope for a second that Belle’s homicidal antics, including the ones Dawn hasn’t seen, are all Dawn’s paranoid fantasy and her name isn’t even really “Batsfrey.”
Shoe – Here’s a tip – transfer to Camp Swamp….
Alice – Skecky Greene had a poultry recipe?
Heathcliff – AI should stick to cleavage clickbait….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
He’d have to be in service for many, many years to even be eligible to make brigadier general. The eyes tell. Clearly, he’s bonkers and this is his thing. Roz is taped up in the back somewhere, the Perfesser is about to get cracked over the head with that coffee cup, and this dude’s gonna spend the rest of his day sniffing bicycle seats. There, Shoe is interesting, now.
Pluggers: Pluggers are fat # 42,618.
Dustin: So, Dustin, you hang around that kid all the time and only now you’ve found out he owns a giant mastiff dog?
@Lauralot:
This is my pet peeve. That is a honing rod, not a sharpening tool.
You and me both*
(which, I admit, is probably someone else’s pet peeve: “It should be You and I”)
MW:
“I tought I taw a homicidal maniac. I did! — I did taw a homicidal maniac!”
— Tweety Bird
Oh. Wait a minute. It isn’t Sunday Quote Box Time yet.
On a similar note, the look on the fish in Heathcliff is totally making my day. “Great Poseidon! I am WITH you nooooowwwww!”
Wary Morth:
Dawn’s been ghosted? Life is brutal.
@Pozzo: Alice has back boobs.
MW: Back after a wicked few day stint of food poisoning that was so bad I would have though Belle poisoned my food. **Hand to earpiece** Wait what’s that? We’re on to stabbing now? With Wilbur helping? …..Sure. Why not.
To be fair, when you exist in a gag strip it’s fair to expect that a career in the army will be nothing more than wacky hijinx and some occasional physical abuse from a sergeant.
@matt w:
Got ’em again!
DT: Even the accounting review is dumb here – noting past transactions won’t let you stop them. For pending ones, I’ve never seen a bank portal with “stop transaction here” buttons – you call customer service or perhaps there’s a webform to post a disputed charge. It’s the Type Fast! That Means We’re Hacking the System, Right?-level of understanding online banking
JP: Sophie, you really should know better than to tempt Fate like that.
RMMD: It’s not fair! *I* was the Bad Girl with the potential to be something more interesting than twice-toasted white bread, I’ve been working on getting my groove back away from the Morgan’s Shield of Boringness – and *you* get a stalker storyline instead of me!
@matt w: Mary Worth is just recycling the plot of Sybil. Clearly “Belle Batsfrey” doesn’t exist, Dawn is suffering from dissociative identity disorder as her mind cracks from the strain of the ugly incestuous relationship she is trapped in with her abusive father.
Shoe: He wanted Beetle Bailey, but he got Full Metal Jacket.
Alice: I’m guessing this is the first grave in a graveyard full of Alice’s
victimsfriends and family.Heathcliff: Feed a cat a fish, he’ll eat for one meal. Teach a cat to fish… are you insane?!?
Shoe: ‘Army’? Surely it’s all the air force, right? BIRDS!
Alice: I see that as the greeting card market is drying up, Hallmark has moved on to tombstones. Hey, it’s a solid product (both in that they’re made of stone and that everybody dies)
Heathcliff: To be fair, if a person came in to my shop wearing a full body suit that was a perfect image of their own nude body, I’d probably give them whatever they want, no questions asked.
Shoe – This is the first in a storyline parodying a famous 80s movie about a Communist Empire invading the United States in a coordinated sneak attack, but done with birds.
Yes, it’s Red Down.
Alice – All Alice’s Mom wanted to do was go quiet into that good night.
Heathcliff – I reiterate the theory I posited before, Heathcliff is on a heater mocking the readers of Garfield about being in a cult where they accept the bland mediocrity of Jim Davis’ character instead of a avant-garde rewriting of the comics medium that has been Heathcliff’s project.
For those true fans, Heathcliff is setting a Nietzschean example will to power and personal liberation in a conformist society.
FC: Adult Jeff gets a group call from his siblings: “Walked through a puddle. Yeah, right. You weren’t called number one son for nothing.”
@matt w: HIYOOOO
Luann: “Or you can fuck off, and I can invite less bitchy people. KThx.”
CS: Lillian’s line evaporated. I can’t imagine why that happened.
9CL: Alistair wants to wait until the honeymoon to explore the mysteries of the vulva.
@pugfuggly: (Shoe) To be fair, the Air Force was a branch of the Army until after WWII.
Heathcliff: Well, if it’s any comfort to you, Heathcliff’s “uniform” appears to be the addition of an orange collar and a white H sticker. Oh, and a ceremonial fish.
“With due respect, you’re a one-star general. Surely you’ve seen combat.”
“Son, I’m in Space Force, and Star Wars is a movie.”
Alice: “You also forgot to tell me how to apply basic rules of perspective, geometry, and human anatomy! But mostly Chicken Marsala!”
Luann: So they made 16% too much lasagna?
@taig: Dang it, out-pedanted!
That is interesting though.
MW: No, no, no. The line is, “You look like you saw a g-g-g-ghost!” We’re going to have to do another take!
FC: “It was a puddle by the fire hydrant!”
Dustin: If this turns into a remake of Cujo, I’m all for it.
Also Heathcliff: There is no evidence cats hunted or particularly ate fish before their domestication by humans. Conversely, there is plenty to show that cats facilitated the rise of agriculture by keeping pests out of stored grain, which is probably what led to their domestication in the first place. Or maybe it was the other way around? Anyway, the Heathcliff outfit seems like the next logical step in humanity’s growing subservience to Felis catus.
@CanuckDownSouth: DT: “AND I’M IN!”
Shoe-“Who knew that when I joined the Army there was a war going on.”
MW-Dawn just saw her father thrust into Belle’s lower backside.
FC-“It’s amazing all the places you can see when you stick out your thumb.”
Alice-That’s it for ‘Alice’. Join us tomorrow as the series goes into unending reruns.
Heathcliff-“That wasn’t Garfield?”
Aaaand a very late hit on yesterday’s Rex Morgan, M.D.: 3/10 only half jazz hands deployed would not recommend
GT: Why is the first baseman covering home? Why is his cap on backwards? Why is the baseline an arc? Why is the yellow-clad ump calling the runner out when he is clearly safe, and the tag is coming from the wrong direction to put him out? Why? Why?
MW: Why is Wilbur still alive? Why? Why?
Crankshaft-“Oh no. You’re going to write the book for me,” Lilliane says cocking a gun.
Alice: I would think the irretrievable loss of generational knowledge would merit more than an “Oh, well!” but then I try not to think too hard about whatever is going on in Alice’s weird cubist head.
Shoe: Ha ha, it’s funny because like many underprivileged youths* he was lured into military service with the promises of education and advancement, realizing too late that he had signed his life away to an uncaring industrial complex using a veneer of patriotism to promote oligarchical empire, and that even if he survives he’ll be left with nothing but lifelong trauma and a hopelessly inadequate support network.
*I’m assuming the soldier bird is a youth, or at the very least younger than the Perfesser, but every character in Shoe looks to be at least in their fifties (yes, even Skyler) so I could be wrong.
Alice seethes at her TEMU headstone. “I asked for a recipe and got an epigram.”
RMMD: I’d like to learn a little more about stalker dude. Didn’t he have anything better to do than stalk? How did he pay for his drugs? He was scrawny. Why wasn’t he getting punched out on a regular basis? Did he ever go beyond being extremely annoying?
“So, uh, raisin’ the dead, eh? Doin’ a little light necromancy? Gonna sic some zombies on the townsfolk, or gonna use some ‘essential saltes’ to raise the ‘liveliest Awfullness?’ What’s your endgame, damnation or carnage? Chicken marsala recipe? Man, there’s evil and then there’s evil. Respect.”
C’shaft: Honestly, I don’t think Lilian writes anything. She just comes up with these stupid titles and fills the pages with lorem ipsum. (She’s gotten away with it so far because nobody reads her books, either–they just leave them sitting around waiting rooms and nursing home lobbies.)
Luann: Man, if only there were something on a recipe that told you how many people it was intended to serve before you made the dish…
MW: Dawn realizes her dad is so desperate to get laid that he’ll hold her down while Belle stabs her.
Phantom: Come on, Sarvana, you know this sort of moral relativism won’t fly unless you’re wearing a purple unitard and stripy briefs.
RMMD: Oh believe me, honey, you didn’t miss much.
@taig:
On Crankshaft : What, is the implication that the massive line at Lillian’s booth was ENTIRELY due to her being late, and that once she got through the backlog of people who had been waiting for her, that was it for the number of attendees who were actually interested in her (heck, the line might have attracted more people, in the “this many people waiting for something MUST be good”)?
Which is the charitable reading, the uncharitable reading is that once the attendees actually MET Lillian McKenzie, the interest in her and her books IMMEDIATELY died COMPLETELY.*************
Luann : What other friends does Luann have? Tara, who hates her? Piro, who hates her and is actively ghosting her? Her brother? That nonagenarian who’s on constant life support (but only off-panel)?
Jock and Nil are part of BERNICE’S supporting cast now, as are the people at the dorm.
And I think neither Luann and Bernice have any direct connection with the people at the Fuse…
…Huh, I never realised how the Luann ensemble cast is… barely connected to each other in any way, and even then, a good chunk of them don’t have ANY connection to the ostensible main character…
“It was fun while it lasted”: what they will NOT print in the last “Alice”‘s strip!
Shoe: In real life, there are numerous non-combat roles within the military that will – if they’re doing their job right – never so much as be near a battlefield. Presumably, the Treetops military is therefore losing so badly that they’re throwing non-combat personnel into the meat-grinder out of pure desperation, and the Perfesser should probably have bigger concerns than insulting people with terrible puns like usual.
JP-Neddy’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.
Heathcliff: “Look, it was your idea to open a fancy downtown market selling nothing but whole dead fish. It stands to reason that cats would be our only customers!”
@TheDiva: I imagine the books in this world are like the fake money you can buy for Asian new year’s celebrations. They’re just a stand-in for some ritualistic purpose. And I strongly suspect that purpose is “pretending you’re smarter than you actually are.” So the book signing attendee in today’s strip is actually being sarcastic. Much like you would say ‘don’t spend it all in one place’ at the S&H Green Stamps factory.
Blondie-Being able to take a punch from Dithers is one of Dagwood’s strengths.
Alice – Gotta wonder how long the deceased spent looking at Microsoft Word fonts for their headstone before choosing Papyrus. Better than Comic Sans, I guess.
Shoe: Um, doesn’t the single star on the helmet signify a one-star (brigadier)general? If it does, he should have retired a long time ago. (He couldn’t be related to Gen. Halftrack, could he? Birds of a feather, so to speak??)
I know you’re enjoying your Year of the Westons, Moy, but for the love of God, please let something happen to progress the plot. Belle’s been at Casa de Mayo for five weeks now and has failed twice to off Dawn with her poisonous tea and tainted carbonara thanks to the Revolting Blob’s superpower of gluttonous clumsiness. Wilbur, of course, is being an oblivious simp with no idea what’s going on while Dawn is feeling uneasy but lacks any sort of survival instinct since she’s still staying in the condo with no sign of leaving. And of course, despite her crazy eyes and murderous intent, Belle has not let her mask slip enough for either Weston to be suspicious and they haven’t asked her why such a workaholic is so careless about missing so much work among other things. This plot is moving so slowly that it’s makes War and Peace look like Green Eggs and Ham.
Alice – “Holy cow, somebody sure screwed up the line breaks in this epitaph.” “Oh well! No biggie, it’s not carved in — Aw, nuts.”
CS: “Murder by Bookend.” Must mean that Loathsome Lil has exhausted all book-related locales and is reduced to citing murder weapons in her titles. “Murder by Board I took Out of the Bookshelf” is up next, followed by “Murder by Bookmark-Inflicted Terrible Paper Cut.”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Hey, buddy! How’s the ice skating?”
“I’m not here for skating! Did you know that if you cut a hole nearly through the ice, you can trap large animals?”
CS, again: I just had the horrifying realization that Lillian’s series detective is probably a little-old-lady amateur sleuth who runs a small bookshop above her garage in a Cleveland suburb. First initial, “L.”
Unless it’s a 21-year-old international terrorist/killer-for-hire with large breasts, mad martial arts skills, and an array of massive firearms, who travels the world solving cozy mysteries and bedding powerful handsome wealthy men with enormous talleywhackers. In which case, you go, Lillian.
@Little Blue Bicycle: Many excellent questions – it joins the list from football season – Milford sends 11 players on a total blitz, yet one peels back in time to snag an interception for a winning pick 6, basketball season – Milford starts in a game wearing orange tops and shorts and midgame switches to white tops and orange shorts. The one answer that unifies all of these oddities and other anomalies is that neither the writer, artist or editor (does anyone actually do that?) know much about high school sports in the USA or sports in general – the only way that play works is somehow the base runner overshot home plate and is now reaching back to tag in, but wouldn’t he have slid in.
Arlo & Janis – Well, Arlo, her boobs will be swollen and look bigger. However, it will be very creepy if Arlo notices.
Crankshaft – She comes up with a title (or rather, someone else comes up with it and she appropriates it) and then writes a book around the title. That sounds like movie studios coming up with the action figures and then coming up with a movie that sort of relates to the merch. I’m sure the book will be just as good as the movies.
9CL – Yeah, sophisticated professional world class musicians behave exactly like this. Get help, Brooke.
@TheDiva:
Yeah, like exactly how good is this chicken Marsala?
@Philip:
Thank you for elaborating so eloquently on the thought I had reading the earlier Heathcliff: Garfield doesn’t have it in him to proactively start a cult.
@Peanut Gallery:
Las personas que cruzan Abundio tienen tendencia a sufrir accidentes.
Shoe: dude is a Brigadier General. Probably in charge of a bunch of Remington Rangers at the Pentagon.
Shoe: Something poignant about the old Boomer reconsidering his war service on the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
@Violet: Chicken Marsala is never very good. It’s the least interesting of the Italian-American scaloppina dishes. Just sauteed chicken in a reduced sauce of Marsala wine, garlic, and a hella lot of butter. Alice’s Mom’s secret ingredient was that she spit in it.
Alice feels like Chicken Tonight™!
Alice: You really want that chicken marsala recipe? Dig then! You’ll find it in my cold, dead hands. Bon appétit!… unless this is completely the wrong grave. Kind of hard to be sure in this cemetery where names aren’t used on headstones.
Shoe: Is this a friendly diner chat, or is the Perfessor actually interviewing the soldier? My god, is it possible that the sole salaried employee of the Treetops Tattler-Tribune is doing his job?
@Garrison Skunk: Alice is a plugger dog?
Shoe is stealing from a Monty Python sketch.
The young soldier was just a walk-on before the arrival of the main characters: two Guy Ritchie-style 1960s British gangsters telling the British Army officer “nice army ya got here. too bad if something happened to it”.
It was very silly.
@Needless Exposition: And it’s going to get a lot slower.
@I speak Jive: re A&J — I had to go back and look, but was not impressed.
@Ukulele Ike:
Just “sautéed chicken in a reduced sauce of Marsala wine, garlic, and a hella lot of butter”?!
I think maybe you and I are very different people.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: Arlo and Janis were discussing their son’s wife, who is pregnant. He expects to see her “glowing.” Any woman who has been pregnant knows that her breasts swell during pregnancy. I hope I didn’t imply that a woman in the strip today had big boobs, because I really didn’t mean that.
@Bob Tice: How I love to watch the morn,
With golden sun that shines.
Up above to nicely warm
these frosty toes of mine.
The wind doth taste the bittersweet,
Like jasper wine and sugar.
I bet it’s blown through others’ feet
Like those of Caspar Weinberger.
—- Opus Penguin
He seemed more trustworthy in the uniform. Also the last shopkeeper who said no to him was found in 5 different dumpsters around the downtown area.
@Violet: I’m not one to butter-shame. By all means, order the chicken Marsala.
I’ll just get the Piccata, al Funghi, or Francese. But most likely the Parmigiana, because it’s an excuse to eat a LOT of melted cheese for dinner.
Luann: The sad part is that day old, leftover lasagna will be more refreshments than were served at Tiffany’s “BIG POOL PARTY”.
Luann: If Jack is invited you’d better make an extra lasagna. Two extra if Ox is invited.
JP: Sophie: “My parents, my sister and my boyfriend are all coming to my college graduation.They’ve got some nerve! Just who do they think they are?”
MW: What panel 1 doesn’t show us is Wilbur and Belle are nude from the waist down. That’s what’s causing the shocked look on Dawn’s face.
Luann: They should have cut the recipe BY one sixth? Was the original recipe targeted at 2.4 servings?
Alice is terrible as always.
@Weaselboy: Alice’s mother was part of a big Undertale fan debate of “Who is better, Sans or Papyrus?” before her passing.
LUANN: Sooo, Evansii, you do not understand grammar or fractions. Because we know full well that today’s error was not an intentional effort to make Bernice, alleged college student extraordinaire, look kinda dumb. I’d chuckle if it weren’t so sad.
Shoe: The old bird is a reenactor, possibly WWI, going by his tin hat. It was back when he joined the real Army, that he didn’t know what he was in for. I’m reminded of Oliver Hardy in Beau Hunks, patiently explaining to the colonel how he and Stanley mistakenly enlisted in the Foreign Legion.
Notice, there are two signature blocks in the second panel.
Crank: Hmm. After the discussion yesterday as to why writers don’t do this, I’m now wondering if we’re going to get a hamfisted demonstration of why not, as this lady starts asking what percentage of the royalties she’s going to get for doing the real work.
DT: Eric Costello Has Even Less Idea How Anything Works Than Tom Batiuk, part 326.
FG: I realise literally nobody else is going to get this reference, but the long drop had me thinking “You mean they’re going daaaahn to Margrave?”
Heath: I agree this is weird. The problem is, I’m not sure it’s weird enough. I feel that sometimes, when Gallagher is stretching a theme over a whole week, he starts phoning the weird in. Tomorrow will probably be “Haha, wouldn’t it be wacky if the Garbage Ape was wearing a Heathcliff uniform? Eh? The Garbage Ape? Diminishing returns definitely haven’t set in on how surreal he is, right?”
JP: With most characters, I’d be wondering what she’s really thinking about that she doesn’t want to discuss with … Hank? Is she back with Hank? I assume it’s not meant to be Glen, even though it looks just like him. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, when Neddy says she’s not thinking about anything, I believe her.
MW: I’d say Dawn’s expression was less “saw a ghost” and more “just dropped whatever Belle’s on”, but whatever.
RMMD: That’s right, Kelly. Your mother’s adventures in having a stalker chucked out of buildings with little difficulty, and then he was strangled by a man who quietly surrendered to the police was almost as exciting as toast with butter! (Okay, let’s not oversell it, margarine.)
JP: I sense a big burst of schadenfreude ahead, yay! *cue “Pomp and Circumstance”*
Alice: When my time comes I hope I too am buried under a headstone that bears a rambling credo but doesn’t have my name on it.
Shoe: TFW when you joint a World War II reenactment society on a lark and they hand you live ammunition.
RMMD: Wait, can’t we learn more about the old guy who killed the stalker? Okay then, could we learn more about the stalker? Then could we please learn more about the truck? Noooo, we’re gonna learn more about Summer & Co, aren’t we. Shit.
@Lord Flatulence: Baby’s got back…boobs….
9CL: Alistair will be plenty surprised when he wakes up in an ice bath minus one kidney.
C-Shaft: This fan appears to think that the writing of Lillian’s books is—if not AI-automated—at least a very low-effort affair. Nor have we really seen any evidence that she’s wrong.
DT: Why did the boss put the bespectacled guy on computer duty? He’s supposed to be out there getting pictures. Pictures of Spider-Man.
Dustin: The surprise is that Hayden wasn’t trying to get Dustin to fetch the ball.
GT: Gil Will be as shocked to learn that Clambake actually exists as he and Mimi were to find out they actually had kids. Their marriage would never recover.
JP: A simple “Nothing” might be taken at face value. Paired with “Nothing at all” it’s an open invitation to inquire further. This is Neddy, so obviously you’ll regret it either way.
MW: Hey, nobody’s trying to kill me and I’m shocked by seeing a dullard like Wilbur sharpen anything.
RMMD: Is Kelly implying that Summer’s life is no longer dull and dry as toast? Has she looked at the two people standing in front of her?
S&S: The unnamed town only has two police officers, a squad car with no roof or backseat, and no jailhouse that has ever been shown. As it turns out this is because all criminals are simply shot on sight. There must be many travel advisories in effect.
@Horace Broon: Thank you for that great Margate link. Never heard that song before and I like it a lot, even more after looking up the lyrics.