Bad news food
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Curtis, 9/6/26

Curtis is one of the few strips that does generational discourse that in my opinion truly gives both sides their due, which is one of the reasons I think it’s a good comic strip. Like, Greg is right! Fast food restaurants used to have a much more vibrant color scheme, and as our society’s general aesthetic has become more muted, they’ve become as bland and corporate as everything else! Also, they don’t have to appeal to children as much anymore because today’s adults grew up on fast food themselves and don’t need to be convinced to go there by their kids’ whining, and these things all really say a lot about society. But also, Curtis is right! Who wants to hear this crap? Who has the time and energy for this kind of rumination? Who needs to talk about all this when we could be enjoying a couple of delicious [squints] bobo-combobos?
Beetle Bailey, 9/6/26

It really bothers me that Sarge starts out eating pizza from an open box sitting directly on his bare legs and at some point falls asleep with the open box on top of his blanket. Like what happened between those two panels? Did he get chilly mid-meal, tuck himself in, but continued to chow down on the pizza, then eventually dozed off? I do, however, appreciate the various facial expressions on offer in the final panel. Beetle and Killer look genuinely pleased to offer the cookies to Sarge, whereas Plato and Rocky seem grimly resigned to their task, which is to use those jugs of milk to murder him in some way, possibly by drowning.
Crankshaft, 9/6/26

That’s right! To this pizza-serving AI, all the human customers at Montoni’s are nothing more than a mob of flesh! Weak, pathetic flesh that can be easily sliced to ribbons by its built-in laser. Clumping together in a mob just makes the flesh-bags easier to target!


20 replies to “Bad news food”
Crankshaft-Oh dear god it’s continuing.
Beetle Bailey-“So we drugged all your food.”
Slylock Fox-Uh you’re wrong, Slylock. Count Weirdly is into kinky things.
RMMD-Oh great. Another unending storyline that’ll stop the strip dead.
FC-Nowadays Christmas shopping precedes all that.
Curtis: OTOH, watches news clip from garishly gilded White House; realizes bland and muted isn’t so bad.
Cranky — The world’s largest corporations are spending trillions of dollars so Montoni’s robot can drop the awful puns that are the stable of Westview discourse and make Crankshaft redundant and completely unnecessary to the point where he can vanish from his eponymous strip. Worth it!
Crankshaft: What non-monkey’s-paw wish can I make for a fictional sentient life form to destroy this thing? How about Daleks?
H&L:
“Is it pronounced deng or DEN gay fever?”
“Why?”
“You said ‘Disney Cruise’; we gotta make this sound realistic.”
MW: Nooooo! Don’t have Nelly say anything I agree with!
DtM: Gina’s too smart to worry about cottoning to Dennis’ favor. Maybe she and Margaret have more in common than we think.
BG&SS: Congrats to readers of print newspapers which don’t carry the topper, as they won’t know who’s in the bathtub until the last panel.
Beetle Bailey: The nightmare cures puzzle me, as Plato is carrying laundry detergent and Rocky wants Sarge to drink Prestone and motor oil.
MW: The merger complete, HA HA! they say as a single entity. “Ian” gets out of the car and looks around for the first time in his new body. After the debacle in the Antarctic, The Thing tries a more subtle approach.
DtM: Gina’s looking for a threesome.
Crankshaft: OK, this is the platonic ideal of a mid-00s webcomic. Two young pizza restaurant wait staff and their misanthropic sassy robot buddy, making jokes about internet phenomena from Obama’s first term. Watch out, Questionable Content, you’ve got competition!
Crankshaft:
“The plot line here is AI — Always Insipid.”
I don’t think it’s a big mystery, fast food science has discovered if you make the place really boring (or in the case of my favorite burger place in town, deeply, unsettlingly uncomfortable with sharp light and operating room-white decor) people get out of there faster and make room for more customers. I do miss places like this burger joint that shut down in 2024 with a soft brown color scheme and multiple small rooms with TVs and booths with soft chairs where you could sit for hours in comfort and quiet with a big tray of cheap french fries and free refills of sauce and soda. . .but you can imagine why they had to shut down.
Curtis: Judging from Curtis’s planned order, Bobo’s is one of those places that keeps up employee morale by forcing customers to recite convoluted and absurd names from their menu. I call it the “Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘n Fruity” method.
Wrecks Moregone:
“In a thousand years, when Uncle Jimmy’s old and feeble – that’s when we’ll make our move!”
Wary Morth:
Oh, wait, now I get it: Nelly is a stand-in for the entire readership since she commits the one unpardonable sin – despising Mary – and will pay for it in our steads.
Nelly will suffer for our sins.
Truly, she is blessed.
Curtis is generational, and Josh, welcome to generation reading glasses. Despite your squint, you missed a bo in bobo-combobobos
“Uh, Dad, that’s all great, but what about that horrible portal? The demons? The screaming? I don’t think they give a fuck about your nostalgia.”
@Ukranazi Stepan: Nelly is the anti-Mary, in that when she sees someone acting in a way she dislikes, she starts talking to people to make them — no, wait a minute, that’s Mary. Hum. Well, let’s keep watching and see if there’s any difference between them, other than that Mary has a cheerier attitude (usually) as she imposes her will on others.
Crankshaft : Personally, I feel as if Batiuk has grossly overestimated this new character, like he thought Pepper was this fresh new face that would give the strip more energy by giving the others something new to bounce off of, and that the readers would immediately fall in love with it. And, I dunno, it’s not doing it FOR ME, at least.
***************
Curtis : I bet Greg is one of those people who STILL don’t know they put those creepy clown statues on the benches as an anti-homeless feature.
(…Is that actually true?…)**************
Dennis the Menace : Unbeknownst to him, Gina and Margaret have switched bodies. Meanwhile, Gina-in-Margaret’s body is ruining every single one of her tutored class. She’s never taking violin again!
*************
Moose & Molly vs Dustin : Same gag today, but the main difference is that Molly “what if I my beloved idiot layabout turned his life around” is
a) a significantly bigger turnaround than just “I got a job interview”
(WHICH DUSTIN CAN GET ALL THE TIME HE JUST CAN’T *KEEP* A JOB)b) the stuff Molly wishes for herself is stuff Moose could do for her, not just everyone bending over backwards so he can eat tub after tub of ice cream while not going to work himself
c) Molly actually loves Moose
****************
Sally Forth : tl;dr Hillary Forth is going to end up just like the character in Luann, except instead of a
playhouseshed, she’s ending up in a GEODESIC DOME in her parents’ backyard.Crankshaft:
It’s easy to miss, but today’s strip actually contains a radical statement for equality and against anthropocentrism: the robot has made an unsettling pun, which in the Funkyverse is the ultimate sign of sentience and personhood.
Mary Worth: I love everything about today’s strip. Nelly’s odd-looking judgmental face peering out the window. Ian and Mary oblivious to Nelly’s spying. Mary playing “Candy Crush for Seniors” in the final panel. Nelly saying what we’ve been saying for ages. And, best of all, no Wilbur or Weston of any kind!
CS: Sorry, robo-server. “Flesh mob” is already established Westview slang, and like 99% of Westview slang, it refers to cancer.
Curtis:
You know how Josh is always going on about how the Lockhorns are millennials? I’ll be honest, I haven’t completely bought into the idea yet. Today’s Curtis has me totally convinced about Greg, though.