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Beetle Bailey, 11/12/10

I know I should be way, way past the point where I get discombobulated by arbitrary, contextless things happening in Beetle Bailey in order to set up a cheap laugh, but something about Donna here doesn’t strike me as right. Why does she have a “Donna” nameplate on her desk? Doesn’t the fact that Killer addresses her by name in the first panel establish her identity and adequately lay the groundwork for the hilarious URL-based punchline? Also, why is her desk empty but for a single tiny slip of paper, but she has two computers sitting uselessly on the shelf behind her? Is this to establish her “computer savvy,” since obviously anyone who knows how to create a terrifying “web-site” must be surrounded by advanced computer equipment at all times? This comic seems like what happened when the crew at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC heard the phrase “Internet dating” in passing and tried to extrapolate what that might mean without doing any further research.

One of the things that rings false about the appearance of Donna is that the Beetle Bailey is actually fairly stingy about the introduction of named characters, only bringing them in once a decade or so when some great shift in society seems to demand it. The last such character introduced was actually computer nerd Chip Gizmo, which leads me to believe that “Donna” is actually Chip in fairly impressive drag.

Judge Parker, 11/12/10

In the latest in a long series of Judge Parker storylines to focus on the problems of the wealthy and attractive, it seems that ex-Judge Parker is chafing at the confines of his extremely comfortable retirement and wants to go back to his old job of deciding who lives and who dies. But now that his son has been declared Judge Parker for Life in accordance with Spencerville law and traditions, how will he get back into the courtroom? Will he start a whisper campaign impugning his son’s heterosexuality? Or will he settle for his own syndicated judge show on daytime television, where he’ll get to berate and insult defendants unrestrained by the niceties of judicial ethics?