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Beetle Bailey, 12/17/24

A thing that fascinates me is that deep in the DNA of the daily comics is the idea that their artists conceive of them as a black-and-white strip where the blacks and whites represent a platonic natural-color “reality” one conceptual layer down, even though probably the majority of their readers see them in a form where someone (not the original artist) has added color to the strip in ways that don’t or can’t reflect that “reality”. I realize that was an extremely complicated sentence, but a simple way to illustrate it is that Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley, in “reality,” wears a red dress to work, as depicted in the Sunday strips where the artists do the coloring themselves, but in the black-and-white dailies this solid color is represented by black, even in strips that subsequently have color added for online display.

Anyway, I bring all that because Zero’s red hat is clearly a bit of whimsy added by the colorist rather than something intended by the original artist, though comics are a collaborate process and I enjoy what everyone brings to the table. According to an article on the Smart Hospitality Supplies website (and who am I to argue with the severely underpaid content drone or, possibly, large language model-based AI that wrote this), a red chef’s hat “can signify passion, power, and determination. It might hint at a chef who is fearless in their culinary experiments, pushes boundaries and isn’t afraid to spice things up. This could translate into bold flavour combinations, innovative techniques, or a drive to keep service running smoothly and effectively in the kitchen.” Is writing a phone number in whipped cream an “innovative technique”? We’ll allow it. We’re also told a blue chef’s hat “can represent tranquillity, depth, and wisdom,” so clearly some thought was put into adhering to Zero’s character here.

Gil Thorp, 12/17/24

Speaking of passion and determination, Coach Perm Gerads, fresh off defeating the Mudlarks, is now aiming to defeat Marty Moon’s sobriety. Gil’s bartendress girlfriend (?) is hesitant about enabling all this, but maybe she shouldn’t have come to work today wearing a shirt that says “DO IT” (???) in big letters.

Family Circus, 12/17/24

You’re on the right track, Billy, but I’m guessing Grandma doesn’t want to see St. Nicholas of Myra in his bastardized Coca-Cola pitchman form delivering a cheery “Hi!” to adherents to orthodoxy and heresy alike. Surely there was a card you could’ve gotten her depicting the fiery 4th century cleric slapping the heretic Arius in the face for preaching that Jesus was a created being rather and not coequal to and coeternal with God the Father? That would be the sort of thing to get her going.

Mary Worth, 12/17/24

Hey, remember Dawn’s friend Cathy, who seemed pretty convinced that it was Dawn’s fault that her drip boyfriend Jared dumped her, because she was a wanton whore who liked to go to the club (with Cathy) while Jared was having an emotional affair with one of his physically abused patients? Well, she seems pretty intrigued by the idea that Jared might have forgiven Dawn enough to invite her to have a Christmas threeway, which scientists are already calling “the saddest sexual act in the history of the human species.”

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Judge Parker, 12/13/24

“I mean, we haven’t seen a panel showing anyone below the shoulders for weeks now, but I’m pretty sure there’s no bed in here and you’re sleeping on the stool. You know what they have prison, Ann? Beds! Just saying.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/13/24

“Because I’m not doing the surgery. They have the real surgeons doing it for once, ha ha! They sent me out here to talk to you, which frankly I’m not thrilled about.”

Beetle Bailey 12/13/24

Oh, don’t look so worried, Sarge: they’re burning you in effigy. They’re not setting you on fire per se. It’s symbolic. They’re taking you on in the markeplace of ideas!

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Mary Worth, 12/3/24

It can be hard to remember sometimes that Wilbur doesn’t dedicate his full energy to being a sad loser with a host of emotional problems; he also has an ostensible job as a newspaper columnist, simultaneously acting, against all good sense, as an advice columnist, something he has no qualifications for, and, separately, as a chronicler of the lives of people who have survived disasters, a job he secured after he himself almost died in a cruise ship disaster (no, not the one you’re thinking of, I’m talking about the one before that). Anyway, Wilbur is going to Florida for two weeks to interview hurricane survivors, which is the sort of thing a lot of people would use as a thin excuse to basically go on a Florida vacation, except that immediately afterwards he’s going to actually go on a Florida vacation. Florida as a state has a lot to answer for, but I frankly don’t believe they deserve this.

Beetle Bailey, 12/3/24

It’s a good thing America’s enemies don’t read the comics, because otherwise they’d learn that, much like 19th century Ireland, the U.S. Army is overly dependent on a single crop, and the introduction of, say, a water mold that could infect that crop would rapidly degrade our military readiness and leave us vulnerable to invasion! But America’s enemies are very much like Americans in a number of ways, one of which is that they generally do not read the newspaper comics. Surely this is something we could bond over, which in turn could transform enmity into friendship!