Archive: Beetle Bailey

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Slylock Fox, 3/4/25

They called Count Weirdly mad at Oxford, of course, and the Medical Sciences Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee repeatedly sanctioned him. But he’s shown them now, or I guess he would have shown them, if they all hadn’t been violently killed in the great animal uprising that wiped out most of the human race. Oxford is run by owls or something these days, but he’d like to think that, if any of his old nemeses were still around, they would understand that in this horrifying new world there just isn’t the luxury to muse on medical ethics the way there used to be. And with so few humans left alive, could anyone really fault him for trying to build a new one, as a friend? It’s not like there’s any shortage of corpses to use as raw materials.

Pardon My Planet, 3/4/25

But … you’re the one buying the pie, cow! I really don’t want to think about why this scenario involves cows wearing shirts and shopping in human grocery stores, or why a cow might assume that products made from cow’s milk can render dishes “sanitary,” and thank goodness that I don’t have to, because I have this basic bit of storybuilding to get hung up on instead. If you think the pie is unsanitary, why are you buying it? You’re standing in the checkout line, there’s nobody else there, you clearly picked it out and are now buying it!

Beetle Bailey, 3/4/25

Beetle is … dead, right? He’s not there, they’re putting a memorial plaque above his bed, he’s clearly dead. RIP Beetle Bailey, 1950-2025, you will be missed, to a certain extent.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/2/25

Oh, hey, sorry I haven’t kept you up to date on the tale of Summer and Augie and the bad date that Summer ditched to hook up with Augie. The short version is that after making a real ass of himself at the bar where Summer met Augie and getting kicked out by the bouncer, bad-date-man showed up at Summer’s workplace at the Morgan clinic and made a real ass of himself and got kicked out by the building’s security guard. As is all too typical for me, that ostensibly “interesting” stuff did not move me to comment, but today’s strip? Where Augie’s going on and on about how much he likes regional artists and educational vacations to Kansas City? Well, you know that’s gonna hook me in. I’m extremely invested in finding out if “regional artists” become the new “roots country.” Meanwhile, bad-date-man has stalked Summer to the art museum, and I guess we’ll find out this week if he’s going to make a real ass of himself and be kicked out by a museum security guard or if he decides that these people are pretty boring, actually, and he has better stuff to do.

Beetle Bailey, 3/2/25

Without the top row of throwaway panels, this strip is absolutely nothing, a boring non-joke about how the General is obsessed with golf and his soldiers don’t respect him, for that reason and also a variety of other reasons. With the throwaway panels … there’s a whisper of something funny in there. Probably they could condense all the other panels down to one or two and then it might actually elicit a sensible chuckle. Keep plugging away at it, guys, you’re gonna write a good one of these eventually!

Dennis the Menace, 3/2/25

I gotta admit, I spent most of this strip thinking, “Wow, the whole neighborhood thinks Henry’s a dipshit, huh. Can’t blame them, really. Look at how he dresses!” But then I got to the last panel and it turns out that everyone was actually mad at [record scratch] Dennis, whose menacing behavior provides this strip with its very title??? Ashamed to confess that they got me with this one, folks. They got me!

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Beetle Bailey, 2/7/25

Unfortunately, Beetle’s little prank happened to fall on the morning when the coalition of America’s enemies finally launched their long-planned invasion. With Camp Swampy’s main NCO out of commission until hours after the alarm was raised, and its commanding general blind drunk, the 13th Infantry Division was undermanned, unprepared, and unable to hold the left flank during the decisive Battle of Hurleysburg. Sarge never did forgive Beetle, but they were kept in different internment camps — Beetle and Killer had predictably gotten separated from the rest of the company during the chaos and were captured miles away from the main battle front — and never saw each other again before Beetle died of dysentery two years later.

The Phantom, 2/7/25

Not to be outdone by the Sunday Phantom doing a flashback to the adventures of an early Phantom in 16th century Africa, the weekday Phantom is doing a flashback to an even earlier Phantom, specifically the very first one, seen here swearing an oath over his father’s killer’s crab-eaten corpse. He’s only spent a little time in Africa at this point, but in the second panel you can see that he’s already very sunburned, and it’s a little disheartening 22 generations of Phantom decided the solution to this problem was to focus on advances in skin-protecting lycra technology so they could keep importing white brides from Europe.