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Archive: Beetle Bailey

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Glad we aren’t seeing the Halftrack Assembly Vat, actually

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Beetle Bailey, 9/4/13

I was going to say something snide here about how if you hear the phrase “3-D printing” on the news you can’t just panic and throw it into a comic at random, you have to do a few minutes of research about what 3-D printing actually is, but then I thought: what if Gizmo has one of those 3-D printers that can create living tissue and has decided to make another version of General Halftrack, piece by piece? If nothing else, this horrible 3-D-printed abomination of science will allow us to do some good nature vs. nurture studies about terrible, crippling alcoholism.

Mark Trail, 9/4/13

Now that Mark Trail’s gotten all the punching out of the way early, the strip is free to draw out the rest of this storyline as one long, dull anticlimax. “Thanks for the tip, Dusty … it turns out it was surveyors who had been damaging our fence! They had been leaning their equipment up against it. I explained to them why they shouldn’t do that, and they apologized and said they wouldn’t do it again. Anyway, good luck catching those poachers! I’m going to go get some pancakes.”

Apartment 3-G, 9/4/13

Oh my goodness, which character from Apartment 3-G will suddenly find themselves appointed the new Lieutenant Governor of New York? Probably Tommie, right? Lieutenant Governor is about the most boring political office America has to offer, Tommie’d be perfect.

B.C., 9/4/13

Wait, none of the ant-adults in B.C. have jobs? All the stories about their work ethic are just lies!

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Wednesday quotables

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Beetle Bailey, 8/28/13

“I guess he’s a pile of shattered bones and mangled organs, mostly! Aw, Sarge looks kind of sad, like he vaguely regrets beating Beetle to death in a savage frenzy of violence.”

Mark Trail, 8/28/13

“That is a good job, Rusty — and speaking of jobs, isn’t about time you started contributing financially to this household? You’re not an actual blood relation, so it’s not like we have an obligation to keep feeding you free of charge. Say, I hear the new glove factory in town is looking for line workers! They’ll pay you 50 cents an hour and all the irregularly stitched gloves you can fit into a gunny sack!”

Crankshaft, 8/28/13

“I’m not really sure what Rocky Rhodes’s name is supposed to say? I guess it was meant to be punny, years back when we first introduced this character, but who can really remember now.”

Family Circus, 8/28/13

“Mommy, is Grandma a filthy foreigner? Is our bloodline tainted? Can we only be redeemed by cleansing this entire condo complex with purifying fire?”

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Related: Mary Worth butts out; Margo cares; world ends

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Mark Trail, 8/12/13

No use denying it any longer. Mark Trail has taken Rusty fishing — it says so right there in the strip. A treasured Comics Curmudgeon article of faith — that Mark never, ever takes Rusty fishing; that such an event is not physically possible — lies in dust and ashes. Can you imagine how the Seekers felt when their prophesied flying saucer failed to show up back in December 1954? You can? Well, this is nothing like that — this is how the rest of us would have felt had the saucer arrived right on time, picked up the Seekers, and left us all to die in the flood.

It’s hard to feel too bad about it, though. I mean, look at the little scamp so darn happy there in panel two. You just want to give him a big hug, never mind that he’s hideous, fictional, and holding a fish.

Slylock Fox, 8/12/13

As is widely known, Count Weirdly genetically engineered animals into sapient bipedal monsters in a deranged effort to replace humans lost to an unnamed apocalypse. Here we see the horrific cost of his obsession: the graves of a century of victims from his early, failed experiments. None tears at the heart more than poor Rita Rabbit, doomed by ruined DNA to live her short life backwards, dreaming only of the chance to savage her insane creator/tormentor one time before her teeth recede into their gums and she is deconceived forever.

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/13

Sarge deadpans a perfectly symmetric, perfectly ambiguous punchline: at once, the pillow is insufficiently firm to meet Army regulations and Army regulations insufficiently rigorous to ban the pillow. From the depths of his forbidden/permitted pillow, Beetle grins directly at his audience: See? We can do irony as well as the next guy — but as hardened warriors, we just don’t go in for all that postmodern self-referential bullshit ;-)

–Uncle Lumpy