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Archive: Beetle Bailey

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The masks are not, repeat, NOT part of some weird sex thing (we hope)

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/26/14

Plantman’s secret … REVEALED! I’m not, of course, referring to a secret about his motivation for killing Jess’s father, the discovery of which was why she arranged this jailhouse interview in the first place but which he’s always been pretty upfront about. No, he’s apparently known for years that Jess’s father, John Darling, was cheating on Jess’s mother, Jan, based on a very oddly constructed set of last words. Will this send Jess into a devastating downward emotional spiral? Will she spend the next several months or years researching this “new lead,” eventually discovering that Plantman has wildly misinterpreted the phrase and it actually means something fairly innocuous? Will she then conclude that her father wasn’t a hateful asshole after all, even though all available evidence indicates pretty strongly that, no, he really, really was?

Beetle Bailey, 4/26/14

Read left-to-right, the final panel of today’s Beetle Bailey is quite an emotional roller coaster! At first, I saw General Halftrack’s sad facial expression and read his dialogue and assumed he was desperately trying to carve out some autonomy within his own life. His wife may find his emotional investment in sports silly, but darn it, he enjoys them, and the outcome really does matter to him. Then I read her sullen response and realized, oh, he’s just worried about having his legs broken by his bookie’s enforcers.

Lockhorns, 4/26/14

Congratulations to everyone who had the Lockhorns in the “Most Disturbing Image In Today’s Comics” pool!

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Something borrowed, something sharp

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/20/14

We’re four and half months into the Terry Beatty era on Rex Morgan, M.D., people! One of the interesting challenges in taking over a long-running continuity strip like this is integrating your predecessors’ character designs into your own style, which can have awkward results — see, for instance, Niki’s starfish hair, which was always pretty bizarre but at least sort of worked with Graham Nolan’s aesthetic, but poor Beatty is kind of stuck with it here. I am glad to see that the new artist is adhering to another tradition involving Niki — namely, that whenever frank discussions of his sexuality are on the table, he’s suddenly drawn to look like he’s about thirty years old.

Judge Parker, 4/20/14

Don’t worry about April out in the jungle, Randy … she’s in her element out there! Plus she has a nice, sharp knife. When you make April leave her own wedding reception to go look for your stepmom because she wandered off into the mercenary-lousy jungle, somebody’s going to get stabbed.

Beetle Bailey, 4/20/14

I’ll admit it: I got to panel five and I thought, “Well, I never expected that Beetle Bailey’s decades-long run would end with all of Camp Swampy dead in some sort of mass cult suicide, but I’m willing to run with this.”

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“To a certain extent,” hahaha

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Mary Worth, 4/17/14

WHAT A TWIST! It turns out that it’s not just Tommy who’s too darn lazy to get off his duff and get a job; his mom is a shiftless bum too! “I don’t want a lot of talk about putting in the effort of learning how to bake, Mary,” she thinks to herself. “Just hand over the goddamn muffins! mmm, just gonna visualize Tommy lounging around back at the apartment while I go to town on this. He sure isn’t learning how to bake! Stay strong, Iris!”

Better Half, 4/17/14

It’s true, Stanley, a cool way to lose weight would be if you were just a smooth spheroid with no openings or internal structure, just a blob of living matter with no mouth or way to digest nourishment, yep yep yep not horrifying at all no sir

Funky Winkerbean, 4/17/14

Wait, but … but … Les already solved this, in his book about John Darling? OH MY GOD NOT EVEN JESSICA READ LES’S BOOK