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Beetle Bailey, 10/31/05

Family Circus, 10/31/05

Just in time for Halloween, the comics are full of SCARY SKELETONS! AAAAHHH! AAAHHHH! Actually, I’ve never quite got the handle on why skeletons are supposed to be scary. I mean, I get vampires (blood-drinking, transforming victims into damned undead), zombies (brain-eating, rotting flesh produces foul odor), werewolves (razor-sharp claws, poor self-control), Frankenstein’s monster (product of perversion of the natural order in which man plays at being God, very tall), and such. But skeletons, well … they’re just bones, aren’t they? Sure, if they walked the earth on their own power, it would be … unsettling, but without muscle mass, how much harm could they really do? Mostly they make me visualize an anthropology lecture, which isn’t “scary” so much as “boring.” (I’m leaving aside for the moment here the skeletal grim reaper, who’s scary not because he’s a walking skeleton, but because he has a creepy robe and a boss scythe and can take your soul to the underworld.)

Anyhoo, the Family Circus and Beetle Bailey both seem to realize that the kids today, they’re not afraid of an animated bag of bones like they used to be, so they’ve come up with a harder-hitting twist: visible bones = malnutrition. Little Billy, always on the make, is planning on exploiting concern for his pathetic, wasted state to get more goodies from the bleeding-hearts in his neighborhood. Check out the little smile on Mommy: she knows that she can remind Billy of this moment if he ever goes soft and wants to donate the family’s hard-earned booze money to some little brown children starving in some filthy third-world hellhole.

Beetle Bailey, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten it’s Halloween altogether, but it still manages to convey sheer terror on the part of Sarge. Convinced to head off-base as part of the lamest 48-hour leave in the history of the US military (Museum? Museum? Where are the whores, soldier?), our portly sergeant is brought face to face with the prospect of his own mortality in the form of some of the most poorly-executed dinosaur skeletons I’ve even seen. While the idea of being reduced to a hulking set of bones has clearly shaken Sarge to his very core, at least he’ll now have the strength to resist the relentless, anorexia-inducing body image peer pressure that is the Army’s secret shame.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/12/05

Yeah! You’ll love it! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be scared, you’ll be … um … angry. So very, very angry. Angry at the filmmakers? Angry at all the chortling, weeping, and shrieking that went on in the theater? Angry at the creators of this strip, who can apparently only draw four emotions? It’s hard to say.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/27/05

Today’s Rex Morgan, M.D., is actually a quite lovely chiaroscuro composition; even the sweatshop coloring hacks knew to leave well enough alone, adding only a splash of red to Rex’s tie that’s quite striking in and of itself. The mood is appropriately somber for the subject matter, but the dialogue confirms my growing suspicion that there’s only one competent medical practitioner in the Morgan family, and it isn’t the one who goes around waving some fancy initials around after his name in an overly compensatory fashion. Maybe Rex is distracted by the recent departure of his sexy blond archaeologist buddy, but his comments here give the impression less of “trained doctor” and more of “Catch Me If You Can-style fraud.” First, he seems baffled by the idea that a wounded man coming back from a war zone might have a piece of metal embedded in his body; then he claims ignorance as to why discussing an injured individual might be relevant at a medical practice. I mean, forget med school; anyone who’s seen an episode of M*A*S*H could have faked his way through this conversation better than “Dr.” Morgan.

The war in Iraq is a potentially touchy subject for the comics pages, even for an ostensibly “issue”-oriented strip like Rex Morgan (though the “issues” raised by the Fence Post Frank/Buck plot would be best dealt with by a psychologist and a landscape architect). If this storyline takes a stand more controversial than “Wounded soldiers should have their wounds treated promptly by a skilled medical professional” (which, I can’t emphasize strongly enough to Jack, would in this case be June), Rex Morgan, M.D. might find itself exiled to the Opinions page with the Boondocks and Mallard Fillmore.

Of course, if the strip needs some help in talking about the war without actually, you know, talking about the war, it should take some lessons from the master:

Beetle Bailey, 9/27/05

Soldier, I know it seems like some of the tasks you’re ordered to undertake are small or irrelevant, but each one slowly but surely advances the cause of freedom. And by “cause of freedom,” I mean “some campaign contributor’s stock portfolio.” I’m not sure how the Army gets its martini glasses, but I’m betting it involves a no-bid contract and a Halliburton subsidiary.