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Beetle Bailey, 9/4/04

When Doonesbury’s B.D. lost his leg in Iraq and we saw him without his helmet on for the first time in that strip’s history, it had an enormous impact on readers. Seeing Beetle Bailey’s Sarge without his hat on is significantly less intriguing. Still, it’s interesting that the taskmaster drill sergeant, normally presented as Private Bailey’s persecutor, is here fervently praying to never see Beetle again. Maybe it’s like with bears: They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.

Also interesting is the fact that God has laughed in Sarge’s face, presenting him with the exact opposite of his most profound wish, causing him to rage against the arbitrariness of the universe. Here’s a tip, Sarge: if you’re gonna talk to the Almighty, put on some damn pants.

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Panels from: Rex Morgan, M.D., Beetle Bailey, and Blondie, 9/1/04

It’s safe to say that a substantial majority of cartoonists are men; inertia ensures that most of those men are middle aged. I know this because I can see the names on the strips and look up how long they’ve been writing them, but even if all I had to go on was the artwork, I think I could hazard a guess on the gender and age of the artists.

Let’s be blunt: cartoonists like to draw women with big tits. Today we have a bumper crop (so to speak), though it’s by no means far beyond the norm. At one end of the spectrum we have Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley (Miss Buxley! C’mon!), who’s drawn with a certain bathroom-wall crudity; there’s Blondie, who sits demurely through her dinner party, stylized, wasp-waisted, and looking like she’s going to tip over forward at any moment; and then we have Rex Morgan’s Heather, caught in photorealistic mid-jiggle, the shadow work on her mid-torso receiving almost as much attention from the artist as Rex’s chin cleft in the previous panel.

Now, I think it’s well-established that a substantial number of literary and artistic geniuses got their start by channeling frustrated sexual energy while in high school. How many great novels have been written varsity-letter quarterbacks? I’m hoping that this is the driving force behind all this buxomness, anyway, and that it isn’t all some incredibly misguided attempt by King Feature Syndicate to compete with Maxim. Heather’s nice looking and all, but I don’t think she’ll be hanging up on the wall of your local auto body shop anytime soon.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/1/04

A reviewer of Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks said that Woody’s character, a poor schmuck who came by a load of money, dressed like “a poor person’s fantasy of what a rich person would look like.” In today’s Beetle Bailey, we have a person with bad taste’s fantasy of what sophistication would look like, to wit:

• a barracks dominated by crystal chandeliers, ill-matching patterned throw pillows, purple drapes, and fuzzy area rugs;
• a mess hall serving non-existent but vaguely fru-fru sounding items such as “Mongolian baby peas”;
• and, in the pièce de résistance, Beetle Bailey dressed as a pimp.

That last item definitely pushes the whole affair into the realm of surreal dreamscape. Any member of the Queer Eye crew recommending such a suit would surely be sent to the lowest level of aesthetic hell, which probably involves doing interior decorating for Donald Trump.

Still, this strip may be more complex than it first seems on the surface. Since the final panel reveals that the whole thing is Sarge’s nightmare, does the author intend for us to laugh Sarge’s uneducated attempts to imagine high style? Or is this Mort Walker’s own nightmarish vision of a demasculinized military? There’s something to think about for thirty seconds or so before you move on to the Junior Jumble.