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Pearls Before Swine, 6/10/23

I’m taking a slight break from my usual routine here to relay a personal anecdote. On Saturday, I went to a showing of The Philadelphia Story at one of the big historic movie palaces in downtown LA, and one of my personal crosses to bear is my inability to be chill about the fact that grown-ass adults cannot stay off their fucking phones even at special events like this. The guy sitting in front of me had one of those absolutely enormous phones that bordered on tablet size, and all through the pre-show stuff where the lights were down and they had a film historian giving a presentation about the movie, this guy had his phone on and sitting in his lap and the browser was open to the Pearls Before Swine strip you see above. Mostly he was paying attention to the presentation but every once in a while he would look down at the strip and zoom in on the phone so he could read it better. This went on for like 10 minutes; he did not look at any other strips, just this specific one. He turned the phone off before the actual movie started, but if I had had to tell some dude to NOT LOOK AT A NEWSPAPER COMIC DURING A MOVIE, surely I would have become the Comics Curmudgeon in that role’s final form. Anyway, if the person who was doing this is reading these words right now, sorry to drag you in public like this, but: when the lights go down, the phone should go off.

Beetle Bailey, 6/12/23

“I’m also burdened by feelings I can’t quite articulate about how my hair-trigger rage is damaging my relationships with other people and my own conception of myself as a basically good person.”

Gil Thorp, 6/12/23

The kids who got busted by Marty Moon for selling vape sticks were all boys, so I’m not sure why Gil feels like he has to alert the girls’ team’s coaches about it in the middle of a game. I guess he figures if his afternoon just got ruined, so should everyone else’s.

Slylock Fox, 6/12/23

Today’s Slylock Fox is a good example of why using a rigorous program of logic to suss out the truth is simply not enough for any law enforcement operation. Sure, Slylock can smugly point out that only a mammal would need hair care products, but the criminal reptile’s refusal to surrender in the face of this “gotcha” means that Sly is resorting to the hotel’s front desk workers to actually apply the force necessary to catch the thief, which implies that he’s failed to grasp the true nature of the problem he faces.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/31/23

The whole “Beetle and Miss Buxley are dating” bit is a recent development in this strip and I’m on the record as strongly opposed to it. Today we learn that the whole thing is just a way for Beetle to express his dominance over senior officers in the only way he can. Of course, while this struggle is clearly sexual in nature, it’s several levels removed from actual sex, since we know Beetle simply dozes off whenever his “girlfriend” tries to get amorous.

Dick Tracy, 5/31/23

One of the underappreciated tragedies of the past few years is that spammers and scammers are increasingly turning ordinary phone calls into a widely avoided and increasingly useless form of communication. The federal government refuses to take action, so local authorities in Neo-Chicago are trying to help by issuing every old person a scam-detecting chicken.

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Gil Thorp, 5/30/23

One of the things I’ve always respected about baseball (the men’s version) is that, as with all sports, sometimes a level of disrespect is shown by one player to another that demands fisticuffs, but generally speaking those fisticuffs are extremely desultory, with all the players fairly quickly forming a huge mass in the middle of the field and just kind of shoving each other. My favorite part is watching the relief pitchers in the bullpen do the calculation on how long the scrum is going to last and then slowly jogging in to make an appearance if it doesn’t break up quickly enough. Anyway — and hopefully everyone understands that I’m saying this as a feminist ally — I feel like the girls of Mudlark softball could learn something from the typical low-stakes MLB brawl, because they are going at it, with roundhouse kicks and punching people in the face and such, which seem like the sort of things that could earn you a multi-game suspension at minimum.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/23

Look, man, I hate to be the one who’s more of a purist about a comic’s characters than their creators current maintainers, but Rocky’s one-note characterization is that he’s a rebel who loves the rock music. He’s not some dork who walks around a metal detector! That’s Chip Gizmo territory!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/30/23

In other news, most of the teens in the Rex Morgan gang of teens are finally graduating high school! And thank God, because by the look of them they’re all well into their 30s.