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Beetle Bailey, 9/2/25

Now, I’m not a big shot syndicated newspaper comics artist, but I think that if you have a joke where a general tells a subordinate officer that his uniform cravat (?) isn’t regulation, and then the officer says “And that is?” because the general is wearing a ludicrous golf outfit, the general’s outfit should be a reveal in the second panel. The element of surprise seems key to making it a “joke,” in my opinion, and you’re probably saying, “But Josh, the comics are a visual medium, how are you going to have the general’s dialogue without showing him,” and sorry, that’s not my problem! You could’ve bailed on this joke at any time once you realized this! But you persevered, and here I am criticizing it on my blog, the Comics Curmudgeon. That’s just the way of the world, I guess.

Hi and Lois, 9/2/25

Speaking of surprises, I think if your garbageman tells you that he and his partner attended an awards banquet for some kind of sanitation worker professional association, and you ask how it went, and he tells you that his partner won an award, you shouldn’t look so surprised about it. This is, to be clear, a criticism of Hi, not of the writing of the strip. I’ve already accepted and embraced the fact that Hi and Lois has rejected punchlines for the most part, so I’m fine with that aspect.

B.C., 9/2/25

Ha ha, remember pop-up ads? Remember when they were an example of a new, high-tech annoyance in the world, but now here they are, being joked about as something in the past, in a comic strip where the characters are, literally, ancient cave-dwelling hominids? Does it make you feel like an ancient cave-dwelling hominid? Discuss.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/25/25

Comedy is, in large part, the art of subverting your audience’s expectations in ways they find pleasing. So you could see how it might make sense in theory to do a comic strip where a soldier yells “INCOMING!!” while pointing to the sky, setting up an expectation that he’s on the front lines and his position is about to get hit by an artillery barrage, only to reveal in panel two that he’s about to get pooped on by a bird, a much less life-threatening scenario. However, longtime readers know that the idea of any of Camp Swampy’s troops being deployed into combat is laughable, so the joke doesn’t really land. I will note that the second panel reinforces the punchline by showing us that Sarge and Beetle are hanging out somewhere littered with power lines, which provide ample places for birds to hang out while also being significantly easier to draw than the birds themselves.

Marvin, 8/25/25

“Marvin hates going to preschool” isn’t a strip theme I dwell on much, as it’s a less obvious target for mockery than “Marvin loves pissing himself,” but it’s just as grim in its own way. Today we learn that he hates going to school so much that he’d rather sit immobilized in his car seat indefinitely, his only company a parent who’s presumably fuming about traffic and who doesn’t feel much affection for him at the best of times, than go there. At least in this situation he can piss himself if he wants, I guess.

Dustin, 8/25/25

Wow, huge news! Dustin has finally stopped going to fern bars to find love and is joining the rest of his generation, along with the two generations before him, on the apps. He’s apparently still getting his bank statement sent to him in the mail, but, you know, baby steps.

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Crankshaft, 8/1/25

OK, fine, I guess if I’m doing Crankshaft two days in a row, I will explain why Ed and Jeff were in an airport yesterday: It’s because Pam accidentally spilled bleach on Jeff’s inexplicably beloved Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt, and so to make it up to her husband she bought tickets to an actual Blue Bombers game for him and Ed, and now they’re flying from Cleveland to Winnipeg (a route many in the aviation industry call “the saddest city pair in North America”) to see some red-hot Canadian Football League action. Anyway, today I’m mostly mad about Jeff saying “No pun intended,” for two somewhat contradictory reasons. On the one hand, “passed the quarterback test” is barely wordplay, like homeopathic levels of wordplay, like “pass” and “quarterback” are in the same sentence but they’re not really relating to each other in any kind of grammatical sense applicable to football; and yet, on the other hand, because this is Ed Crankshaft we’re talking about, a pun was absolutely intended. The man hasn’t gone more than three sentences without intending a pun in his entire life.

Beetle Bailey, 8/1/25

Say what you will about Beetle Bailey, but I always respect just how grim the strips about the Halftracks’ failing marriage are. Like, look at the General’s face here. A lesser strip would have him be cheerfully blotto, but he actually looks genuinely distressed, like he spent the entire trip home perseverating about the fact that he’s returning much later than he promised and he knows he’s really going to hurt his wife’s feelings. And for what? Booze? He doesn’t even really enjoy it anymore! He’s got a real problem!