Archive: Beetle Bailey

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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.

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Shoe, 5/26/23

I know that restaurants generically calling side dishes like potatoes or rice or whatever “starches” was a thing at one point, but is it still a thing? I’m sure someone’s going to be like “there goes Josh the coastal elitist again, who only goes to hip, Instagram-savvy restaurants when real Americans in the heartland are happy to order a side starch whenever they go out to eat,” but the joke’s on you because the hip restaurants have started eschewing that bland Instagram aesthetic and are pivoting to TikTok, which rewards motion and video so now they’re doing frankly gross shit like serving dishes where the waiter breaks it open for you and cheese gushes out everywhere. Where was I? Oh, right, I was talking about the phrase “with your meal, you’re allowed a starch,” which honestly doesn’t seem that appetizing to me, and I don’t think Roz saying it with come-hither eyes while holding the menu three feet away from the Perfesser really helps.

Dick Tracy, 5/26/23

Dick Tracy is doing a plot about how boring film-themed villain Silver Nitrate is in prison, and in case you were wondering how he’s doing: he’s doing pretty well! He knows who to avoid now, and it’s the other Dick Tracy villains who tell him, explicitly, that they don’t want to hang out with him. Honestly seems pretty straightforward!

Beetle Bailey, 5/26/23

A group of Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC staff sit around a table, sweating. They’ve just broken open the “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY (THE KIND WHERE YOU RUN OUT OF BEETLE BAILEY JOKES) BREAK GLASS” case that’s been hanging on the wall of the office for as long as anyone can remember. Inside is a single scrap of paper, on which someone has written four words that terrify them: “Sgt. Lugg gets horny.”