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Archive: Beetle Bailey

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Mary Worth is also invited to the wedding, so it’s gonna get real Oedipal up in there

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Curtis, 11/30/22

Curtis may have been a little late in celebrating Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday, but it’s making up for lost time with a whole week of beloved Peanuts character Franklin tutoring the strip’s education-resistent title character. They’re going to the always reliable joke of “this art style’s specific stylizations would look baffling and grotesque in the context of another art style with a different set of stylizations, were characters from the two universes to coexist.” Curtis may be focused on Franklin’s huge mouth, but I’m more weirded out by his mohawk. I guess if you 3D-modeled Franklin based on the original drawings, you’d come to the conclusion that he had a mohawk, but I don’t think he had a mohawk.

Mary Worth, 11/30/22

Oh, that mysterious figure from Zak’s past? You’d better believe it’s his beloved baby sitter, the one who made him the delicious rice-gravy slurry that to this day serves as an erotic Proustian madeleine! I think it’s very funny that in the last few days in this strip characters have spent a lot of time blissfully thinking about how Zak and Iris’s age gap isn’t problematic at all, and now suddenly we’re barreling full-speed towards “WHICH SUBSTITUE MOMMY WILL WIN?????” territory.

Beetle Bailey 11/30/22

I was pretty mad at Beetle’s response in the first panel when I read it, to be honest. Why does it have to have something to do with you, Beetle? Why can’t your girlfriend just tell you something interesting about her workplace and her day, huh? But then in the second panel it quickly becomes clear that their relationship is in fact wholly transactional, which frankly is a real downer.

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Zero, dark and gritty

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Beetle Bailey, 11/29/22

Beetle Bailey has recently established that, in addition to being extremely stupid, Zero is also an extremely accurate rifleman. But how can the U.S. military harden this peaceful simpleton’s heart so that he can use his skills to kill America’s adversaries? Well, it turns out that Sgt. Snorkel is actually pretty good at the “teach your soldiers to dehumanize the enemy” part of the job.

Crankshaft, 11/29/22

One of my least favorite Crankshaft tropes is when the gang treats Lena, a coworker who is always depicted as nothing but delightful as a person, with wholly undeserved contempt, especially when it comes to her cooking and/or making coffee. Like, fine, she’s probably bad at it or whatever, but their reactions are always way over the top in a way that I guess is supposed to be “exaggerated for comic effect” but always comes across as mean-spirited and unpleasant. Today’s strip, in which Ed declares that Lena’s cookies actively interfere with the Christ child’s mission to redeem mankind from sin, is a good example.

Dick Tracy, 11/29/22

Say, remember back in 2017, a more innocent time, when we all learned that Dick Tracy knows what cosplay is? Well, this is the year when we learn that Dick Tracy knows what furries are. Maybe he’s going to shoot one, or shoot somebody who’s robbing one, who knows!

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Sparktacular Saturday

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Folks, today is what would’ve been Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday! I feel pretty strongly that he was the best who ever did it in the newspaper comics world, and one of the great things he did was not hand off the strip to a child or assistant and create one more zombie lurching across the funny pages.

Anyway, most of the strips (zombie or otherwise) are celebrating Peanuts today, and most of those celebrations and great and heartfelt. But this website isn’t called the Comics Respecter, so for this Thanksgiving Saturday I’m going to bring you the two worst ones. Enjoy!

Marvin, 11/26/22

Feel like this is the very worst of the bunch. Ha ha, Marvin is talking about the comic strip Peanuts, but his friend has never heard of it and thinks he’s talking about peanuts, the food! And why would he have heard of the comic strip, anyway? It stopped running in papers years ago and these guys are literal babies. Honestly it’s pretty weird that Marvin knows about it. Anyway, that’s it, the third panel is just wasted, and we assume these two babies move onto some other conversational topic that they can both engage with on equal terms. Couldn’t even be bothered to wedge a poop joke in there. Sad!

Beetle Bailey, 11/26/22

Speaking of sad, before they did this strip, the team over at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC probably briefly contemplated what their lives would be like if all comics artists were as protective of their creations as Charles Schulz was. Or maybe they didn’t! Honestly, nothing that’s ever appeared in this strip implies that they’re real introspective over there. Either way, their vision for this assignment was “What the town where the entire Peanuts gang lives was washed away in a flood, with a terrified Snoopy the only survivor?”