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Beetle Bailey, 9/17/22

God, I legitimately love this Beetle Bailey. Look at how absolutely miserable Halftrack is in that second panel! Golf is the thing he does for fun, on his day off, and he’s played miserably all day and it wasn’t fun at all and he hates it. Now he’s going to drink a mason jar full of whiskey and get blackout drunk. It’s perfect, no notes.

Crankshaft, 9/17/22

Oh hey, uh, why exactly is Crankshaft tagging along on this theater-buying expedition, exactly? Does he think they can’t do the strip without him? Did he get wind of Dennis getting pushed out of his own strip even though his name is on it? “I’m not going out like Barney Google,” he thinks to himself. “I’m gonna do a labored pun, or at least a smirk, in every one of these stupid strips. I’m the brand!”

Judge Parker, 9/17/22

Big news everybody! Remember Steve, the heroic double-amputee war vet who was Sam’s law partner for a while before running off with their legal secretary Gloria back in 2014? Well, he’s back, which is probably … exciting in some way? For the real Parker trufans? I don’t actually remember Steve being particularly interesting, but maybe he’ll shake things up in the current iteration of the strip, after he and Sam finish this elaborate social dance of mutual blame over the next six to eight weeks.

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Mary Worth, 9/11/22

Man, I wasn’t sure how Mary was going to use her Jedi mind powers to get Dawn to rationalize herself out of her rage over getting dumped by the boyfriend she never respected, but “well, we were in a codependent relationship due to our various personality flaws, but then I got too emotionally healthy for him to fix so he had to dump me, which was for the best,” is really quite impressive.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 9/11/22

Uh, yeah, going forward I’m going to want to hear a lot less about “Count Weirdly stole some top secret plans” or whatever and a lot more about “Count Weirdly has twin sisters and they keep using their genetically identical nature to commit crimes for which they cannot be prosecuted.”

Pardon My Planet, 9/11/22

Really like the contrasting faces of the couple at the lower right here: both are sexually aroused by what they’ve just seen, but she’s in touch with her kinks and fine with that, while he’s had feelings awakened he’d rather keep buried.

Crankshaft, 9/11/22

Crankshaft’s expression in the final panel is really great. “So, uh, we’re doing really doing this, huh? Sure we can’t just do another strip where I’m an asshole to children?”

Beetle Bailey, 9/11/22

WARNING: BEETLE BAILEY HAS BECOME AWARE OF THE CONCEPT OF “FURSONAS,” THREAT LEVEL ALPHA, REPEAT, THREAT LEVEL ALPHA

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Beetle Bailey, 8/16/22

Feel like it’s been a long time since I saw someone actually smoking a tobacco cigarette in a newspaper comic strip, and while I hadn’t thought about it much, I think I unconsciously assumed there was some kind of Hayes Code-style agreement that we wouldn’t depict such a thing in a medium intended for children. But maybe I’m wrong about that, or maybe there was a collective recognition over at Beetle Bailey central that nobody cares anymore and definitely no children are reading Beetle Bailey, so why not be free, for certain limited definitions of “being free,” which is to say free to depict Rocky, the camp’s resident “bad boy” (non-sexual division), enjoying a cigarette held at arm’s length and Beetle being weirdly passive aggressive about it.

Mary Worth, 8/16/22

Part of being a true alpha predator like Mary is knowing when to sit back and let your prey come to you. Dawn is wasting absolutely no time in flinging herself emotionally prostate at Mary’s feet, and Mary, as you can see in panel two, is sitting absolutely still, with a fully neutral facial expression, to allow the maximum emotional purging to take place on its own before the meddling process begins. I assume she’s about to lift that lemonade to her lips and make the quietest sip humanly possible as Dawn spirals into a vivid description of her hateful emotional inheritance.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/16/22

Oh, sorry, I guess we’re gonna be spending this week doing a wellness check on all of this strip’s elderly characters. How is this dynamic duo of pinball maniacs doing? Well, I guess I hope to one day live to be quite old, and maybe by that time I’ll have earned the right to answer innocent conversation starters like “How’s it goin’, pop?” with musings on my own mortality that are faux cheery and also reveal that I don’t really understand how aging and dying works.