Archive: Beetle Bailey

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/1/22

Huh, well, I guess Funky really is shutting down Montoni’s after all? This of course provides a great opportunity to trace the experiences of these longtime beloved characters as they move into a new phase of their lives do some nostalgia bullshit about the good old days of the strip, which, in a visual medium like the comics, is obviously best delivered by a wall of text and some photos that would be 100% invisible to anyone reading this in a newspaper, if anyone still read newspapers.

Judge Parker, 11/1/22

Gloria’s righteous rage has led her and Sam to the home of the judge at the heart of this mystery, where she won’t stop righteously ringing her doorbell until she gets answers! Of course, you might find her righteousness a little misplaced given that the judge himself just had most of his family brutally murdered, either by crooked cops or meth gangs or maybe his own son, so maybe he doesn’t want to chat about your wounded but still alive husband, Gloria, jeez.

Beetle Bailey, 11/1/22

I was going to do a whole riff here along the lines of “Ha ha, you know your legacy comic strip has been going on for 70+ years when the only new joke you can come up with is ‘What if one of our characters were covered in ticks?’”, but then it occurred to me that this is a strip about golf, the official pastime of legacy comic strip creators, and maybe the risks of tick infestation are everyday “relatable” content to these guys. Good to know that I can add “could end up with Lyme disease” to “boring” and “expensive” on my list of reasons why I don’t play golf.

Mary Worth, 11/1/22

Mary Worth is not just entertaining: it also seeks to impart important life lessons to its readers. This week that lesson is “don’t stand on cliff edges,” which may seem obvious to you but you never know who needs to hear it!

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/28/22

Sorry, I refuse to get emotionally involved in this sudden revelation, which I’m reasonably sure is some kind of fakeout, mostly because Funky is a diva who would’ve been griping and moaning for years about the bad economy or how people don’t just respect overpriced shitty pizza like they should before finally closing the restaurant. I’m assuming this is just some kind Three’s Company-style misunderstanding. “No, I meant close our doors for the night! I just said it in a way nobody actually would, for no good reason.”

Beetle Bailey, 10/28/22

This isn’t what “margin of error” means, either in normal use or, I feel confident in saying, in a military context, but I feel like there’s still a truth at the heart of this strip, which is that Beetle would not actually be an asset in an armed conflict. He’s very lazy, and doesn’t seem very well trained! He could probably get a lot of his fellow soldiers killed and it’s frankly good he’s never been deployed into combat.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/19/22

So, I guess several years ago Susan Smith thought about killing herself, but she was saved by the fortunate arrival of Ed Crankshaft, who revealed that he too in a moment of great personal darkness contemplated taking his own life. Susan will now move forward powered by the revelation that Ed is about to bestow upon her that’s defined his life for the past 50+ years: that you can take that overwhelming self-loathing and turn it outwards, and that you can make your own misery bearable by making literally every person you interact with miserable as well.

Beetle Bailey, 10/19/22

Ha ha, it’s funny because Miss Buxley is subject to endless sexual harassment at the workplace that the army refuses to do anything to stop, so she’s resorting to desperate measures!

Dennis the Menace, 10/19/22

Look, man, your dad put on a tuxedo for this bullshit, so what if he had to psych himself up in the bathroom for a little bit before you left, cut him some slack