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Beetle Bailey, 5/29/21

I guess it was probably a colorist’s decision/error, but I am truly tickled by Beetle’s slice of pizza, which appears to be devoid of any toppings or even cheese, just a sad triangle of crust. Truly, Sarge’s insatiable gluttony is ruining everyone’s day at Mama Rosa’s. The saddest thing is Beetle’s big smile: unlike the dude at the next table, he at least gets a little starch for dinner, and he’s grateful for it.

Dick Tracy, 5/29/21

Speaking of sad, Dick Tracy, a comic strip that once depicted a maniac in a gimp suit being eaten alive by rats, can now no longer bring itself to print the word “damn.” Sad!

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Mary Worth, 5/27/21

We all frankly know that the intertwined personal and (aspirationally, on both parts) professional relationship between Drew and Ashlee is going to hilariously unravel into unhinged acrimony at some point. The delicious narrative tension arises from the question of how, exactly, this will go down. Personally, based on panel one here, in which Ashlee’s limbs are splayed in random directions and her mouth twisted into a rictus grin, my bet is that Drew is going to post a bunch of these pictures to his Instagram and they will be terrible, just laughably bad, thoroughly humiliating Ashlee online and producing a ragestorm that will make her public meltdown from a few weeks ago seem like a calm and rational conversation about a misunderstood scheduling conflict.

Anyway, this panel has delighted me like few others in recent memory, and while I’m not sure I have the energy to run a formal contest, per se, along the lines of the ones I did for self-clubbing Tyler in Gil Thorp and Rex and June’s funeral facial contortions, I certainly wouldn’t object if anyone were to attempt to reproduce Ashlee’s pose/outfit/whole vibe here, photograph themselves in the process, and email the results to me at bio@jfruh.com, and I would definitely post any photos I received on this very blog!

Beetle Bailey, 5/27/21

Hey, guess what year the sale of leaded gasoline for personal vehicle use was fully phased out in the United States? 1996! Guess what the average age of a private in the U.S. Army is? Less than 20! If you think those two numbers seem at odds, maybe contemplate what the average age of a Beetle Bailey reader is instead.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/27/21

I am a squeamish indoor kid who does not like bugs, so I am experiencing zero regrets about the fact that I no longer live in Baltimore, which is currently ankle deep in screaming cicadas, according to all my friends there. Anyway, each of those cicadas now befouling lawns across the Mid-Atlantic was laid as an egg 17 years ago, it’s fun to think of them as “teens” to whom you would not loan your car, just like regular teens! That’s because every single neuron in their tiny brains is focused on fucking and then dying, just like regular teens.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/11/21

As recently noted, Zero’s one-dimensional characterization has in the past decade or so shifted from “is very stupid” to “is a very stupid farm boy”. I for one am excited about the next stage in his evolution, to “is a very stupid farm boy who is also a deadly accurate sniper, just pumping bullet after bullet into the skulls of his enemies while maintaining that same vacant, aw-shucks grin.”

Hi and Lois, 5/11/21

Not sure why (beyond basic sexism) “humorless scold” is a common attribute assigned to little girls in comics (see also: Dolly Keane, Margaret from Dennis the Menace) but I feel like Dot has been really leaning hard into it lately, to the extent that it stops being annoying and starts being funny again. “You’re a drunk, mom, and your boring friends are all drunks” is a fine addition to Hi and Lois’s exploration of suburbia’s alcohol problem.

Mary Worth, 5/11/21

I know everything about Ashlee has been a forest of red flags so far, but today she appears to be about to eat a slice of pizza sideways, clear evidence of utter madness. She needs to be locked up in that plastic prison where they put Magneto in the first X-Men movie and studied by scientists to see what makes her tick.