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Archive: Beetle Bailey

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Loretta hasn’t alienated her friend — yet

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The Lockhorns, 2/20/21

I sincerely enjoy the presence of non-Lockhorn characters in the Lockhorns, who often seem to have somehow been drawn into Leroy and Loretta’s social orbit, where they never remain for long for obvious reasons. Take the dude standing next to Leroy here: that is a perfectly rendered facial expression for someone who’s just gone on his first outing with someone he thinks might be a new friend and has had a good time watching a movie, only to be hit with “You know who I hate? My wife.”

Shoe, 2/20/21

For all I snipe at the strip, you gotta give props to Shoe for having a consistent aesthetic tone, and that tone can best be described as “bone-deep weariness.” “Thank you, Cosmo,” Trish says out loud in response to this backhanded compliment, but what her eyes and posture say, very clearly, is “I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes and yearn so, so strongly for death.”

Beetle Bailey, 2/20/21

Honestly can’t decide if the proper response to this one is “Finally, the media reputation the narcoleptic community has yearned for” or “Beetle Bailey: Asexual Icon.”

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Extremely grateful we don’t see what Lt. Flap’s gift would’ve been

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Beetle Bailey, 2/9/21

I guess the point of this strip is that each of these characters is responding to the question of what to get Sarge for his birthday in his own way, according to his own character (in Beetle Bailey, “character” means “whatever dumb on-the-nose collection of tics and running gags they’ve accrued over the years”). So, Plato wants to give him a book, because he’s a nerd; Killer wants to give him a box of candy, because he’s so monomaniacally focused on getting laid that his only context for gift-giving is the cliches of heterosexual courtship; Zero wants to to give him a comic book, because he’s dumb (?); and Rocky wants to give him a music mix, because he’s named “Rocky” due to the fact that when he was introduced into the strip, his one-note character was focused on liking rock ‘n’ roll music, which was as novel then as omnipresent personal computers were when Specialist Chip Gizmo was introduced in the early ’00s, because that’s just how long Beetle Bailey has been around. Anyway, I wanted to point out that all of these people are giving Sarge something they’d like, not something that he would actually want to receive. Can you visualize Sarge reading a book? Of course not. Only Beetle’s proposal is actually thoughtful. Sadly, it will not be appreciated.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/9/21

After kicking off his life as a diagnosed diabetic with one last indulgent fast-food meal, Buck’s blood sugar numbers got real bad, but then he came home and exercised, and they got OK again! Is this … how diabetes works? I don’t know much about it but I do know that Rex Morgan, M.D., is a rigorously fact-checked comic that aims primarily to spread accurate medical information, so I’m just going to assume that this is, in fact, how diabetes works. Good job, Buck! Looks like you’re on your way to a healthy lifesty[finally gets to narration box at bottom of second panel] OH NO

Pluggers, 2/9/21

I mean, duh, of course he’s not going to fold up his underwear. The wrinkle lines are a further turn-on for fans of the sick sex thing that Pluggers, in one of 2021’s biggest surprises, has become.

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Mostly Walker-Browne Tuesday

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Hi and Lois, 1/19/21

Do you think the Flagston kids are being sarcastic here? I mean, kids generally have, um, let’s say “unrefined” palettes, so I imagine they’re actually quite jazzed about getting spaghetti and hot dogs on nights when Lois is showing her clients McMansions after dark because you “really get a sense of how quiet these gated communities are at this hour” or whatever. This, to me, makes Hi’s sour, gloomy facial expression in the final panel even funnier. He hates that his kids are excited about the extremely basic things that strain his limited cooking skills, and holds both them and himself in simultaneous contempt.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/19/21

Welp, it seems Buck’s meek, mild-mannered, easily winded persona has been an act, a front to hold back the monster within, the monster who dreams of nothing but carnage. But now that he’s going to have draw blood from his finger every day … well, Buck can’t speak to what’s going to happen next. But it won’t be pretty.

Beetle Bailey, 1/19/21

Oh, Sarge. Foolish Sarge. Did you think that you could pound a man into a puddle of goo and then reshape him into a human form three times a week and not create something … more pliable, but also something essentially inhuman? Something no longer tied to a stable physical form, or to our sense of morality? Be afraid, be very afraid of what you have wrought.