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Beetle Bailey, 6/4/20

Being a general is a decently big deal. And yeah, technically, when I say “general” I mean “general officer”; only a four-star is truly a “general,” amd Halftrak is a one-star Brigadier General, but the point remains: by law there can be no more than 231 in the Army as a whole, which is more than I expected but still isn’t a lot. What I’m trying to say is that this comic strip inspired me to read the “general officer” article on Wikipedia and click on several of the links therein, and I definitely learned quite a bit but also came across nothing that altered my original thought here, which is that it’s probably kind of concerning that General Halftrack’s staff is just forging his signature on things.

Mary Worth, 6/4/20

After what I’m pretty sure were seven solid weeks of Dawn’s love triangle concluding in the dullest way possible, this week’s storyline has given me serious whiplash as it zigs and zags through various possibilities! Is it about Toby failing as a baker? Is it about Saul Wynter’s dying family? Or is it about the god-damn millennials [aide whispers in my ear] ahem, I have been informed that many millennials are now well into their 30s at this point and they’re calling the new crop of kids “zoomers,” so, as I was saying, is it about the god-damn zoomers, always staring at their phones and swearing and disrespecting their elders, who never did any such thing? Is Mary gonna have to teach this tween terror some respect?

Mark Trail, 6/4/20

Folks, as prophesied, it’s time for an Andy story in Mark Trail! The story so far is that Andy accidentally got closed up in the back of this truck, which drove far away from Lost Forest, and now appears to be ready to maul the hapless truck driver to death. Sorry, truck driver! It wasn’t your fault Andy wandered into your truck, but you will be suffering the consequences!

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Dick Tracy, 5/30/20

[I take an extremely deep breath so that I can wrap up the current boring-ass storyline in one run-on sentence] So Shaky got arrested but then later got bailed out by this woman who’s going to be playing Breathless Mahoney in a movie and I guess is a relative of the real Breathless Mahoney, who was lovers with the original Shaky, and even though Shaky has a perfectly nice girlfriend, I guess he and Breathless Jr. here are gonna do it? It hasn’t been an “interesting” journey to this point by any means, but when a woman in the newspaper comics asks one of Dick Tracy’s freakish villains “So, you’re basically a human vibrator, right?” I feel honor-bound to report it to you.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/20

Man, I’m so steamed over Beetle calling Killer his “buddy” — I can’t cite any specific strips or anything but my strong impression is that they tolerate one another but have no real strong feelings about each other either for good or ill — that I can’t even focus on the fact that Sarge has started pitting the men under his command against one another in sport combat, for his amusement.

Shoe, 5/30/20

I don’t … think that would work? I’m really pretty sure that wouldn’t work.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/27/20

As you may know (and if you don’t buckle up because you are about to find out), I love etymologies. So, here’s a fun fact! In German, the word for “prince” (in the sense of “a sovereign ruler regardless of other title” rather than the sense of “the son of a king”) is “fürst.” Etymologically, this word means, quite literally, “the first,” as in the foremost person in the state; “fürst” and “first” also have the same etymological root, and are basically pronounced the same way, but because English always has to be fancy, we imported our word for the noble title from French, which in turn got it from the Latin word “princeps,” which also literally means “first.”

Anyway, I’m pointing this out mostly because of Jughaid’s “furst” in panel two, which is a prime example of the eye dialect used in this strip, designed to make the characters look like they’re speaking non-standard English even though the difference between “furst” and how anyone would pronounce “first” is negligible. And honestly, I’d like to believe that Jughaid is announcing that the Holy Roman Emperor had invested him in a small alpine principality with the status of imperial immediacy, and that he’ll be leaving the Holler behind to take possession of his new realm post-haste.

Beetle Bailey, 5/27/20

I woman I dated briefly years ago once said that it always made her cringe to see a couple both sitting on the same side of a table at a restaurant because she took it as a sign that the passion had gone out of their relationship, and while I definitely think that’s a sweeping overgeneralization, I admit I always think about it whenever I see people sitting like that. Anyway, I wonder what she’d think about a couple who’s sitting together on one side of the table at a restaurant and also one of them has fallen asleep face first onto their plate.

Gil Thorp, 5/27/20

Good news, everyone! Mike “The Mayor” has resigned himself to having his life destroyed for no good reason and has now come on down to see his old friends continue to play team sports, like he used to do. Anyway, would it be an appropriate response if he just whipped out a butter knife and started stabbling everyone to death with it? Well, no, no it wouldn’t. But would it work as narrative? Yeah, sure, probably.

The Lockhorns, 5/27/20

I know this isn’t the intended reading, but I am absolutely cackling at the thought of Leroy diligently printing out the “How To Fake Your Own Death” WikiHow article, which he’s now studying with more determination than we’ve ever seen him demonstrate in his entire life to this point.