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Beetle Bailey, 5/13/20

Literally every single one of Beetle Bailey’s running bits has been repeatedly done to death over the strip’s decades in print, with all possible variations mined for even trace amounts of humor, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that today’s edition of “Let’s crap on Lt. Fuzz” focuses on the fact that he gets more information via sound than smell. What a nerd, amiright?

Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/20

Look, Les, I do have a certain amount sympathy with … well, not with you, per se, but with anyone who finds themselves in the position of needing to perform some version of their genuine grief for professional reasons. But I guess you should’ve seen that coming when you decided to build your entire creative career and indeed your entire personality on the foundation of “I lost my young wife to cancer.” Now dance for the nice lady, Les! Dance! Weep real emotionally genuine tears if you want that sweet, sweet Hollywood cash!

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Beetle Bailey, 5/1/20

What’s your favorite incredibly wrong-headed aspect of this strip? For many, it will be the misguided implication that the cultural triumph of “nerd”-focused media like superhero franchises has upended society’s assessment of what is and isn’t sexually desirable. But I personally am a big fan of Killer wearing a v-neck sweater that somehow also has a shirt pocket on it.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/20

Speaking of the triumph of nerd-focused media, the Chinese market’s appetite for action flicks has definitely distorted the American film industry’s incentives in all sorts of troubling ways, but if that results in the new, gritty and realistic version of Lisa’s Story never getting off the ground, I for one am willing to forgive a lot.

Crock, 5/1/20

You know, sometimes you can actually forget that Crock is about a sadistic military officer who rules his colonial outpost as an unaccountable dictator, but then you get to a strip like today, when he forces one of his least favorite soldiers to eat a bowl full of rat meat.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/17/20

I’m sure the Smifs and the Barlows could rattle off a list of slights and transgressions going back generations that have kept their blood feud alive, but today’s strip shows the real underlying structural motivation behind it: a battle over access to scarce resources.

Mary Worth, 4/17/20

Sure, Hugo is brusquely rejecting Dawn’s suggestion to look at a Star Wars … exhibit? movie? poster? … which is I guess a thing Dawn likes now, and this is a point against him in her mental calculus. But I think he’s actually growing as person: this was a perfect opportunity for him to go on at great length at how much better Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was than any American sci-fi flick, but he chose not to.

Beetle Bailey, 4/17/20

As the creator of a long-running entertainment website, I understand the tension between going to the well of my classic running bits that regular fans love and doing jokes don’t require backstory so I can hook in potential new readers; newspaper comics face the same dilemma. Today’s Beetle Bailey presents a double face as a result. Longtime strip readers know that the joke here is about the fact that the General and his wife hate each other, and one thing she particularly hates is him staying out late at bars. But if you just came into this strip cold, with no background on the characters, there would really be one logical and obvious way to interpret this punchline: that the General, despite being weary of America’s endless wars, is about to go home, pick up the phone, and start giving the orders that will set yet another one in motion. You can see in his eyes that the thought of sending the ill-prepared men of Camp Swampy into combat is killing a part of his soul, but he has his orders and sees no way out.