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Archive: Beetle Bailey

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Josh says some nice stuff

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Flash Gordon, 11/7/24

The new-ish iteration of Flash Gordon got a shout-out from Uncle Lumpy a few weeks ago, but I’m here to give it my full-time blogger shoutout! The art is great, and the writing is very fun and captures the fast-paced cliff-hanger-y-ness of old movie serials. There hasn’t been too much to make fun of, but I’m going to start slipping it into the rotation here, I think. Anyway, today there are two important developments: we meet the King of the Lion Men and learn that his crown appears to be made from a wildebeest skull (dark!), and once again have the timeless truth affirmed that any sequential art whose storyline would support it at all eventually trends towards erotic furry stuff.

Beetle Bailey, 11/7/24

There’s been a little bit of an attempt in Beetle Bailey of late to upgrade Zero’s character from “dumb farm boy” to “farm boy with certain legitimate skills and his own point of view,” and today seems to be a big step in that direction. Frankly, I would like to see more depth added to all of this strip’s one-note characters. Lt. Fuzz isn’t just an annoying bureaucratic kiss-up: he’s trying to drag Camp Swampy’s administration into the 21st century while showing respect for the current leadership! Cosmo isn’t just a scam artist looking out for number 1: he represents the sort of individual ingenuity that’s always existed in supposedly regimented structures like the military! And Rocky was … in a gang, I guess? Or is currently in a gang? And gangs represent an alternative form of belonging and identity for those living in economically and socially marginal areas that have been more or less abandoned by the state? That’s what I assume he and Zero were talking about immediately before this strip started, and I frankly would’ve liked to have seen it.

Six Chix, 11/7/24

Folks, have you seen Conclave yet? It’s a banger! Everyone’s got Conclave fever! And by everybody I mean at least me and the Thursday Chik. That’s assuming the movie was the inspiration for this strip, that is, which doesn’t make a ton of sense but makes as much sense as anything else, I guess. Anyway! Go see Conclave today!

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Bench II: Return to the Bench

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Beetle Bailey, 11/3/24

Every once in a while, you do have to wonder how much anyone at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC knows about the actual U.S. military and how it works. Like, do you think that they’re vaguely aware that’s there’s a football team called “Army,” but don’t know that it’s the college team fielded by the U.S. Military Academy and assume instead that its players are just, like, enlisted men chosen at random? Anyway, today our Camp Swampy heroes are playing against a team [squints at helmets] comprised of literal pirates, or maybe representing Death itself.

Family Circus, 11/3/24

Say what you will about today’s Tiktok-addled children, but they would not get distracted from a wholesome family game by some dumb hobo clown on TV and then sit there watching him enraptured for a full minute. Kids simply don’t have that kind of attention span anymore.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/3/24

Noooo, Wanda, be careful, Truck is trying to pull you into his bench sitting based lifestyle, don’t fall for it

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Century Boulevard … we love it

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Blondie, 11/2/24

The Blondie creative team is usually very locked in to whatever big calendar full of real and fake holidays that’s clearly hanging up in the writer’s room, so today’s misstep is actually kind of surprising to me. Sure, it was possible, weeks ago when this strip was written, that game six of the World Series might’ve been played on November 1, but it was also possible that one of the teams would wrap it up in five games or less, as one of them in fact did (go Dodgers!). Anyway, I get why you’d risk it though, the glaring error is absolutely worth it to deliver this tight, flawless joke about a mailman streaming the baseball game from the night before, so his trainee has to talk to one of the mail route customers, like the regular guy usually does, about something that we don’t need to bother explaining, you know, the usual customer-mailman conversations we all know and love and have every day.

Marvin, 11/2/24

Of the weird holdover jokes from an entirely different era of gender relations that routinely pop up in newspaper comics, I have to say that “haha, it’s women’s job to cook but this particular woman is really bad at it!” are my absolute least favorite. The particular woman in question could be the speaking character’s mother, wife, or (as in this case) daughter, each possibility carrying with it its own specific unpleasant vibe. That said, I do think today’s Marvin is kind of funny because usually you think of “runing your appetite” as something you do with snacking, but Roy is just straight-up eating a whole actual meal here. Like he knows Jenny’s cooking is terrible, he wants no part of it, and he’s just made his own dinner early, because he’s fully self-sufficient.

Beetle Bailey, 11/2/24

Some days I think I’ve left the snickering sexual innuendo I was prone to in this blog’s early days behind, but then I encounter a strip like “Lt. Fuzz decides to horn in on General Halftrack’s threesome,” sigh heavily, and realize I will simply not be able to help myself. Anyway, here’s today’s Beetle Bailey, in which Lt. Fuzz decides to horn in on General Halftrack’s threesome.