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Archive: Beetle Bailey

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I hope Mary and Jeff are just going around in a tight circle just offshore for this whole conversation

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Mary Worth, 6/20/19

Man, I didn’t intend to make this an All-Mary Worth week; in fact, if you had told me on Monday that we’d be getting a whole additional week of Estelle dating drama, I’d have been pretty mad about it. And yet I have been delighted to see a week spent with Mary and Dr. Jeff just taking potshots at Wilbur as they burn endless marine fuel zipping around the Channel Islands. Delighted, I say! Anyway, today we learn that Mary doesn’t really have much of a grip on Wilbur’s personality; she figures that, as a man, he must be “into” “sports” of some kind, but the only “sport” we’ve ever seen him engage in is running around in the woods with his illegitimate not-son. Despite claiming to value Wilbur as a friend or whatever when she was trying to stop him from hurling himself off a cliff, she clearly doesn’t have much interest into what Wilbur Weston is actually all about, and, honestly, who can blame her.

Slylock Fox, 6/20/19

Here’s another Six Differences that takes place at the very day, at the very moment when the animals suddenly Awoke and began the uprising that displaced humans from their place at the top of the food chain. Our enterprising bulldog has already realized he can manipulate tools and has freed his comrade from leash-slavery, while the shocked bunnies look on and realize start to understand their own sudden power. One thing that occurs to me is that a significant majority of pets are spayed or neutered, yet the post-animalpocalypse world has no shortage of puppies and kitties — do you think whatever process changed the animals also reversed the sterilization imposed on them by their oppressors? Anyway, these dogs are gonna go fuck, probably.

Beetle Bailey, 6/20/19

A thing I genuinely laughed at in today’s Beetle Bailey is the guy running in the background of panel one, presumably fleeing from the tornado, while General Halftrack and Major Greenbrass argue semantics. Ha ha, they’re going to be killed!

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I wouldn’t feel too superior about “people who find unlikely people attractive,” Dr. Jeff

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Six Chix, 6/19/19

Nostalgia is near universal human emotion, but as Proust and his madeleine proved, it’s also one that’s remarkably easy to evoke in a quick, efficient way. Today’s Six Chix is an In Search Of Lost Time for our era, combining a once popular brand of automobile, a once popular media property, and fucking, and boom: it’s like you’re there! I have no idea what the joke is supposed to be.

Mary Worth, 6/19/19

You’d think Dr. Jeff would’ve remembered that he’d already met Iris, Wilbur’s ex-girlfriend, who also lives in Mary and Wilbur’s condo complex, especially considering that her son Tommy, the notorious local drug dealer and addict, figured heavily into some of the most important storylines in this strip’s history. But you know, maybe he hasn’t met her! In fact, maybe all the non-Dr. Jeff storylines in this strip pass by without him noticing or caring! I honestly kind of love the idea that he’s completely unaware of Charterstone gossip. On the other hand, maybe this is precisely the reason Mary persistently refuses to marry him. LOVE ME, LOVE MY DRAMA, JEFF.

Beetle Bailey, 6/19/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Miss Buxley was specifically created to cater to the male gaze and she can never, ever escape it!

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Happy Frog-ther’s Day (is what the joke should’ve been in my opinion)

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Beetle Bailey, 6/16/19

Gotta say, I don’t agree with Sarge here. Beetle is entirely passive in this tale, swept along by events without taking action or seizing control of his own destiny. And then there’s the bear that enters the story in the third act: what’s his deal? Is there an emotional connection between him? What motivates him? Without seeing inside his head he’s just a deus ex machina. Beetle needs to read Robert McKee’s Story or at least Save The Cat and then do some extensive rewrites if he has any hopes of getting this script optioned.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/16/19

This is the sort of Crankshaft-esque exaggeration that has no place in the Lockhorns, which is usually brutally realistic both in its setting and in its bleak emotional landscape. That’s why I’m choosing to believe that things really are as they seem: the bombs are dropping, nuclear fire is destroying everything, civilization as we know it is about to be annihilated. Loretta knows that she has only seconds before the shockwave hits and burns the skin off her bones, just seconds left to get in one more passive-aggressive dig in at Leroy. He’ll never know what she said — he’s probably dead already — but she feels like if she doesn’t, in some strange way she will have failed him.

Six Chix, 6/16/19

Fun fact: 96 percent of tadpoles die before they reach adulthood! Happy Father’s Day, frog-dad, sorry about the awful emotional carnage in store for you