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Beetle Bailey, 9/5/23

A lot of Beetle Bailey’s M.O. boils down to “We thought of a joke, which of our long-ish list of one-note characters that we’ve accrued over the years can we assign it to?” Reading panel one, I though Rocky, as the camp’s resident rock-and-roll loving bad boy, was a bad choice for this, but once I realized it was about one of the soldiers being rejected by his family and forced to make a home in a cruel institution that doesn’t want him either, I changed my mind, this is a good one.

Dick Tracy, 9/5/23

Look, this may be a “Minit Mystery,” but do we have time to spend a whole strip on some Grade A Wholly Innocent [change this later if necessary –Eds] Beefcake? Yes, yes we do.

Dustin, 9/5/23

“Ha ha, get it? Wait, no, actually, that metaphor doesn’t really make sense. Sorry, I’m still workshopping this bit. Anyway, long story short, you’re dying.”

Judge Parker, 9/5/23

I’m sorry, Gloria, are you keeping meticulous accounting records of a criminal fucking conspiracy?

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Hi and Lois, 9/2/23

If you want a glimpse of how in mid-century America, syndicated newspaper cartooning used to be your ticket to a comfortable life, consider the central position the great suburban participatory leisure sports of golf and tennis hold in our legacy strips! It’s a different time now, but these strips can still teach us a lot about the folkways of suburban Connecticut and similar communities, and if I’m reading today’s Hi and Lois right, those places are on the verge of civil war. Hi thinks he can just ride this one out on the golf course, but there will come a time, and soon, where he’ll have to take a side.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/23

Oh ho, it looks like Rene, aka “Professor Mirakle,” is back to tie up some loose ends, possibly by murdering his erstwhile disciple Mud! Ha ha, everyone will be real sorry they didn’t accept his apologies, once they find his bullet-ridden corpse in this hotel room three days from now! Honestly, though, it seems much more likely that Rene is just trying to get a cut of the money from Mud’s apparently quite lucrative Li’l Fergus character and the songs he co-wrote and/or inspired through fake guru powers. It would be funny to see an attempted murderer make use of the legal system to enforce his intellectual property claims, but honestly, it’s not like he hasn’t done it before.

Between Friends, 9/2/23

Sorry to this lady who is being abandoned by all her friends and family, but I will never get over the phrase “We live in a global world.” Do we? Is it a global world we live in? Is it really? Is that why you can use a globe to depict the world with such uncanny accuracy?

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Baby Blues, 8/9/23

C’mon, Darryl, you don’t need Wren for a three-legged race; just tie a shoe on that nose.

Crankshaft, 8/9/23

They train surgeons not to say “Oops”, but Ed’s dermatologist missed the class on “Holy $#%!!”. I hope she took the Continuing Medical Education unit on “Get me the belt sander.”

Between Friends, 8/9/23

Don’t get too relaxed there, Susan—Lucky Eddie could be lurking just around the corner, looking to get lucky.

Luann, 8/9/23

It’s not unusual for authors to tire of their main character—I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle is a famous example, and look what happened to Barney Google. Judge Parker turned into Sam Driver, Action Lawyer and stayed that way for decades. Team Luann has done a lot to sideline their protagonist: shunted her off alone to Community College, gave her dweeby thrall Gunther an actual girlfriend, introduced secondary characters (Tara, Stef) with far more robust backstories, etc. So why keep Luann around? Waiting for readers to get as sick of her as her creators have? I have news: that ship is a mere dot on the far horizon.

Anyway, former hottie Tiffany is hosting a pool party at her Dad’s house (persistently and annoyingly called “the Manse”). Tiffany covets and covertly ogles Stef’s boyfriend Kip, who is staying at the pool house because of the reasons, and complains that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. But Tiffany has never had a boyfriend; her Whole Deal was that she was “popular” in the abstract, i.e., she had a world of choice but never made one. It seems pretty clear that she “wants” Kip only to shore up her sagging, um, confidence, because Kip is so dull and dimensionless he couldn’t get cast as a Ken in that Barbie movie.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 8/9/23

Your son, Herman, Megan, c’mon, get with the program.

In an echo of February’s “Chinese Spy Balloon” incident, Sherman ate a bunch of helium balloons found in a crate of derelict property that fell into Kapupu Lagoon en route to Whacko’s Party Store. The Kapupu Self-Defense Forces seem a lot more on the ball about territorial integrity than our own armed forces were, for which their reward will be a deluge of shark guts.

Josh has sworn a Blood Oath not to cover Luann. A Blood Oath. Worth more than a few bucks, wouldn’t you agree? Make a generous contribution to the Comics Curmudgeon today!

—Uncle Lumpy