The hidden cost of Sunday dinner
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Beetle Bailey, 6/25/17
This is an example of a strip that only really works with the top row of throwaway panels — so called because they’re often excised by papers looking to cram more into their comics section — in place. Without them, this is just a basic Beetle Bailey strip about General Halftrack giving a long, boring speech about himself. But those first panels drive home a pair of exquisite yet offsetting tragedies: that Halftrack, desperate for affirmation and yet wholly unloved, has arranged this ceremony for himself; and that Halftrack’s creeping dementia has caused him to forget that he’s done so, which might allow him to feel briefly good about his life during the ceremony. I assume that the award is small scale model of the pyramid in which he will soon be buried, along with his staff.
Dennis the Menace, 6/25/17
Wow, if I had to guess which Sunday strip was going to peel away our assumptions and get us talking about the hidden nature of uncompensated domestic labor, Dennis the Menace would not have been high on the list.
Judge Parker, 6/25/17
“You always ask that five minutes before it’s done. And you always ask me, as if I’m making dinner! Our paid servant is doing all the work! She’s right there, you could at least make eye contact with her.”
