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Beetle Bailey, 3/28/20

Lots of people, me included, criticize legacy strips like Beetle Bailey for just going back to the same well over and over again. But I want to recognize the fact that they can be innovative too, often refining established joke premises into sharper and sharper barbs. Take this strip’s now beloved weekly regular, “The Halftracks Hate Each Other.” Today’s installment really presents us with a harrowing and baroque version of what’s usually a quick and savage interaction: Amos sitting in a bar drinking himself blotto, with every sip reported back to his wife, who’s no doubt lying in bed alone, staring at her phone and getting more incandescently angry and bereft with every text. I personally feel like I will never be warm again after reading this!

Gil Thorp, 3/28/20

Oh man, remember how this Gil Thorp storyline began with jokes about how annoying it would be to have the same name as a popular digital assistant? Well, guess how it’s ending! Let’s please do something dumb about baseball starting Monday and never speak of any of this again.

Dustin, 3/28/20

Dustin was of course created to specifically poke fun at the tensions between millennials (who suck) and baby boomers (who … don’t, apparently?), but that doesn’t mean it can’t also take on some more universal truths, specifically that women be shopping. Throughout time, in every nation, across generations: Women. Be. Shopping.

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Dustin, 3/15/20

Incredibly, it seems that there must be a limit the amount of cross-generational abuse Dustin can absorb from his father, because apparently the hateful old man feels the need to leave the house to dump it onto others as well. Thanks for accommodating this gentleman as you’re wrapping up for the day, Starbucks employees! Probably you’ve walked through the steps of taking an order repeatedly over the past several hours, putting you pretty much on automatic pilot about what you’re doing. So here, let your last customer of the evening really theatrically make you feel like an asshole about it! Bet you wish you had locked that door exactly at closing time now, huh?

Mark Trail, 3/15/20

Mark Trail is many things — an adventurer, a sort-of dad, a murderer — but above all, he is a man of science. Some might claim that the pika is the cutest animal out there, but he won’t believe it until he sees a rigorous, peer-reviewed study proving it.

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Dustin, 2/29/20

I’ve beat this drum before, but it continues to boggle my mind that Dustin, a strip deliberately dreamed up to poke fun at the foibles of millennials, constantly goes to the well of jokes about its millennial characters’ dating life without ever even mentioning Tinder or other dating apps and instead having them go cruise for love at the local fern bar as if they were characters in Shoe. But I also feel it’s important to note that, once you get past this oddity, you get to the actual theme of these strips, which is that Dustin and Fitch, two of the recurring characters whose life the strip offers up to us to experience, are completely unfuckable, just an utterly dogshit pair of dudes who women reject literally on first sight.

Arctic Circle, 2/29/20

The whole deal with Arctic Circle is that its characters all live in the Arctic, and while I’m not sure what the tone of the strip has been over the full 12 years of its run, I can tell you that today it’s about a group of characters living in an Arctic biome completely collapsing due to climate change. This is of course always pretty grim, but today’s strip, in which it appears that a mountain of beaver corpses has been piled up in a futile attempt to hold back the tide of rising sea levels, is really something else.

Mark Trail, 2/29/20

“Normally we don’t let Rusty interact with other children because his face would frighten them, but these kids have seen all kinds of savage beasts in the forest! They’re tough! Maybe if we keep his mask strapped on tight, he can join them!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/29/20

HELL YEAH SNUFFY

NO GODS NO MASTERS