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Archive: Heathcliff

183

Comic strip jokes (mostly not funny) (not my jokes, my jokes are all funny)

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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/25

There’s a lot of Beetle Baileys where the joke is that Sarge has beaten Beetle into an undifferentiated mass of broken limbs and shattered organs for some minor infraction, but for my money this one is much, much funnier. Just imagine Sarge going red-faced with rage over this extremely sub-par bit of wordplay, grabbing Beetle by the shoulders and huffing and puffing a bit as the two of them grapple, and then stalking off, leaving Beetle with his uniform hiked partway over his head as we see here, unhurt but also humiliated. All the while Killer stood absolutely still, watching the whole thing go down and hoping he isn’t next.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/29/25

I took Snuffy’s whispering in the first panel as a sign that he wanted to go easy on Horace, either because he genuinely didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings or because he knew that any perceived slight could lead to violence in Hootin’ Holler’s clan-based culture. But it turns out he’s willing to take some risks! Congrats to Snuffy Smith for producing a strip that actually subverted my expectations, for the first time [checks notes] ever???

Curtis, 7/29/25

Curtis has gotten a summer job helping take care of a semi-comatose old woman who turns out to have telekinetic powers, which I think is a pretty normal sentence to write, and the plot hasn’t risen to the interest level necessary for me to blog about it, until today. Static snow is, of course, an artifact of the age before the transition to digital TV in 2009, which now gives it a sort of old-timey spookiness, and it has always been foreign to smartphones and similar devices. A video taken on your phone that’s just been deleted is a mild mystery; a video taken on your phone that’s been replaced with static snow is deeply unsettling, and Curtis, as an aficionado of the horror genre, should hopefully recognize the truly terrifying situation in which he’s found himself now.

Heathcliff, 7/29/25

One thing I love about Heathcliff doing elaborate bits in Heathcliff is how everyone else seems to view them mostly with gentle bemusement, even the very elaborate ones. I’m not sure if Heathcliff built this stadium, a project that would’ve cost tens of millions of dollars and taken years, or if he merely somehow managed to gain control of an existing facility by agreement or force, but either way there would’ve been a lot of steps leading up to this moment, which presumably Grandpa and Iggy watched with their hands in their pockets, mostly in silence, before finally remarking, “Ah, yeah, this looks like an opening ceremony of some sort.”

188

Old age, youth, the past, the present, etc.

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Heathcliff, 7/20/25

I’m a little obsessed with the tiny fish saying “Welcome to the club!” to Jaws. (Side note: Do we agree that the shark from Jaws is named “Jaws”? I hadn’t really thought about it until I started writing this post but now I feel very strongly about it.) I guess the fish is the representative of the entire Heathcliff universe, which itself turned 50 a couple years ago, and is acknowledging on behalf of his mostly land-based comrades that a fellow aquatic character has hit the same milestone. That said, it feels a little off because the Heathcliff characters are perpetually alive and keeping up their wacky antics and you can imagine them knowing at some level that they’ve existed for 50 years, whereas Jaws dies at the end of Jaws (sorry for the spoiler, but as noted this movie is 50 years old now, c’mon). I know there are more Jaws movies but those have different sharks in them. Are those sharks also named “Jaws”? I gotta think about that one, I’ll get back to you on it.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/20/25

Some really harrowing throwaway panels here: they transform a simple strip about Hagar inventing the movie theater freestyle machine so he can get super blotto into one that informs us that (a) somehow beat generation genius/weirdo William S. Burroughs had his strangest novel adapted into a play more than 1,000 years before he wrote it and (b) the canonically illiterate Hagar can’t parse out the word “naked”, but he can read “lunch.”

Pardon My Planet, 7/20/25

Gotta say that I’m impressed that this panel carefully avoided showing us whether or not Adam and Eve had navels, thus avoiding theological controversy, but dared to ask the question “What would Adam’s whole body hair situation have been?” and came up with an answer that’s more fucked up than any of us could’ve dreamed of.

Dustin, 7/20/25

Ha ha, just a couple of Gen Z dudes talking about mailing physical letters, a process they know a lot about from long experience! This strip, which is literally about the differences between young people and old people, demonstrates once again that it has its finger on the pulse of what young people know and do.

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One-panel Friday

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/27/25

Look, we all associate Cinderella with trying on glass slippers, but canonically, the Prince’s retinue repeated the process over and over again with different girls, and once Cinderella put it on and proved her identity, that was the end of the glass-slipper-trying-on process. She only had to do it once! And she didn’t really wear glass slippers after that! Why would she want to wear them again as an old woman, as if she were in the habit of it? I know that fact-checking a cartoon is boring and lame, but I feel like we should hold a strip that’s literally called Mother Goose and Grimm to a higher standard.

Alice, 6/27/25

I know you all rely on me for keeping you up to date on the lore developments in the insane fever dream comic Alice, so here’s the latest: the weird Alice aliens live underneath Alice’s floorboards now, and one of them is in love (?) with her? More on this as it develops in new and insane ways!

Dennis the Menace, 6/27/25

Look at Mr. Wilson’s face. That’s the expression of a guy who’s either going to get rich at the blackjack table or die via suicide by casino security. Either way, he’s not gonna have to deal with this brat again.

Heathcliff, 6/27/25

They banned spiral hams and are putting our Heathcliff in prison, when are people gonna wake up to what’s going on in our country