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Beetle Bailey, 3/29/19

Sorry, I feel like I have to call bullshit here: while Beetle Bailey is somewhat of a trickster narrative figure, like Kokopelli or Bugs Bunny, his overwhelmingly dominant characteristic is that he is extremely lazy. He can’t even maintain consciousness for the full duration of a single date, so I refuse to believe that he has the gumption or energy to either learn enough artistic skill to paint a serviceable Picasso pastiche, or that he would bother to dress up like an “artist” stereotype just to add to the laughs when General Halftrack confronted him.

Hi and Lois, 3/29/19

Chip, I know you live out in the ‘burbs and have only passing familiarity with what the hipsters are up to, so, as someone who lives in the belly of the urban beast, let me assure you that hipsters today are all about growing elaborately sculpted and maintained facial hair and getting $60 haircuts and beard trims at “retro” barbershops with extremely on-the-nose names, to give you just one example within electric-scooter-riding radius from my house. Ditto, who seems more plugged in to the zeitgeist, is right to “Huh?” at you in slack-jawed shock as he imagines you walking into some dive bar simulacrum and ordering a $17 cocktail only to have the handlebar-mustachio’d bartender laugh in your Don Johnson-esque face.

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Hi and Lois, 3/3/19

Wow, I’ve never noticed that the Flagston house looks … really small from the outside? Like, I know that the design dates back to when the strip launched the ’50s, when new suburban houses were much smaller than they are now. (In a similar phenomenon, the Bumstead home layout dates from the ’20s and doesn’t even have a shower.) But in this comic, the Flagston house looks shockingly tiny, like it doesn’t even seem to have a wing for bedrooms. Certainly it’s not big enough to get amorous by the fire when you’ve got four kids around! Which may explain why the kids are not around, having possibly been left outside to freeze to death.

Spider-Man, 3/3/19

Killgrave is a man with the nearly unstoppable ability to utterly enslave someone with his voice — and having just exposed himself to a special nerve gas, he’s now able to command multiple people at once. Spider-Man and Luke Cage, two powerful superheroes, were only barely able to defeat him. And now they’re going to hand him over to … the police? Sure! That’s going to go great! “Should we have told them to make sure to not take the blanket off of him?” “Ennnh, they’ll figure it out.”

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Gil Thorp, 2/22/19

You know, I joke about how everyone in Milford is obsessed with high school sports, but we could be getting a skewed view into this town because so many of our characters work for the Milford High athletics department. Gil and Kaz seem to only seem to socialize with each other, occasionally dragging their partners along for double dates, but it seems that Mimi does in fact close, rewarding friendships of her own, in the form of these three women who we’ve literally never seen before in the 14 years I’ve been reading this strip! Anyhoo, because true friendship means hating your friends’ enemies, Mimi’s pals are furious that Marty Moon has dared to, uh, come into a public place to exchange money for goods and services. Mimi knows that the best way to defuse the awkward social situation that arises when you bump into a nemesis in public is to do some elaborate pantomime that really draws attention to yourself.

Hi and Lois, 2/22/19

I love how genuinely crestfallen Chip looks in the second panel. “You mean that I’ve been a sullen dick for my entire adolescence and my room is a borderline health hazard and mom … doesn’t love it? Who could’ve predicted!”

Pluggers, 2/22/19

You’re a plugger if you buy one of the pricier kinds of vegetables and immediately throw it into the garbage disposal just to make some kind of point.