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Beetle Bailey, 8/16/22

Feel like it’s been a long time since I saw someone actually smoking a tobacco cigarette in a newspaper comic strip, and while I hadn’t thought about it much, I think I unconsciously assumed there was some kind of Hayes Code-style agreement that we wouldn’t depict such a thing in a medium intended for children. But maybe I’m wrong about that, or maybe there was a collective recognition over at Beetle Bailey central that nobody cares anymore and definitely no children are reading Beetle Bailey, so why not be free, for certain limited definitions of “being free,” which is to say free to depict Rocky, the camp’s resident “bad boy” (non-sexual division), enjoying a cigarette held at arm’s length and Beetle being weirdly passive aggressive about it.

Mary Worth, 8/16/22

Part of being a true alpha predator like Mary is knowing when to sit back and let your prey come to you. Dawn is wasting absolutely no time in flinging herself emotionally prostate at Mary’s feet, and Mary, as you can see in panel two, is sitting absolutely still, with a fully neutral facial expression, to allow the maximum emotional purging to take place on its own before the meddling process begins. I assume she’s about to lift that lemonade to her lips and make the quietest sip humanly possible as Dawn spirals into a vivid description of her hateful emotional inheritance.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/16/22

Oh, sorry, I guess we’re gonna be spending this week doing a wellness check on all of this strip’s elderly characters. How is this dynamic duo of pinball maniacs doing? Well, I guess I hope to one day live to be quite old, and maybe by that time I’ll have earned the right to answer innocent conversation starters like “How’s it goin’, pop?” with musings on my own mortality that are faux cheery and also reveal that I don’t really understand how aging and dying works.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/15/22

Ah, good news, everybody! It looks like Andrzej and Tildy may have had some health scares, but they’re on the mend and all this drama has brought them closer together. It’s a perfect ending to the week as we look forward to seeing what new story begins on Monday, and [looks at calendar]. Oh. Um. Well, I hope everyone is excited to see two old people sitting quietly and watching the the 1930 Cooper/Dietrich film Morocco in a hospital room for the next six days!

Gil Thorp, 8/15/22

I’ve made many, many jokes over the years about how the Thorps’ kids have been memory holed. The strip’s new writer is bringing them back, though, and in their very first appearance is letting us know why they’ve been gone so long: they suck. A bratty teen and a little tattletale! Who’d want a get a Christmas card with pictures of these losers on it? Certainly not me!

Blondie, 8/15/22

A thing about this strip that makes me sad is that in the third panel you can just see that the gas station where the Bumsteads are filling up is called “Gooney Gas.” That’s a solid goofy Blondie business name and it deserves better than to be crammed in between two word balloons in such small type that it’s probably illegible in newspapers. Is there a Gooney Gas mascot? A bizarre slogan on par with “Say — then pay!”? America demands a full exploration of this intriguing corner of the Blondieverse!

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Mary Worth, 7/30/22

It honestly hasn’t been the greatest week for the comics this week, but I absolutely started hooting and hollering when Mary, bristiling in boldfaced type, said that “No, Jared, I don’t know how it feels to be disrespected.” You’re (relatively) new here, Jared, so you maybe you don’t know this, but when some sort of disrespect happens in a relationship involving Mary Worth, that disrespect only goes in one direction: away from Mary and towards the other person. Cruising a guy at his mother’s funeral or having a vacaton fling with a Broadway star, even though you’re already in a relationship: that’s something Mary did to her boyfriend, not something that was done to her. Never something that was done to her. One man — one man — dared to act disrespectful to Mary, romantically, and we all know how he ended up (dead). So you need to take a step back, Jared, Mary is not like you!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/30/22

“You’re an American, Tildy! You’re going to go into that hospital and die and then go bankrupt, just like everybody else.”