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Beetle Bailey, 9/22/12

I know it doesn’t pay to overthink Beetle Bailey (though I do, constantly; “Overthinking Beetle Bailey” will be the name of my autobiography), but one sign that your strip isn’t very good is that there’s really no coherent background that could explain the action we see in the first panel. Have the men of Camp Swampy been sent on a Bigfoot hunt by meddling government scientists who have somehow got the ear of top Pentagon brass? General Halftrack may not have a PhD in cryptozoology, but he still feels that he knows how likely it is that various sites might have Bigfoot infestations!

The easiest explanation is, as ever, total madness, which is to say that the most likely thing is that Halftrack is barking incoherent complaints into a bar of soap to nobody and is about to be waylaid by the weird, underimagined hallucination we see in panel two. But that’s undermined by the fact that the flat black rectangle he’s pressing to his face is a shockingly accurate depiction of a 2012-era smartphone. I mean, usually in Beetle Bailey you’d expect him to be talking into something with a huge antenna or maybe a curly phone cord trailing off to nowhere at the bottom of the panel. The presence of a recognizable piece of modern technology in this strip ought to shake you to your very core. On the other hand, it’s possible that the cellphone industry’s industrial designers have finally created objects so simple and minimalist that even Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC can draw them.

Slylock Fox, 9/22/12

That’s right, kids, don’t worry about the horrifying, violent fights between your parents, the ones that always attract the attention of the police, the ones that are literally tearing your house apart. Just focus on the Six Differences. Find the Six Differences and it’ll be OK.

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Gil Thorp, 9/17/12

“Let’s put it this way … we only have one bonfire, and it burns forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. Constant human sacrifice is necessary to keep the sacred flames alive, but we consider this a small price to pay for its numinous protection. Surely your own Druid ancestors would approve! Oh, yeah, and, like, we get all jazzed up about football too, I guess. But mostly we’re into the searing fire of divine grace.”

Slylock Fox, 9/17/12

Oh, Slylock! Your fancy science knowledge might explain why those balloons popped, but elementary physics will never help you understand why this innocent birthday party for children so quickly turned into a scene of vicious adult accusations and recriminations.

Marmaduke, 9/17/12

Marmaduke has finally succeeded in digging a hole back to the hell-dimension from which he was long ago exiled, and now he plans to climb down a ladder he stole from a fireman he ate and reclaim his awful kingdom.

Ziggy, 9/17/12

The mice who live in Ziggy’s walls are really into whip-its, but tonight things have gotten out of hand.

Wizard of Id, 9/17/12

Sir Rodney’s date caught a venereal disease from a frog.

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Mary Worth, 9/16/12

The “Dawn gets dumped and mopes and goes to Italy and is in a shipwreck but is rescued” storyline sure has had a lot of twists and turns and so far, but now we are truly seeing the 100% amazing payoff: Dawn is comparing an admittedly traumatic incident from which she emerged completely unscathed physically with a traumatic incident in which a young man whom she just met lost an arm. Her adventures over the past few weeks sure have provided her with some much-needed perspective about her troubles! Nevertheless, we already know that this will somehow work as a pickup technique, since an epigram from Anaïs Nin surely portends incipient sexytimes.

Mark Trail, 9/16/12

Mark, for a so-called naturalist, you have some funny ideas about our relationship with phylum Arthopoda! Nature is a rich, vibrant tapestry, and the idea that humans and spiders are allies in some kind of “war” against insects is simplistic and reductive. No, clearly both spiders and insects are mankind’s implacable enemies, seeing as they are gross disgusting creepy-crawlies; but their mutual hostility is a boon to us, and we must pit each against each other in order to keep both groups weak. A spider-insect alliance, particularly one with support from their centipede and millipede relatives, would surely overwhelm us, so must surreptitiously encourage intra-arthropod hostility at all costs.

Hi and Lois, 9/16/12

The most disturbing thing about Trixie’s school fantasy is that she apparently assumes that by the time she’s of school age there will be two of her. This may be the way her infant mind processes the existence of her twin siblings — perhaps she believes that Dot and Ditto were born as a single person but then split into two before the age of five. On the other hand, Trixie also seems to believe that she’ll be reading Tolstoy in kindergarten, which shows a certain degree of intellectual precocity.

Panels from Slylock Fox, 9/16/12

I love how upset the two construction workers at the bottom left of today’s Six Differences look. “Noooo, what are you doing? Your blundering, amateurish excavation techniques are ruining the integrity of the dig site! This is a priceless paleontological find, but we’re losing so much data as you drag the fossils out of the ground willy-nilly!”

Luann, 9/16/12

Mr. Fogarty would gladly give up the burdens of sentience if doing so meant that he’d never have to deal with any of the morons in this strip ever again.