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Beetle Bailey, 2/7/25

Unfortunately, Beetle’s little prank happened to fall on the morning when the coalition of America’s enemies finally launched their long-planned invasion. With Camp Swampy’s main NCO out of commission until hours after the alarm was raised, and its commanding general blind drunk, the 13th Infantry Division was undermanned, unprepared, and unable to hold the left flank during the decisive Battle of Hurleysburg. Sarge never did forgive Beetle, but they were kept in different internment camps — Beetle and Killer had predictably gotten separated from the rest of the company during the chaos and were captured miles away from the main battle front — and never saw each other again before Beetle died of dysentery two years later.

The Phantom, 2/7/25

Not to be outdone by the Sunday Phantom doing a flashback to the adventures of an early Phantom in 16th century Africa, the weekday Phantom is doing a flashback to an even earlier Phantom, specifically the very first one, seen here swearing an oath over his father’s killer’s crab-eaten corpse. He’s only spent a little time in Africa at this point, but in the second panel you can see that he’s already very sunburned, and it’s a little disheartening 22 generations of Phantom decided the solution to this problem was to focus on advances in skin-protecting lycra technology so they could keep importing white brides from Europe.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/6/25

I think the joke here is supposed to be “Lucky Eddie, who is notoriously soft and weak, is a cat guy,” and as a cat guy I’m not going to take the bait. I am going to point out that, as depicted in the strip, Lucky Eddie is much less a cat guy (are there really any running jokes about him liking cats?) as a fish guy, or more precisely a fish–lady guy. Which leads me to ask: what’s his mermaid girlfriend’s bathroom situation like? In the strip where they’re hanging out together and she’s floating in a fish tank, is the fish tank the equivalent of her litter box? Much to think about, if you like thinking about mermaids peeing and pooping, and I apologize because you probably don’t actually like thinking about that and it may be that I did get mad about the cat thing and took the bait a little bit.

Blondie, 2/6/25

Do you like those odds, Elmo? Because I don’t, actually. I mean, I think the set of pizza ingredient combos that anyone would want to eat are relatively limited and covered by the standard menus at most pizza places, and we don’t need to go that far beyond the limits. If you want to explore the possibilities of “infinite kinds” of pizza and call up some hapless restaurant and say “Yeah, gimmie a pizza with [spins wheel] bakelite crust, tomato sauce, and [spins wheel again] deuterium” be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll enjoy the results.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/6/25

Yeah, what is the deal? What the heck is the deal with Rex Morgan, exactly, or just, like, the deal in general? I for one would like to know! Like, really, earnestly, please explain the deal to me. Glad to see we’re getting to the bottom of what the deal is, finally.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/5/25

Hagar is of course no friend of kings, so obviously this strip, where he appears to be halpertfacing to the reader while hanging out with his friend the king while the king waxes philosophical, is a bit confusing. A more likely interpretation of what we’re seeing: for once Hagar has decided to abandon his usual strategy of frontal assault on a targeted stronghold for stealth, the king thinks he’s alone and is just soliloquizing to nobody in particular, and Hagar is halpertfacing to the reader just before slitting the king’s throat and stealing his gold.

Dennis the Menace, 2/5/25

I can’t believe everyone is smiling at this terrible quip from Dennis. You should not be smiling about this! You should be very upset!

Pluggers, 2/5/25

Plugger torch passed from Boomers to Gen X: CONFIRMED