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Beetle Bailey, 5/2/10

Beetle Bailey’s recent flirtation with self-referential absurdism has in fact led logically to this. All the references to the misty origins of the strip — you may not have known that upon launch Beetle Bailey was a college-humor strip, until the title character abruptly quit school and joined the army a year into its run — are here systematically dismantled. His long-forgotten girlfriend has found love with another, his ancient jalopy has been sold to a classic car collector, and his room at his parents’ has had all traces of his presence eliminated. With all ties to his former life finally cut after sixty years of basic training, Beetle is finally ready to ship out to one of the various war zones, where he will presumably die in a hail of bullets almost immediately, due to his incompetence.

Mark Trail, 5/2/10

Way to bring everyone down, Mark. “Look at this adorable little mouse, washing its face with its hands, OMG SO CUTE! Later, it was ground to bits in a mechanical thresher.”

Panels from Mary Worth, 5/2/10

LIES LIES OH MY GOODNESS SO MANY LIES

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Gil Thorp, 5/1/10

So I guess the Gil Thorp baseball-season A plot (getting started a little late, isn’t it?) will revolve around how groovy musician Derek Chance is just on a, like, different wavelength, man, and how all the dumb jocks on the baseball team don’t “get” him, leading to Conflict. Never mind that even alt-country, Derek’s chosen musical genre, is fairly closely associated with a persona that’s more ordinary Joe than space cadet. Anyway, hopefully we’ll get a “no-hitter on acid” plotline out of this, which will force Gil to choose between Honor and Victory. (In cases like this he always chooses, “Honor,” the sucker.)

Apartment 3-G, 5/1/10

The hilarious point of this strip is that Grief Cannot Touch Margo’s Icy Heart, but it got me wondering: who actually did die and make Lu Ann curator? I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t keep track. It wasn’t Eric; Eric died and made Margo gallery owner. Was it Alan? Wasn’t Alan curator when he was gunned down by a crazed bald dope fiend? And what’s Jack’s job? Is he just some nebulous “business consultant” or was he actually hired as curator? If so, perhaps he died and made Lu Ann curator when Margo killed him for approving the damn note cards.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/10

Even when it isn’t gruesomely punishing its characters, Funky Winkerbean is depressing, as the prospect of two reasonably nice and attractive women vying for Les’s smirky charms and pear-shaped body ought to sadden all readers everywhere. At least we have the sure knowledge that this will inevitably end badly for everyone to console us.

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Hey everybody, just a quick note that may not mean anything to most of you: I am moving my RSS feed away from Google’s FeedBurner service. If you subscribe to my site via RSS (and this includes subscribing via Google Reader), you will be automatically redirected to the new feed for the next 15 days, but you should change that address now, to:

https://joshreads.com/?feed=rss2

Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience. If anyone has any problems with that new URL, please let me know ASAP, either in the comments to this post or by emailing me at bio@jfruh.com. And if you just get to this site via my updates on Twitter, or by just reloading the page obsessively until I put up new posts, feel free to ignore this.

UPDATE: Did I say I was moving away from Feedburner? I should have said “I am moving from one Feedburner address to another, just to confuse everybody.” Ha ha! But, really, this is all behind-the-scenes stuff — if you use that URL above, you will always be automatically redirected to the appropriate address. And I recommend you resubscribe to that link now, just to be sure. Apologies for the confusion, all.