Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 5/31/23

The whole “Beetle and Miss Buxley are dating” bit is a recent development in this strip and I’m on the record as strongly opposed to it. Today we learn that the whole thing is just a way for Beetle to express his dominance over senior officers in the only way he can. Of course, while this struggle is clearly sexual in nature, it’s several levels removed from actual sex, since we know Beetle simply dozes off whenever his “girlfriend” tries to get amorous.

Dick Tracy, 5/31/23

One of the underappreciated tragedies of the past few years is that spammers and scammers are increasingly turning ordinary phone calls into a widely avoided and increasingly useless form of communication. The federal government refuses to take action, so local authorities in Neo-Chicago are trying to help by issuing every old person a scam-detecting chicken.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 5/30/23

One of the things I’ve always respected about baseball (the men’s version) is that, as with all sports, sometimes a level of disrespect is shown by one player to another that demands fisticuffs, but generally speaking those fisticuffs are extremely desultory, with all the players fairly quickly forming a huge mass in the middle of the field and just kind of shoving each other. My favorite part is watching the relief pitchers in the bullpen do the calculation on how long the scrum is going to last and then slowly jogging in to make an appearance if it doesn’t break up quickly enough. Anyway — and hopefully everyone understands that I’m saying this as a feminist ally — I feel like the girls of Mudlark softball could learn something from the typical low-stakes MLB brawl, because they are going at it, with roundhouse kicks and punching people in the face and such, which seem like the sort of things that could earn you a multi-game suspension at minimum.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/23

Look, man, I hate to be the one who’s more of a purist about a comic’s characters than their creators current maintainers, but Rocky’s one-note characterization is that he’s a rebel who loves the rock music. He’s not some dork who walks around a metal detector! That’s Chip Gizmo territory!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/30/23

In other news, most of the teens in the Rex Morgan gang of teens are finally graduating high school! And thank God, because by the look of them they’re all well into their 30s.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/29/23

You might think that the inhabitants of Hootin’ Holler would object to the fact their only clergyman is a grifter and fraud. But in truth, for these rural folk, the niceties of organized religion are of little interest, as their spiritual world is dominated by essentially pagan beliefs in signs given by nature and the practice of folk magic.

Dennis the Menace, 5/29/23

That’s not to give followers of monotheistic creeds too much credit, of course; many, like Dennis, will menace generations of sophisticated theologians by simply treating God as a source of apotropaic power, a shortcut to get out of a bind rather than a mystery to contemplate.

Blondie, 5/29/23

Speaking of mysteries, do you think Dagwood has lied to these kids and told him that he’s a combat veteran, so they’re leaving him alone to give him time to contemplate his fallen comrades? Or is their attitude just something like “Well, I guess he respects the troops, so we won’t fuck with him and make his life miserable … today, anyway.”

Shoe, 5/29/23

CONFIRMED: traitors to birdkind in the Shoe universe are punished by ritual execution and cannibalism.