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Beetle Bailey, 8/1/04

A reviewer of Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks said that Woody’s character, a poor schmuck who came by a load of money, dressed like “a poor person’s fantasy of what a rich person would look like.” In today’s Beetle Bailey, we have a person with bad taste’s fantasy of what sophistication would look like, to wit:

• a barracks dominated by crystal chandeliers, ill-matching patterned throw pillows, purple drapes, and fuzzy area rugs;
• a mess hall serving non-existent but vaguely fru-fru sounding items such as “Mongolian baby peas”;
• and, in the pièce de résistance, Beetle Bailey dressed as a pimp.

That last item definitely pushes the whole affair into the realm of surreal dreamscape. Any member of the Queer Eye crew recommending such a suit would surely be sent to the lowest level of aesthetic hell, which probably involves doing interior decorating for Donald Trump.

Still, this strip may be more complex than it first seems on the surface. Since the final panel reveals that the whole thing is Sarge’s nightmare, does the author intend for us to laugh Sarge’s uneducated attempts to imagine high style? Or is this Mort Walker’s own nightmarish vision of a demasculinized military? There’s something to think about for thirty seconds or so before you move on to the Junior Jumble.

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The Phantom, 7/31/04

The Phantom is one of those strips that, it strikes me, was created in significantly less politically correct times, and is desperately trying to make up for it now. After all, it revolves around a benevolent white man protecting the dark-skinned, half-naked, ludicrous-straw-hat-wearing, pidgin-spouting natives of the amusingly named African nation of Bangalla. It’s the sort of comic strip that Rudyard Kipling might have come up with, if he had known about the wonders of form-fitting spandex. Of course, today Bangalla is an independent democracy, with a capital city full gleaming, modern buildings, and a suit-wearing president with the admittedly unfortunate name of Lambada (“the forbidden dance!”) Luaga. (If the current Sunday storyline is to be believed, Bangalla has a thoroughly modern relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex; I’ll bet President Luaga isn’t so pleased that his old friend has decided to borrow his multi-million dollar missile cruiser for his own purposes.)

Anyway, in the current weekly series, the Phantom is kicking ass and taking names not in Africa but in his wife’s native United States. And while portraying one of the strip’s African villains like a Planet of the Apes extra would probably cross a line that the strip is already too close to, I suppose it’s OK that the leader of this band of evil rednecks looks uncannily like the majestic mountain gorilla, or maybe Ernest Borgnine.

One of the things I like about the Phantom is that his origins lie in an earlier, pre-Superman era of comic book heroes. Although he is highly skilled in both fisticuffs and gunplay, he has no actual superpowers as such, though the melty word balloons in this strip imply that he has the power to make his voice super scary.

Bonus observation: Our redneck posse includes a member of America’s diminishing but still-proud suspender-wearing community.

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Sally Forth, 7/30/04

If I were a different sort of comic reader — that is, an insane and hypersensitive one — this is the sort of comic strip that might prompt an angry letter to the editor about the open sewer that is American popular culture today and shouldn’t the comics pages be the one place where we can escape from the smut and won’t somebody please think of the children? As it is, my main thought was just “Ew.” Yeah, I know that it’s important for parents to have times to themselves and everything, and that a healthy sex life is not incompatible with parenting and/or responsible adulthood, but still: Ew. Imagine the trauma that would be unleashed on the unsuspecting comics readership if other comics, like Cathy, Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, or, God forbid, Marmaduke start encouraging us to imagine that the main characters are going off to get their Smoove B-style freak on immediately after the closing panel. If I wanted to think about that sort of thing in conjunction with cartoons, there are plenty of videos I can order from Japan, thank you very much.

When I was taking Latin in college, I was looking up the verb prodeo and was told that one of its potential translations into English was to sally forth. Immediately a little light went on in my head: The name of that comic strip is a Latin joke! Just like the Family Circus! Maybe failed classicists end up on the funny pages, or, in my case, commenting on the funny pages on the Internet. It sure would explain Prince Valiant.