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Beetle Bailey, 2/9/21

I guess the point of this strip is that each of these characters is responding to the question of what to get Sarge for his birthday in his own way, according to his own character (in Beetle Bailey, “character” means “whatever dumb on-the-nose collection of tics and running gags they’ve accrued over the years”). So, Plato wants to give him a book, because he’s a nerd; Killer wants to give him a box of candy, because he’s so monomaniacally focused on getting laid that his only context for gift-giving is the cliches of heterosexual courtship; Zero wants to to give him a comic book, because he’s dumb (?); and Rocky wants to give him a music mix, because he’s named “Rocky” due to the fact that when he was introduced into the strip, his one-note character was focused on liking rock ‘n’ roll music, which was as novel then as omnipresent personal computers were when Specialist Chip Gizmo was introduced in the early ’00s, because that’s just how long Beetle Bailey has been around. Anyway, I wanted to point out that all of these people are giving Sarge something they’d like, not something that he would actually want to receive. Can you visualize Sarge reading a book? Of course not. Only Beetle’s proposal is actually thoughtful. Sadly, it will not be appreciated.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/9/21

After kicking off his life as a diagnosed diabetic with one last indulgent fast-food meal, Buck’s blood sugar numbers got real bad, but then he came home and exercised, and they got OK again! Is this … how diabetes works? I don’t know much about it but I do know that Rex Morgan, M.D., is a rigorously fact-checked comic that aims primarily to spread accurate medical information, so I’m just going to assume that this is, in fact, how diabetes works. Good job, Buck! Looks like you’re on your way to a healthy lifesty[finally gets to narration box at bottom of second panel] OH NO

Pluggers, 2/9/21

I mean, duh, of course he’s not going to fold up his underwear. The wrinkle lines are a further turn-on for fans of the sick sex thing that Pluggers, in one of 2021’s biggest surprises, has become.

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Crankshaft, 2/8/21

My earlier suggestion that what we’re seeing in Crankshaft was written a year ago and reflects the very early days of the coronavirus pandemic was meant mostly in jest, but after two weeks of Crankshaft defiantly going through his daily life in a hazmat suit, I’ve become more and more convinced I was right. Today’s gag, which name-checks hand sanitizer, everyone’s early-to-mid-pandemic obsession, just confirms it for me. I guess the strip’s putting it in terms of “flu” because the thought was that jokes about COVID-19 would be completely out of date by February of 2021? Ha ha! [laugh becomes increasingly manic and desperate] HA HA HA HA

Gil Thorp, 2/8/21

Wait, so Tessi is “short” for Tessa, a word the same number of letters and syllables? I refuse to accept this, but the alternate reading is that her full name is actually “Contessa,” which I refuse to accept even harder.

Crock, 2/8/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because … the birds shit in their food, which they then ate, not realizing it was full of bird shit? Wow, between this and Dennis the Menace yesterday, everyone’s just kind of going for it, huh.

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Crankshaft, 2/7/21

I’m not such a stickler for detail that I’m opposed to a comic strip being established via in-strip dialog as taking plance on a different day of the week than the strip actually runs in the real world, but I do think that you sort of have to have a good reason for doing so, because it’s going to cause a little niggling of dissonance for the reader. Take today’s strip, for example; it’s a Sunday strip — something the format makes impossible to ignore — but within the world of the strip itself, it’s taking place on Thursday. At least the joke it’s in service of is very funny, right? Well, no, not really. But doesn’t the joke require the full muti-panel treatment that only a Sunday strip can provide? I’m afraid that’s not true either.

Dennis the Menace, 2/7/21

When margarine was first introduced to the U.S. in the late 1800s, the butter lobby pushed to undermine sales of it. For a while, it was mandated that pink food coloring be added to it to make its artificial and presumably less appetizing nature clear; though that law was struck down by the Supreme Court, other laws taxed margarine that had yellow food coloring added to make it look more butter-like. What I’m trying to say is that I wonder if today’s Dennis the Menace was the end product of a long, tortuous negotiations that ended with the editors saying that yes, fine, you can do an entire Sunday strip about Dennis picking his nose and even graphically depict boogers, but you have to depict said boogers in a bright yellow color found in no booger that has ever been extracted from a human nose.