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He’s like six feet away so he can probably also hear … you?

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Beetle Bailey, 5/13/20

Literally every single one of Beetle Bailey’s running bits has been repeatedly done to death over the strip’s decades in print, with all possible variations mined for even trace amounts of humor, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that today’s edition of “Let’s crap on Lt. Fuzz” focuses on the fact that he gets more information via sound than smell. What a nerd, amiright?

Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/20

Look, Les, I do have a certain amount sympathy with … well, not with you, per se, but with anyone who finds themselves in the position of needing to perform some version of their genuine grief for professional reasons. But I guess you should’ve seen that coming when you decided to build your entire creative career and indeed your entire personality on the foundation of “I lost my young wife to cancer.” Now dance for the nice lady, Les! Dance! Weep real emotionally genuine tears if you want that sweet, sweet Hollywood cash!

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“Maudlin Parrot” would be a good name for a band

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Mary Worth, 5/12/20

A fun thing about even a pretty narratively explicit medium like the comics is that you can always fill in some of the lacunae with your mind to create the version of the story you most want to read. For instance, there’s nothing in the second panel of today’s Mary Worth making it explicit that there’s a long, lingering silence after Dawn says “I worked things out with Hugo” — a sentence that any normal human would interpret to mean that Dawn and Hugo had patched things up and would continue to operate as a couple, leaving Jared either as a side piece or, more likely, a piece of rejected romantic detritus on the side of the road — but there’s nothing that strictly speaking precludes you from imagining that silence, either. So I’m imagining it. I’m imagining Dawn running into Jared’s arms off the jetway, nestling her chin on his shoulder, and saying, enraptured, “I worked things out with Hugo!” and letting that sit there for a minute, only moving on to “We agreed to be friends!” after his big, ugly, heaving sobs have started and can’t be stopped.

Gasoline Alley, 5/12/20

In case you’re wondering, the actual line in question is “Folks these days just don’t do nothin’ simply for the love of it.” So yeah, this guy will dip into the lyrical repetoire of popular music in order to make his rhetorical point, but he’ll be damned if he submits to these punks’ grammatical barbarism.

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Thank goodness at least one “rock and roller” acknowledges that farms exist

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Gasoline Alley, 5/11/20

A problem with any kind of narrative is distinguishing between the things individual characters know and ways they interact with each other on the one hand, and ways the creator of the narrative intends to interact with their audience on the other. What I’m trying to say is that it would be very likely in-universe that this shambolic event would eventually devolve into a speaker telling the audience specifically to Google some 36-year-old Don Henley lyrics, rather than, say, actually listening to the song on Spotify or something, but it’s just as likely that Gasoline Alley sincerely intends this to be a helpful suggestion for the comic’s audience itself. Anyway, check out this long-haired young fella’s thoughts on the farming crisis, he’s got some good ideas!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/11/20

Wow, Les, act like you’ve been here before, will ya? Because you have. During your last ill-fated trip to LA to try to turn Lisa’s Story into something people might actually enjoy, the studio actually put you up at the Chateau Marmont, so you’d think you would gotten all that actress-leering out of your system! Anyway, I certainly hope that ‘Pink Entertainment’ is the newly founded studio arm of the Susan B. Komen Foundation, set up solely to create entertainment products that raise awareness of breast cancer, because that will make it all the sweeter when they reject Les’s little graphic novel as unfilmable schlock.