The old men and the Friday

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Beetle Bailey, 5/8/26 I honestly am not sure if the joke here is simply “Lt. Fuzz is humiliated because Gen. Halftrack takes an enlisted soldier’s advice instead of his” (I assume she’s enlisted because she wears the same uniform as Beetle — I’m not sure how that relates to actual U.S. Army uniforms but I’m confident Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC isn’t either) or if there’s another possibility lurking, which is that the General is being agreeable with this soldier because she’s a pretty lady. That’s in character, but it requires us to interpret some ambiguous visual cues — are Halftrack’s eyes particularly bugged out in panel one or am I imagining it? is “blonde” a guaranteed marker of attractiveness in the Baileyverse? — and, maybe it’s mean to say…