Please stop trying to to introduce political commentary into your Beetle Bailey comic strip. If I want to read topical, scathing political punditry in the daily funnies, I have several Bloom County collections I can reread, or I can just skim down the comics section of the fishwrap and read Doonesbury. I read Beetle Bailey to see General Halftrack ogle Miss Buxley and to find out what wacky misadventures Beetle and Sgt. Snorkel have gotten into each day. Leave the politics to the experts, like Berke Breathed and Garry Trudeau (both Pulitzer Prize winners), or, you know, the professional editorial cartoonists. They’re actually funny. On its best days, Beetle Bailey’s recycled gags are good enough to elicit, at most, a half-hearted smirk. Don’t push it.
And to the creators of Mallard Fillmore and Prickly City: Take the previous rant, switch out Beetle Bailey for the names of your strips, and multiply by 10. Or better yet, just retire.
Sincerely,
Corey A. Henson, Esq.
December 13th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Corey, you can’t take politics out of the creative process. Even supposedly nonpolitical stories are political in that they show what the author thinks is desirable in human society and what isn’t.
I will agree that punchline fell flat, and so does most of Mallard Fillmore. But that’s more due to lapses in skill delivering the joke than in bringing in ideology.
December 13th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Right. More doggie jokes. And Miss Buxley. Hungry fat guys. And incompetent old white men. Sassy black people. And the learning disabled.
Brilliant!
December 13th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I stopped reading Beetle Baily because of the politics– not because I disagree with them or just because they’re there at all, but because he shows how very little he actually knows about them. There was this one strip soon after 9/11 where they were all gathered about and one of them said “How could anybody hate us? Look at all the great things we’ve done!” followed by a list of–I kid you not–inventions and technological advances (half of which weren’t even really American inventions). Not even the slightest consideration towards our foreign policy, or even the idea that arrogance like that could contribute to people hating us.
December 13th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Creators have the right to do what they will with their creations. If you don’t like it, your choice is to stay for the bits you still do like or else move along to something new. At least, unlike too many of the moldy strips in the newspaper, Mort Walker is the creator and still the artist behind the strip.
I mean, I never even looked at BC after a point because of the bizarre religious preaching and the jettisoning of the strip’s central concept (they could have been anything in any time or setting, there was nothing caveman about the characters any more). But it was his right and I simply moved on. But he’s dead, and like Blondie and Hagar the Horrible and Mark Trail and the Phantom and more, the strips go on without being interesting, relevant or inspired. I can see criticizing those guys, as they are playing with someone else’s creation. But the original creator? It’s up to them.
December 13th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Yeah! Also, Dixie Chicks/Bruce Springsteen/Pearl Jam should shut up and sing, right?
And while we’re at it, whoever asked Tim Robbins to make “Dead Man Walking” and “Bob Roberts?” I wanna see “Tapeheads II!”
December 13th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Maybe there are other strips from which you are building your argument, but there is nothing overtly political in the posted strip. It is a joke that would apply to any president – a statement that as a nation we hold neither our weathermen nor our politicians accountable. The strip would have been just as applicable in 1998 as 2008.
December 13th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
“I read Beetle Bailey” – this seems to be the root of the problem.
December 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
I want MORE political commentary in Beetle Bailey. Seeing Beetle ripped to shreds by a IED, that’s entertainment, as his bits and pieces shower all over corporal winkerbean. CROSSOVER!
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I can see how one might have problems with Beetle Baily, but this rant strikes me as disrespectful to Mr. Walker — a man who has helped shape the modern perception of comics.