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Personal Day

Oh hi! I’m taking a “personal day” today, so this post will be mostly promotional in content, with only a few memorable zingers for you to carry with you for the rest of the day. But really, you’ve had two epic Jog posts this week. What more do you want, people?

Earlier this week Gabrielle Bell immortalized me in comic strip form. I feel humbled, flattered, and yet exalted.

But much of the last two weeks has been taken up dealing with PictureBox stuff, which brings me to the promotional part of this post: There is a TON of new stuff in the shop, most of which will arrive by X-Mas is you order by Monday.

I have, of late, been fishing through bins and finding a few treasures, like D.O.A. Comics, the one-man anthology by the late, great Jim Osborne. Or the anonymous and amazing Junk Comics. Of course there is always some Marshall Rogers and some sweet Moebius.

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When Titan’s recent collection of Beetle Bailey landed on my doorstep a few weeks ago, I don’t think I’d read more than half a dozen strips of the title in almost two decades. But throughout my childhood, I pored over the strip (along with everything else in the funnies section) on a daily basis. Considering how long Beetle Bailey & co. have been a part of my mental furniture, I have had a surprising amount of difficulty thinking of what to write about the strip. (Hence my linking to that terrible, terrible cartoon yesterday, for which I apologize.) After all, whatever you may believe about its quality, Beetle Bailey is undeniably one of the most influential comic strips of all time; debuting one month before Peanuts, and six before Dennis the Menace, BB joined forces with those titles to usher in a new era of newspaper funnies. (Usually somewhere in that sentence, a writer would feel obligated to utter that old incantatory phrase, “for better or worse,” but it would be more accurate to say that their influence was for better and worse.) As a sixty-year-old strip still boasting the involvement of its original creator, it is one of our only living links to a now vanished golden age of cartooning.

So why is it so difficult to find something worth saying about it? (more…)

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Today’s post is running late, but in the meantime, please enjoy this related entertainment.
Something to think about the next time someone tells you they don’t make ’em like they used to.