Is Dawn going to stop talking long enough to choke down that muffin

Beetle Bailey, 8/16/22

Feel like it’s been a long time since I saw someone actually smoking a tobacco cigarette in a newspaper comic strip, and while I hadn’t thought about it much, I think I unconsciously assumed there was some kind of Hayes Code-style agreement that we wouldn’t depict such a thing in a medium intended for children. But maybe I’m wrong about that, or maybe there was a collective recognition over at Beetle Bailey central that nobody cares anymore and definitely no children are reading Beetle Bailey, so why not be free, for certain limited definitions of “being free,” which is to say free to depict Rocky, the camp’s resident “bad boy” (non-sexual division), enjoying a cigarette held at arm’s length and Beetle being weirdly passive aggressive about it.

Mary Worth, 8/16/22