Beetle Bailey, 8/25/25

Comedy is, in large part, the art of subverting your audience's expectations in ways they find pleasing. So you could see how it might make sense in theory to do a comic strip where a soldier yells "INCOMING!!" while pointing to the sky, setting up an expectation that he's on the front lines and his position is about to get hit by an artillery barrage, only to reveal in panel two that he's about to get pooped on by a bird, a much less life-threatening scenario. However, longtime readers know that the idea of any of Camp Swampy's troops being deployed into combat is laughable, so the joke doesn't really land. I will note that the second panel reinforces the punchline by showing us that Sarge and Beetle are hanging out somewhere littered with power lines, which provide ample places for birds to hang out while also being significantly easier to draw than the birds themselves.

Marvin, 8/25/25