This Beetle Bailey strip ran a couple weeks ago and caught my eye for a couple reasons.
1) Beetle and Plato appear to be under fire. This strip never depicts war situations. The characters are in perpetual training, and never actually ship off to real combat. Presumably this is another drill at Camp Swampy — but you wouldn’t know that from these two panels.
2) That punch line is a killer. This strip has more of a punch, more of an edge, than I’m accustomed to seeing in Walker’s work, or indeed much of anything on the funnies page.
Afterthought: Could this be a cryptic anti-McCain reference?
Some training does involve live fire going off, especially over head. But if they were at war, it would add more heft to the strip.
Come to think of it, the mere fact that they’re talking about war is pretty remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Beetle utter the word “war” before.
This does seem unique for Beetle Bailey. And I thought the army was just always training.
Totally off topic, but I got interested after the debate a couple of posts ago, Barney Frank voted against Gramm-Leach-Bliley (here’s the Senate vote – Dodd voted against it, too). That’s not to say both sides don’t have muck on their hands – Clinton’s Treasury Sec. Robert Rubin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, did support it.