Needs More Dots

"Beetle Bailey" reminded me anew that the march of progress is unstoppable and the impacts of evolving technology upon Society are myriad, deep, and impossible to predict.

As any reader of Josh Fruhlinger's excellent "Comics Curmudgeon" blog can attest, comic strips that continue to run even decades after their original creators kicked their clogs are are to that industry as high-fructose corn syrup is to farming: they represent a disproportionate amount of the industry's output and they're making us all progressively less healthy.

Sometimes, the cartoon syndicate hires fresh, less-dead artists and writers to keep the thing going. Often, though, they just keep re-running strips that were originally published a long time ago. They just give the strips a quick check for references that are distractingly out-of-date, change "disco" to "Macarena," and send it.

These people had it pretty sweet for a long time with smartphones. Yeah, there was a transition period ten or fifteen years ago when they had to erase all of the thick phone handsets and curly cords from the artwork. Then they just had to slap a simple black rectangle into the character's hand, and bob's-your-uncle: that strip's good for another twenty years, easy.

The only time I give "Beetle Bailey" any thought is when Josh has something to say about it in Comics Curmudgeon. This time, however, I have to show some respect: the phone that Pa Bailey is holding has the appropriate number and arrangement of lenses for a modern smartphone.

This is going to be a canary moving forward: it serves the same function as the "This product packed on" date stamped on a thing of lunchmeat. Three camera holes, good. One camera hole...maybe you should sniff it first. ⓘ