Philosophical Friday: Beetle's Last Kiss

Beetle Bailey's relationship with Sergeant Snorkel is a complicated one. You assume that as Beetle is lazy and incompetent and Sarge is constantly berating and assaulting him that they would feel nothing but enmity for one another, but it seems that that is not the case.

Beetle Bailey, 2014-02-28.

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That aside, today what I really wanted to talk about is a different comic. It's called Last Kiss and it is awful. First I'll let you read what GoComics has to say about it.

Pairing vintage comic art with hilarious, new dialog by Disney veteran writer John Lustig, Last Kiss revels in the absurdities of love, lust and 'life with lip.' The series originated when Lustig bought the publishing rights to a romance comic book series from the 50's and 60's, and started rewriting the stories for fun. Since then, the re-dialogued comics have been a popular feature in newspapers, magazines, comic books and greeting cards. Today Last Kiss is gaining popularity and is also available on email cards from Jib Jab and greeting cards from NobleWorks. Check www.lastkissinc.com for the latest news and product launches.

Sounds OK, right? There's certainly plenty of potential there. Let's take a look at today's.

Last Kiss, 2014-02-28.

Oh. Well, everyone has their off days. Maybe that's a bad example. How about the previous one?

Last Kiss, 2014-02-26.

So... third time's the charm? One more? OK, I can't even bring myself to link any more of these. It's not that they're lazy, it's that they're just not funny. At all. And someone's actually printing this garbage as greeting cards.

I don't mean to imply that it's easy to think of funny captions for these images. It clearly isn't. They're just single panels of one or two ordinary people with absolutely no context. And that's the problem, I think. John Lustig has set himself an impossible challenge. If he'd gone with an entire strip (or a row of panels from a comic book) for each one then it would not only be easier, it would be funnier. Even if he's bad at being funny (which I suspect he is) it would still be better than this.

But more importantly, if re-captioning other people's comics is a legitimate option, why am I not a syndicated cartoonist yet? I do that all the time!