Bad Machinery by John Allison for May 15, 2019

Wisdom beyond her years right there.

Those ulcers are bacterial! And entirely treatable! See the doctor!

Me thinks Bostwick is going to be trouble. Or not up for the task. One or the other. Maybe both. Whichever comes first.

Got a kick out of the suspendered fan-boying teacher! (If they call it fan-girling, then there’s an opposite, right?)

Hooray! The old man is out!

It’s amusing to see “bollocking” (twice!) in a comic strip. It used to be that the only comic book that used the word “bollocks” was D.C.‘s Hellblazer, a comic in their Vertigo imprint that carried a “For Mature Readers” advisory on the cover. (That comic series was about the character John Constantine, whose profanity-laced dialog used it a lot.) However, a few years ago D.C. rebooted all their titles, and they brought John Constantine from their Vertigo line into their “mainstream” comics line (that doesn’t carry a “mature readers” advisory), and he brought the word along with him (as well as some other rather salty expressions). It spread from there through other “T”-rated (for teenage readers) titles, and now it has shown up in unlikely places such as Marvel’s Spider-Man comics. I wonder whether it will spread from its use in today’s strip to other comic strips as well. Who is next in line for a bollocking? Will that be used to describe what Sarge regularly does to Beetle Bailey, or what Mr. Dithers regularly does to Dagwood?

bol·locks /ˈbäləks/ noun

VULGAR SLANG•BRITISH

plural noun: bollocks

1. the testicles.

2. used to express contempt, annoyance, or defiance.