The Comics Curmudgeon

33 responses to “Don Johnson syndrome”

1. Joe
   March 14th, 2005 at 9:44 pm [Reply]

   Didn’t someone earlier mention that Mrs. Dr. M. lives in Little Big Horn, Montana?

   At any rate, add ‘grave robbing’ to Rex Morgan grievance list.

2. Sassy_Rocks
   March 14th, 2005 at 9:49 pm [Reply]

   Besides the disappearing/reappearing stubble, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense that a starving grad student would lurk around private property like that rather than dealing with more urgent matters, such as food, hygiene and his puss infected wound.

3. Hippolyta
   March 14th, 2005 at 9:57 pm [Reply]

   I like the sexy orange and purple mood lighting that the Morgans have in their kitchen.

4. Renee S.
   March 14th, 2005 at 10:08 pm [Reply]

   Unless there’s a problem with my cpu screen, in panels three and five, we see that both Buck and Mrs. M have turned a lighter shade of pale in patches on their face. I think that the strong use of ’suddenly’ and ‘catastrophic’ in panel three excited Mrs. M in such a way that she turned ash white.On the other hand, Buck’s emphasis on ‘horrible’ has heightened his libido to a point that he not only has a white patch over his eye,he’s also bleached out parts of his hair and has light blue lips. Or maybe his lips are cold, since his word balloon is frozen blue. In fact, he looks hypothermic in the last panel.

5. Zanzibar
   March 14th, 2005 at 11:15 pm [Reply]

   There were a few other interesting Sunday strips yesterday. First, Garfield:

   http://www.ucomics.com/garfield/2005/03/13/

   When I began reading I suspected that it would be the usual joke about Garfield somehow harming Odie in the end, although the unusual shading (not quite as visible in this reduced image) and the overall rarity of a Sunday strip dominated by Odie made me wonder if something else might not be going on. And finally this was confirmed: in the very bizarre final panel, it’s revealed that Garfield had no role in this, but that in fact the ball had come to life in order to torture Odie with an impossible goal. (I especially like the last image of Odie, sliding down the wall as if transformed into an entirely lifeless object, at the same moment that the ball has asserted its dominating force.) The dark implications remind me somewhat of Don Hertzfeldt’s “Billy’s Balloon,” certainly very remote territory from the usual Garfield fare; and, closer at least nominally to Garfield’s realm, of the well-known Peanuts theme of Lucy pulling the ball away from Charlie Brown.

   And in addition to this, and even more obviously grim, there was Luann:

   http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/luann/archive/luann-20050313.html

   I wondered, due to the unnecessary space in the final bubble, if the dark wit had initially been capped by a yet more morbid punchline, which Evans had later self-edited or which had been turned down by the syndicate; so I sent him an email early this morning inquiring about this. He replied that this was not in fact the case, however:

   From: Greg Evans
   Subject: Re: Contact Greg Evans
   Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 11:20:35 -0800
   To: ( )

   Zanzibar,

   It does look as though there is space for more words… but I really
   just drew the bubble extra big for some reason. Deadlines, y’know,
   makes us do odd things.

   -greg

   In any case, the morbidity was unexpected and refreshing; it would have really capped things off if the Family Circus had had more biting wit like last week, but two out of three isn’t terrible.

6. Incident
   March 14th, 2005 at 11:41 pm [Reply]

   Every day he’s drawing Buck more and more like one of those anime girlie-boys. Y’know, like Sephiroth?

7. PizzaBagel
   March 15th, 2005 at 12:37 am [Reply]

   Re Sunday’s Garfield:

   1. It seems to me to be closer in spirit to Peanuts’ kite-eating tree than to Lucy’s perpetual stunt of pulling away the football before Charlie Brown kicks it.

   2. Assuming that it’s Odie’s momentum which causes him to crash into the wall, then if he’s still watching the Evil Ball – which bounced behind him – why does he land against the wall face-first instead of smacking into it with the back of his head? I guess he could’ve turned his head in that split-second before the impact.

   3. The Evil Ball (Oh, boy! A new character in the Garfield pantheon!) must have either bounced back or rolled back (of its own volition?) into the last panel in order to deliver its maniacal thought-balloon monologue.

8. Zanzibar
   March 15th, 2005 at 2:27 am [Reply]

   It seems as though between the third-to-last and second-to-last panels, Odie has looked back, realized (if he had time) that he was going to crash into the wall, and then crashed into the wall. He must have noticed the presence of the wall when he saw the ball bounce off it in the third-to-last panel, but he was probably more concerned at this point with the loss of the ball than with the potential of hitting the wall. As far as the landing of the ball goes, I would suppose that in some sense the ball is hopping by its own force throughout the strip, so that when it bounces against the wall, it is able to land in its position in the final panel without bouncing yet again.

9. Tuwa
   March 15th, 2005 at 2:30 am [Reply]

   I hope that’s the ball from that room upstairs with the wheelchair.

10. Tom Clancy
    March 15th, 2005 at 7:16 am [Reply]

    Notice in the penultimate panel the speaker is clearly one of of the dead Native Americans who let Buck in on the secrets he’s spilling to June. Either that or the chair itself.

11. Irina
    March 15th, 2005 at 9:52 am [Reply]

    Could someone link or at least direct me to the genesis of Buck’s pus-infected wound?

    I’ve been writing it off as gratuitous morbidity but I’m seeing it repeated so often that I’m wondering if it was actually mentioned in the strip.

    Roadside!

    Irina

12. R. McDonald
    March 15th, 2005 at 9:58 am [Reply]

    Ok, his beard comes and goes, the big question is “What happened to Sarah?” A disappearing kid is more of a concern than some stubble.

    I suspect that she is out in the yard with Frank the Fence guy, learning just what you can do with a post hole digger.

13. Sourbelly
    March 15th, 2005 at 11:37 am [Reply]

    Wow. Sentient balls, goats burning in the furnace…Garfield’s taken a turn for the creepy.

14. RememberByronFrost
    March 15th, 2005 at 11:38 am [Reply]

    Irina, check out Josh’s write-up from 3-3-05.

    And Sarah is only midway through her 2-week nap, Ronald.

15. Ah Xia
    March 15th, 2005 at 1:58 pm [Reply]

    Does anyone else think the grad student resembles Johnny Depp in the Ninth Gate…

    He seems much hotter now that he’s cleaned up and well, indoors.

16. Irina
    March 15th, 2005 at 2:02 pm [Reply]

    Yup. That’s where I think I first saw it. Am I missing something in the strip? Or an inside joke?

    Everyone seemed to latch onto the pus-infected wound thing automatically that for a (comparative) newbie like me, it sounded like it was something that had been around for a while (e.g., more zippers, mule! — which although I don’t pretend to understand, I do gather was plucked from someone’s strip, baffled everyone in a what-on-earth-did-they-just-say kinda way, and was enshrined forever for posterity on this site. Yes?)

17. Moesy
    March 15th, 2005 at 2:02 pm [Reply]

    He’s hotter because of the purple and orange mood lighting. It helps that there are no dramatic extreme close-ups, too.

18. Irina
    March 15th, 2005 at 2:13 pm [Reply]

    A-HA!

    Scratch everything. Finally went back and started reading the Rex Morgan archives and saw the whole story. I’d only read the strips that came up here, and missed the part about the cut hand.

    Guess I’ll have to actually start adding RMMD, MW and A3G to my list of soap comics to follow your commentary.

    :)

    Hugs,

    Irina

19. Islamorada Girl
    March 15th, 2005 at 2:43 pm [Reply]

    I can’t remember where the pus infected wound (PIW) started. But I’ll speculate that Grad Student Buck stuck his hand in oral hygiene- challenged Fence Post Frank’s mouth and FPF bit him. Yowza! Bacteria central!

    Speaking of those skeletons, longtime Rex Morgan readers may recall Melissa, the cranky little old lady patient of Rex and June’s. Seems to me Melissa was going to leave her considerable fortune to the Morgans when she finally died. Is there any connection between her sudden disappearance, the Morgan’s expensive new house and land and the skeleton in the shallow grave, hmmmm?

20. squinky
    March 15th, 2005 at 3:01 pm [Reply]

    So let me get this straight:
    It’s not a Native American burial ground.
    It’s just a place where a bunch of Native Americans are buried.

    You can tell the difference by the depth of the graves.

    Riiiight.

21. RememberByronFrost
    March 15th, 2005 at 3:43 pm [Reply]

    It’s just a place where a bunch of “lost” Native Americans are buried; wonder how ol’ Bucky knows they were ‘lost’?

22. Anonymous L
    March 15th, 2005 at 5:28 pm [Reply]

    150 years ago? Has Buck already done carbon dating?

    I half expect him to add to his statement, “And I think something really horrible is about to happen again…” Bdum, dum, dum!!! (*cymbals crash*)

    Last thing, I really like that not only does Buck’s stubble appear and disappear at will (what a nifty trick!), but so does the background. Oh, June, you think you’re in your kitchen, but hang on, because ole Bucky-boy is going to transport you into white, orange, and black worlds… Maybe it’s a time travel device, and we’ll go back 150 years to finally answer, What Really Happened Here?

23. Moesy
    March 15th, 2005 at 5:41 pm [Reply]

    How long ago did they find that first human bone…seems like eternity. These comics drive me crazy.

24. Cobaltnine
    March 15th, 2005 at 6:58 pm [Reply]

    I presume he found stuff about 150 years old (pottery, coins, etc) that dated it. C-14 is prohibitively expensive for someone living in the woods and it’s not worth it, in general. You can even tell (by teeth) whether a dead person is NA or European.

    But, hey, Buck, you do the legal thing and report this to the state, they might set you up with a proper dig. With funding and stuff. And I know you’re poor and stuff, but you could at least be doing a better job of this investigation. A compass and some graph paper, maybe some string, that’s all I’m asking.

    Ah Xia: Thank you! I knew I was reading him with someone’s voice but I couldn’t remember who!

25. Pookie
    March 15th, 2005 at 10:51 pm [Reply]

    Graph paper? String? Buck don’t need no stinkin’ string! He found those graves by listening to the voices in his pus infected wound.

26. Anonymous
    March 16th, 2005 at 7:32 am [Reply]

    Something terrible happened 150 years ago and it’s called…syphillis.

27. NotReallyErnie
    March 16th, 2005 at 8:09 am [Reply]

    Anonymous L spoke these words:
    “Maybe it’s a time travel device, and we’ll go back 150 years to finally answer, What Really Happened Here?”

    I think it was 150 years ago that Rex and June got married. Oh wait, were you talking real time or comic time?

28. Big Dog
    March 16th, 2005 at 11:35 am [Reply]

    It’s like a “Where are they now?” about Egon Spengler.

29. JohnnyC
    March 16th, 2005 at 2:34 pm [Reply]

    Marriage has been good for June. She lost that stupid hat and her rack got waay larger.
    or maybe she’s hiding that old busybody Melissa in there.

30. Anonymous
    March 16th, 2005 at 3:25 pm [Reply]

    I am hoping they were victims of a volcanic eruption and died from the pyroclastic flows. Then the volcano can erupt again and destroy everyone in the strip.

31. Steve
    March 16th, 2005 at 4:31 pm [Reply]

    What Mary Worth is to the fine art of arm hair, Rex Morgan is to weird beard.

32. Monkeys Uncle
    March 16th, 2005 at 6:08 pm [Reply]

    150 Years ago? I think that was when this storyline started. I wonder if the little girl is in the living room looking at static on the TV and talking to a poltergiest. I think they need to call in a shamen to quiet the undead spirits and help Frank dig the post holes. Hey! maybe all these indians died from untreated pus infected wounds and Buck is a spirit wandering June’s backyard and begging for cheese sandwiches.

33. Cobaltnine
    March 16th, 2005 at 9:18 pm [Reply]

    Re: Today’s
    BOOKS? You found 150 year old books in the wet, leafy ground.

    I call serial murderer on Buck. I was holding out for the sake of all us graduate archaeology students, but that’s the last straw.

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