Mostly babies
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Hi and Lois, 11/19/24
See, here’s an example of why Hi and Lois absolutely should stick to its post-punchline vibes: today’s strip does have a punchline, and it sucks. Oh, what’s that? You don’t watch a form of televised entertainment that’s become omnipresent because it’s cheap to produce and activates the same base pleasure centers in the human bran that react to cocaine? You’d rather contemplate the slow-moving majesty of nature instead? Thanks, smug baby, you’ve really given us all something to think about, via extremely mild wordplay.
Marvin, 11/19/24
Two of the worst things about Marvin are (a) it’s often about the title character peeing and pooing, and his adversarial relationship to toilets and being potty trained, and (b) it never really lands on whether the title character is a preverbal infant who communicates with thought balloons, in which case the peeing and pooing make sense, or a child old enough to go to school independently and talk out loud and such. Anyway, today’s strip hits both of these low notes, if you’re keeping track.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/19/24
Is Rex Morgan a fast-paced, gripping adventure strip that makes every visit to the comics page a thrill ride? No. But does it tackle real-world medical issues and educate the general public about their importance? Also no. But does it feature lots of drawings of hands in very specific positions and configurations? Yeah, that’s the one. It does that. We all know about “feet guys,” but if there’s such a thing as “hand guys,” as I assume there are, Rex Morgan, M.D., is their go-to, and I think that’s great.
62 replies to “Mostly babies”
Mary Worth Mashup: Yes, it’s exactly what you think.
Lockhorns: What’s worse than Loretta’s singing? Loretta singing an annoying advertising jingle.
Pluggers: Ha ha! Pluggers know they’re so ugly a decent haircut won’t help ’em be less hideous to polite society.
G. &*#$#*! Thorp – It would make sense to reference someone’s first interception of the season, but it sounds downright stupid to say first interception of the game. Does Marty Moon have ESP and know that Austin Field will have a multi-interception game? If Marty were around in 1861, would he announce, “The Confederates are whipping the Union in the first Battle of Bull Run?”
RxMD: I thought Brooke was the Hand Guy.
RMMD:
“The thing is, Doc, I don’t feel so good.”
“Not to worry, Mr. Lewton — you’re not wearing a red shirt with a Star Trek emblem. You’ll be okay!”
RMMD:
“Wait a minute. You’re not Mr. Lewton. You’re Jimmy Hoffa! — I thought you disappeared!”
I don’t know about anyone else but I read Rex Morgan for its hyper-realistic medical scenarios. I know when I go to the doctor, he has no idea why I’m there until I blurt out “I don’t feel so good.” And of course, like everybody does, when he asks me a routine question about my daily habits, I respond with a truculent “Eh,” arms crossed, frowning, daring him to inquire further. It’s like really being there!
RMMD: At least this guy hasn’t represented with the dreaded Spazz Finger.
MW: If one wants a turkey leg on Thanksgiving, one had best begin kowtowing well in advance.
BB: I can’t believe that Sarge doesn’t use this as a reason to pummel Julius to a pulp. He’s reduced Beetle to a smear for a LOT less.
RM- “If you’re having trouble with sleep, there’s a comic strip I can prescribe. You don’t have any allergies to root country music do you?”
MW:
You can just see the wheels turning in Toby’s head as she searches to come up with some kind of snotty comment.
H&L: For babies, all of reality is new and strange and incredible. For adults, reality is a known and terrible quantity, so to hell with it, let’s close the curtains and watch Milf Manor.
RMMD: Jesus fucking Christ, Terry Beatty, can you just cut to the goddamn chase? We get it, Chemtrail Lewton is a tedious old asshole who takes forever to get to the insipid point, but you don’t have to bore us with your accidental author-insert’s bullshit.
CS: See above, replace “Terry Beatty” and “Chemtrail Lewton” with “Tom Batiuk” and “Tom Batiuk.” I mean “Skip Rawlings.” Oh, and remove the word “accidental.”
MW: 2024 is my favorite month of the year.
H&L I really want an extra panel here so the dog can wander into frame and say something like “Ah, but what is reality, sweet child? I concern myself with the metaphysical…”
Marvin: I mean…better than stopping it with just poop, right? I feel like they should get credit for that.
RMMD Amazing how it only takes a brief interlude of Rex doing his daily job for me to long for the excitement of Truck and his fiancée. Man, you think they’re sitting on a bench right now? I’ll bet they’re sitting on it real good.
JP: Is Sophie responsible for Neddy’s terrible behavior? Eh, debatable. But Sophie probably should be held responsible for Sophie’s behavior, which was also abhorrent and should not be so casually excused. But Marciuliano has some weird notions about the relative culpability of men and women for their actions, so Sophie getting into a screaming match in a restaurant and subsequently ignoring Glen entirely just makes him love her all the more. Meanwhile, this transition sucks. After spending all that time building up Neddy confronting Glen, the
seasontime of day changes and we have no real idea how Glen and Neddy parted ways. Don’t hold your breath on this conversation about Glen’s extremely fucked-up life being particularly meaningful, either.GT: Where did that ball come from? Did the rest of both teams drink invisibility potions or did Valley Tech’s QB throw a pass around the entire circumference of Earth?
Luann: No, Luann, you keep that word “dull.” No one’s earned it more than you.
Marvin: Most vandals run away after stuffing the toilet but Marvin appears, from his sopping wet footsteps, to have stood there reveling in the overflowing sewerage. While many would assume Marvin’s obsession with fecal hygiene is a sign of a larger psychosis, it may be simply be a desperate cry for help. Has anyone checked this child for rectal prolapse?
You know in any realistic suburban living scenario Hi would be out there laying traps, poison, ultrasound alarms or just straight up taking an axe to any and every part of this infestation of rabbits, squirrels, birds, purple weeds and whatnot ruining the perfectly flat sterile lawn aesthetic the HOA is going for. Mom needs reality TV to feel like there’s something genuine and alive in her home, don’t judge her too hard, smug baby.
RMMD: Re hands, maybe Beatty’s been feeling nostalgic for the old Soupy Sales show:
“Rhaa woo, wha rhoo, rha rha rha woo?”
Wait, Marvin… uses TOILET PAPER??
RMMD — Rex gives the whitest, least-sassy possible interpretation of “talk to the hand.”
H&L: “I don’t know why She watches those…” Trixie detachment from Lois is so complete she doesn’t even realize that’s her mom.
DtM: Give it up, kid. If he hasn’t had a heart attack yet, it ain’t going to happen.
Marvin: Look, I have a Marvin-aged son, and he’s about as tall as my hips. I know comics exaggerate for artistic effect, but he’s just too small. He’s the size of his mother’s foot! This doesn’t look like #relatable parenting content about a troublesome toddler, it looks like a horrible little leprechaun is breaking into schools and homes and peeing all over them.
RMMD: Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he does not feel so good. Says he wakes up sore and tired. Says he is not sleeping all right. Doctor says, ‘Treatment is simple. Rex Morgan MD is in the local paper. Go and read it. That should bore you to sleep.’ Man bursts into tears. Says, ‘But doctor…I am in Rex Morgan MD.’
@jroggs:
On Luann :
1) That first panel, where Luann looks directly at the audience and basically says “My life is not worth following because it’s a very empty, dull routine”… considering how little she appears in her own strip anymore, I feel like it’s the most SINCERE thing the strip has done? (ALSO : that’s the routine of a HIGH SCHOOLER with a part-time job, not a college student who took a bunch of random classes for fun)
2) …Luann is still tutoring kids? I thought she had stopped doing that, what with the last time we saw her doing it being… I wanna say over 18 months ago?
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Marvin : …Lucky those puddles Marvin is leaving behind are colored like clear water, and not yellow, or worse, BROWN.
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Ripley’s Don’t Believe It :
1. Conversely, that study is proving that “I read (non-specific) books” is the LEAST REPULSIVE hobby
(commenting on Comics Curmudgeon is probably the MOST, with my luck)2. …You’d think that Ernest Hemmingway having very modern tastes would be a more commonly known factoid
(did Epic Meal Time ever do “Bacon-wrapped Fried Fish”?)3. And if you beat it up enough, it evolves into Araquanid.
H&L – The bee is a busybody, the cardinal won’t shut up, the rabbit will screw anything, the squirrel can’t stop playing with his nuts, and the butterfly flaps his wings and there’s an earthquake in Cartagena….
Marvin – Aw…they’re full of shit….
RMMD – A mob boss…ordering hit jobs…burning out small businesses…stealing from the rich and poor, alike…can’t sleep at night? Well, that doesn’t sound right….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Hi and Lois: Josh talks about a kind of television program that “activates the same base pleasure centers in the human bran that react to cocaine,” which, in that excessive cocaine use can cause you to lose control of your bowels, is a most appropriate typo. It’s shit and it causes you to shit, is what I’m saying.
@Schroduck: And here I thought you were like the rest of us. You know, old.
H&L: Note that when Trixie says she watches “real reality”, she is staring directly at… us. The comics know that they’re comics, and they know that we’re “reality”, and they’re reversing those roles. Why? Last month H&L observed its 70th anniversary, and so Walker-Browne Industries apparently decided that enough is enough. After being the subject of over 25,550 comics for us to look at, now the Flagstons are going to be looking back. This explains why the H&L strip is moving into what Josh describes as its “post-punchline” phase – henceforth, we’re the punchline. Smile, readers, the joke’s on you!
Crankshaft: “Yeah, I bet. So, can we do something about the ‘old man smell’ in here? Burn some matches maybe?”
@seismic-2: Headcanon immediately accepted.
Marvin: A strip like this makes me wonder who the joke is for. Parents of not-quite-potty trained toddlers? They’re too busy and stressed to read the comics. The grandparents of said toddlers? Probably closer, but clipping a strip like this and posting it on the refrigerator is an awful lot of work for passive-aggression. Sickos with extremely niche fetishes? Could be, but how many of us Marvin hate-readers are there, really?
@seismic-2: @Amelie Wikström: When you stare into the comics, the comics stare back at you.
@Hibbleton:
Ahh. White Fang and Black Tooth. Both staples of my misspent childhood in the Detroit area (although I know that Soupy eventually went national.)
RMMD – Downloading a reference photo of a CPAP machine from the internet is too much work, but my hand? It’s right here! I can draw that!
GT:
Rachel asks; “Henry, can you play football in the void?”
“Sure, but you better add Marty in a control booth to keep it grounded.”
6Chx: ”Punk” is just shy of fifty years old. Binaca might not be as cutting-edge as she thinks she is.
Lockhorns: I have no idea what this is referencing, so I’m just gonna go with Bleak House.
I know there isn’t much reality in reality shows. I don’t even watch reality shows. But damn it, Hi and Lois, you made me hate a goddamned BABY for snobbishly putting quotation marks around “reality” in her own thought bubble.
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Who on Earth is this doctor fella in Rex Morgan M.D. and why the heck is he talking to some non-hipster who probably isn’t even into roots country or neo-Vaudeville?
RMMD: That’s Ernest Borgnine, right? Just rub one out everyday, sir, you’ll feel better in no time.
GT: Is Marty in Houston at mission control? Clearly this game is taking place on a distant asteroid.
Hi and Lois – That is a lot of smugness for a baby that still hasn’t mastered object permanence and anthropomorphizes sun beams.
Marvin – How Marvin got from school while still tracking toilet water leaves a lot of questions to be answered.
Rex Morgan, MD – Artist Terry Beatty has an attachment to an early book on figure drawing and makes sure to use the same general hand positions and never deviates.
RMMD: If you wite-out Rex’s word balloon, that third panel makes a perfect reaction-gif, just like the same guy’s earlier reaction, “AWFUL!” in an earlier strip.
MW-Mary fills her cooking with a lot of THC.
FC-And Mommy has a buttonhole someplace less visible.
I somehow feel like Marvin being the next strip up was the reason Josh wrote “bran” instead of “brain.”
Yes, Hi and Lois, we should critique the quality of the TV show the Mom is watching while she ignores her baby.
MW: Everyone everywhere: “PLEASE GOD NOT ANOTHER WILBUR STORY LINE!!!!”
**monkey’s paw curls**
H&L: We were shown just a couple of days ago (okay, Saturday) that the Flagstons live in a monoculture-giant-lawn-and-bare-fences neighborhood with barely a fringe of minimal shrubbery right next to their house. So the presence of this wildlife makes no sense. Yes, it only consists of one butterfly, one bird, one rabbit, etc., but even that much wildlife needs more than what, for wildlife, is a ginormous mowed-grass hellscape. Trixie’s baby brain is so desperate for stimulation that she is hallucinating.
JP: “I know family can be challenging, especially after everything that happened to mine this summer.”
“Oh, we’re going to make this all about *you* now? That’s not why I agreed to this.”
MW: “Do you want me to help with this year’s Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Oh, double Hell No.”
CS: “Well since you asked, we do have a dress code here that mandates short skirts and skimpy tops for girls. That won’t be a problem, will it?”
Frazz: Just send the little shit to Harvard already and be rid of him.
Sometimes art drift suddenly really stands out to me for some reason… Martin is barely SHIN-HIGH, even an infant (standing upright under its own power???) would be taller. And WHAT is going on with the adult’s mishapen ovoid feet with the heels extending far back past the ankles?!
Marvin – He couldn’t have done it. He was too busy participating in a macrocephaly study.
H&L: Lois has four underage children, including a baby, plus a career as a real estate agent. Congratulations to her on being organized and efficient enough to have time to relax and watch television in her very clean house. To hell with reality shows, she should become what I think is called a mommy-blogger or influencer, right? Showing thousands of followers How It Should Be Done.
@Poteet:
A mommy blogger whose kids never get any older would certainly make the other mothers count their blessings.
Today’s Jumble features Slylock Fox. Get out your thinking caps, everyone!
Hi And Lois: “Kids these days and their damn technology”-type bits are already horrid, but putting them into the mouth of a literal toddler just takes it to a whole new level of making you wish you could tell the writer to shut the fuck up. Particularly when that supposed “toddler” acts more like a cat for some reason.
Marvin: Marvin isn’t actually a kid at all, just a man with extreme dwarfism and a scat fetish who killed and replaced this couple’s real kid and is now living as said child, much like the changeling myths of old.
Rex Morgan: Josh, I’d like to introduce you to a good man by the name of Yoshikage Kira…
H&L: Ah yes, the “reality” of a carefully manicured lawn in an idealized version of 1950s suburbia. Nothing like it!
Marvin: Even assuming Marvin is old enough to be in preschool (in which case his limited oral vocabulary and lack of toilet training would have resulted in an IEP, if not intervention from CSS), the setup of today’s strip implies that he walked/bussed home entirely on his own, rather than being picked up by a caregiver. That seems improbable even in the realm of “free-range child” nostalgia, let alone our more security-obsessed era.
RMMD: Don’t know about “hand guys,” but there are definitely “hand girls” and, as one myself, I can tell you this is doing absolutely nothing for me.
@ectojazzmage: Marvin’s mom should start brewing in eggshells to get him to out himself.
Rex Morgan – “Whatever it is, I’m guessing oxycontin would take care of it… whaddaya say, doc?”
@13 Hibbleton: About six hours after Thanksgiving dinner, a epidemic of prolapsed rectums runs through Charterstone.
@16 Cindy: Marvin uses toilet paper…to clog toilets. It’s his rebellion against potty training.
@33 Ukulele Ike: on The Lockhorns: Jardiance is a prescription diabetes medication advertised ad nauseum on Plugger TV stations. It has an earworm-worthy song involving ” a little pill with a big sto-ory to tell.”
So, we’re going to get a whole week and a half of various people advance-praising Mary’s cooking, aren’t we. Followed by one day of people eating Mary’s cooking while praising it, and then by a whole week of various people reminiscing about just how great Mary’s cooking was.
I can barely contain myself. Excitement, thy name is Moy.
What can your television show that contains such great drama as nature, red in tooth and claw? Absorb your simplistic stories of knights and dragons and gore, while I consume consumption itself. I watch as the hawk descending breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror! You sit mindlessly before soap operas, while I watch nature glory in lust and death. Sit in your heated box, believe you are protected from nature, but revel in the fact that just beyond the liminal spaces of your doorway awaits a world of terror and glory!
Trixie stares out of the window, riding in her bubble, where she waits for the blessèd break.
@Baja Gaijin: Thanks! I prefer to believe that Bunny was paying homage to “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.” However, given the Bleak House plot, they should be spontaneous combustion pills.
C’shaft: So this isn’t a “newspaper” so much as it is a blog you distribute in a very inefficient manner.
DT: On the plus side, Dick now knows where the violent final confrontation will take place.
Dustin: So, does this end like “The Veldt” with Dustmom preferring her helpful virtual man to her self-absorbed egotistical husband and arranging his death, or are we going in the direction of that Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” bit where the artificial intelligence falls for the wife and tries to off the husband? I would approve of either outcome.
JP: Yeah, your sister having an unreasonably overprotective freakout over your boyfriend being five years older is totally the same as your uncle going all King Claudius.
MT: I don’t know, if it comes down to hanging out with Bernice or being strapped to a dialysis machine for five hours, I know which one I’m picking.
MW: “Besides, last time you went to the store for me I asked for baking soda and you came back with a two-liter bottle of Sprite.”
CS: So one-armed Skip produces a full-featured daily newspaper all by himself. Compare this to the process of making a comic book cover, which takes a full week and at least two people.
9CL – Mock all you like, but “The Cum-Stained Shirt of Courage” is the most insightful depiction of cum stained clothing in comics since the Fuck Hut storyline in “Luann”
@Banana Jr. 6000: The part Skip hates most is composing the daily crossword puzzle and Jumble. Maybe he can trick this dumb blonde into it.
LUANN: LOL at this comic’s passive aggressive way of telling us that that, nope, Luann’s life is going to stay dull and uninteresting despite what status-quo-breaking scenarios we might have hinted at. That “blank slate” is going to be as untouched as Mary Worth.
LUANN (2)
Claudette, Lisa’s momMrs Horner (non-chalant): “I got the results of the test today. I definitely havebreast cancerkidney failure.”LisaLuann (casually): “Oh don’t worry about it. Anyway back to what I was saying….”