Not taking questions on which “biz” I’m talking about
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/18/25
The chronology of this Rex Morgan storyline flashback has now looped back around to the point where the beat cop who’s been summoned to deal with this inconvenient corpse is like, “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice if I could successfully pin this on literally the first person I talk to, even if it is the guy who called it in to begin with,” and The Stalker Strangler: The Man Who Only Strangles Stalkers doesn’t like what he’s hearing. This was probably his first strangle, and he’s only now coming face-to-face with the dilemma of performing high-profile acts of righteous but legally unsanctioned vengeance: on the one hand, you don’t want to get caught, because you want to have more strangling opportunities, but on the other, you put all the work into strangling a stalker and then some other guy is going to get credit for it? Doesn’t seem fair, really.
Heathcliff, 4/18/25
I refer to our cats, who are both well into cat middle age, as “babies,” but that’s because they are not bipedal sapient comic strip cats but rather real-life cats who, like human babies, are tiny and cuddly and pretty stupid. The question of “is Heathcliff an adult” is complex, but the fact that he has a steady girlfriend and needs ED drugs in order to have sex with her is a good sign that he should be thought of as one, and thus today’s strip, in which his human companions have dressed him as a baby, taken him in an old-timey pram to the city dump and its vast open field piled high with undifferentiated brownish slurry, and declared that “it’s baby’s feeding time” while he eagerly licks his lips, is what we in the biz call “real sicko shit.”
Crankshaft, 4/18/25
Not much to say here about yet another Crankshaft word-mangling bit, though I do enjoy learning that Ed finds the daily grind of his existence disappointing. Mostly I want to point out the very purposeful way the waitress is striding away from the gang in panel two, probably because one of them said something really off-putting.
119 replies to “Not taking questions on which “biz” I’m talking about”
RMMD – Um…so the Equalizer is a white man again?
Heathcliff – Better than lasagna….
Crank – That’s code for I just filled my adult incontinence undergarment….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Heath: “Uh, does the ‘baby’ need a bottle?” asks the confused city worker.
“No thanks. He can catch rats on his own.”
Crankshaft: At first glance I thought the waitress striding away was saying the caption in the word balloon– which tracks very well for her daily chore of attending to these fossils on daily basis. Therapy would be futile.
CS: here’s my problem with today’s installment- -if Crankshaft wasn’t an idiot disappointment would be a mildly amusing bit of world play. However, he is an idiot so it’s probably just another instance of word mangling. The joke just seems stupid.
RMMD:
“Wait!? The police investigate murders and question suspects!? This strangling business is way more complicated than it looks.”
CS: Knowing what we know about Ed, he likely told the waitress not to expect a tip and the other two are smugly indulging him because they can depend on Ed to make them look good by comparison. But of course they’re not going to give her a tip either.
MW: In an effort to make Wilbur the accidental hero of this storyline, he’s gone from passive aggressively bitching about Dawn’s latest diet to suddenly finding it irresistible all so that he can get the credit for saving Dawnie from the batshit poisoner willing to touch his tiny wrinkled aubergine.
RMMD: Hmmm, so Narration Box has identified Mysterious Non-Neighborhood Onlooker as “the killer,” indicating that McStalkie was NOT already dead, but merely sleeping or, more likely, passed out from substance overload. Seems like kind of a waste of a good stalk of you’re going to be unconscious for much of it.
Marcy has been dressing Heathcliff as a baby for 50+ years, although not much in the Gallagher years.
Shaft: The waitress might be striding away like that due to old man smell.
RMMD: Does it actually look like the police officer is suspicious of Augie? If I had to guess, I would say that it looks like they ran into each other because of a mutual friend who had to go, leaving them to chat awkwardly until one of them can come up with an excuse to take off.
Heathcliff: Can’t take my eye off that golden box in the top left of the panel. If this were an action-adventure game, I’m sure that would be one of seven gold fishbones you have to collect to fulfill a quest for Garbage Ape.
C’shft: Love the expressions of Ed’s friends: they’re just so happy that he’s is still in constant physical pain! I suppose in some weird way it gives their life meaning, knowing that there is some kind of cosmic justice in the universe…
@Cleveland Mocks: Could this be the first Unreliable Narration Box in comics history? RMMD creates history!
Blondie: It Works. Beasley is of the right age to have been a big fan of Clerks.
RMMD:
“I don’t like what I’m hearing. That Karen Carpenter music I’m hearing in the background is as grating as fingernails on a chalkboard!”
RMMD — “I don’t like what I’m hearing.”
Me neither, Anonymous Stalker Killer, me neither. Oh, wait, that’s because I’m not hearing anything! Maybe the narration should give us some Idea of what Summer/Augie/beat cop are chatting so seemingly amiably about. . .
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – “So, officer, while in the midst of rawdogging a former student’s mom, I heard this noise outside . . . ” I guess I wouldn’t like hearing that either.
What biz are you talking about?
What biz are you talking about?
What biz are you talking about?
What biz are you talking about?
What biz are you talking about?
@Dennis Jimenez: Like Dr Who we have many different manifestations. Edward Woodward Denzel Washington and Queen Latiffa.
Heathcliff: That large yellow thing in the upper left looks like a really large piece of corn, leading me to believe that this is actually where giants go to take a…well, dump.
HEATHCLIFF: Would’ve been funnier if Heathcliff were a pig.
RMMD: Tedious to confusing is not necessarily an improvement.
GT: Milford; where everyone looks like a talking Easter Island statue.
MW: Wilbur will have to change the name of his column to; “I Save Lives By Being A Schlub.”
@Yesyouareffjjd ch jjd: That would be the “Moron-Attracting Biz,” apparently.
Crankshaft: Considering how close Ed’s friends are sitting, and the expressions on their faces, somebody’s putting a real crank on the [television suddenly goes to static]
@MKay: Maybe we’ll get lucky and he takes a swan dive off Kelrast Kurve because the newspaper has finally decided to go digital and they outsourced his survival stories column to someone who doesn’t spend two thousand dollars on room service and actually gets to the location on time.
Heathcliff: They call it the “City Dump” because that’s where they dispose of unwanted cities.
Slylock Fox: How do these depictions of human polyamory tie into the post-apocalyptic world of anthropomorphic animals? Do they hang in museums as a cautionary tale of a decadent past? Or are they salacious material, that must be hidden away in the private galleries of rich uncles?
RxMD: “Interesting,” the pointy-eared killer muses, “It would be most illogical for a murderer to report his own crime, and yet against all logic it appears that the human authorities are pursuing this man as a suspect. A most baffling species indeed. To continue to study this phenomenon, I will need to commit more murders. Pain and brief life, stalkers of Glenwood, Earth.”
Rex Morgan, M.D.: “I don’t like what I’m hearing. You have a right ‘to be secure in your person, house, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,’ Son! Don’t talk to the cops without a lawyer!”
GT:
“Clang, clang, clang went the storyline,
Ding, ding, ding went the bell
Zing, zing, zing went Peanut’s heartstrings
From the moment Horse Girl could tell”
MW: Darn it Karen Moy! What part of ‘Wilbur shouldn’t be alive’ do you not understand?
Also Crankshaft: Tortured wordplay delivered with a mouth full of napkin. Breakfast joints that still use cloth napkins. Blissed out straight-men waiting for the delivery. Are we sure this isn’t a vaudeville bit?
RMMD: Odds that Bats tainted all the lentil bolognese, or just the portion she’d ladled out for Dawn? Because there’s no way Wilbur has the willpower to leave alone a whole pot of leftovers when he could be taste-testing it to see how it stands up to the regular sauce.
DT: And with the priest (white cassock = rare but totally normal, folks! sash should have been white to match, though, I think – colorist error if so) not violating the confessional but just accompanying the dude who stole the shoes, we see that the corpse who was doctored up by dental work to “match” Mr Fancy Executive … was left with sneakers as shoes. Possibly ratty sneakers. That scans, I guess? It’s not like the rest of the plan (steal the corpse? show up as a grieving widow when you shouldn’t know he’d “dead”…) was well thought-out
@Yesyouaretgedunbfck:
Hey, look who’s back! It’s Pustulent Anal Boil Boy — in quintuplicate! And as entertaining as ever!
Ooze on, PABB, ooze on!
RMMD: Next episode, Debra’s father kills the cop.
@CanuckDownSouth: Re DT: I’m not sure, but I think the stolen shoes are in the paper bag, and we’re being shown why Mr. Bum thinks he needed new ones. Or, this could be just as stupid as you think. Never seen a white cassock in the wild, though.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Oh yeah, I’ve seen plenty of white albs in the wild, not white cassocks, so I looked it up. Would be more normal in a tropical climate, but maybe these priests have them because they appear to be from India* and getting a new set before the old one completely wears out would be wasteful.
*also totally normal, many orders from the Global South have some agreement with various dioceses in North America to send priests, given the relative lack of priests here vs there
Rex Morgan, MD – The Strangler Stalker will now stalk either Augie/Summer or the cop, thus becoming the monster he sought to kill. Perhaps this story will take a supernatural turn, when we learn the dead stalker had previous killed a stalker, only to be possessed by the stalking/killing demon that jumps from body-to-body through acts of homicidal revenge.
Heathcliff – It’s bad enough being sent by your company to work in whatever city Heathcliff lives in. Even with the corner office you get for being the regional manager, all you can see from your perch of power is the city’s unsanitary open dump (and God help you the days the winds blow straight into downtown!).
But on one particularly bad day, when the quarterly numbers came back lower than expected, you stare out the window just to clear your mind, you see this scene playing out. What is wrong with this town!
Crankshaft – Crankshaft hasn’t been doing his home exercises like the therapist told him to, and he’s going to be mildly rebuked like the dentist does when they see you haven’t been flossing.
MW: And yet again, somebody spills something. All spillage, all the time.
Rex Morgan, MD: Is Old Man Strangle suspicious of Augie? Does he think that men who know women are probably violent criminals, or has he already forgotten who the murderer is in their current situation? Or is he just looking to graduate to cop killer?
This is a semi-serious question. I have no idea what the killer vigilante is hearing or why he doesn’t like it. Can somebody tell me, please?
@Philip: “Perhaps this story will take a supernatural turn, when we learn the dead stalker had previous killed a stalker, only to be possessed by the stalking/killing demon that jumps from body-to-body through acts of homicidal revenge.”
Uh, no. That would be interesting and exciting, and this is Rex Morgan MD.
Mary Worth: Belle’s behavior is supposed to be suspicious, but when I saw Wilbur stooping down to the plate with drooling lust, I too screamed and flung away the thing I was holding (the laptop on which I was viewing Mary Worth).
@Treetown: So…that makes RMMD a potential cosmic Quincy M.E…..
MW: I’m glad Brigman’s having fun at least.
MW-Joke’s on you, Belle. Your attempt to kill Dawn for the insurance money will fail because Wilbur never took out an insurance policy on Dawn.
RMMD-“The killer notices the police officer…” Well I can see why this line wasn’t included in ‘The End’.
Heathcliff: Wait, are the white things in the linked Heathcliff strip meant to be pill capsules? I assumed they were bathtubs. Why would Heathcliff and Sonia have his and hers bathtubs set up on her owners’ lawn? Because surreal whimsy, that’s why.
“I don’t like what I’m hearing.” Yes! Finally a character I can identify with! I also find the dialogue on “Rex Morgan MD” unbearable!
Did you write today’s Beetle Bailey today, Mr. Curmudgeon? I refer you to Sarge’s line to Beetle in the first panel. But, rather than write it here, I will follow the grand tradition of Dave Madden on Laugh-In and just throw confetti. This way, I can think a dirty joke, and you can think a dirty joke, but I don’t get in trouble for saying a dirty joke.
@Lauralot: Noooo … it was the ED drug ad style of the time, nekkid each in their own tub representing being able to Do The Deed: https://www.fiercepharma.com/dtc-advertising/updated-my-bathtub-or-yours-how-a-panned-cialis-ad-became-promotional-gold
Don Abundio, translated:
“I don’t like apples”
“Your father was the same way”
“‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree'”
“That’s right… And neither does the worm!”
“Man, I love this city. The skyline from the distance, and how the parks, the restaurants, the theater district, and the dump are all conveniently located downtown. There’s a reason they call it ‘the city that never hires urban planners!’
Crankshaft has learned that happiness is not an absolute value, but it is relative to expectations, which can be manipulated. He seems to be learning a key to happiness and I do NOT like it!
@Ken: True, this is my mind trying to fill in a blank canvas where plot and stakes should be
RMMD – The only justice in Glenwood is vigilante justice. Our boy needs to get with the Street Sweeper and find himself a gimmick.
It appears the troll’s brain broke.
RMMD: It’s a good thing Dick Tracy isn’t interrogating him, since he’d be dead already.
CS: I’ve got another Crankshaft disappointment to read.
Say what you will about whatever sick fetish roleplay Heathcliff is getting into, this is still the most coherent Heathcliff strip in years. (As I can actually ascertain what is going on)
MW – Is this leading up to a Mary lecture about wasting food? Because, you know what the binder for Salmon Squares is? Dessicated muffin crumbs!
FC: Harvest Gold and Avocado? Is this a rerun from 1970?
Dustin: Where does this strip take place that two hundred days a year Dustin keeps running into new women around his age to not impress?
C’shaft: Funny how Ed’s “physical therapy disappointments” (har har) always seem to be scheduled right before the check arrives.
RMMD: “Guess I’m going to have to kill the cop too.”
Strangler Stranglersson: “I don’t like what I’m hearing! I need to get my ears checked.”
Heathcliff: “Look, kid, your cat’s welcome to eat all the rats and roaches he can kill, but don’t come crying to us when he chokes to death on a disposable e-cig and ruins your weird Victorian child-rearing fantasy or whatever.”
MW: Belle really wants to honor Dawn’s vegan diet! Wilbur would have just had a mild case of indigestion if he ate it, though.
@Liam: The killer rose at dawn and put his boots on and he walked on down the hall. And he came to a sidewalk. “Officer?” “Yes, son?” “That guy didn’t do it.”
FC: Bill regrets taking the melonheads to Home Depot to look at paint earlier in the day.
Dustin: This was kind of funny when Laverne & Shirley did it 40-45 years ago.
Dustin: Look, you’re the ones hanging around a fern bar in The Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty-Five. You’ve got to realize the pickings are going to be slim.
MT: Big freaking deal, Rusty. Deer are everywhere. They roam through half the suburbs in my area.
MW: It would be typically Wilbur to blissfully ignore Belle’s attempts to poison Dawn, only to break up with her for letting good food go to waste.
Luann: I’m with Dez.
9CL: It’s about time the piano fought back. (I think that’s what is happening here)
@ValdVin: re FC: “So they’ll match the kitchen!” This one was pretty easy to date to the 70s. If they still have any Hot Pink appliances they are leftovers from the 50s. I wish I could get Avocado or Harvest Gold again instead of the ugly “stainless steel” colored plastic.
MW: GENUINELY have no idea who the person Wilbur is trying to get the plate from in the second panel is. It’s certainly not Belle, it’s someone like 30 years younger…
Heathcliff: “No cats in the dump, kid! We can’t have cats eating garbage and spreading diseases.”
“This isn’t a cat, it’s a baby I want to feed garbage to.”
“Oh. Right this way.”
FC: Has Bil checked his eyeglass prescription lately? The kid on the left with the bicoronal head is definitely not Jeffy.
Crankshaft: I feel kind of sorry for those two old guys crammed shoulder to shoulder on their side of the booth, but they do get front row seats for the “Crankshaft uses a napkin to pantomime dick sucking” show.
MW: I just realized that’s supposed to be an apron Belle is wearing rather than contrast striping on her dress. Does she have an apron to match every dress? Does she always take them along when traveling? Did she bring her entire wardrobe?
@Lauralot: The linked Heathcliff strip depicts Heathcliff and his girlfriend sitting in separate bathtubs on the lawn. That appeared to be a reference to an ad campaign for the erectile dysfunction medication Cialis, which used similar imagery. (Google “cialis commercial bathtubs” for more information.)
FRAZZ:. I willingly gave in and looked up lyrics to “Two Trains” by Little Feat. Nothing racy about them unless you think the trains were competing to see which would come first
BF:. Thought Maeve used a new word this morning, defunctate. Or something similar. But either the word was changed to confused, or I’m remembering wrong strip. (Found it in Urban Dictionary)
FG:. The mad scientist brain transplant experiment is old hat. Look what the RAs are doing now!
Oh no, the suspense! Is the killer who only killed to protect other people from the man responsible for his daughter’s death going to let an innocent man go to prison? Find out in maybe a week or two, same bland time, same bland comic!
***
Huh. It turns out I didn’t miss Tom Batiuk’s excruciating word play.
JP: Abbey mistakenly grabbed Easter egg dye instead of Miss Clairol to dye her hair which, coincidently, is one of the colors Dolly is missing.
@Ken, RXMD: I say that Narration Box killed the Original Stalker.
FC: Avocado green and harvest gold? Way to make it abundantly clear that you don’t give a crap about hiding your “reprint your dad’s strips from fifty years ago” habit.
@CanuckDownSouth: I was legit curious whether the artist was just making stuff up, as one might assume, or if there was in fact a model he was working off.
Heathcliff: The City Dump: a perfectly rectangular pile of brown compost surrounded by pristine green grass, created by a couple of old-timey garbagemen who apparently carried the round metal bins there by hand. Suspicious indeed! You know they’re about to light the whole thing on fire, right? Kid, don’t screw things up with your “cat baby” act — we’re bored comics readers, and we wanna see this town burn!
Rex Morgan – The Stranger kills only people who deserve it because they did something bad. It’s the boring version of Dexter.
@Ken: This isn’t the first time the narration box was unreliable. It promised that Buck would suffer consequences from drinking milkshakes while diabetic, and it didn’t happen. I wouldn’t put the narration box on the witness list for the trial.
I’m actually in physical therapy at the moment, and am chagrined to say that I just may crib Crankshaft’s bit.
“A little too much exercise and not enough massage,” I’ll say. “I’m afraid this has been a bit of a physical therapy DISappointment!” And I’ll mean it to sting!
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: He might be working off the Pope’s white cassocks (although the Pope, being the Pope, wears some Pope cape with it), or the missionary in ancient Tintin BDs who wore a white cassocks in the hot climate. But those have the more common line-of-buttons style instead of the no-buttons cassock style. It is always possible the artists was just making things up in order to not point out a particular church/order and stumbled on what is noted as an allowed but seemingly rare subset of a rare cassock color.
Yeah, the little church details real-or-not have been bugging me too. I have no idea why that’s what does it when the whole DT strip is a Rube Goldberg mess of steps to fake a death
I’m always impressed when Josh references past comics in the blog. If he’s not pulling data from his big brained actual memory, I imagine an extremely large spread sheet that has it’s own hard drive due to it’s sheer size. Either way it’s impressive.
Mary Worth – Maybe this time Wilbur will notice that the food is eating a hole through the floor. He still won’t notice Belle’s suspicious behavior.
Pluggers – One would think that the Tooth Fairy would pay a premium for something as rare as chicken teeth.
9CL – Time spent creating the meticulously detailed first panel: several hours more than the second panel. That’s including time Brooke spent cleaning up after creating the first panel.
FC – @Dmsilev: Exactly.
CS: I’d like to think the waitress is hightailing away from them not because they said something off putting but rather the stench of Bengay and applesauce farts is too much to handle today
I’ll say this about Rex Morgan M.D.
That is very nice shading, usually comic artists wait until the weekend to go into such detail.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV:
Speak for yourself
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Whats hiding in that napkin anyway?
@I speak Jive: Reminds me of that futurama gag. Hermes’ wife’s cooking is so spicy, that one drip landing on the table, burns a hole through the table, burns a hole through the floor, down through multiple apartments, eventually going deep underground, further and further until it reaches Robot Hell and the drip lands on the Robot Devil’s head who runs around screaming in pain.
(This becomes a Chekhov’s gun later actually)
@Joshua K.: Today I learned. Thanks.
@Needless Exposition:
#6. MW:. Can’t help but think the “Perils of Pauline”. Earlier mudge was right:. Wilbur’s superpower is to unwittingly save unsuspecting lives. He never gets thanks, recognition, or even satisfaction of knowing he’s helped the community. But the world is better with him. (Not the comics, though)
Or maybe he’s the opposite; f Don Quixote, who tried to do right but had intended effect of making his community worse.
@TheDiva: Good point re MT. In most of the U.S. east of the Missouri River, white-tailed deer populations are so huge that they have become what researchers have called “an ongoing ecological catastrophe.”
Rex Morgan: “He must be another stalker!” *runs over and tackles Augie*
Heathcliff: Obsessed with the implication that heaps of garbage is to Heathcliff what lasagna is to Garfield. Imagine that cat choking down broken syringes and empty soda cans like its nice Italian food.
Crankshaft: I imagine the waitress is going to tell her cook to throw out these three old assholes because Crankshaft told her she had a nice set of tits, though he probably mangled the statement in question into something like “you got a great pair of bobs!”.
@Nobody: I’ve sometimes wondered how often Crankshaft changes/washes his clothes, since he’s almost always shown wearing the same outfit. Maybe his friends have gone noseblind and the waitress has not.
@Dmsilev: Exactly! Too bad the color on the far left isn’t burnt orange.
Sorry to start an argument about a 9 years old Heathcliff, but where in that 9 years old Heathcliff does it mention ED drugs?
DT: Sometimes I wonder if Costello is somehow as frustrated with Dick’s lack of detective skills as I am.
Priest, ages ago: There’s a homeless guy called the Sergeant that went missing. He’d recently had his teeth done. He looked a lot like the photo of Piltdown.
Piltdown’s dentist, last week: This isn’t my work. Whoever this body is, his teeth were done recently.
Costello, now: Oh, the heck with it, I’ll just have someone tell Dick the body is actually the Sergeant, because he’s never going to figure it out on his own!
SH: I guess “control group” is another one to add to the list of sciencey words Holbook has heard but doesn’t really understand.
@Victor Von: I think the idea is that the Stalker Strangler thinks Augie is under suspicion, and it had not previously occurred to him that, when a stalker gets strangled, the current stalking victim and their loved ones are obvious suspects, and now he feels guilty that he may have accidentally framed someone. But who knows?
@Arabella: I had to look several times, but you’re right! Interestingly, she was wearing a t-shirt the same shade of pink with white jeans last week. So either a) her entire wardrobe is that colour or b) the colourists are as confused as we are.
@mark in the funnypapers: The whole set-up is a reference to a US advert for such.
MW: This is starting to get a little improbable. Also, I’m fairly certain Belle is wearing an apron but the coloring makes it look like a harness.
@mark in the funnypapers: Please read explanation by @Joshua K. at #72.
GT: Do all the women in this strip have Habpsburg jaw? Maybe on his way to Mexico to get his ill-fated crown Archduke Maximilian stopped by in Milford and impregnated several of the local girls.
MW: The last time I saw someone drooling over a plate of food like Wilbur it was Li’l Abner staring at a plate of po’k chops.
Crankshaft: “I’d better be going,” he said as he finished eating a final handkerchief….
@Philip: #36: re-RMMD: Hey, that’s an old Star Trek plot. Too bad John Fiedler isn’t still around to play Daddy McStrangler.
@Activist: I’d rather deal with the Man of La Mancha than the Man of La Mayonnaise.
In the old Heathcliff strip & commentary that Josh linked to, I don’t quite see how he makes the jump from “two bathtubs” to “erectile dysfunction drugs” but I’m also not in “the biz” (I think).
Too late for COTW, but: Reckless Morgan: This is a RMMD strip. Auggie will be a suspect for all of two days before Mr Stalker-Strangler gives himself. Just enough time for the inexperienced reader to expect some kind of drama. But wiser heads expect nothing from this strip, and always get it.
@JeffMcm: as I and others noted, it was an ad style for an ED drug: an old man and woman, nekkid each in their own tub representing being able to Do The Deed: https://www.fiercepharma.com/dtc-advertising/updated-my-bathtub-or-yours-how-a-panned-cialis-ad-became-promotional-gold
@JeffMcm: it was an ad style for an ED drug: an old man and woman, unclothed, each in their own tub representing being able to Do The Deed: https://www.fiercepharma.com/dtc-advertising/updated-my-bathtub-or-yours-how-a-panned-cialis-ad-became-promotional-gold
@JeffMcm: Hmm, I’ve tried twice to get my link from #47 into a new comment but it’s held up awaiting approval. Scroll back there and there’s an article about the bathtub-people ad campaign
@Philip: The Strangler Stalker will now stalk either Augie/Summer or the cop, thus becoming the monster he sought to kill.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you, where by “abyss” in this particular case I mean any given installment of Rex Morgan, MD, and it doesn’t so much gaze back into you as merely lull you to sleep with boredom while you wait for something interesting to happen, which doesn’t sound quite as bad but you are still advised to take appropriate precautions.
Blondie: It’s absolutely precious that Mr. Beesley doesn’t respond until he’s turned around and walked 20-30 feet away from the doorstep of Dagwood, who has no idea if he just said something or not.
FC: We get it, Dolly, you like colors. You’re a Benjamin Moore prodigy. But why aren’t you wearing pants?
GT: Leo Atazhoon’s misunderstandings about female pop singers aren’t necessarily the reason he’s spent eight years in high school but they do amuse his easily amused classmates.
JP: How many people have to be trapped before they talk to Sam? I bet it’s a lot.
MW: Look at the bestial way Wilbur lunges at that plate. If Belle has a sane cell in her brain she must be rethinking which Weston she wants to kill.
Pluggers: Mainly because you’re a chicken and don’t have teeth what the hell is going on here
WofI: Maybe the Wiz’s virtual immortality has warped his sense of who and who isn’t a “kid.”
C-Shaft: This statement from Crankshaft is the kind of thing for which the phrase “Perfect, no notes” was invented.
RMMD: The Bald Strangler is miffed that the police are crediting another man with his brilliant(?) revenge killing. This is why your more acclaimed murderers have a gimmick. Try reading a handful of Batman comics for tips.
Oh, the moderating software is blocking my comment on Crankshaft and Morgan.
@CanuckDownSouth: Thanks, now I know that it isn’t something Josh invented out of thin air, but rather a very old and outdated reference that he pulled out of thin air.
Hello all! I apologize for making a joke in today’s strip that relates to a erectile dysfunction medicine which spambots used to post ads for in the comment section all the time, so I had to set up the spam filter such that, if you type its name, your comment gets immediately sent to the deepest level of spam hell. That’s on me!
@JeffMcm: I’m going to ask you something that’s going to make me sound like an old person, but: are you a young person? Because the ads for ED drugs with the two people sitting next to each other in bathtubs were on TV consantly and were WIDELY known and remarked upon in their heyday, which was like 10-15 years ago (and to be fair, the Heathcliff strip I linked to is 9 years old at this point). I assumed they had stuck in the public consciousness but perhaps not! And perhaps they are not something a young person would know about!
@CanuckDownSouth: The DT priest’s white cassock is reminding me of Bertie Wooster’s white dinner jacket, which Aunt Dahlia said made him look like a waiter.
Too bad the padre doesn’t have a Jeeves to “accidentally” throw it away.
Crankshaft seems like the type of guy who loudly and often exclaims “ALL lives matter!” in public. That’s why she’s walking away.
@Josh: That’s also the way it would seem to me with the BRAND REDACTED ads, but then I still have “slip a Ritz under anything but me” playing in my head so perhaps this Gen Xer isn’t the one to ask.
Thanks for freeing my other comment.