Belated change belatedly acknowledged
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B.C., 8/27/25
A fun thing that happened in B.C. about halfway through the decade or so when I was ignoring it is that the Cute Chick and the Fat Broad got renamed “Grace” and “Jane,” respectively. So, congrats to both of them! I bring this up because the setup to this strip seems to be that Jane went out onto this boat with Curls and her cat, and she told him something about “catfishing” that he didn’t really understand, but he didn’t ask her any follow-up questions for whatever reason. Would he have been so deferential if she was still known only as “the Fat Broad?” Doubtful!
Gil Thorp, 8/27/25
Football season is underway in the Valley Conference! Glad to see in panel one that the refs don’t let a little light-to-medium face-masking interfere with everyone having a good time. Sure, a few necks will be broken, but the surviving players will be even tougher, and within a few generations we’ll have a whole community full of supernecked athletes! Let’s take the long view here.
Alice, 8/27/25
Panels like this are classics of the “A cartoonist experiences something incredibly mundane in their daily life and decides it would make a good comic for some reason” genre, but when Alice does that, it really makes me worry about the origins of the strips with the aliens.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/27/25
Oh, I’m sorry, did you not want to explore your newly discovered familial connection to Cody? Well get ready to be struck dead by an angry God, buddy!!!
57 replies to “Belated change belatedly acknowledged”
Dustin: [record scratch] Ed politely resisting scarfing sweets? Ed’s been replaced by Bizarro Ed. The only explanation. Maybe brain worms. OK, two explanations.
Beetle Bailey: I never noticed the heart on Buxley’s computer. When did Dell put the “Cathy” laptop on the GSA contract?
RMMD:
“Let me grab my axe from my car and do a little riff on McCartney and Lennon as you’re making the guttural grunts I’ll feature in the lyrics, while going through whatever episode you’re experiencing, Jonah! — ahem.
“One day you’ll look to see I’m spawn
For tomorrow may pain, so
I’ll follow the UNH
Some day, you’ll know
I was Spuds’ son
But tomorrow may pain, so
I’ll follow the UNH
“And now the time has come
And so, my bro, I must go
And though I choose to wend
In the end you will know
Oh, oh, oh
“One day you’ll find that I have gone
But tomorrow may pain, so
I’ll follow the UNH
[bridge]
“Yes, tomorrow may pain, so
I’ll follow the UNH
“And now the time has come
And so my bro, I must go
And though I choose to wend
In the end, you will know
Oh, oh, oh
“One day, you’ll find that I have gone
But tomorrow may pain, so
I’ll follow the UNH.”
Mary Worth:
“Let’s see — who does my pamphlet here say this imposing-looking fellow is?…ah, here we go. It’s the famed Roman gladiator Gluteus Maximus!”
FC: Daddy’s going to lock up the melonheads–but they’ll never escape–too many sharks in the bay (dum, de, dum, de, dum . . . apologies to John Williams!) Then Daddy goes to the Castro district where he makes out with the melonheads’ “Uncle Roy” while doing LSD. Hilarity ensues!!! Daddy’s on a trip in a trip!!!
Chix (sic): Konar draws on the great untapped reservoir of Victorian humor.
Gil Thorp:
“But wait! There’s a 15-yard penalty for face-masking which nullifies the touchdown! — Milford doesn’t win after all!”
From the size of the lettering on Lucas’ jersey, there’s no way “Milford” could fit on the front. I’m guessing the “D” is somewhere around his left shoulder blade.
Mary Worth:
I think that must be a svelte Wilbur Weston admiring the statue in the first panel, because he’s pictured next to one of his columns.
GT: Missing first panel dialogue:
“Hey, you lost your helmet!”
“Uh, oh”
“No worries. I’ll put it on you.”
FLASH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!: “Savior of the uni….” Oh, I see what you did there!
RxMD: Who saves his life with chest compressions? Olive or Luann?
BC: Bland. Now who is which?
RMMD: Called it.
JP: ‘Sorry, I play for the other team and even if I didn’t I’d learn after discovering men like you exist.’
SF: Ted, you are not Joe Dante or even Martin Short. Please stop.
MW: Mary must have had a great teaching opportunity when they stopped to admire that statue. “Maybe don’t mention this to your parents.”
TIL: Ball carriers are allowed to stiff-arm but not straight-arm (non-forceful vs forceful) a prospective tackler
There MAY be a violation depicted, but maybe the ref accidentally swallowed his whistle
Mary Worth: “. . . And ignore penises.”
RMMD: In a MW/RMMD crossover moment, and in gratitude for Olive saving her from a dangerous undertow, Vicki pays it forward by giving Cody’s brother chest compressions after he collapses on the sidewalk, seconds before another air conditioner falls from a window high above them and takes both of them out for good.
RMMD: Cody is still sitting in his car because he’s also had a heart attack….and he’s dead. Jonah’s last words as he seeks his help, “You good for nothing little…” Cut to Rex doing an autopsy on the two boys which, all things considered, is not a bad way to wrap up this story arc. “It’s never too late to connect with loved ones, or not.” He smirks.
MW: Mary is piling on the crap big time. Olive’s “gift” must be transforming gibberish into profundity.
BC: Paleolithic catfishing: Jane pretends to be Grace in a really dark cave.
RMMD: Of course, the ” feel good” edict dictates that Cody is the savior and Jonah repents and loves him forever. But is anyone going to point out that Cody CAUSED the whole thing? Noooo.
Uh, Gil Thorp does know that in football, the winner is the team that scored more points?
@matt w: Forget that, does Gil Thorp know that you don’t kick an extra point after winning the game?
Congrats to whoever correctly predicted/read ahead at Comics Kingdom yesterday that we’d have a heart attack in Rex Morgan, M.D.
@The Quiet Man: RMMD: Called it.
In the old days, when stuff in the comments showed up in the strip a week later, we’d joke that the writers must be reading this blog. Nowadays of course, it’s because the AIs the writers are using for their plots have been reading it.
The best thing about this morning’s Gil Thorp (other than the facemasking) is that the comment section at GoComics hates the new creative team for being “woke” and not focusing enough on sports. So here we have a bit of focus on sports, which of course will not stop them from mocking the strip for its politics and art, unlike this comment section, which will mock the strip just because.
@matt w: @I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: US football scores are traditionally given with the home team second, and they do kick the extra point even if time has run out, so I can excuse the writer. The artist, on the other hand….
@Anonymous: Nerts, this was me. Stupid cookie expirations.
@Ken: Nerts again, I was thinking “you don’t get a bonus kick after winning,” but that is not at all what I said. As for the art, yes, I was trying to decide if that was Martin’s exposed skin, or if he was wearing an skin-toned underlayer.
MW: The generic platitudes are way over the top the last couple of days. A wildly unfortunate series of events for anyone hoping for bloody retribution from Olive
BC: Couldn’t the artist simply make a more coherent scenario by having Jane lure the horny male fish with a sexy fish marionette as bait?
MW: Wait, Mary Worth is implying that other people might be capable of just stuffing some learnin’ into Olive like pimentos of perception? Non-Mary people? Mere mortals? Capable of teaching the “kindred spirit” that no one but Mary can understand?
Are her Meddle Powers deactivated? Had Mary been replaced by a cyborg? This is not the Mary Worth I know!
B.C.: Humans had a surprisingly early understanding of the difference between “horrific death by saber-tooth tigers” and “horrific social death by deception”? I’m going to need some carbon-dating evidence on this one.
6 CHX: re last Thursday’s in Protein Shakes joke. Last night (Tues) I heard an article on NPR that super-high-protein diets are still a fad in some communities. So the joke was a good one!
MANDRAKE: These braniacs just figure out if there actually is a plane, they’ll be free! (Of course they’ll then shoot Narda)
MF: (the strip that cant be discussed). Nonpartisan today. I had a classmate cut a semester so she could work on a sitting senator’s campaign. For free. Afterward she came back bitter for although she helped him win, she wasn’t offered either a job or a useful referral.
GT: Cut to the stands, where we see Heathcliff holding a pennant reading MILF.
@Bob Tice: Fine work though I did think “why is he singing about the University of New Hampshire?”
ALERT! ALERT! DO NOT PANIC! A MEDICAL EVENT HAS BEEN INTRODUCED INTO THE REX MORGAN, M.D. COMIC STRIP! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! PLEASE LEAVE YOUR DEVICE IN AN UPRIGHT POSITION AND PROCEED TO THE NEAREST MARY WORTH! ALERT! ALERT!
Don’t sports scores usually get referred to with the winning number first?
Something for everyone; every strip for no one
6CHX: can the Mudges who can’t relate toTuesday Chix’s strips find today’s more relatable? Or is it just a woman thing?
@Ken: When the score displays on a TV screen or something, they put the home team second, but usually when reporting the end of the game score they put the winner first, I think especially when only naming one team. I’m pedantic/epistemically insecure enough to have double checked, so here’s a weekly recap article with all the winners listed first.
G. *(&@##@$! Thorp – I understand Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, but can someone explain “Milford Wins 21-28”?
@Guts Dozier:
I feel like this is more of a MILF helmet moment.
@Wamba: also, in nearly every stiff-arm compilation you see on YouTube there’s many examples of a ballcarrier forcibly shoving a tackler instead of “just” redirecting them like the rules state. I think to draw a penalty with a stiff-arm you’d have to grasp by the facemask and bring the tackler down by the helmet.
RMMD: “What? You’re having a heart attack? Sorry I can’t help you, Jonah. I was willing to give you some bone marrow or even a kidney, but I’m afraid a heart transplant is out of the question.”
@Tabby Lavalamp: It’s OK, said medical event took place at a safe distance from Rex Morgan.
Curtis: Greg apparently has three credit cards. I assume they’re all nearly maxed out to feed his smoking habit.
Dustin: ALL THEY DID WAS TAKE THE LADY IN PANEL 2 AND MIRROR HER IMAGE FOR PANEL 3. And this is a strip that prides(?) itself talking about how terrible and lazy young people are.
B.C. – For the green fish, it was get a gig on B.C., or a regular job on Marvin as one of the pet fish, and being eaten by a prehistoric cat at least has dignity.
Gil Thorp – Milford and the local athletic conference play by modified rules of football, where “getting your nose” of your opponent is worth extra points. This is because sports is more valued than education, so a good percentage of players don’t have object permanence.
Alice – Alice left all her jokes behind that locked door.
Rex Morgan, MD – Rex Morgan is the anti-Mary Worth. No matter how little he cares about the affairs of other people, their drama eventually imposes itself on him, as Cody’s half-brother’s heart attack will do. He won’t even get unearned benefits from being socially connected to these people. All he has to look forward to is work and some skimpy Medicaid reimbursement.
Gil Thorp: It’s probably good that Fox News doesn’t cover Milford football. They’d definitely accuse him of making gang signs with those square-ass fingers.
That said, I like the “MILF” jersey he’s wearing in panel 3. The under-the-uniform body stocking that exactly matches his skin color? Not a good look.
Rex Morgan, MD: I legit thought Cody’s secret half-brother was Mud Mountain Murphy. They’re both basically Bluto, so I see how that happened.
RMMD-Ah the neatly timed heart attack which will cause the two of them to bond.
MW-“Now let’s find a quiet spot so I can teach you some more, Olive.”
FC-I hope they get told about Machine Gun Kelly.
“The moment my brother had his heart attack I felt a searing pain in my chest. I spilled my 7/11 coffee and damn it was hot. So I drove away to get a new shirt and some more coffee. Never saw him again.”
GT: I do like how the runner kicked the PAT, as many high school teams use regular players for the kicking unless the school has a soccer team player who can place kick. This preseason, the Buffalo Bills had RB Ray Davis kick a PAT (he made it) and there was just something so old-school cool about that. Davis can also kick FGs from 50+ yards. Makes you wonder how many NFL teams are wasting a roster spot on a kicker.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: THAT’S why I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at.
I was expecting a regular housecat, but all I saw was some weird human-sized fish-lipped thing, no matter how much I stared.
Expecting tusks, I can (sort of) see a cat now.
The actual “joke” in Alice? Not funny. “THAT IS SO ANNOYING” in the white void below the strip? Somehow funny. How? Why? Is my sense of humor broken?
Alice: Alice, that is not a purse. That is a teabag. Which makes me wonder if her real problem is that she boiled her purse and drank it. We can only imagine what potent cocktail of psychedelics and narcotics were in there.
Momma: I know Momma comics often forget the basic premise of the strip, but “Francis is a dedicated, task oriented hardworker with a job, whose boss wants him to chill out and relax” is so off base that I wonder if Mel Lazarus was kidnapped at some point and this was a coded cry for help.
MW: “I wish I was further along in what I know…”
Opportunity lost for Mary to quote Donald Rumsfeld:
“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns…”
I don’t blame Jonah for his ulcer acting up again. Anyone who had to interact with Cody would have the same reaction.
@Ken: If the touchdown wins the game with no time left, the extra point attempt (or two-point attempt) is moot. Also known as a “walk-off”.
These comments show more accurate interpretation of sports than the strip.
@astroboy:
Went to a Giants game many years ago and was surprised to see linebacker Lawrence Taylor practicing kicking field goals. I didn’t realize he was a backup kicker.
Beetle Bailey: Not relevant to today’s comic, but I was thinking, that recently they redesigned Corporal Yo so he no longer has slanted eyes and yellow-ish skin.
SOMEONE must have complained to Walker-Browne Inc forcing them to change his design
(unless the creators changed him solely on their own initiative, implying that they may actually have a soul)
If the former, where are the people issuing complaints about (pretty much everything) involving Wilbur and 9 Chickweed Lane.
(I mean outside of our blog venting)
I would be a daily reader of a version of Rex Morgan, MD in which every week is spent on a rando yelling at a regular cast member about how much they hate them before being mercifully taken out by some medical condition, free from ever having to interact with them again. I mean, I’m already a daily reader of Rex Morgan, MD, but at least then my behavior would make sense to me.
Daddy Daze: Always a great idea to hold your infant over the grill when you light it.