Is that old CRT TV some kind of portal to our dimension
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Wizard of Id, 1/26/26
I guess a running bit in the Wizard of Id now is that the titular wizard is encountering aspects of contemporary life one by one and commenting on them as an outsider, and, look, I’ll allow it if all we get is some mildly corny jokes about emo, but I have to draw the line at “the Wizard sees women wearing much more revealing outfits than he’s used to in his culture and gets horny about it.”
Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/26/26
Oh, man, it’s gonna be Buck, right? June’s going to get Buck, the soap opera comics’ biggest drip, who doesn’t have much going on beyond scouring Etsy for dumb nostalgic bullshit, to “cover” for her in terms of providing Rex with emotional reassurance? This is gonna be great. Rex is going to open his newly healed eyes only to lunge for the nearest scalpel so he can gouge them out and never look Buck’s stupid face again.
Dick Tracy, 1/26/26
Being a one-off ancillary character in Dick Tracy seems like a mixed bag. On the one hand, they get to wear cool outfits and have sexy, drunken adventures! On the other, they tend to stumble upon horribly mangled corpses much more than you or I would.
Hi and Lois, 1/26/26
“Plus Marky Mark is out there drowning somewhere! It’s a win all around!”
49 replies to “Is that old CRT TV some kind of portal to our dimension”
RMMD:
In today’s last panel, a cleverly-disguised Rene Belluso casually strolls to the operating room to make sure that everything about Rex’s eye surgery procedure is going just so.
RMMD:
[guy sitting next to June]: “You know, reading today’s Slylock Fox here, they say that you’re supposed to add the words ‘in bed’ to the end of every fortune cookie message — and it works here when you do that!”
RMMD:
“As you can see from today’s first-panel depiction, Summer, this came on like a bolt out of the blue!”
RMMD:
“Say, there’s fellow comic strip character Herb Woodley from Blondie sitting next to me, not doing much of anything as always, apparently. Maybe he can fill in for me!”
DT: After her comeback in Marty Supreme, Fran Drescher is disappointed that her next role was a cameo in a comic strip.
RMMD: My vote is for Mud Mountain Murphy. Who wouldn’t want to wake up one-eyed to HIM?
MW: Ian is a broken man. And they lived happily ever after.
Rex Morgan: When my grandmother had cataract surgery, she had to wear extremely dark glasses on the way home. Which means Rex could be picked up by Buck, and he might not even realize it isn’t June. The kinds of highjinks that would ensue at that point are limited only by our creepiest imaginations.
Dick Tracy: I’m glad to see that Dick Tracy is introducing a new mystery: Will that expensive bottle of wine break or not? As for the murdered guy, well, that’s just another weekend in the town protected by Tracy’s highly trained detective squad.
Hi and Lois: Lois just realized what those snowflakes (with tails for some reason) look like, and she’s right to be startled. She has enough weird kids already — the last thing she needs is to give birth to a Frosty.
Slylock Fox: R.I.P. Slylock, who survived a pool of vicious crocodiles, only to meet his demise choking on an unchewed fortune cookie.
Wizard of Id:
“And no life on offense, either, since Denver has a substitute quarterback who hadn’t thrown a pass in two years. What a corker of a game this is. Not.”
I agree with other commenters that the Evanses are trying to rebranding Luann as Manic Pixie Dream Girl (when she’s exactly 25% of those things). But if they’re going to make a story out of her too being dumb to find a classroom at a school she’s attended for decades, this isn’t the right tone at all.
And why does the sign say “Pitts Community College”? I thought she was attending
Brigham YoungBob JonesLibertyOral RobertsGrand CanyonMoonie University.H&L: “Just enough to cover the ground is perfect because… it hides the filthy neighborhood we live in. Seriously, can’t we just kill that dirtbag next door?”
H&L: It takes a lot to break Hi’s habitual look of “dull surprise”. But when a light snowfall comes and obscures his most hated archenemy, The Ground, Hi is overwhelmed with warm fuzzies.
DT: This guy’s so drunk, he can’t tell that the wine bottle has already been opened.
DT: Today’s strip guest-writer: Dick “Law’n’Order” Dick Wolf!
@Buck Ripsnort: Doink doink!
Rex Morgan, M.D.: If this strip runs through all its characters, main and ancillary, replacing one another in a giant chain until we get back to Sarah babysitting and June sitting at the eye surgery center going “WTF?” I will forgive a lot. Oh, and Johnny dies of appendicitis, that’s a must-have.
Wiz is newly contemplating professional football, which can be traced back to 1892, while watching a device that didn’t begin achieving common usage until the Mid-1940s. Maybe tomorrow he can discover fire from the cockpit of a 747.
Wizard of Id – How can I laugh at this joke when not only was there no television in the Middle Ages, but there was no infrastructure to power it? It’s the same reason I never laughed at The Flintstones. Too many anachronisms.
Hey, if you’re going to do a throwback TV episode, you might as well do a throw all the way back to the days when cheerleaders were the height of sexiness. They don’t call him the Wizard of Id for nothing.
Hi and Lois: “It’s the ‘Ice Storm,’ dear, and it was supposed to be a warning about our marriage.”
H&L: Why is Lois looking so horrified at this light snow fall? Has she, like Dick Tracy’s drunks, just spotted a corpse on the lawn? Is it Thirsty, frozen to death after a drink too many? It’s Thirsty, right?
Speaking of revealing outfits, I just realized that the entire kingdom can see the Wizard of Id’s penis. On whom do I revenge myself?
Also The Wizard of Id: I prefer to think of the Wizard’s TV as one of his more demonic familiars, following him around on four legs to help him with potions and tempt him with Cinemax After Dark.
Wizard of Id: Comic strips have their own version of carcinisation. Any premise that involves a historical era or fantasy world, or creatures that aren’t human, eventually evolves (or devolves) into a simulacrum of modern human life. “Modern,” of course, being mostly frozen in time when the strip was created, with token attempts at evoking modern trends that suggest Grandma finally discovering Taylor Swift’s music. A sad contrast with Michael Palin’s peasant lecturing Graham Chapman’s King Arthur about syndicalism, where the anachronism is part of the joke.
The balding, mustachio-ed dude in a blue shirt has shown up in a couple of Rex Morgan stories already. He managed the roots rock venue where Truck and Wanda got hitched, and he works a police desk job – he took Summer and Augie’s report about the stalker encounter.
I must say, Terry Beatty has a mastery of human form that most daily strip artists do not. Every character stays recognizable even outside the required single identifying characteristic (tight ponytail, muttonchop sideburns, weird square jaw, spitcurl, pissyface, etc).
@Schroduck: Actually, I think that’s Thirsty in Dick Tracy. He’s stepping out on Irma with a bimbo who shares his love for booze — the cheaper, the better (meaning both the booze and the bimbo).
DT: That’s how I react when the hotel room lacks a corkscrew.
Hi and Lois-But not enough to cover Thirsty’s lifeless body.
I’m pretty sure this “Wizard of Id” is a rerun, but finding the original manually would take more work than was used in the creation of this strip
Wizard of ID: They get all of the benefits of our entertainment, without actually having to live in our reality.
That’s….. fine…. I’m not jealous about that at all….
W_of_Id: The Wizard is willing to sit through a three hour football game to catch the sixty seconds or so that feature cheerleaders? Which actually sounds a lot like the guys I grew up with.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
Short version of what would be an ENORMOUS RANT
(About Friggin’ LUANN, I know)Luann doesn’t attend Moony Uni because (supposedly) it’s a prestigious place that would require her to get significantly higher marks (to get scholarships) or spend a significant fortune to attend. (Please ignore most of the students we’ve seen are penniless idiots).
So, Luann attends the free classes at the local community college instead, because Frank told her “
I’m not wasting a PENNY on your educationOther colleges are too expensive”.I dunno WHY they pick the local free college to do the “man, what a huge campus! And it’s labyrinthine, too!” instead of Moony Uni (the last time they did such a joke, it was Pittsville Community College and Luann failing to find a class too).
I’m also confused as to what the heck a “Career Path” class that’s taken in a group is supposed to be. Was it supposed to be yet another throwaway generic class Luann was taking with Tara, the Evansii realised that Phil’s “advice” would probably lead Luann to stop taking such classes and start attending career counseling to find a job she’s good at
(GOOD LUCK!), but the art was already drawn for a “Luann chases after the room her class is being held in”, and they couldn’t change it at the last second(even though they could have just run a week of reruns again)Yes, this is the SHORT version
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Dustin : oh, right, I forgot about the “the only jobs that count are white collar office desk jobs, all other jobs do not count” part of this comic.
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Wizard of Id : Is watching an Orkland Raiders vs Greenfield Grasshuggers game. THAT’s the kind of cheerleaders he’s into.
Yeah, I know, typically I make the Walker-Browne strips be set in the WarHams, but…Imagine only watching football for the cheerleaders but not watching competitive cheerleading. Though it’s possible that the Wizard’s magical television can only pull in over the air signals from that future far-off land and not from cable.
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The Wizard tried watching quidditch then saw it was just a bunch of nerds running around with broomsticks between their legs, and it was a stupid concept for a sport where one person doing one thing could undo everything that happened up to that point. He would have stopped watching anyway because *gestures in the general direction of the author*
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If Mud Mountain Murphy isn’t there to great Rex then what even is the point of having him as a character?
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Weird note: My spellchecker is fine with “cheerleaders” but thinks “cheerleading” is a problem. What do cheerleaders do, spellchecker?!?
S4th: ‘Don’t worry, I did ask. In fact, my boss said something about never coming back!’
JP: Who’s screaming off panel? Could it be
A) Judgey Wudgey in the throes of the Screaming Mimies: ‘ANN! The spiders are back! Get ’em off me, get ’em OFF!!’
B) Katherine: ‘ANN! Stop being a b*tch to the woman who’s been protecting your new daughter!’
C) The raspberry-haired brat: ‘ANN! Shut up, ‘Martha Speaks’ is on!!’
D) CIApril, who just sneaked in the back door: ‘ANN! Why are you in the same house as my precious, beloved daughter who I abandoned months ago? Talk fast and I’ll kill you anyway!’
E) Randy, who just stumbled in the back door led by CIApril: ‘ANN! Can you change my diaper? I hadda little… accident…’
MW: I just figured it out. Moy rights these things after watching some kids movie while under the influence of… something. The Goldfish Funeral? ‘Finding Nemo’. Olive the Telepathic Wonder Kid? ‘Matilda’ starring Mara Wilson. What we’re suffering through right now? ‘Rio’ followed by ‘Rio 2’.
@Banana Jr. 6000: No. In a fit a “realism”, the creators figured our star wouldn’t be able to meet the oh-so rigorous standards to get into place as esteemed as Moony University (that name just screams “prestige” doesn’t it?) As a result, Luann is stuck going to
Pokey Oaks KindergartenPitts Community College. If you guessed this would alienate her from the rest of the class, then congratulations, because you also guessed why some of the characters dropped out of Moony U and they had to wade through 20,000 plot contrivances to drag Bernice to the Degroot house.Wumo: Running out the bathroom in the middle of a bowel movement is bad enough, but why does he bring the toilet roll? Is he planning to wipe right there in the living room next to his friends?
DT: It looks like the colorist couldn’t quite figure out what to do with her leggings.
RMMD: I know you’re desperate, June, to find someone to wait for Rex after his surgery but I would probably skip over the guy walking in the blue cap with a Bowie knife hanging from his belt.
RMMD: “Great” thinks Michelle. “I get all the short arm inspections after a long weekend. Why Dr Morgan opened this clinic in the red light district, I’ll never know.”
MW-“Is this our lives now? Are we parrot people now? Whenever we show up we have to bring up the parrots,” Ian laments.
MW-Ian would rather live with two co-eds.
RMMD-June calls her double who does all the things that June doesn’t want to do like being married to Rex.
Dick Tracy: Honey, that’s not our room! That’s the Dead Body Room, a publicized service this hotel provides!
Of course, I could probably find you a body if you need one. This is Neo-Chicago and… oh? We’re screaming? Okay, let’s do your thing.
Dustin: Did you know that if you have a fetish for being forced to dress up in sequined tights and body slammed by 300 lb women, you can just write a newspaper comic about it and no-one will stop you?
Someone drop Hi in Kamchatka’s 6 metre snowfall and let him start talking about the perfect storm.
Wrecks Moregone:
Look over your shoulder, July: that’s the plate licker from Mary Worth right there! Give him a plate to lick and he’s yours to command as you desire!
WIZARD OF ID: Y’all got it all wrong. This is just the “OmicI Persei 8” gag from Futurama, bit in reverse. (So don’t be surprised if next week’s punchline isn’t the Wizard impatiently waiting for Ross to eat the other five Friends.)
Wary Morth:
Moy and Brigman *could* have ended this story at a slightly less illogical point where Pompous Axx and Sunny had bonded together, but noooooooo.
June’s assistant is named Summer and summer begins in the month of June. Does this have a deeper meaning or poetic relevance? This is “Rex Morgan MD”, so certainly no
“Thanks, Summer”: me when I can leave behind winter and spring
I suggest that June just leave Rex to walk back home with a non-functioning vision. Mr Magoo was never the funniest cartoon, but it would be an improvement!
Today’s “Dick Tracy” has a guest writer AND a guest artist, but it is still credited to Charles Ettinger and Mike Curtis. Dick move, guys. Dick Tracy move, guys.
Hi’s idea of a well-ordered cosmo is one where immense natural forces coordinate to spare him from mild annoyances