She really “felts the clods,” if you know what I mean
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/12/26
Oh, I didn’t mention that the Hollywood starlet turned recluse turned runaway in the current Rex Morgan, M.D., storyline was named “Lorna Starr” — because she used to be a star, GET IT???? — but now, in order to go incognito in her new, roots-country-forward community, she’s going by “Mae Mae Clodfelter.” I guess this is supposed to be her actual name, or maybe she’s just decided to go by the most country name she can think of? Either way, I think even in a town where guys named “Buck” and “Truck” and “Mud Mountain Murphy” walk the streets, people are going to think that’s a bit much.
Archie, 3/12/26
I genuinely appreciate the attention the artist has lavished on the breasts of the young woman on the Andrews’ new plasma TV. The whole context lets us know that Archie’s dad really is extremely focused on this latest advance in television technology, and unlike his son doesn’t experience horniness for even a fleeting second.
Hi and Lois, 3/12/26
“OK, well, where did you get this huge bookshelf? Didn’t this used to be in the living room?”
46 replies to “She really “felts the clods,” if you know what I mean”
Unless Dot is washing out those cans assiduously, which from what we know of Dot isn’t likely, he’s starting a mold, bacteria, and yeast collection as well.
H&L — I hate to deprecate youthful enthusiasm, but three shelves packed with dented cans of Miller High Life is not a collection in the usual sense of the word.
RMMD — Only in the funny pages would someone who didn’t need the money work in retail. . .
H&L: Ditto constructed and collected this whole display totally unnoticed by his parents? Trixie isn’t the only neglected kid in this family.
Hi has called the rehab facility to reserve Ditto’s suite for 2032.
HnL Thirsty must be a fastidious drinker, treating his precious alcohol with dignity – not a single crushed can or even a dent allowed, they must be placed in the recycling reverently
MT *head desk* You take the photos and show or upload them afterwards. You can’t even claim there’s some “live commentary” requirement because the little sneak got his badge from a photo you sent around and he grabbed from the group chat.
H&L: You gotta hand it to Ditto. For a kid his size, draining the remnants of Thirsty’s empties is a cheap way to get his drunk on.
Artist: “This is what plasma TVs look like, right? Big grey box in a weird aspect ratio with a huge bezel and chunky rectangular buttons?”
Writer: “They definitely still sell plasma TVs in the year of our lord 2026, right?”
Hi and Lois:
“My collection is the best ever, Hamm‘s down!”
RMMD: “Hooray! Hooray! We love to Work All Day! (Reprise)”
Archie: Plasma TVs and Palm OS smartphones? At this point, they might as well rerun strips from the 1940s.
H&L: Poor Thirsty. He’s reached that point where he’s pretty sure he’ll never find happiness at the bottom of a beer glass, but he’s going to try every brand just to make sure.
Wasn’t beer can a thing just in the 70s? There are some adults today who collect really old cans but are kids doing this? And don’t heavy beer drinkers just buy the same cheap brand every time instead of a nice variety of brands?
Why is everyone assuming that Ditto accumulated that collection gradually? That’s one week’s worth of Thirsty recycling.
On the other hand, I don’t think Irma would let those cans make it to the recycling bin–she needs the money from the deposits.
Lorna: “My name is Mae Mae and I’ll be your server today.”
Mud: “May May? You look more like a late July July.”
H&L: Seriously, did she even have to ask?
I managed a liquor store for a few years. Thirsty would be a single brand consumer, 6 pack after work, case for the weekend. Likely Miller Lite.
RMMD: A simple “Lorna Lou” would have been classier.
Archie : is a comic that has the reputation for being gratingly squeaky-clean, yet, as today shows, every once in a while it just features pin-ups of girls in bikinis.
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Hi & Lois :
a) the individual beer cans are surprisingly lovingly detailed, like, this is borderline product-placement level.
b) the comic would be better if it omitted the words “recycling bin”
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Luann : HAHAHAHAHA, “Luann is an optimistic planner”, good one. I know what the Evansii THINK they’re saying with that*, but no way Luann is a “planner”. She’s impulsive and easily swayed.
*the idea being that Luann only thinks and dreams, but never actually ACTS.
@johnny lt: Hey, at least the plasma TV is less anachronistic than those chunky cordless phones.
JP: Preview from next week’s strips, “And then what happened after the truck broke down, Bodgan? And where are April and Randy?” “Well—we stuck in frozen wilderness, and Bogdan get very hungry…”
Let me predict how this Wrecks Moregone tale will go (apologies in advance for [spoiler].
Lorna/Mae Mae will fall in love with Mud and decide to lose weight for him. Slimmer she will then be recognised as Lorna Starr, Mud will demand to know why she hadn’t told him before, she’d say that she wanted him to love the real her, not the movie star. Since this is not Mary Worth, this will all go without any kind of even contrived drama, and the be achieved with no meddling whatsoever.
[/spoiler]
@Ukranazi Stepan: stuck in moderation
RMMD: If my parents had named me Mae Mae Clodfelter, I’d have changed it as soon as city hall opened on my eighteenth birthday and never looked back, celebrity or not.
JP: While now out of his prison uniform, Bogdan is still wearing blue. His Cookie Monster transformation continues.
Rex Morgan, M.D.: It’s funny because Mae Mae is going to use her star power to unionize the staff at Glenwood’s only motel café after experiencing their lives during a four-hour shift.
@CanuckDownSouth, MT: Pretty much. Also, if his dad tries to cover his theft again, Rusty can cite the unique flora, fauna, and Mom in the background.
Pibgorn Watch: 580 days; or 1 year, 7 months, 3 days; or 19 months, 3 days.
If you’re gonna make a joke about a “thin” TV, you ought to freakin’ draw a THIN TV. This one is chunky as a cereal box, or worse! What, did they need extra room for the starlet’s boobs?
@Ukranazi Stepan: I don’t think she’ll loose weight for Mud, per se (particularly because he seems to like them thick). Rather, as treetown theorized the other day, I think the idea Lorna/Mae Mae has hypothyroidism, explaining all of her symptoms (weight gain, puffy face, depression/ennui/listlessness) which Rex will discover and cure, is the most likely scenario. I think the “drama” that will be happening here is whether Mud can overcome his chubby-chasing ways and settle down with a stick-thin action starlet.
Hi and Lois: For once the joke isn’t “Ha ha, our neighbor has a drinking problem.” It’s “Our neighbor is drinking Schlitz! That really is a cry for help!”
Archie: Jeff Foxworthy once said that you might be a redneck if your working TV is on top of your non-working TV. Archie’s dad seems to have positioned his new plasma TV on top of his old 1965 console TV. Is Archie a redneck?
9CL: While this strip is already a parade of fetishes, this feels like McEldowney was secretly paid a commission by one of those deep-pocketed weirdos who pays artists online to produce artwork that caters to their extremely specific niche fetishes, like that one fellow who was paying artists lots of money to draw pictures of either rich women at grocery stores who had their carts filled with loaves of Wonder Bread, or pictures of chainsaw wielding women ruining the environment. Someone who has a fetish for pointless unicycle “jokes” would be nothing compared to some of these folks I’ve heard about.
Hi and Lois: Did Bud Light pay to have their product featured, or did they fail to pay to have their product not featured?
Archie: Sure, the last plasma TV was manufactured in 2014. But Archie’s dad is a hobbyist, and there’s nothing he enjoys more than hand-building retro ultra-high-voltage televisual equipment to watch his softcore porn on.
H&L: I refuse to believe Thirsty drinks different brands of beer. He just drinks whichever one Costco has the largest crates of.
@Anonymous: Oh boy, I get to link one of my favorite things ever, the testimony from the Zapp Comix trial where Sid Jacobson told an increasingly disbelieving judge that he believed that Archie was drawn to appeal to the sexual interest.
The whole Archie phenomenon is increasingly weird. There was a hit TV series based on it–the youngs must have liked it, I saw a Chinese tiktok trend based on a clip from it (“Karma’s a bitch”)–but it never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind to try to draft off it to revive the comic strip, and probably rightly so. It just keeps chugging along in reruns, having ended new strips in 2011. It’s like if the hottest show on TV was a dark and gritty take on the world of Pogs and meanwhile the five remaining members of the Pog community keep on Pogging away, tiddlywinking in peace while everyone forgets about them.
Well, strictly speaking I guess the comic strip was always an appendage to the comic books, like newspaper Spider-man, but [the nursing home people finally manage to administer me the sedatives]
MW: Hang on, Mary, I want to make some popcorn before hearing your version of what happened at the lunch with Mr. H. I’m guessing it will be even more fictionalized than your account of the balloon incident, what with this flop hitting harder at your self-image.
@Ukranazi Stepan: As someone pointed out yesterday, Beatty seems to have a… thing for larger women (and men if Buck is anything to go by) so while I think this story is going to play out pretty much just as you say, Fatso ain’t gettin’ any smaller.*
*A story where a woman goes on an unhealthy crash diet to get thin because that’s what she thinks her true love wants could be genuinely dramatic and medically interesting, so we all know THAT won’t be happening…
RMMD: “Hi, Lorna!” Says Mud. Turns out he had a bit part in one of her movies playing a CW singer. “You’re looking good! How you been?” Lorna panics but since no one else in the cafe, and no one else hears it, nothing happens.
RMMD: Is Mae Mae really her name or does she only have a stutter?
@Anonymous: The problem isn’t what the Evanses think. The problem is that they don’t realize that being an aimless dreamer isn’t a positive trait. They think this makes Luann a manic pixie dream girl, when she’s exactly one of those things.
The test result is spot on. Luann likes to consider, plan for, and dream about careers. What she doesn’t like to do is try to get one, or do anything that would make her a better candidate for one. Ditto for everything else in her life. The fact that she’s wasting credit hours on a stupid “Career Paths” class instead of something that would accomplish that, is Exhibit A. And, she badly failed her ONE class assignment, proving that she doesn’t even care enough about “pondering careers” to complete coursework for a class whose entire purpose is pondering careers.
The test (and her friend Tara) basically called her a layabout, which is accurate. But there’s no way Luann took anything from this but “I have inner beauty.” Look at her smug face in that second panel.
Archie: I almost appreciate the art on the television, which has been drawn both too thick to be a flatscreen and too thin to be an old CRT set. That level of missing the mark takes effort.
RMMD: It should be easy for a famous Hollywood star to hide out using her birth name. She just has to avoid anyone who has access to IMDb, Wikipedia, fan sites, and every official and unofficial biography written about her.
You have to appreciate Archie’s editors giving the writers a deadline of 20 years before publishing.
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Mae Mae may be out of the Hollywood rut, but at least she still sleeps with her lipstick on.
MW: “I’m gonna have to call you back, Mary. There’s a strange echo on my phone.”
“That’s no echo, dear. I’m standing behind you.”
ARGH!!!
Rex Morgan, MD: I’m waiting for the political ads inspired by this storyline. “The rich already have too much money. Now they’re stealing the jobs that you desperately need. Out of BOREDOM.”
MW: We aren’t able to see Toby’s current work in progress, but if the way she’s holding that phone is any clue, her lack of hand control will prove an impediment to the realization of her artistic vision.
To get the cans each morning, Ditto has to step over Mr. Thurston laying on the ground, sleeping off his drunken binge. The boy should label the shelf as a memorial to his neighbor’s liver.
“He’s amazed that is hasn’t required a blood transfusion!”
“He can’t get over the fact that it’s not shedding electrons!”
“He’s shocked we’re not calling it chalcedony like everyone else outside of a 1927 issue of American Mineralogist!”
“He’s still looking up definitions of plasma on Wikipedia to make lame jokes with!”
Plasma TVs were popular in the 2000s and early 2010s, and have fallen way off since then. Panasonic, the main manufacturer, announced recently that they’re getting out of that business. I guess what I’m saying is that the timing is perfect for this to be the latest and greatest technology on Archie. Coming soon, Archie and his family buy some Treo phones and open MySpace accounts.
C’shaft: Well, good thing the church choir was able to show up on short notice, with none of the members having jobs or doctor’s appointments or any other commitments. I’m not even going to pretend they were asked to sing/rehearse something specific and meaningful to the couple; it’s probably just going to be the Hallelujah Chorus warbled by a bunch of shaky old lady voices.
Dustin: “On second thought, I’m no longer proud of you. Shut up and have a burger or something.”
FG: And that’s why Flash is no longer welcome at BLM rallies.
Luann: That is not a hobby. It barely even counts as a pastime.
MW: Toby might be more convincing as an artist if her smock had a single drop of paint on it.