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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/14/25

Back in the days when Woody Wilson was writing Judge Parker and Rex Morgan, M.D., one of the running bits was that the characters would reap significant financial rewards and social prestige extremely easily, like when Alan Parker’s unreadable potboiler The Chambers Affair became an international best-seller beloved worldwide, even by murderous black-market arms merchants. But in the post-Wilson world of both strips things have been, uh, different, and now Auggie is shopping around a novel and his hopes have maxed out at getting an advance large enough to afford one (1) nice dinner for him and his girlfriend. I’m not gonna read way too much into some soap opera comic strips and say this trajectory nicely summarizes the collapse of the economic possibilities of creative work over the past decade, but … oh, who am I kidding, reading way too much into some soap opera comic strips is basically the whole shtick on this blog, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Mary Worth, 10/14/25

I know that trying to derive meaning from the bolded words in Mary Worth strips is a fool’s errand, but it is intriguing that she’s leaning on accident here. You know, Olive, the balloon accident, the event that was definitely unplanned and not at all arranged in advance as a means to test your powers to see if they could be exploited by the CIA. What have we learned from it? Uh, I mean, you, what have you learned about it, ha ha! Forget that little slip of the tongue!

Pluggers, 10/14/25

The degree to which pluggers are sedentary can honestly not be overstated.