Mae Mae cut out the middleman and blackmailed herself, then didn’t pay
Post Content
Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/13/26
Oh, did you think that maybe Lonnie’s blackmail scheme might generate sustained dramatic tension of some kind? Well, sorry, Mae Mae got bored with this plot even faster than I did and has decided to just short-circuit the whole thing. I do enjoy the fact that she doesn’t seem to have a phone of her own and has to borrow the short order cook’s. Just a few days ago this guy was worried about not having enough customers to keep him employed, but when Mae Mae posts this video to his TikTok account, he’s going to be catapulted into the upper tier of “Lorninfuencers” (he will still have work as a short order cook, Lorninfluencing is not a lucrative job).
Marvin, 5/13/26
Marvin can never decide if its title character is a preverbal infant who shits himself or a child who talks and goes to school and also shits himself. I guess today’s strip is really leaning into the first take on the character, as he’s just sitting there thought ballooning while his grandfather ignores him. His grandfather is probably thinking about a big tasty plate of liver and onions, honestly. Maybe he’ll wander over to the diner and get some, forgetting Marvin on the park bench to die of exposure! Wouldn’t that be swell?
Hi and Lois, 5/13/26
No, Trixie! You’ve chased away the sun, giver of life! You’ve destroyed us all!
40 replies to “Mae Mae cut out the middleman and blackmailed herself, then didn’t pay”
MW-Or maybe Brandy just needs to go to Florida and find out more about her father from his recently discovered secret sister.
Wrecks Moregone:
Tomorrow:
In a desperate bid to keep his Hollywood Whatsit payday alive, Moustache pushes Mae Mae aside in a desperate attempt to grab the phone, thereby recording evidence against himself for assault and battery. Obviously he’s sacked immediately, so he ends up with no job, no payday, and no freedom.
(Intended lesson: don’t blackmail, kids.
Actual lesson: spy on other people and sell the information to the first person willing to pay before the target gives the information away.)
Phantom: Dammit! A Wilburman cameo was *right there* for the taking!
RMMD: ‘Anyway, I’m pretty sure the owner of this phone is illegal, so if y’all would like to give little ol’ ICE a call and have them come down here to violently arrest him, me and Lonnie here would sure appreciate it!’
And the resulting media firestorm surrounding this puts the Glenwood Motel on the map! (It also ruins Mud’s career as ‘Lil Fergus tanks due to guilt by association but hey, omlettes and all that…)
JP: They go in the diner only to find drunken Judgey Wudgey thrusting a picture in the faces of customers babbling ‘Have you seen this SUV??’
Wary Morth:
Maybe she needs someone not permanently stuck in the immediate present, Tommy boy?
__________________________________
Murky Tail:
I don’t know, Rusty, a raccoon the size of a gorilla would be of concern to *me*.
RMMD Ok, she’s revealed her ‘secret identity’, what comes next in this little video? I’d like to think about full choreographed lip-sync to Weird Al’s 80s class “Fat”.
H&L: I have to imagine that by now, Trixie looks like an old leather boot.
MW: We have to endure all of this prattle, while Mary’s just going to say, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” and bing, bang boom, Tommy’s contentedly eating a muffin.
GT: Between the garbled dialogue and the brutish artwork, I can’t tell if Gil is talking to the same person three times, or one person once and one person twice or…
Trixie goes all “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” mode in panel one.
“Dammit, and I thought the blackmail thing would go so well. Back to the old routine. Does this diner sell gigantic glasses of Scotch?”
Marbin
It’s all fun and games until you’ve seared your retinas, Trixie! Do you want to need all the same kind of special help Ditto does? DO YOU?!
Liver and onions!
*shlurp shlurp*
O blame me on a whim, where the Maemae film
Where the selfie of the telephone zoom
Where blackmail falls flat, confusing moustached rat
And the story is over, boom boom.
(With apologies to Glendon Swarthout, “Bless The Beasts And Children”, Chapter 20)
Marvin: Imagine putting Marvin’s grandad on a pedestal. A man whose only achievement in life was creating an annoying son whose only achievement was creating an even more annoying son.
(I’m going to keep my previous typo I clicked “Post” on by mistake, because it made me laugh)
Luann “Wow – that’s a big step, moving in with a boyfrien-” “What? Ew! No, no, we’d of course use bunk beds!”
FG Hmmm … maybe they are setting up Rollin as being more incompetent rather than as volatilely bad a king as his dad in the lead-up to Why Ming Went For All Power. Seriously? He has *no idea* of the wars fought, the alliances lost?
Snuffy Smith : What the hell are you talking about, Jughaid? High Noon gets PLENTY of glory! What, have you never seen a movie befo- oh, right, “Moving Pictures”, to you, are just rumors that your parents insists are made-up stories to make flatlander life sound more glamorous.
**************
Crankshaft : this is one of those “Batiuk is trying to be self-depreciating, but he’s actually telling on himself” bits, isn’t it?
**************
Dustin : DustinMom is trying to tell DustinDad she found someone willing to fix their car (after DustinDad’s accident on sunday) for cheaper, but all DustinDad heard was the price out of context, so he’s gonna tell her “NO WAY 1450 $ THAT’S TOO EXPENSIVE FORGET IT”, then pay 5000 $ for his usual mechanic (it would be 2500$, but he charges double because DustinDad is constantly spouting “car mechanics work in a garage because they’re idiots who couldn’t get REAL office jobs” in front of him).
DustinMom should have known DustinDad would zone her out the second she said “So, I shopped around […]” (the word “shop” means DustinDad stops listening to whatever she has to say)
…Too many words for freakin’ DUSTIN…****************
Hi & Lois : Too late! He’s going to someplace he’s actually appreciated : HOOTIN HOLLER.
***************
Luann : doesn’t realise it, but if she had said “Bernice Halper has basically lived in my bedroom for my entire life”, Tara’s reaction in the final panel would be sincere.
(Also, Luann could have said “Yeah, I shared my room with you for a couple of weeks, letting you live there in secret while you were hiding from your cousin, remember?”)
***************
Marvin : you MAY think today’s Marvin is not scatological, but you’d be mistaken : Marvin’s grandpa did not say that his favorite meal is liver and onions by using his words, but unwittingly said it because that’s what the scent of his flatulence betrays to anyone who breathes it in (Marvin’s height and downwind position makes him the ideal victim for this).
Moustache Boy: “What are you doing? There goes my share of the pig butchering scam centre business in Cambodia!”
MW: I’m still unsure whether Brandy’s dumped him, or whether all this angst is because she’s in Florida for two weeks. For that matter I’m still unsure whether we’re still in the flashback. It’s like a master class in storytelling, the day they cover “don’t do this.”
RMMD:
“What are you doing?”
“Doing a video of your shirt for Scientific American. It’s Schrodinger’s shirt pocket and pen — it’s there, but it isn’t!”
Is Marvin being subjected to a Liver-and-Onions fart in the second panel? If not, he should be.
I call foul on Marvin. The Marvinverse is mutual contempt all around; no one ever puts anyone on a pedestal.
Marvin Hey look: the baby whose whole deal is ‘shit factory’ has objections to the smell and/or taste of someone’s food. Someone’s throwing turds from a glass toilet…
@Tony: i feel like celebrating…
I’d like to think that Granddad shit himself, not just farted. It would be a touching familial story.
JP: Kidnapping, assault, grand theft auto, all leading up to… “I’m starving.” Wow, all the dramatic tension just leaked out of that scene. I doubt the diner will be a RMMD crossover, but dare I hope that Ann and Neddy run into “Pumpkin” and “Honey Bunny” from the Tarantinoverse?
MT: You know, it only just occurred to me that in the 6ish years since Jules’ more ironic, self-aware, cartoonish retool of this strip, we haven’t had a single Rusty-in-Mortal-Danger storyline, so I for one looking forward to a much-needed tonal shift in “Rusty Gets Rabies.”
H and L:
“Sunbeam, when the star that produced you begins to die, it will expand into a teeming gas giant that envelops Earth and incinerates life as we know it!”
Marvin:
“You know what I love about you, Grandpa?– you have the same lack of sphincter control as I do!”
Rex Morgan, M.D.: “What are you doing?!” “Letting ICE know where our cook is, what are you doing?”
With fame being more transitory than people think, this cafe can now expect their customer base to double to four people with this revelation.
Oh, sorry. I forgot this was the Rex Morgan, M.D. Hipsterverse for a moment. It’ll triple to six. But with people being what they are in any universe, those customers will think Mae Mae is rich so her tips will remain the same.
***
Kid, you shit yourself regularly so maybe don’t badmouth people’s culinary choices? And no, I’m not feeling personally attacked just because I actually enjoy liver and onions and anyone who says otherwise is a damned liar.
***
I’m so sorry, Trixie. As a baby in 2026 you will never know a world before climate change so you might as well get used to that sunbeam making your life miserable now before the rising sea levels force your family to move further inland.
Marvin…is the size of a newborn here? With a pop-out eye and an enormous head that his spinal column is surely not equipped to hold up, and which must have absolutely ruined his mother, Grandpa’s daughter? Much to consider, unfortunately.
I tend to only read the comics elsewhere out of occasional curiosity so I went over to Comics Kingdom to look at the entire exchange between Mae Mae and the blackmail guy and I should have avoided the comments section because I saw the nickname some of them have given her based on her size and I should know better that in most places avoiding the comments section is solid advice.
RMMD: “Hey folks. You probably know me as Lorna Starr. You see, I got sick of being typecast in action movies and having to maintain a ‘movie star body,’ so I left Hollywood behind. And if you’re wondering why I didn’t announce this before I was threatened with blackmail, or why I didn’t say anything ten years ago when I quit, well…huh. Why didn’t I? I guess to create intrigue? No, this strip has never had intrigue. Because the comic writer wouldn’t let me, that’s why.”
MW: Newborns have better object permanence than Tommy here.
Hi and Lois: Dammit Trixie, “You Are My Sunshine” is supposed to be a melancholy reflection on loss, grief and suicidality, not a possessive declaration!
@Ken: I think we came out of the flashback on Sunday, although you’re right that it was never explicitly stated. As someone else commented earlier this week, there’s still no indication that their relationship actually ended.
MARVIN: This is mostly because Marvin found out whose liver Grandpa wants to feast on.
MARVIN (2): Also I call foul on this*. Marvin would love a food combo that gives him the stinkiest diaper imaginable.
*See? Get it?
JP: “Doing multiple felonies always gives me an appetite. I’m thinking of a big ol’ plate of diner liver and onions. And a chocolate phosphate.”
FG: Ming is so worked up over his Death Squad plans for the Lions and the Giants (…and we’ll call ourselves….the Cleveland Browns!”) his baby blue eyes have turned green.
Also Marvin: Eh…I’ve been commended worse than liver and onions. Smelt, braunschweiger, head cheese, chili with puréed green peppers…
Also Rex Morgan, M.D.: Do they serve liver and onions at the Glenwood Motel Café? I’m pretty sure they do.
LUANN: I hope Luann is wearing gloves. I’d hate for her to get her hands chapped raw as continues to beat that dead horse after all.
Sometime between panel one and two, Marvin’s eye disappeared. Maybe there was a sniper. Maybe a hungry hawk. Maybe it just exploded from the gaseous buildup in the titular character. But, typical for Marvin, the strip didn’t show us the action we actually want to see.