Friday is for failure
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/15/26
Oh, I had sort of forgotten that Lonnie didn’t just turn to blackmail because he was evil; he was actually acting out of financial desperation, which hasn’t gone away just because Mae Mae decided she doesn’t care about privacy, actually. Ha ha, look at him burying his face in his hands as his world falls apart around him! This scheme was his last hope!
Alice, 5/15/26
Part of the whole deal of newspaper comics is that their characters are at least a little bit silly. Are they really qualified to opine on the big issues of the day? Shouldn’t they simply sit silently and learn more about all this complicated stuff from their betters on cable news talk shows?
Mary Worth, 5/15/26
Tommy! No! No!! Not your beautiful locks! Please don’t take this route to self-harm! Do drugs instead! Do all the drugs you want!
72 replies to “Friday is for failure”
MW:
“I hope this is one of those places where ladies give you haircuts and pretend that they like you while they’re talking to you, so that you’ll give them a big tip!”
MW: We’re about to be treated to weeks of Tommy wandering through the streets, fantasizing about being “cool” whilst pushing people into traffic. This will, of course, be treated as an act of heroism.
Is Tommy an Unfrozen Caveman Stockboy? “Wowee Zowee! A haircut place! How do you get your gods to make this thing spin?”
MW:
“Wow. This hairstyle on the left is called ‘The Thin White Duke,’ and the one on the right is called ‘The Shemp Howard.’ I wonder what that means!”
MW: “That’s a cool-looking front…puts me in the mood for some Neapolitan ice cream!”
MW:
It’s always a winning tonsorial strategy to walk into a barbershop with a non-collared shirt, so as to deprive the barber of perspective on how short they should cut your hair in the back to synch it with your collar.
MW. Tommy is walking aimlessly down a street, staring blankly, and becomes fascinated by the front of a barbershop. Pretty sure the “whether to do drugs” decision was made at least fifteen minutes ago.
I’m completely non-sarcastically fascinated at Rex Morgan background colors. They seem to have rhyme or reason. Today, looks of things, whomever chose them was watching Return Of The Jedi, I assume.
MW “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re going through tough times don’t cut your bangs”
Luann They can’t even get their Designated Sleaze character to connect “moving in” with, shall we say, “snugglebunnies”? Luann must emit an anti-eros pheromone that prevents any such nonsense in her vicinity
Curtis is this the setup for “Curtis has to get a job” this summer? Because if so I’m going to be very interested in whether or not they actually set it up in a way that he could earn the thousands it would cost for the landscaping, never mind the thousands for even a small group of proper koi fish.
MW-“That’s what I need,” Tommy says looking at the pictures, “I need a man.”
MW-Wow just wow. I know there is sparse writing and then there is this. We might as well make up our own stuff instead of trying to snark on what’s happening.
MW-“That’s a cool looking front. I wonder what drugs they sell.”
FC-“Grandma, if you feel queasy later on that’s just from the poison.”
MW-Yeah they really aren’t cool. You really don’t want to know about how the model on the left gets sexually abused by his agent.
MW-“That’s a cool looking front.” Tommy then looks down at his hands. “My hands are so big.”
MW: Which agony is more intense; a love lost or a haircut that you hate? We’re about to find out.
RMMD: Tom Hanks makes a cameo appearance to tell Lonnie that there’s no crying in blackmail.
RMMD:
Lonnie decides to change sales careers and to do a deep-dive into the kinds of pleasure craft that recreational boaters might be interested in purchasing. Depth of a Sailsman.
MW: Tommy could be a dead ringer for Toby if he donned a pair of hoop earrings and wore cucumbers slices over his eyes.
MW: Tommy gets a haircut, gains confidence with his new self-image, finds a new girlfriend, and is happy again.
Now you may be saying “That can’t be the resolution, where’s Mary fit in,” but the meddling is needed when Brandy returns the next day from her two-week trip.
As usual, I’m confused by the caption in “Alice”. Is “Maids and Butlers” meant to be the title of today’s artistic vignette? Or is “Maids and Butlers” meant to be the answer to the question “What do maids and butlers get?” Is it servants all the way down?!
What about the maids and butlers? What do they have? How is Ai going to give us all maids and butlers? Why is that supposed to answer the question? Why was that question asked? How has Alice managed to make less sense than usual?
MW Also mildly annoyed with Brigman’s work (yeah, yeah, it’s *good*, it’s not the trainwreck of several other strips…) this morning. Actually that’s the thing – the trouble is that if you’re good enough to draw eyes pointing in directions we can follow, we expect something better. If the barber pole on its own is the “cool front” that’s, well, not much but it’s something – but that only makes sense if Tommy looks at it. I’d expect there’s one of: fancy neon sign / Art Deco cornice details / old mosaic etc up where he has his eyes pointing.
You know what’s not funny? Now Lonnie is eating schnapps and ice cream and crying like a little girl!
Luann: WE JUST DID THIS!!!
JP: Right now, Judgey Wudgey’s probably thinking you hocked the car for drug money, Ms. Ex-Jailbird.
Phantom: Go ahead Schmelon Schmusk, take a sip of that champagne through the mask to try and keep up the illusion that this isn’t some little juvenile cosplay, I dare you! I DOUBLE dare you!
Speaking of whom…
Alice: “And by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’. All of you will be my maids and butlers, because I’ll have all the money in the world.”
S4th: ‘And by ‘winnow that list down by a lot’ I meant ‘decide on another plan altogether’. Just forget I called, Ted. In fact, please forget my number and just go wander into the woods again like that ‘Stand By Me’ fantasy you keep having!’
@A Grave Mind: Reminds me of a gag from Mystery Science Theater’s presentation of ‘The Deadly Bees’:
British woman visiting eccentric man’s home: What a beautiful room!
Servo: Did you paint it with your own blood??
CS: True story– Mr. Batiuk came to my town for a talk, and yes, afterward, a book signing. I wanted to go to lecture but knowing I’d then be guilted into buying a book that I’d read once and donate, didn’t go. Today’s strip is accurate– everyone reads, but no body pays.
FG: Shock and awe, if it succeeds, results in oppression, not peace or not stice. Ming’s statement yesterday that the strong always conquer the weak is true only if diplomacy, alliances, and law fail.
GT: fame– it’s not for everybody. Consult Mae Mae.
MARY WORTH: “That’s a cool looking front…I’m positive the gangsters who run this ‘barber shop’ are looking for drug runners.”
I am a bit surprised that Mary Worth will be the first legacy comic to address looksmaxxing.
@matt w:
#17. ALICE: I follow this only when Josh features it, but my take is that ai will be maids & butlers, secretaries & assistants, writers and editors. Thus, we humans are all rendered superfluous.
Alice’s critique is an accidental disclosure of the Luddist logic behind SOME of the arguments against AI. “What if AI took away your job of being a servant for the 1%? Is life even worth living if you do not wait on the hand and foot of some rich bastard?”
Wrecks Moregone:
She’s a former actress, Moustache, not a fugitive on the run.
Man, for a salesman you really don’t understand the concept of knowing your market.
____________________________________________
Murky Tail:
Rusty (handing the phone to Rocky Raccoon): “Tell Mum I’m not here!”
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Wary Morth:
The left one looks just like Russian singer Yaroslav Dronov (stage name Shaman). He’s well known to go for older ladies. So Tommy should totally adopt his hairstyle; with that haircut he should be about right for Toby.
“Barber, I must change my style! I must imitate the hair of a manly man like Zack! Only this way I could get into bed with my mother. I mean a woman as sexy as my mother! I mean a woman, any woman! That’s my very normal desire!”
Wrecks Moregone:
If Hector has any brains he’s sending the video straight to Hollywood Whatever.
Alice : judging by the way the people on TV look, this is confirmation that Alice, within the universe of her own strip, is meant to be unattractive/weird-looking, right?
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Mary Worth : For a second there, I thought that by “Cool-looking front”, Tommy was indicating that the “barbershop” he was walking past was actually a front for another operation (possibly a meth lab).
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Safe Havens : “No, I meant, I wanna be the same kind of flower as that lady, you know, where she gets to live beyond next autumn, and gets to be the one who does the experiments rather than the one who gets experimented on?”
“Hahahaha, sorry, you don’t get to be a main character, random lab rat. Off to the compost pile with you!”
@Bob Tice:
…..ooooooor he could go and try to interest Mary Worth in setting up a muffin scented mouthwash scheme.
You could call it Breath Of A Saleman.
No, Tommy! If you cut your hair you’ll lose your great strength and be unable to combat the Philistines!
I might have gotten that confused with someone else.
Alice-What’s going on? Am I missing something?
MW & RxMD: Well, it looks like both of these arcs are going go resolve themselves without the titular protagonists having any meaningful involvement at all. At most, Rex will perform the autopsy when Lonnie is found dead in his Glenwood Motel room after having [redacted] himself in a fit of despair, while Mary at most will compliment Tommy on his sharp, crisp new haircut, reaffirming his impulsive decision and propelling him on to a new chapter in his life as a himbo.
@Bob Tice: There’s a great bit in the Venture Brothers cartoon where someone refers to David Bowie as the Thin White Douche, which I find very appropriate today.
RMMD: There’s something deeply hilarious about this guy despairing that his airtight plan of ‘blackmail’ didn’t pan out. Why didn’t she just pay him, the guy threatening to expose her for the thing she didn’t mind exposed? How could this have failed?!
Alice: My favorite part of this strip is the chyron of this cable news show that just says ‘news’ over and over, as if just to remind their viewers that there is news going on in the world, but we’re watching a talking heads segment filmed disturbing close to the panelist’s faces.
MW: Did Tommy just get drawn in by a barber’s pole? Let’s hope he doesn’t wander by an arcade or he might just have a seizure.
Alice: Good, it’s comforting to know that when we’re all slaves mining Mars for Elon Musk’s descendants, we’ll at least have robot servants to care for us during the four hours we’re allowed to rest.
MW: What’ll it be, Tommy? The 1980’s Lesbian or the Badly Blended Toupee?
I love how Tommy greets everything in life like a fresh-born baby. He got off drugs when a pharmacist told him that there were treatments for addiction, and he reacted like it was the first he ever heard of such a thing. Now he’s looking at the photos in a barber shop and thinking, “wait, so hair… can be cut, and even styled? Wow, that actually explains so much.”
RMMD: Most writers would have Maena deal with some kind of internal conflict, wondering if it’s better to pay off her blackmailer or sacrifice the privacy she’s protected for so long, considering the long-term consequences of both paths, maybe thinking about how this will affect her budding relationship with Mudgus. But this is Rex Morgan, where conflict of every kind goes to die, and her decision is made and executed in a matter of moments with no qualms or regrets.
Mary Worth: June Giella, probably: “Okay, I need something ‘cool’ for Tommy to be looking at. What can I draw?” [monkey’s paw curls]
@Dan: He probably had his spiritual awakening in the style of a Chick Tract. “Who is this ‘Jesus’ you speak of? Is he like Santa Claus?”
@Charterstone: Dune: We could set up an “X days since Rex last appeared” counter, but frankly who cares?
Also Mary Worth-ish: My dorm roommate once appeared in a local television ad for a hair salon, flipping his magnificent locks to the sax break from Wham!’s “Careless Whisper.” He told me later with a shrug, “They gave me a great deal on my cut.” It was 1987.
@Activist: Maiding and butlering is one thing AI, in the sense of those LLMs, definitively can’t do. That’s why they call it the Butlerian jihad.
You know what it could do? Blackmail! AI is going to take away the livelihoods of hard-working blackmailers like Lonnie and force him to work as a maid and/or butler.
Alice: Ah, but can AI provide a background, a television that is not floating in air, and adequate leg support on a couch? [checks notes] Yeah, probably.
@Everything Is Better With Monkeys: Will Tommy take a hammer to his face?
Alice:
“news…news…news…news…news…” says the ticker in the lower third of this news program. It’s a good thing, too, because you’d never figure out that this is allegedly a news program just from the content. However, I’m intrigued by the people being shown on screen, who look somewhat more human than the triangle-nosed Alice and her boyfriend(?) do. Perhaps Alice lives in an isolated area of Earth heavily affected by radioactive contamination, which produces grotesque mutations in the inhabitants. It would explain a lot.
Mary Worth:
As a male with long hair myself, it of course saddens me to see Tommy consider cutting off his locks and adopting conventionally masculine personal aesthetics. But perhaps this pivot to the mundane isn’t surprising, considering he just looked at the world’s most boring barbershop and thought “That’s a cool-looking front!”
C’shaft: “No, really, I can’t tell you. I’m not really a developed character, just an empty mouthpiece for the praise you desperately crave.”
Dustin: Normally Parker and Kelly will limit their petty grievances to a single strip. They must be really, really angry at the UFC cologne thing.
JP: Ann and Neddy had their phones! They were in their hands while they were talking about grabbing lunch and an Uber! Why wouldn’t they take five minutes to call chez Parker and let them know they’re okay, rather than selfishly ignoring how their disappearance might affect him and thinking only of…
…Never mind, I just answered my own question.
MT: Goddammit, Project Hail Mary had just made the name “Rocky” cool again, and then Rusty had to go and ruin it. What is the opposite of “Amaze amaze amaze” question?
Pluggers have so many melanomas on their scalp.
Alice: Why do those weird people on TV have outlines, and masses of hair? What’s wrong with them?
Also also Mary Worth: I 100% unironically love the way Tommy is popping up, prairie dog-style, and sincerely hope he’s doing it all over town. “That’s a cool-looking storefront. That’s a cool-looking town square,” he says, poking his head out of his hole while chewing on a bit of grass. “That’s a cool-looking lady in purple. That’s a cool-looking drug deal. That’s a cool-looking man with a large-caliber handgun.”
MW: Whoa! What a cool, hypnotic spinny thing! Now I want to get a haircut so badly, and I just got one three days ago!
@TheDiva: On CS: Is that the guy from those YouTube videos? Can’t think of their name, but that ‘small eyes, bald head’ look seems awfully familiar…
Alice-What we won’t have is jokes because AI can’t do humor.
Mary Worth: It’s so fun to see Tommy on a journey to personal discovery. And by “personal discovery,” I mean “learning what a barber pole looks like.”
Alice: I can’t figure out which talking head spoke first! And I guess it doesn’t matter since neither one of them really made any points! Meanwhile, Alice and Bowtie McBoyfriend are squatting against a drawing of a couch on the wall. This comic feels like a breakthrough in nonlinear nonstorytelling.
REX MORGAN M.D.: “Why would you do that?”
Because Lorna/Mae Mae doesn’t think what you are trying to “sell” her (her privacy) is worth the cost. Duh! You really are a shitty salesman, Lonnie!
REX MORGAN M.D. (2): Hey, Lorna/Mae Mae. You know what would also be “good for business”? If the employees were actually working instead of talking/gloating at dopey Ned Flander-ish losers.
Alice: I’m liking this new chat show format where people’s heads fill the whole screen and they’re yelling right into each other’s faces. Feels like whatever the opposite of social distancing is.
MW: *sees a generic strip mall outlet with a barberpole on the door* Whoa, this is the coolest front I’ve ever seen. I bet Leonardo DiCaprio gets his hair cut here.
@Ken: I certainly don’t! I’d love to see him phased out Barney Google-style! He can show up in crowd shots at roots alt-americountry rock n’ folk shows or whatever, and maybe get a week’s worth of strips each year devoted to doctoring, but otherwise, I say let’s have the large women of Glenwood anchor this strip going forward.
Lonnie did try to blackmail Mae Mae, so in a couple of years when he meets his new, bald cellmate and explains what he’s in for, Rene can breathe a sigh of relief and wearily say, “At least she has nothing to do with roots country.” And then Lonnie tells him about her boyfriend…
***
Tommy! Eight words before you step in there – Business in the front, party in the back! (I know I’m not a praying gal but Zeus, if you’re up there, I don’t ask for much…)
Alice: The TV show is called Maids and Butlers. It’s like Backstairs at the White House except they don’t specify the color of the house. Also, the closed captioning is terrible.
Tommy will cut his hair, declares he feels “all better now,” and then Mary will spend weeks debriefing the story arc with her hypoallergenic cat.
Gasoline Alley: Gertie won’t go anywhere. Unless Joel, Rufus, and Becky come along.
Blondie: Elmo’s parents are wasting money on the kiddie sports industrial complex. There’s no athletic scholarship for a kid who hasn’t hit puberty in seventy years.
Dustin: Megan, you’re aware that women “hit in the head a lot” and “likes something, anything, about Dustin, including how he smells” are basically two overlapping circles. For once, he knows what he’s doing.
H&L: What I’m getting is big “Chip’s pretty adept at picking out girls with daddy issues”. Way to get past the Comics Commission!
FC: The big morning talk ending in “No, Daddy’s not losing his hair!” has some unexpected conversational effects.
@TheDiva: Re: MW: I’m utterly offended by that you know!. That poster is “early 90’s lesbian” at most! (“Give me the ‘k.d. lang'” Tommy would say to the stylists.)
MW – A cardinal rule regarding failed relationships – never get a revenge/reinvention haircut!!! Who among us has not Super Kutzed in haste and regrown in leisure?
MW: Lonely, desperate, and short on money, Tommy resorts to snorting hair…
“And what about the maids and butlers, what will they have?”
Maids and Butlers… he just laid that out.
MW – “Have to cut my hair… I got to move with the fashion or be outcast… Zoot suit, white jacket with side vents five inches long…” Darn it, Tommy, you forgot which rock opera by The Who you’re supposed to be in! Go find a pinball arcade!
MW: Looking forward to Tommy getting his hair cut short and dyed black so he can look in the mirror and be his own Brandy. I don’t think Mary has ever meddled dissociative identity disorder before. It might just be the challenge she needs to snap her out of this string of mediocre meddles she’s had lately!
GIL THORP: “He can be the next Tiger Woods, because he’s good at being Black…er…I mean ‘golfing’….” (To be fair maybe Coach Not-Gil-Thorp was referring to Black Guy #2 in the second panel…even though narratively they might be the same guy with completely different hair styles for some reason. If so, then the golfer’s ability to change wigs mid-swing does in fact make him a golfing savant and I stand corrected.)
GIL THORP (2): Barajas: “No, no no, I’m not trying to imply anything offensive by that comparison. I just meant that this guy is the most likely candidate to be banging cocktail waitresses just before a vengeful ex-wife gets ready to shove a golf club up his….”
Alice – With AI, comic strips will finally get the placement of word balloons right, so they’re not read in the wrong order. Ha ha, kidding! AI will screw that up even worse than humans do!
Don Abundio, translated:
“Excuse me, sir. Why do I run into you everywhere I go?”
“Ah… It’s just coincidence, and you can easily change your luck…”
“… go down the street and knock on any door at random…”
“Hello again!”
MW – I call bullshit. No scruffy hippie is going to cut his hair in Mary Worth until Mary herself tells him to do it.
@2+2=7: “He can be the next Tiger Woods” would be a line I would see coming from Pluggers.
Although of course that character in question would be a literal Tiger.
I was going to say “What if all of the characters in Gil Thorp were animals” then I thought “NO!” the artist can barely draw humans, so they shouldn’t drag Furries into this mess.