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Bizarro, 12/6/23

A fun fact is that while “Frankenstein,” in the sense of a story about creature sewn together from corpses and reanimated via forbidden science with unexpected results, is in the public domain, Frankenstein’s monster, in the sense of the green-skinned corpse guy with a flat head and bolts in his neck, is the intellectual property of Universal Studios, for whom that design was created in 1931. I really had it in my mind that the flat top of the head was meant to indicate that the skull had been sliced open to drop a brain into it, but I can’t find any citation to that now; however, the Wikipedia article for Frankenstein’s monster does have the unsettling note that “Jack P. Pierce … based the monster’s face and iconic flat head shape on a drawing Pierce’s daughter (whom Pierce feared to be psychic) had drawn from a dream.” Anyway, today’s strip raises a lot more questions than it answers: are the Monster and his Bride having sex, reproductively, and are their corpse-mangled qualities passed down to their offspring via some Lamarckian mechanism? Or did the pair conspire to reproduce the sins of their creator, assembling in their own image a son from scavenged corpse parts, continuing the hideous cycle? Also, is the kid’s full name “Frankenstein’s Monster Junior,” and does he get mad if people just call him or his father “Frankenstein?” I honestly care about all this much more than his potential head injury situation.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/6/23

This week’s Rex Morgan is really just dragging out a plotline we had all hoped would be done by now, but honestly I’ve been enjoying a lot of the facial expressions so I’ll give it a pass. Today, Mr. Ollman (get it? he’s an “old man”????) has hit the end of his patience with this entire conversation, as his face in panel three makes very clear. “Look, doc, I came here because I need my prostate checked out and I heard you weren’t gonna give me a lot of pushback when I asked for a painkiller prescription. I stopped making new acquaintances 15 years ago, and I certainly don’t want to hear anything about some Italian I’m supposed to know, got it?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/6/23

It seems to me that you should be rewarding a budding young musician for time spent honing and practicing his craft in whatever way works best for; demanding a new song in exchange for each cookie feels like it’s encouraging quantity over quality, just my take.

Gasoline Alley, 12/6/23

Rufus’s dick has burst out of his elf costume, right? That’s what’s going on here? He’s hanging hog? That’s what’s going to get the beloved comic strip Gasoline Alley cancelled after all these years? Rufus with his dick out?

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It’s Sunday, folks, the day when newspaper comics include a couple of panels that can be excised based on the vagaries of print layouts. Taken in isolation, these “throwaway” panels can be kind of fun!

Panels from Blondie, 12/3/23

Here’s the panels from today’s Blondie, for instance! It sounds like they’re discussing the possibility of doing some wife swapping, but actually this just leads into a dumb bit about Christmas decorations.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/3/23

And here’s the panels from Snuffy Smith! Snuffy looks like he’s going to make sweet love to that radio. In fact, he’s going to listen to horse racing with some horses, which, considering how many horses die as part of the horse racing industry, is pretty grim.

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 12/3/23

On Sundays Dennis the Menace uses its throwaway panel space to do a title block, which is fine, except in this case it seems to be drawn by someone who thinks boy band members wear suits and ties, which isn’t fine at all. Anyway, the main strip is about how Mr. Wilson hates Dennis but his wife forces him to endure the child’s company.

Mary Worth, 12/3/23

For Mary Worth we need the full strip, though, so we can see that Keith and Kitty’s big smooch is interrupted by some cruel soul razzing them! I suppose the razzer is Sonia, whose anti-authoritarian streak is so strong that she calls her own mother by her first name, but it would be very funny if it were just some random acquaintance of Kitty making fun of Keith’s cartoonish physique for no good reason.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/3/23

Oh come on! Are you going to tell me that the whole Mirakle Method was actually stolen wholesale from this old guy, somehow? C’mon! The Method was Rene’s one accidental success! It really worked on at least one guy! You’ve got to give him this! He needs this!

Rhymes With Orange, 12/2/23

Sorry I got so worked up there, I just really care about my boy Rene. Anyway, here’s a comic strip about teen starfish having sex!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/13/23

You know, at first I thought this was about the eternal struggle between the modern scientific method, as represented by Doc Pritchart and his flatlander medical degree, and the ancient, chthonic folk wisdom of the Holler, as represented by Granny Creeps and her cave full of potions. But then I realized that Doc is probably just trying to stop Snuffy from getting poisoned. He’s right to worry! Who the hell knows what’s in that stuff she’s going to give him!

Pluggers, 11/13/23

Look, Pluggers, I get that you’re a comic whose whole thing is that you take submissions from your readers who are, by definition, pluggers, and pluggers absolutely love to forward emails consisting of jokes that they themselves did not write to their friends and loved ones, but I feel like maybe you should Google those submitted jokes to make sure they aren’t from, say, Cool Funny Quotes Dot Com’s collection of quotes by Anonymous or a weirdly padded blog post on Grumpy Fuckers Dot Com written by “Royston Butterscotch” or a magnet you can buy from Fem Power Gifts by Getbullish or X, the website formerly known as Twitter before you go to the trouble of illustrating them with anthropomorphic chickens.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/13/23

It doesn’t count as “dramatic tension” per se, but for weeks now I’ve been really unable to tell whether or not Mud is supposed to be sincere about the Mirakle Method or not. I guess he believes both that the Method can improve your life and that people are rational economic actors who always have access to the full information they need to make spending decisions that will never regret. Buzzy, though? Buzzy seems shady. Feel like Buzzy’s gonna get forcibly Mirakl’d in the not so distant future, i.e., he’ll be weeping openly as he contemplates his own personal swingset on the moon.

Gasoline Alley, 11/13/23

I often have fun on this blog trying to figure out where exactly various syndicated newspaper strips take place. But, Gasoline Alley? Never really cared to put the energy into it, to be honest with you all. Good thing, too, because all I had to do is wait it out for a while until today, when the strip tells us the characters all live near Charlotte, North Carolina. Who would’ve guessed? Not me, I admit, but as noted I wouldn’t have tried very hard.