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Mary Worth, 5/23/11

There are a few signs that maybe you have spent too much of your life writing blog entries about the comics! One is when you get a mysterious email that says “How are you today? I see that you own the domain name: joshreads.com. I am writing to let you know that the domain name rhinospeed.com is for sale. I am contacting you to gauge possible interest in this exceptional domain name” and you think HOLY GOODNESS WHAT IS THIS ABOUT HAVE I DROPPED THROUGH THE RABBIT HOLE? but then you remember that you actually wrote a blog post about how fast a rhino can run, five years ago!

Another sign is when there’s a flashback in Mary Worth and you remember the events being flashed back to and then you think to yourself, “I don’t think this is an accurate depiction of this long-ago and hilarious episode,” and then you look it up, because of course you have this very comic, three and a half years old now, on your blog as well, like you’re running some sort of alternative to the microfiche machine down at the library (do they still have those?).

ANYWAY! Let’s pretend that flashback panel two in today’s strip isn’t just cobbled together from misty memory by the Mary Worth creative team (because that would mean that I have better recall of Mary Worth and/or better access to archives than they do, which is kind of horrifying to contemplate) but instead represents Dr. Drew’s memory of the events. If we think about it from that perspective, a side-by-side comparison becomes rather interesting!

You’ll note that Drew remembers rather precisely a number of minor details — what color shirts he and Dawn were wearing, and the colors of the coats of the horses, for instance. But there’s one quite striking difference, and that’s Drew’s face. One assumes that the earlier strip, on the right, shows how Drew would appear to an objective observer — with a rounded, boyish face — whereas the panel on the left shows his own self-image, in which he’s square-jawed and manly with impossibly sharp cheekbones. How vain we all are, in our minds!

It’s also worth nothing that, in Drew’s memory, his non-Dawn girlfriend Vera has terrifying melting nightmare eyes, but the less said about that the better.

Gil Thorp, 5/23/11

Over in Gil Thorp, the cuts to the school district’s budget are proceeding at high speed! But haven’t they already economized enough? The Chicago font on that sign indicates that it was probably printed on the district’s only computer, a Mac SE/30 purchased in 1991 or thereabouts.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/23/11

Oh, hey! Have you been wondering what’s up in Rex Morgan, M.D.? Well, what’s up is that Rex and June are apparently talking themselves into cashing in Berna’s lottery ticket and then fleeing the country.

Hi an Lois, 5/23/11

In non-soap news, today will be remembered as “the day Hi and Lois left Trixie outside to die of exposure.”

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On a more serious note, thanks to everyone who let me know about the death of Crock cartoonist Bill Rechin at age 80. I’ve been pretty savage with Crock here but he was by all accounts a really sweet guy and is a big loss to the comics community. In the grand tradition of syndicated cartooning, the strip will of course be carried on by Rechin’s son Kevin, a phenomenon that I can’t even work myself up to rage against anymore. It’ll be interesting to see what Crock 2.0 is like.

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Crock, 5/2/11

Ha ha, someone thought that underage scat porn used as an instrument of torture was a good theme for a comic strip! Sure, why not?

Crankshaft, 5/2/11

It sure makes Crankshaft’s half-assed attempts to sexually harass hapless customer service personnel seem positively quaint by comparison.

Spider-Man, 5/2/11

This whole “human vampire” business has worked itself out in even sillier fashion than I could have imagined, with Dr. Morbius’s fiancee accidentally becoming a real vampire in order to understand her beloved’s fake vampirism. The only logical hole out of many I’ll point out here: wouldn’t Dr. Morbius, wracked with guilt over his faux-vampirism, have noticed his fiancee’s vampiric tendencies? “Say, sweetie, would you like to go out for dinner? I’ve got 6 o’clock reservations!” “Let’s make it 9, so that I don’t have to leave the apartment when the sun’s still up. Also, they serve blood there, right? You know I subsist entirely on human blood now.”

Also, regarding the last panel’s NEXT box, it probably wouldn’t be so much a race against time if Peter had woken up when MJ first got into trouble, several hours ago.

Panel from Hi and Lois, 5/2/11

Was baby Trixie from Hi and Lois not on your list of characters who filled you with dread? Well, that’s changed forever now, I’ll say.

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Gasoline Alley, 4/12/11

Let me tell you a little story that has something to do with the genesis of this blog. In 2002, I moved to Baltimore and, as was the style at the time, got a print subscription to the local paper. The early ’00s Baltimore Sun had four glorious pages of comics every day, including relics that I had heard about but never seen — Mark Trail, Rex Morgan, Apartment 3-G, and, of course, Mary Worth. The last strip was in the midst of a plotline involving a cantankerous old cuss named Smitty Smedlap, and I came in the middle of a dinner he was having with Mary (and maybe Dr. Jeff too? can’t remember now) at the Bum Boat — a dinner that lasted weeks, and that seemed to me to be extremely awkward, and yet day after day it continued, with no reaction from the other characters indicating whether that was the intended reading. By the end of the dinner, I was hooked, and there’s pretty much a straight line from that joyful discovery to these words you’re reading today on the Internet.

I bring this up only because this awkward dinner in Gasoline Alley seems to me a a pale shadow of the depth of awkwardness that Mary Worth is capable of. Still, you have to kind of respect the strip for its current metahumorous gambit, in which we have a character whose sole identifying characteristic is that he tells bad jokes, and yet each day his unfunny gags are presented as the strip’s punchlines. Still, a little of this goes a long way, and it’s already gone quite far enough.

Luann, 4/12/11

Like all artistic geniuses do eventually, Gunther has left behind conventional notions of what his chosen medium should do and has gone full-on into his experimental phase, just in time for Luann to be the most avant-garde contestant in Tiffany’s sham beauty contest. I like the fact that Luann begins the strip screaming in horror/aesthetic confusion, but by the time her parents arrive on the scene has settled into a state of droopy-eyed ennui. For is there anything more truly banal than a new artist’s first heavy-handed attempt to shock bourgeois sensibilities?

Crock, 4/12/11

I don’t think I’ve ever met this bugilist before, but since he’s a character in Crock I assume he has an entire backstory established over the course of the strip’s 109-year run, which is now mostly forgotten by everybody but can still be glimpsed in some of his characteristics. For instance, that round red blob on his head: is it supposed to be a beret (indicating that he’s a jazz-trumpeting hepcat) or a turban (indicating that he’s a cobra-charming fakir)? Fortunately, this is Crock, so we can move on with our lives safe in the knowledge that this character will not reappear for decades and we’ll never really have to worry about it again.