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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/18

Those of you who are longtime OG Joshreads dot com trufans remember how in the early days of this blog we had a great deal of fun with the Canadian soap opera-ish comic strip For Better or for Worse, and one of the days we had the most fun with it was January 26, 2005, when the strip came up with an inexplicable and hilarious series of words a Canadian tween might use to denigrate a classmate for her promiscuity, the most absurd of which was “roadside.” What I’m trying to say is, the two Hanks have been doing their tour of roadside attractions for weeks, and now Hank Sr. has finally encountered a “roadside” “attraction” in the form of Millie Gray! Sorry, Lefty Gillis, your gal’s about to be swept off her feet by her first love, a big shot horror comics artist who has an RV and everything! Sorry, Hank Jr., you’re gonna have to find a non-RV place to sleep tonight! If this RV is rockin’, it’s a sign that it’s a little unbalanced, so don’t come a knockin’, as it could tip right over!

Mary Worth, 6/24/18

Brandy: A woman haunted by a vague, intrusive fantasy that she’s desperately fleeing from the faceless adversaries trying to track her down and kill her, a woman comforted by the white noise of crashing waves on the beach. Is she the perfect match for a ex-con pill fiend who was wildly incompetent at every aspect of being a drug dealer? Looks like we’re going to find out!

Mark Trail, 6/24/18

Mark Trail wouldn’t be my first guess as to which soap opera strip character would show up with a cherry-picked anecdote to explain that, sure, spicy foods from weird foreign countries are becoming increasingly popular, but they’re probably detrimental to the health of God-fearing Americans and we should stick the flavorless boiled meat dishes our Anglo-Saxon ancestors enjoyed, but, you know what? It’s definitely not a surprise or anything.

Dennis the Menace, 6/24/18

Summoning a pack of neighborhood dogs of all shapes and sizes to do his bidding? Pretty menacing, I would say!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/24/18

“Prototypical persons with NPD present with many interpersonal problems and comorbid disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder, with consequent increases in risk of suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, and eating disorders” is a sentence from the Psychiatric Times that I’m just going to leave here for no reason!

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Spider-Man, 6/4/18

There are of course plenty of different schools of thought on storytelling. Some people will say that every detail should point towards the eventual resolution of the narrative, and if that’s the template Newspaper Spider-Man is going for perhaps this angry cabbie will show up up at a crucial part of the climax, out for revenge. But many writers like adding little grace note details to their stories, which make the world of their tales feel more filled out and lived in, and clarify the nature of their characters, without really pertaining to the plot. I assume that’s what’s going on here as Peter Parker is berated by a cabbie as a cheapskate. While Peter himself doesn’t make much money, his wife is a successful actress and, honestly, he doesn’t even attempt to beg poverty. “Sorry. Didn’t have that much money on me,” he says casually. “I just didn’t think ahead, and now you have suffer for it. Oh well!”

Dennis the Menace and Pluggers, 6/4/18

Here we have two men in the twilight of their lives evaluating their priorities in very different ways. Mr. Wilson rejects Dennis’s extremely non-menacing nutritional advice, for a number of obvious reasons: he’s already lived a good long life, and why not enjoy the time he has left, or at least use the fleeting joy of a sugar rush to distract from the fact that what should’ve been his golden years are being spent constantly feuding with the child who lives next door? Then there’s our elderly dog-man plugger, whose house and body are in equal states of disrepair. He could try getting out the toolbox and fixing up the house — he is a plugger, after all, and that’s the sort of thing they do — but, you know, he’ll be dead soon, so why bother? The stair will outlive the knee, at least, and soon he won’t be able to walk down the steps anymore to hear the squeak. Then it’ll be somebody else’s problem.

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Dick Tracy, 5/31/18

Oh, right, they tried to kill Dick Tracy last year by tying him to a tree and letting him freeze to death? It was both ineffective and so boring that I seem to have not covered it at all on this blog, and you have to admit it isn’t necessarily the most obvious way to kill a guy when you’re hiring a man named “Sawtooth” with razor-sharp metal teeth to do the killing. I mean, you’d think you’d want the guy to, like, bite him, right? Bite him with his deadly metal teeth? Anyway, Sawtooth is working on his own now, which means he does it his way, which, I assume, means the whole biting-to-death thing. Ha ha, look how excited he is! Gettin’ all sweaty and worked up thinking about all the biting he’s gonna do!

Blondie, 5/31/18

The thing I can’t get past in this cartoon is Elmo’s opening line: “Mom made me wear this for graduation, Mr. B.” I can’t decide which possibility I like more: that Elmo, whose extremely bad attitude is on display throughout this strip, didn’t want to dress like a damn square the way the man says you should for your graduation, but his mom forced him to conform to social norms for at least the length of the afternoon; or if Elmo’s graduation from, like, second grade or whatever is rightfully not being run by his school with any particularly degree of ceremony, but his mother is insistent that her child and each of his milestones, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are of utmost importance and should be treated accordingly.

Dennis the Menace, 5/31/18

Ha ha, we make a lot of jokes on this blog about what is or isn’t menacing, but I think we can be serious for a moment and say that a guy sitting by himself in the park telling little kids about all the fucking he’s doing overseas is pretty bad news.