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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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Shoe, 5/19/11

Nobody ever reads off a list of everything on a menu aloud, and Roz’s pencil is working diligently, so I assume that the Perfesser is actually ordering this extremely long list of food items, which in turn means that Shoe is referring to some kind of U.N. meeting on global obesity problems. Several of the dishes the Perfesser is trying to order are also based on bird-flesh, which means that it may be a U.N. meeting on a resurgence of cannibalism.

Gil Thorp, 5/19/11

I’m sad to report that the less interesting of Gil Thorp’s two current plotlines is the one that doesn’t involve school budget negotiations. Still, Coach Kaz is extorting money out of a longhair with the implicit threat of violence, so maybe things are looking up a bit. My bet is that Buzz Marco is less intimidated by Kaz’s beefy arms than he is by the horrifying tentacle-fingers that Kaz has so delicately draped across his collarbone.

Mary Worth, 5/19/11

Today’s Mary Worth narration box is for readers who don’t understand the orthographical convention by which bold italics convey emphasis. I dearly hope that Drew is literally shouting the final clauses of his sentences at Liza, in the increasingly desperate hope that she’ll acknowledge that he broke up with her.

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Archie, 4/29/11

So, the Archie newspaper strip got a new artist this week! Despite having written a blog about comic strips for like the past six years, I actually don’t have a very good vocabulary to describe what I like and dislike about art, so I’ll just say that the new style looks more … cramped? All the features have seemed smaller, less detailed, seen from farther away — until today, that is, when we’re treated to the horrifying closeup of Professor Flutesnoot in panel two, with the bags under his eyes and the terrifyingly realistic shading on the huge fleshy proboscis jutting out at us from the middle of his face. From now on, I want the viewpoint of the strip to stay as far away from the characters as possible to spare us such horrors.

Also, isn’t Professor Flutesnoot a chemistry teacher? I distinctly remember people fiddling with test tubes in his class. Damn it, do I have to keep track of continuity for the Archie universe? Because I don’t think I’m ready for that.

Mark Trail, 4/29/11

Of course, Professor Flutesnoot isn’t one tenth as terrifying as Nightmare Sherriff there in panel three of Mark Trail. What’s the most disturbing thing about him, do you think? The fact that the distance from his eyes to his upper lip seems disproportionately long when compared to the distance from his upper lip to his chin? His “hair,” which looks like someone else’s scalp that he’s wearing as a hat? His soulless orange eyes? The unexplained figure standing behind him, whose anxious expression seems to be saying “Watch out! I can’t control him when he’s like this! Oh … oh God!”

Gil Thorp, 4/29/11

At last, someone has the guts to cut down Milford’s bloated budget! I can see two directions where this story might be going. Hobart McMustache could demand cuts to the athletic department, particularly to sports that are boring and/or involve girls; on the other hand, he might hold the Thorps up as examples of good fiscal stewards of public money, since they tend to get assistant coaching duties for no charge from the janitorial staff or from cantankerous old weirdos who just show up at practice one day.

Mary Worth, 4/29/11

Oh look, Liza got a taste of Drew’s love and now has instantly become a psycho stalker, what a surprising development. Frankly, I’m much more intrigued by Drew’s hideous phone, which appears to be a cheap Vietnamese knock-off of a Dell PocketPC from 2004 or so. Still, you have to be impressed that it auto-hyphenated “tonight” to keep the lines of text formatted properly, unless we’re meant to understand that Liza did that to interject a charming faux-Victorianism into the midst of her awful txt-speak.