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Archive: Hi and Lois

146

Monday is for troubling revelations

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/21/25

It’s Monday, y’all! Monday, the beginning of a new week in the soaps, with promises of exciting setups playing out over the next few days in increasingly intriguing and twisty ways, especially in this Rex Morgan plot about literal murder, and … wait, what’s that? The murderer has announced his intention to turn himself in and is apologizing to anyone his murderous ways might have inconvenienced? Hmm. Not really what I was hoping for. I guess we now have three to six thrilling days of everyone standing around awkwardly waiting for the cops to show up to look forward to.

Hi and Lois, 4/21/25

Ha ha, yes, that certainly is a pickle, you guys. It’s not fair, college wasn’t so expensive back when you embarked on the project of having a family with four children back in [does math] 2009? Can that really be right? Kids who are in high school today were born in 2009, a year when I and my contemporaries were already fully mature adults? Seems wrong. Seems very wrong indeed.

Crankshaft, 4/21/25

“Look at this ring … I’m married? To you, I guess? What the hell?”

174

Death, doom, etc.

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Mary Worth, 4/12/25

Welp, looks like Dawn’s about to die in agony after drinking a powerful drain cleaner … and that’s the tea, sis! Ha ha, get it, because Belle poisoned the tea, in order to murder Dawn? Anyway, I feel like it’s relevant that Dawn has eaten Mary Worth’s cooking for years, but I can’t tell if constant exposure has hardened her system enough that she can survive drinking Wilbur’s off-brand Drano, or if it’s merely numbed her senses of taste and smell so much that she won’t be able to detect the toxic substance as she drinks it.

Shoe, 4/12/25

Wow, Madame Zoo Doo’s facial expression is extremely grim here. See, all this time you thought she was crazy or a fraud, but it turns out that she can really see into the future — she just can’t change it. Free will, she knows all too well, is an illusion: nothing we do can change our fate. Why burden her customers with this terrible knowledge?

Hi and Lois, 4/12/25

Hey, Hi, I don’t want to make things awkward, but you know your friend’s an alcoholic, right? Like, it’s kind of his whole personality? It’s right there in his name? Sorry you had to find out like this, but, c’mon.

151

I read the comics to protect you from terrible truths

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/8/25

Way back in the mists of time when I first started this blog, it was called I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To, and I still thinking of myself as fulfilling that mission, especially when it comes to letting you know when something exciting or important has happened in the soap opera strips. However, this goal runs into a philosophical conundrum with Rex Morgan, M.D., the strip where nothing exciting or important ever happens: sometimes it seems like something’s going to happen, but if I tell you about it, that’s leading you astray, because in fact nothing’s going to happen, so instead I usually wait to update you until it becomes clear that nothing is going to happen. Take this past week, for instance: after Augie did the responsible thing and reported the dead stalker to the police, the beat cop who showed up decided that Augie was actually the most likely murder suspect and started asking a bunch of probing questions. Was something exciting, like Augie’s arrest on false (or possibly true) accusations, going to happen? I sure didn’t tell you about it, because I didn’t want to toy with your emotions unnecessarily. But now it’s safe to discuss because a homicide detective has arrived and decided that the stalker simply drank three bottles of hooch then smoked crack and shot heroin simultaneously before eventually succumbing to his many vices. Problem solved! Nothing’s going to happen! Enjoy today’s strip and then go about your business.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/8/25

I actually spent a lot of time getting furious at this strip because everyone knows that in the comics, poodles are sexy French ladies, not old people, so what is this even about??? After some thought I think he’s riffing on “dumb blonde” stereotypes rather than old people stereotypes, but it doesn’t really work because (a) lots of people say “senior moment” but nobody says “blonde moment” and (b) poodles (in cartoons, anyway) are white while Grimm himself is blonde, or at least yellow.

Hi and Lois, 4/8/25

“Hey Josh,” you’re probably asking, “I know that in this current run of Hi and Lois, the Flagstons are beset by depression and anxiety, but is that true for everyone else too?” Yeah man, it is. They’re all burdened by awful knowledge they can do nothing about!