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Archie, 6/28/11

I don’t understand the joke in today’s Archie — I guess it’s either “Fashion changes and so clothes that were once nice become less so over time” or “Dames, who can understand ’em” — but panel two is actually an excellent depiction of a young man staring into the face of madness.

Apartment 3-G, 6/28/11

“Oh, Paul, stop teasing Lu Ann — you know that on Groundhog Day I make my special Groundhog Loaf, made from ground-up groundhogs!”

Judge Parker, 6/28/11

It’s really kind of impressive to me that Judge Parker has managed to squeeze an entire day’s strip out of various bland forms of electronic communications.

Hi and Lois, 6/28/11

Lois is horrified that Hi has been talking to the kids about their sex life.

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Hi and Lois, 5/30/11

I admit to being tickled at how pleased Hi looks about … well, everything in this cartoon. Since nothing Thirsty is saying could possibly have generated such merriment, I’m forced to conclude that Hi has finally decided to “believe the hype” about his own name and gotten high as way to endure yet another day of crushing suburban ennui.

Baldo, 5/30/11

Tia Carmen apparently believes that pots are unhappy unless they’re being tortured, with fire.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/30/11

Just another night in Hootin’ Holler, where the rodent infestation is so bad that people literally can’t sleep because of the awful noise of thousands of tiny claws!

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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.