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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/22/22

Oh ho. Oh ho ho. It’s a new week and a new storyline in Rex Morgan, M.D., and the game, as they say, is afoot! Buck’s about to be tasked with taking care of both an old man and a child, at the same time! What crises will arise that will force Buck to juggle these unexpected responsibilities? Will he fuck it up, somehow? You know it! It’s Buck, he’s very annoying and incompetent. Will this result in life threatening danger to the baby and/or old man? Probably not, because this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where all the stakes are very low. Will the old man and the baby look at each other and wordlessly acknowledge “You’re not so different, you and I, in the sense that we apparently need this schmo to take care of us”? Let’s hope! Might be the most we can ask out of this!

Crock, 8/22/22

Gotta admire the level of not giving a shit on display on today’s Crock. Sure, you could have this plumber working inside the fort, where all the plumbing would be. But seems like it’d involve drawing some backgrounds that aren’t the featureless Sahara Desert. What if there were just some pipe hovering in mid-air? Is that something a plumber could fix? Sure, why not, whatever. Oh, also he’s a rocket scientist or something, I guess.

Mary Worth, 8/22/22

Not sure what time of day/what alien planet is denoted by the pastel clouds and inky black sky in panel one, but I’d like to believe that Dawn chose to call Jared in the middle of the night, hoping to go straight to voice mail, unaware that he’s sleeping with his phone under his pillow in anticipation of exactly this scenario. Anyway, based on her dead eyes and the fact that she sounds like she’s reading a press release, I’m assuming Mary is just off panel, with cue cards, or a gun, or both.

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Mary Worth, 8/18/22

Oh, man, Mary is truly, truly cruel, because after having a brief cafeteria talk with Jared, she’s decided she’s going to force Dawn to give Jared what he wants: namely, to be friends with him, even though he dumped her for a woman he inappropriately connected with in a caregiver-patient context, and also she never really liked him that much in the first place. Would your father be emotionally big enough to maintain a friendly relationship with an ex, Dawn? I mean, kind of, I guess? He hangs out with Iris socially, sometimes? They even went on a double date once? He’s pals with her boyfriend? How much better of a person do you expect Dawn to be here, Mary?

Family Circus, 8/18/22

Loving the look PJ is giving us here. “Folks, why don’t we let the liberal eggheads argue about these so-called other countries — who can even keep track of which ones there are or what specific communist perversions they support? Me, I’m sticking with one country — the good ol’ US of A — the only one I have to know anything about.”

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Family Circus, 8/17/22

The Keanes have been on vacation in New York City for a couple weeks now, in a series of panels that are actually reruns from decades ago; Don McHoull on Twitter pointed out that the Twin Towers were replaced by the modern-day Freedom Tower in last Friday’s episode, which was a surprise to me because I had been assuming that the originals were from before the Twin Towers were built in the first place in 1972. Very little else has been done to modernize the strips; today’s, for instance, reminds us of an era when telling the world that your restaurant was AIR CONDITIONED was a solid way to differentiate yourself from your competition. Sadly, I initially misread the awning sign as AIR CONDITIONERS, and got irrationally angry at Billy (it doesn’t take much) and was about to write a whole screed here on the theme of “You little shit, you think you’re gonna order a HAMBURGER at an APPLIANCE STORE???” His actual transgressions is a bit more normal than that so I’ll leave it be.

Pluggers, 8/17/22

I feel very protective of the idea that pluggerdom represents a specific cultural and socioeconomic position, but here we have yet another canonical Pluggers panel taunting me with the fact that sometimes the whole gimmick is just “all-number calling was rolled out nationwide by the early 1960s, so you’re a plugger if you’re older than about 63.” Why this particular take on the plugger mythos is accompanied by a particularly pissed-off bear in overalls holding up a sign the size of a license plate that doesn’t have enough digits on it to be an actual phone number is not clear to me, but I guess Pluggers knows its business.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/17/22

I am a middle-aged married man without children and so it goes without saying that I am very out of touch with what the kids today are up to, but I am given to understand they will often say they’re “talking” to someone as a euphemism for the early stages of romance, which can run the gamut from flirting in DMs to having actual sex but not yet defining their relationship or committing to monogamy. I guess the son half of this father-son duo, who appears to be 5-10 years older than I am and is therefore one of the younger characters in Rex Morgan, M.D., is at that stage in the process of wooing a nice lady he met at a funeral, but is showing his maturity by referring to it as “chatting.” Anyway, he’s gonna leave his dad alone to go get laid! Hopefully the old guy isn’t gonna drop dead while he’s gone, that would make the whole thing pretty awkward.

Mary Worth, 8/17/22

“Oh, yeah, your dad? Your terrible, terrible dad? I’ve been watching you turn into him for years, honey, but I wasn’t gonna say anything until you came crawling to me begging for help.” Truly Mary must completely break down her victims in order to build them back up in her image.