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Rex Morgan, M.D, 11/29/24

Oh, hey, it turns out that Rex’s cranky old patient is Merle Lewton, who we met a few years ago after he got scammed by Miss Galexia, the Rene Beluso-backed new age healer. Merle’s current complaints are more down to Earth, mostly consisting of him being tired and in pain all the time, and Rex’s advice was “I dunno, try going for a walk instead of sitting on the couch and watching TV all day?” Merle tried to “beat the system” by getting a treadmill so he could go for a walk and watch TV all day, but that was nixed by his wife who claimed treadmills were “expensive” and “ugly”; she assigned him dog-walking duties instead. But now — whoops! — it turns out that taking your dog for a walk is just an open invitation to harassment by local punks, thugs, and ruffians. The lesson here: don’t listen to your killjoy wife and snooty doctor! Leaving the house is not worth the trouble!

Beetle Bailey, 11/29/24

What I love most about the Beetle Bailey strips that look at the Halftracks’ awful marriage are Mrs. Halftrack’s facial expressions. She always looks either furiously angry or crushingly depressed. They’re not doing a bit! Their married life really is a constant punishment, especially for her!

The Phantom, 11/29/24

Speaking of punishment, there’s a new Phantom plot getting started, and Diana, on a work trip in London, appears to have by chance met a guy who was once involved in some kind of BDSM relationship with her husband. We’re probably not supposed to imagine him talking like Austin Powers in that last word balloon, but I’m doing it anyway.

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Crock and The Phantom, 10/21/24

One of my longest-running bits on this blog is pointing out strips where the colorists have very clearly not read the comic before doing their work on it. I feel like this doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen, like in this Crock, where that “golden” shovel is glowing and yet is still clearly made of wood and steel.

I assume that this happens in part because the strips aren’t sent to the colorists with any explicit instructions on what colors should go where. That’s an even bigger problem in cases where the color is important but you can’t necessary get it from context. Like, is this being emerging from the Avarice rover in today’s Phantom, who bears an uncanny similarity to Elon Musk, supposed to be Ian Mollusk himself? Or is it a robot that looks like Ian Mollusk, one made in the mad annoying inventor’s image, and therefore the human-like flesh coloring he’s been given is actually in error?

Bizarro, 10/21/24

A quick recap of some Josh Deep Lore: did I get a college degree in classics, and then get a subsequent master’s degree as part of an abortive attempt to become an historian of ancient Rome? Yes! Was this a mistake? It was! Do I regret having done it? Sometimes! Did they even cover Greek mythology in my coursework? Not really! Nevertheless, I feel qualified to say that this panel has the Medusa thing all wrong. This dumb hippie should be turned to stone! He’s looking right at her! She turns people to stone because she’s so hideous looking; it’s not a superpower she can just turn and off. Are you telling me that this won’t work on hippies, because they reject society’s rules about who’s beautiful and who’s ugly, or because they’re very, very high?

Zits, 10/21/24

A thing about getting old is that you do get to see mores change, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, but it always creates a little mental dissonance. For instance, a Zits anthology published a full five years after I started doing this blog noted that the comic got pushback from the syndicate whenever it used the word “sucks” in dialogue. And now here it is using the word “horny,” in front of God and everybody! Hopefully I don’t sound like an “old fuddy duddy,” but I think everyone involved in creating a Zits strip with the word “horny” in it should go to prison.

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The Phantom, 10/16/24

The Avarice AI’s suicide attempt was actually a murder-suicide attempt, but it failed in both respects ignominiously, so now the poor robot has to sit there and listen to further lecturing from the Ghost Who Lectures, this time about how its declaration yesterday that it was “the unified sovereign of this planetary body” was wrong, since it thinks it’s on the moon, since the moon isn’t a planet. Far be it for me to chastise a guy for pausing his violent battle against a novel machine intelligence in order to smugly establish that he’s technically correct, the best kind of correct, but if you do that, you have to actually be technically correct, and I regret to report that the big purple guy is, in this case, not. In astronomy, a “planetary body” is an alternate term for a planetary mass object, which is defined as any body large enough to achieve achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (to hold together as a sphere or something close to it, in other words), but not large enough to sustain fusion like a star would. Plenty of objects in our solar system meet this definition, including a whole suite of natural satellites, of which our moon is one. So the score is now Avarice 1, The Phantom … well, several higher than 1, and we know he’s going to win eventually, but we gotta give this robot this one, it deserves it.

Gasoline Alley, 10/16/24

Ida Noe the evil magic doll has already tried to kill these children once, by taking them back in time to the horrors of the Civil War, but has now realized that it would be much more efficient to simply transport them beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will quickly asphyxiate.