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Archive: Rex Morgan, M.D.

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Soapy Friday

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Gil Thorp, 10/9/20

The current football plot mostly focuses on the most classic form of football plot known to science: a quarterback controversy! Who will be Milford’s starting quarterback this year: Terry Rapson, or, uh, the other guy, whose name I forget? This would be a much more interesting storyline if either Terry or the other guy were interesting or if I could tell them apart, but things may be looking up, because Terry was ordered by Coach Thorp to run out the clock at the end of the last game but decided to throw some touchdowns instead, and now they’re locked in a battle of wills during which Gil plans to break Terry in mind, body, and soul. But Terry’s resisting! Keep it up, Terry, Gil will definitely get bored of this soon enough.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/9/20

Oh, man, remember when we were teased with the idea that something interesting might happen in this strip but then it was all resolved off-panel? Well, it seems we are actually being allowed to see someone try to do something interesting, though they were immediately stopped before anything interesting actually happened. I’m not sure what’s funnier: that Nancy’s parents have given up on trying to stop her COVID-spreading ways themselves and have just sent out an APB to all the local disreputable hotels, or that the photo they sent is of her trademark sneer. I certainly hope they have a big framed version of that picture hanging over the fireplace!

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Off-putting Friday

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Blondie, 10/2/20

One of Blondie’s less pleasant running bits is about how most poor people are scam artists, actually, and I feel like today’s strip started out as being a variation on that but somehow become something much, much weirder. This dude isn’t drawn as the typical long-haired scruffy Blondie panhandler; he’s just a regular guy with normal clothes, a respectable haircut, an unsettlingly piercing gaze, and a desire to engage with you about the professional upkeep on his toes. The fact that he’s actually wearing closed-toed shoes makes the whole interaction even more off-putting for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, maybe because the strip is demanding we think about this guy’s feet but isn’t showing them to us so we need to use our imaginations.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/2/20

Well, it seems what “does it” for Buck and Mindy, sexually, is when things more or less work out for the best without anyone having to really do all that much, so I have some good news for them about the comic strip they currently inhabit.

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Josh ragin’ out on the weekend!

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Dustin, 9/26/20

You know, for a brief, shining moment, I assumed the joke here was that “tuna” just means “fish” in its language of origin, and I thought to myself that “Hey, the few seconds I spent thinking about Dustin today won’t be wasted, for once, because I’ve learned something,” but nope, it turns out the word tuna ultimately derives from the Greek thynnos, which means, well, tuna. So “tuna fish” may be repetitive in that you’re naming a thing and then the larger category of thing that the thing belongs to, but it’s repetitive in an entirely different way than when you name a team after a city, but do so by translating the city’s name into English. And let’s not even get into how the team was for decades called the California Angels, which was actually a fairly clever way to nod to L.A. while claiming territory all over the state after they moved to Orange County, and only recently changed to Los Angeles Angels and it was a whole big controversy! Anyway, the big news is that I got so mad about this that I wasted a lot more than a few seconds thinking about Dustin today.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/26/20

Man, who could forget the Glenwood Motel, the depressing place where Truck was forced to quarantine in isolation for days because he was suffering from a persistent respiratory illness? Normally you’d say this experience was a terrible theme for a song, but occasionally, an artist stumbles into his perfect historical moment.