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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/24/19

Hey, occasional Rex Morgan readers! Remember Edward, the cruel bully who pulled an “Emperor’s New Clothes” on Sarah’s art, but then Sarah raised up a rebellion against him, and then later Sarah got amnesia and then Edward became nice and protected Sarah, after she had to go to a public school? Well, I guess we’re back to another story about how bullying is bad, and also how the only thing that can stop a bad bully is a good bully, a good, huge bully who can just beat the ever-loving crap out of the bad bully, for justice.

Hi and Lois, 4/24/19

Gotta love how depressed Hi looks in this strip! At first you might think that it’s because Trixie doesn’t appreciate all the hard work he’s done to clean the windows and just foolishly attributes the stronger light coming into the house to “sun vitamins.” But of course, in-universe, the other Flagstons can’t “hear” or otherwise perceive the dialogue in Trixie’s thought balloons, because otherwise they’d know that they have a baby capable of fully adult cognition and they’d probably be much more freaked out. No, Hi is just depressed because chores suck and he doesn’t want to do them.

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Dick Tracy, 4/22/19

A quirk of the newspaper industry is that, traditionally, many people have subscribed only to the Sunday paper, which was much larger than the other days’ editions, and, conversely, some people subscribed to every day but Sunday. You can see the effect of this in how the continuity strips deal with Sundays. Most structure things so that Sunday sums up the previous week’s action, accommodating both Sunday-only and no-Sunday audiences while boring the rest of us. The Phantom famously has an entirely separate storyline that runs on Sundays; Gil Thorp doesn’t bother running on Sundays at all.

Then there’s Dick Tracy, which treats Sunday as just another day of the week, man. This is hilarious to me this week because I’m imagining how anyone who didn’t see yesterday’s shootout would parse this conversation, which sounds to me a lot like Dick and Joe acknowledging, without coming right out and saying, that Tracy killed an unarmed man and then planted a gun on him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/22/19

I immediately and 100% believe that not only did Rex tell Sarah that ice cream trucks are “music trucks,” but that he also told her that they were the only legal way to listen to music of any sort. It’s great, how the music trucks will drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, bringing their songs with them! The rest of the time we get to enjoy a little peace and quiet around here.

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/4/19

This won’t be the first time I’ve dwelled on this, but I do think it’s funny how certain objects have just sort of become an archetype for “things that dogs pee on,” like fire hydrants or trees. Dogs will, for the record, pee pretty much anywhere, but they do like a vertical thing where other dogs can sniff, I guess, so trees are more likely that not what you’re likely to see your dog peeing on when you take them for a walk. My point is that today’s Mother Goose and Grimm only works because we have an iconographic context for it: we get that the joke is that “dogs pee on trees, the air freshener looks like a tree, it’s funny because Grimm has mistaken this symbol for the physical object it emulates.” But imagine someone who for whatever cultural reasons wouldn’t be able to make those connections! To them, this is just a comic panel about a dog threatening to piss all over the inside of a car, while his owner begs him not to.

Crankshaft, 4/4/19

In yesterday’s Crankshaft, Crankshaft asked the stewardess for a Coke and she asked if Pepsi were OK and he said “No” and that was the whole strip! Today he just keeps hitting the “call attendant” light and irritating the stewardess for no reason. I know that usually “Crankshaft is an asshole” is the subtext to every Crankshaft punchline, but I guess they’ve decided to make it the text this week? And it’s only Thursday, so buckle up!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/4/19

Sure, Rex was in a plane that almost crashed, but the irritating person he encountered in the process got arrested and slagged on by his own twin brother, and also Rex was showered with praise and free stuff for doing really the bare minimum of keeping an eye on a kid who quite frankly wasn’t showing any inclination to wander off or anything. Honestly the only substantive inconvenience he encountered through this whole ordeal was that he had to leave his bag behind on the plane, and, well, good news, everybody!