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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/18

Those of you who are longtime OG Joshreads dot com trufans remember how in the early days of this blog we had a great deal of fun with the Canadian soap opera-ish comic strip For Better or for Worse, and one of the days we had the most fun with it was January 26, 2005, when the strip came up with an inexplicable and hilarious series of words a Canadian tween might use to denigrate a classmate for her promiscuity, the most absurd of which was “roadside.” What I’m trying to say is, the two Hanks have been doing their tour of roadside attractions for weeks, and now Hank Sr. has finally encountered a “roadside” “attraction” in the form of Millie Gray! Sorry, Lefty Gillis, your gal’s about to be swept off her feet by her first love, a big shot horror comics artist who has an RV and everything! Sorry, Hank Jr., you’re gonna have to find a non-RV place to sleep tonight! If this RV is rockin’, it’s a sign that it’s a little unbalanced, so don’t come a knockin’, as it could tip right over!

Mary Worth, 6/24/18

Brandy: A woman haunted by a vague, intrusive fantasy that she’s desperately fleeing from the faceless adversaries trying to track her down and kill her, a woman comforted by the white noise of crashing waves on the beach. Is she the perfect match for a ex-con pill fiend who was wildly incompetent at every aspect of being a drug dealer? Looks like we’re going to find out!

Mark Trail, 6/24/18

Mark Trail wouldn’t be my first guess as to which soap opera strip character would show up with a cherry-picked anecdote to explain that, sure, spicy foods from weird foreign countries are becoming increasingly popular, but they’re probably detrimental to the health of God-fearing Americans and we should stick the flavorless boiled meat dishes our Anglo-Saxon ancestors enjoyed, but, you know what? It’s definitely not a surprise or anything.

Dennis the Menace, 6/24/18

Summoning a pack of neighborhood dogs of all shapes and sizes to do his bidding? Pretty menacing, I would say!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/24/18

“Prototypical persons with NPD present with many interpersonal problems and comorbid disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder, with consequent increases in risk of suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, and eating disorders” is a sentence from the Psychiatric Times that I’m just going to leave here for no reason!

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Dick Tracy, 6/10/18

Ha ha, I guess this is why they call him “Sawtooth”: if you try to make small talk with him during the 46-hour train ride from California to Chicago, he’ll bite your head off! Metaphorically. And maybe literally, later. 46 hours is a long time. And that’s the scheduled travel time. Those long-haul Amtrak routes often run very late. Lotta opportunities for, say, a guy with metal teeth to bite another guy’s head off, is what I’m saying. He’d have some soothing quiet then, by God. Except for all the horrified screaming, I guess.

Mary Worth, 6/10/18

Remember, Mary is of a certain age, so she uses euphemisms like “seeing someone at the Medical Arts Building” to mean psychotherapy and “exciting personal life” to mean “non-stop fuckfest with a hot rich dude her son’s age, to which I have given my blessing.”

Spider-Man, 6/10/18

Boy, there’s a lot of musing about hospital administrators padding out this comic before we get to the best: the NEXT: box that boldly uses the completely horrifying phrase “spider of flesh!” Imagine if you will a spider not covered in chitin like the ones you know, but rather just composed entirely of flesh. Just a spider-shaped flesh-chunk, no organs or anything like that, but somehow alive, and moving. Pretty awful, right? Sure would want a fist made of iron to come along and pound it into oblivion!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/10/18

“…with a bigger budget than most, of course. So, in other words, I’m not like a regular mom at all! I’m rich as shit!”

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Shoe, 6/3/18

This is, I think, is my favorite Shoe Patented Goggle Eyes Of Horror yet. I’m not sure if the Dates R Us lady is supposed to be an employee, in which case she’s worried about getting fired, or if she’s the owner of this small business, in which case she may be realizing that she’s completely unqualified for her chosen field of endeavor, but either way she just seems genuinely appalled that she’s botched things this badly, possibly because she’s ignorant of the meaning of extremely common English phrases.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/3/18

The restaurant industry? Notoriously forgiving to first-timers. The main qualifications you need? Thinking about running a restaurant a lot, and being good at cooking for you and your girlfriend. The main endorsement you want to get? A wealthy nanny who also owns an aerospace company. This scheme can’t fail!