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Archive: Rex Morgan, M.D.

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There’s big profits to be had in zappin’

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Dick Tracy, 10/17/25

So Dick Tracy wrapped up the case of the lady scientist with the glowing green zap gun by merely arresting her, not shooting her in the back while she was “resisting arrest.” And this turned out to be a terrible idea, because mysterious, powerful forces, possibly related to Diet Smith’s company’s desire to own the intellectual property behind said zap gun, have gotten the charges against her dropped! Mostly I’m showing you today’s strip because I think the thumb placement in panel three is very funny. How much hush money exactly is Edgar being illegally given via an easily traceable paper check? Three million and how many dollars? I guess that’s a mystery we’re not meant to know the answer to.

Wizard of Id, 10/17/25

A thing that always bugged me as a young comics-obsessed child was that the Perfesser, not Shoe, clearly seemed like the main character in Shoe, just based on how often the two of them were in the strip, and that Les Moore, not Funky Winkerbean, was clearly the main character in Funky Winkerbean, and that the King, not the Wizard, was clearly the main character in Wizard of Id. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize how the interest of comics creators in their own various characters can wax and wane over the years, but unless you’re Snuffy Smith, it’s unlikely you’ll completely overturn the order of your reality and get your name added to the strip’s title. Still, since I’ve started reading the Wizard of Id more often lately, I feel like the Wiz is in it much more than he once was, and today it appears that he’s trying to violently ensure that his return to glory is permanent.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/17/25

“A teacher and an author? How many non-lucrative jobs can one guy have? Is he in an improv group too?”

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I think I have the genders of these things pegged correctly, but who knows, really

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Six Chix, 10/15/25

I genuinely love the open, slightly quizzical expression on the face of the bucket in this panel. He’s just a simple bucket! He doesn’t fully understand the complex emotional lives of the brooms and mops, here in this world where brooms and mops and buckets have faces and talk and go to bars. He’s interested in seeing how all this plays out, but ultimately he’s just waiting for the mop to stick herself inside him again, where she can get good and wet. Is that sexual, in this world? Well, it’s not not sexual, I’ll tell you that much.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/15/25

Speaking of sexuality, you’re probably wondering: sure, the characters in Rex Morgan, M.D., aren’t getting a bunch of money all the time like they used to, but are they having sex? Well, no, they’re not. They’re turning down sex so they can go work on tasks that, to reiterate, aren’t going to pay them very much, or possibly at all.

Alice, 10/15/25

Sorry I complained about Alice’s rogues gallery of baffling freaks, everybody! We’re now going to be subjected to new characters that are bone-crushingly boring and normal until we’ve learned our lesson.

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“Dogs are great … receivers of my thoughts” is a little unnerving, not gonna lie

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/14/25

Back in the days when Woody Wilson was writing Judge Parker and Rex Morgan, M.D., one of the running bits was that the characters would reap significant financial rewards and social prestige extremely easily, like when Alan Parker’s unreadable potboiler The Chambers Affair became an international best-seller beloved worldwide, even by murderous black-market arms merchants. But in the post-Wilson world of both strips things have been, uh, different, and now Auggie is shopping around a novel and his hopes have maxed out at getting an advance large enough to afford one (1) nice dinner for him and his girlfriend. I’m not gonna read way too much into some soap opera comic strips and say this trajectory nicely summarizes the collapse of the economic possibilities of creative work over the past decade, but … oh, who am I kidding, reading way too much into some soap opera comic strips is basically the whole shtick on this blog, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Mary Worth, 10/14/25

I know that trying to derive meaning from the bolded words in Mary Worth strips is a fool’s errand, but it is intriguing that she’s leaning on accident here. You know, Olive, the balloon accident, the event that was definitely unplanned and not at all arranged in advance as a means to test your powers to see if they could be exploited by the CIA. What have we learned from it? Uh, I mean, you, what have you learned about it, ha ha! Forget that little slip of the tongue!

Pluggers, 10/14/25

The degree to which pluggers are sedentary can honestly not be overstated.