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Mary Worth, 6/19/11

“When?” we’ve all been calling out, for weeks now, as poor Drew has the living daylights stalked out of him by Liza. “When will the meddling start? When?” Well, this is where it starts: “Drew … let me see what I can do.” Think of the all the horror passing through Mary’s vast and cool and unsympathetic unsympathetic intellect during that ellipsis. Being cruel to Liza is not an option for Drew, but he’s not afraid to farm the cruelty out. He may be off to Vietnam at the end of this thing anyway, just to avoid the carnage.

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/19/11

Every Rex Morgan storyline begins with awesome supporting characters before eventually petering out into dullness, and this one is no exception. I’m already falling in love pretty hard with this bickering mother-daughter pair with bad emotional boundaries. Check out those icily arched eyebrows and model-quality cheekbones! I certainly hope that one of the promised loser boyfriends show up at an inappropriate time to the consternation of everyone, especially Rex.

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 6/19/11

Meanwhile, Sarge has been possessed by demons.

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Spider-Man, 6/18/11

Ah, yes, a character who is despised and rejected despite his super-powers shakes his fist and declares with a twisted visage that someday his tormentors will show some respect! It’s pretty much the origin story of every comic-book supervillain ever created. Are the Spider-Man newspaper comic strip people even vaguely aware of the conventions of their own genre?

Apartment 3-G, 6/18/11

Tommie’s touching reunion with her estranged (?) mother has taken place entirely off-panel, between yesterday and today’s strips. Normally I’d complain about this, but really, it’s a blessing. The only thing that could possibly be duller than a strip about Tommie is strip about Tommie and her boring mother.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/18/11

A sexy, sassy, midriff-baring goth teenager … her sexy, pissy, shoulder-baring mom … the two of them appear to be roughly the same age … looks like Rex Morgan, M.D., is on a collision course for sexy wackiness!

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Mary Worth, 5/23/11

There are a few signs that maybe you have spent too much of your life writing blog entries about the comics! One is when you get a mysterious email that says “How are you today? I see that you own the domain name: joshreads.com. I am writing to let you know that the domain name rhinospeed.com is for sale. I am contacting you to gauge possible interest in this exceptional domain name” and you think HOLY GOODNESS WHAT IS THIS ABOUT HAVE I DROPPED THROUGH THE RABBIT HOLE? but then you remember that you actually wrote a blog post about how fast a rhino can run, five years ago!

Another sign is when there’s a flashback in Mary Worth and you remember the events being flashed back to and then you think to yourself, “I don’t think this is an accurate depiction of this long-ago and hilarious episode,” and then you look it up, because of course you have this very comic, three and a half years old now, on your blog as well, like you’re running some sort of alternative to the microfiche machine down at the library (do they still have those?).

ANYWAY! Let’s pretend that flashback panel two in today’s strip isn’t just cobbled together from misty memory by the Mary Worth creative team (because that would mean that I have better recall of Mary Worth and/or better access to archives than they do, which is kind of horrifying to contemplate) but instead represents Dr. Drew’s memory of the events. If we think about it from that perspective, a side-by-side comparison becomes rather interesting!

You’ll note that Drew remembers rather precisely a number of minor details — what color shirts he and Dawn were wearing, and the colors of the coats of the horses, for instance. But there’s one quite striking difference, and that’s Drew’s face. One assumes that the earlier strip, on the right, shows how Drew would appear to an objective observer — with a rounded, boyish face — whereas the panel on the left shows his own self-image, in which he’s square-jawed and manly with impossibly sharp cheekbones. How vain we all are, in our minds!

It’s also worth nothing that, in Drew’s memory, his non-Dawn girlfriend Vera has terrifying melting nightmare eyes, but the less said about that the better.

Gil Thorp, 5/23/11

Over in Gil Thorp, the cuts to the school district’s budget are proceeding at high speed! But haven’t they already economized enough? The Chicago font on that sign indicates that it was probably printed on the district’s only computer, a Mac SE/30 purchased in 1991 or thereabouts.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/23/11

Oh, hey! Have you been wondering what’s up in Rex Morgan, M.D.? Well, what’s up is that Rex and June are apparently talking themselves into cashing in Berna’s lottery ticket and then fleeing the country.

Hi an Lois, 5/23/11

In non-soap news, today will be remembered as “the day Hi and Lois left Trixie outside to die of exposure.”

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On a more serious note, thanks to everyone who let me know about the death of Crock cartoonist Bill Rechin at age 80. I’ve been pretty savage with Crock here but he was by all accounts a really sweet guy and is a big loss to the comics community. In the grand tradition of syndicated cartooning, the strip will of course be carried on by Rechin’s son Kevin, a phenomenon that I can’t even work myself up to rage against anymore. It’ll be interesting to see what Crock 2.0 is like.