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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/5/08

In Rex Morgan, M.D., clueless yuppies Rex and June Morgan wait in lines, drive in circles, play golf and natter on about ice cream. Meanwhile, all the interesting people they meet in their pointless existence get shot, kidnapped, lost at sea or incinerated, to the reader’s great loss. Sufferin’ Lee here will soon join their ranks — the only suspense is the nature of his demise. But before he goes, I want to thank him for proving that Rex Morgan, M.D. will practice medicine, although only when threatened at gunpoint.

Judge Parker, 2/5/08

What appears to be a modest flirtation between Hero Steve and “Get Me a Sandwich” Fake Law Partner Gloria thinly masks Gloria’s desperate search for a surgeon to correct her failing eyesight. If she doesn’t get those lids up soon, it’ll be the blind leading the lame all the way to the bus stop.

Apartment 3G, 2/5/08

OK, this has nothing to do with medicine, except that Alan’s gonna need some if he keeps up this guff. Great to see Margo back on her game after her brief dark night of the soul. And while it’s common for Apartment 3G to introduce a guy who looks like every other guy in this strip, this is the first mop that looks like every other guy in the strip.

P.S. In case you missed this post by faithful reader name (yes, that’s right), the Sunday Toronto Star carried this thoughtful article about both comic strip mockery and why tired strips survive. The article quotes Josh, and offers links to This Week in Milford, Reynard Noir, and several other local favorites. Worth a look!

Uncle Lumpy

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Gil Thorp, 1/29/07

I dare you to try to explain panel two of today’s Gil Thorp without using the words “physically impossible,” “insanity,” or “mescaline.” I dare you. I’m not a big expert on basketball or anything, but I’m pretty sure that “setting a screen” does not entail lunging at the dude with the ball and attempting to karate-chop him so that the ball goes flying up into the air and then bounces off of the featureless void in which you find yourself floating. Seriously, if I were the A-Train, I’d steer well clear of that whole scene too.

Panel three may look like an instance Coach Gil’s magnificent wrath, but in fact he just has to appear to care about his teams for the first few weeks of each season so that he doesn’t get fired. Don’t worry, by the time the playdowns roll around, he’ll have retreated to the bleachers, more than willing to let some hobo offer incomprehensible advice about pick and rolls or whatever.

Six Chix, 1/29/08

Hats off to one-sixth of Six Chix for sharing one of my pet peeves. To expand on this complaint, I offer this piece of advice to expectant parents: In all probability, your child upon birth will already have a perfectly good last name. Why saddle him or her with a second one where the first name should be? Especially to be avoided are last names of former U.S. presidents (e.g., “Carter,” “Madison”) or Canadian prime ministers (e.g., “Mackenzie” and variants).

I note actually that the Chic (Chik?) responsible for today’s Six Chix is in fact Margaret Shulock, who also writes Apartment 3-G. Perhaps this is why, for all their other faults, the bland lookalike love interests of that strip at least don’t suffer from the terrible last-name-as-first-name affliction. Though if Lu Ann’s cousin Blaze is any indication, our quizzical bespectacled lady might be about to say, “If it’s a boy, why not name him after a famous lady stripper instead?”

Shoe, 1/29/08

Who is “Charlie Crone”? Why is January 29th his “day”? Why does Shoe alone among all media outlets dare to commemorate whatever he did or whoever he is? Is he still alive, and if so does he appreciate his name floating aimlessly over a sofa from which a bird-man tells a terrible iPhone joke (like there’s any other kind) to his miniskirted bird-lady therapist? Google has no answers to any of these questions, but perhaps you, my faithful readers, do!

Momma, 1/29/08

Look, I’d like to believe that I’m emotionally capable of dealing with Momma cartoons that allude to the title character’s sex life, but as it turns out, I’m not, so let’s not publish any more of them, OK? It would help, obviously, if there were some kind of joke in the strip, since that would keep our minds from otherwise orbiting helplessly around the words “emptiness,” “fill,” and “stuff.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/29/08

Fortunately, I long ago learned to emotionally deal with cartoons that allude to Niki’s sex life — fortunately because I imagine we’re going to keep on seeing them.

Pluggers, 1/29/08

Wow, it’s yet another Pluggers conceptual repeat, this one harkening back to one of my favorites of all time. So, does it turn out that “a classic” means that this is a new submission of an old idea but we’re redrawing it?

I actually spent a little bit of brainpower this afternoon trying to decide which of the two pawn-shop themed Pluggers was grimmer. On the one hand, in the one from July of ’06, you get a better look at the bankrupt man-beast’s face and can see how depressed he is. On the other, in that older panel Rhino-Man is hocking his tiny TV, which, let’s face it, is a perhaps nothing more than an agent of his couch potato-ization; perhaps having to give it up will inspire him to get out of the living room and take chances in life! Bear-Man’s saxophone, on the other hand, probably represents his only creative outlet, or maybe his long-ago dreams of being something more than a plugger, and now he’s realized that those feelings are for people with self-worth, not for him. So I’m going to have to give today’s panel the win.

Oh oh, wait — what if that’s Bear-Man’s kid’s saxophone? And he’s thinking “Now I’ll be able to afford my next payment on our TV, and I won’t have to listen to that racket!” Bonus points!

Unrelated to any of these but awesome: A few threads back, faithful reader ChattyGenes posted a funny Annie song spoof, which faithful reader mollificent then recorded and posted to YouTube! Hilarious and excellent all around! (Note that the YouTube “video” is really audio only.)

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Pluggers and Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/25/08

Oh poor little plugger! Oh poor little Niki! You both think that you’ve just gotten off the hook, but the truth is that you’ve been hooked, and now you’re being reeled in. Once someone in authority over you has that secret, they can hold it over your head at any time, and you can’t even imagine what you’ll end up doing to make sure that secret stays secret. In the plugger-spawn’s case, it’s probably relatively innocent stuff, like keeping the South Dakota state troopers none the wiser about Grandma’s illegal oxycontin distribution ring — “Now, your dad doesn’t need to know about all those people ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night, just like he doesn’t need to know about the lamp, right? Here, this grubby, wadded-up $20 bill will help you remember that.”

In Niki’s case, us filthy minded people are of course thinking of scenarios that are much more sordid, but more realistically I worry that the character is going to have pay for his transgression somehow. His initial crime against June was redeemed by his decision to go on the straight (ha ha) and narrow with Rex, but this — will he in the not so distant future have to take a bullet for his Big? Will he die for his own sins? Will he be all moodily lit as he is in this strip when it happens? Will Rex allow himself a guarded moment, remarking only that “there was something about him” before moving on?

Family Circus, 1/25/08

This comic is disturbing. As I think I’ve noted, I’m fully in favor of Keane-on-Keane violence, so I’m not put off by the notion of Jeffy waiting outside his pre-verbal little brother’s room, waiting to pulverize him with his new boxing gloves. No, it’s the gloves themselves that bother me; their weird potato-like lumpiness and dirt-brown color make me wonder if they actually aren’t boxing gloves at all, but rather burlap sacks Jeffy’s parents have thrown over his elephantiasis-stricken hands in lieu of actually taking him to some kind of expensive big-city doctor. And even in that case I’m not so much disturbed by the thought of Jeffy suffering from painful, swollen fingers as I am by the knowledge that eventually the sacks will fall off and I’ll actually have to see them.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/25/08

I’ve remarked that Shoe sometimes seems to forget that it’s a strip about anthropomorphized birds; somewhat less often, Snuffy Smith seems to forget it’s a strip about hillbillies. I mean, I can understand why it forgets — if I had to churn out a horribly dated and vaguely offensive hillbilly joke every single day of my life, I’d probably develop a meth habit out of some combination of class solidarity, irony, self-loathing, and spite — but trying to glom it onto the traditional cartoonist “doctors sure love golf” joke, as in today’s strip, can produce baffling results. The attempt to render some kind of yokel golf attire for the doctor is bad enough, but why on earth are the ailin’ folks all standing around with their eyes closed? Is that supposed to be their angry face Are they afraid of being blinded with a golf ball? What?

Apartment 3-G, 1/25/08

Wow, so this has taken a turn for the significantly less sexy than I had hoped. Not that I couldn’t say that about every Apartment 3-G plotline ever, but still.

The backstory on Margo and her mother (and apologies to those who know this, but it’s the one sort of important bit of A3G lore that the strip just sort of assumes you know rather than hammering you over the head with the details over and over again) is that Margo’s dad was wealthy and married, and he knocked up his maid Gabriella and made her give up the resulting bastard spawn (our girl Margo) which he and his wife raised as their own. (I have to admit that I don’t know if said maid continued in the Magee family employ or not while Margo was a tyke.) Margo only found out about this as an adult, whereupon she cut off relations with her dad and the woman she had always thought of as her mother; however, she and Gabriella don’t have a really normal mother-daughter relationship for any number of obvious reasons, including Margo’s total inability to feel, and Margo traditionally just calls her Gabriella. I’m not sure why the temporary departure of her kind of dickish boyfriend has caused her to collapse into her mother’s arms while the trauma from her kidnapping and forcible enslavement was washed away by a nice hot bath. But I do know that if Gabriella has been praying to the Blessed Virgin to put Margo through something so painful that she calls her mother “mama”, she won’t be up for Secret Biological Mother Of The Year honors anytime soon.