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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/19/06

For once, I’m not going to use a discussion of Rex Morgan, M.D., to impugn the title character’s heterosexuality. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the good doctor’s facial expression in the second panel of the second row. Have we ever seen Rex look more melancholy than he does at that moment? The ellipsis between “about” and “universal” seems to speak volumes. What’s going on behind those troubled, blandly handsome features? Is he thinking of a better world, where medical costs are controlled by social contract and doctors can pursue their calling without worrying about the profit motive? Is he thinking of all the patients who get inadequate care because they aren’t fully insured? Uninsured patients like a certain sexy blond archaeologist … who needed help with his hand, and then his head … and then his heart … and who just left like he was never there, unmarked except for the terrible emptiness he left in Rex’s innermost soul …

Oh, wait, I said I wasn’t going to talk about this, didn’t I? Sorry about that.

I’m beginning to wonder if Dr. Troy is less medical socialist and more golf shark. After all, Rex was wiping up the links with him until he dropped the UHI-bomb, which got Rex all agitated — as it would any doctor, no matter what his stance on it. I would have started with malpractice insurance premiums and not gotten to wholesale reform of the medical profession until the back nine, but that’s just me.

Dr. Troy appears to be the master of psychological warfare, actually. All he had to do was say “tree line” and he gave Rex (in panel two) a case of the shakes as bad as a poker junkie desperate for his next fix.

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Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 3/17/06

Again, due to relentless pressure from my readers, I have begun reading twin strips, Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, years after my last acquaintance with them. I have fond memories of FW from my youth, having been a dorky band dork, though I was perhaps too far removed from the marketeer-coveted cranky-old-guy demographic to care much for Crankshaft. As promised, both strips seem to have been transformed into well-drawn but plodding quasi-soaps at some point in the course of my young adulthood.

I’m featuring Crankshaft today, which takes place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for two reasons:

• It makes a totally-not-subtle joke about cocaine.
• It makes a totally-not-subtle joke about cocaine and it’s funny.

This Funky Winkerbean, by contrast, seems to me to exemplify all that’s wrong with the retooled strip. I used to love the FW episodes about the megalomaniacal band teacher and his Glengarry Glen Ross-level mania for selling band fundraising trinkets. It was way, way over the top, as was everyone else’s terrified reaction to it. But here in the new, hyperrealistic Funky Winkerbean, blond boy’s busy selling to an gender-indeterminate mark who’s possibly the most depressed person in the history of the comics, including Charlie Brown. He (let’s call him a he, what the heck) looks like this unwanted intrusion is the final push he needs to download those painless-suicide-by-carbon-monoxide instructions from the Internet. Hopefully he’ll buy some candy first.

Meanwhile, Dr. Troy has finally outed himself … as a Canada-loving commie!

“You know what I’m for, Troy? Freedom! Freedom and anal sex. Now shut up and let’s ‘play golf.'”

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Mary Worth, 3/15/06

So, presumably because of outraged letters from portly advice columnists everywhere, Mary Worth has jettisoned its Wilbur-gets-sued storyline like so much ballast from a bald-headed hot air balloon. This week we’ve gotten a new saga starting up, with trophy wife Toby Cameron making awkward attempts to befriend Charterstone’s resident meddler. What with her husband being roughly Mary’s age, you’d think that she’d know how to talk politely to old people. Instead, she not only refers to Mary as being of “a certain age,” but condescendingly pledges not to “outwalk” her on her young, sexy, coltish legs. Maybe those “passive-aggressive hostility quotes” fly right over the head of your blowhard chinbeard of a husband, Toby, but Mary Worth does not miss a trick. See that weird hand gesture she’s making in the second panel? She’s about to grab you by the ear and drag your skinny blonde ass out the door.

Meanwhile, over in Rex Morgan, Dr. Troy McHomosexual finally makes his move:

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/15/06

Can you imagine how dissapointed Rex is going to be? The only reason he went out on this damn jaunt was to get some action, but I think he’s about to get an Amway pitch instead.

Oh, one more thing: Some readers might think that I’ve hemmed myself in a bit by focusing my blog on just the comics. Heck, sometimes I feel restricted myself. But I honestly believe that the best blogs — both the best ones to read and the most rewarding ones to write — are the ones where there is a single thread that holds things together. With that in mind, I give you a comics blog I discovered today with much more of a laser-beam focus than I could ever hope to provide:

The Silent Penultimate Panel Watch

SPPW: We salute your extreme specificity.