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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/13/05

I think we need to go a little easier on no-bucks Buck the grad student and his Arafat-esque perpetual stubble. In this sequence, we can see that, in addition to some antibiotics for his filthy wound, June has apparently lent Buck one of her husband’s razors: his face in panel one is so smooth that he looks like a teenage girl headed for her first Pat Benetar concert, circa 1983. Yet mere moments later, those baby-butt-smooth cheeks look more like the saggy tuckus of your fiftysomething Uncle Larry, which is to say: covered with hair. Clearly he’s got some sort of glandular condition and doesn’t deserve our constant mockery.

On the other hand, he could very easily push those stray hairs out of his face. I can only guess that he’s hoping that they’ll drive Mrs. Dr. M. crazy and that she’ll eventually gently move them aside for him … their touch will be electric and she’ll suddenly been overwhelmed by the feelings of loneliness, the aching, the longing … fortunately for all concerned, Fence Post Frank is there to chaperone. Unless he’s busy burying little what’s-her-face, who we haven’t seen in quite a while, in the backyard with all the other skeletons.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/9/05

I love the look on Buck’s face in panel three. It says, “Hmph! This gap-toothed proletarian and I may be similarly unkempt, but my wise and devilishly handsome eyes gaze upon Mrs. Morgan with only the utmost respect for her as a strong, educated, skilled career woman! Whereas this boorish oaf cares only for her sexy ’80s hairdo and prodigious bustline! He probably couldn’t even remember his name if it weren’t stitched onto his chapeau, let alone intelligently discuss contemporary scholarship about Mayan ruler cults!” He may also be amusing himself by thinking up his own rhymes, possibly involving the word “yank,” as a riposte to our fence-man’s little couplet.

Don’t be too smug, though, Buck: Frank probably has health insurance. But maybe not dental insurance, from the looks of things.

What is it about the common people and their ability to get under the skin of middle-class career women? My parents had a roofer who worked on their house for a while who always called my stepmother “mother,” something she found both creepy and annoying (whereas my father and I found it both creepy and amusing.)

Update: Due to overwhelming demand, I’ve added a new product to the Comics Curmudgeon store. You too can look like one of the “common people” (as I so insensitively put it) — but at non-common-people prices!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/2/05

So I pretty much lost interest in this Rex Morgan storyline when it became less about human remains and sexual innuendo and more about this mysterious homeless guy living just off the Morgans’ property and June’s endless treks back and forth between the kitchen and the yard. But the epiphany in this strip hit me like something very heavy dropped from a great height. The filthy, shabby, unfashionable clothes … the six-day growth of beard … the pus-encrusted, self-tended wound … the prickly and evasive attitude … of course he’s a graduate student! Sadly, this is something that those who have never been there probably can’t appreciate, like the time that I found out that our neighborhood’s letter-to-the-editor-writing, quixotical-city-council-campaign-waging, neighborhood-meeting-attending-and-blathering-on-and-on-through crank was, like me, a copy editor. But I spent so much of my early 20s BS-ing my way through grant applications, convinced that their rejection would leave me homeless and destitute, that I feel just a little bit vindicated by this strip.