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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/25/04

OK, I can’t hold back any longer. Mrs. Hendershot is the villain in the current Rex Morgan story line, and I just love her hair. Is it really her hair? Is it a wig? Who cares? It’s so … interesting! I like how it seems to be one solid mass at the crown of her head, and then has precisely parallel lines mapped onto the curve of her skull further down, then ends in a perfect line that almost cups in a bit. Rex Morgan’s artists love interestingly stylized hair (just look at Heather’s two little droopy devil horns) but Mrs. H’s freaky ‘do just takes the cake. It makes her head look all the weirder perched at the end of her unnaturally thin neck.

I mean, do you think kids call her “Kremlin Head” behind her back? Because … well, I mean … her hair looks kind of like … those tower things on Russian churches. You know what I’m talking about. Those things.

Heh. “Kremlin Head.” That’s funny.

All right, that’s all I have to say about that.

Some grim fare in the soap opera strips these days. Margo’s tied up in the trunk of a car in Apartment 3-G, some poor college kid’s in the hospital from bad meth in Mary Worth, and now we’ve got a mean old lady whose crusty exterior is just a cover for a hateful, unhinged, child-abusing interior. She may be evil, but seeing this skinny elderly woman hauled off in shackles — as we almost certainly will — is going to be a somewhat unpleasant image for the funny papers.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/04

The avant garde-est of the soap opera strips (in terms of art, of course; surely there’s something avant garde about the recent dog vs. shark battle in Mark Trail) just keeps getting avant garde-ier. Today’s strip starts out normally and then starts getting trippy in panel two: Heather’s disembodied head smiles knowingly as it floats against an abstractly patterned background. Then in panel three, all hell breaks lose. Is it just me, or does June look deeply freaky? Her eyes have ballooned to 12-year-old-anime-girl size, and all her facial features seem pushed forward, focusing on the shiny, shiny object, while one taloned claw reaches out to snatch it. It took me a minute to figure out who she reminded me of — and then I realized that it’s another ring-loving character from fiction:

I also think she kind of looks like a parakeet, but I couldn’t find an appropriate picture by press time. Anyway, the whole thing is pretty weird. Did someone put some PCP in June’s morning coffee?

Bonus observation: in the first panel, Heather is holding her hand in that weird, contorted position typical of newly-engaged women who want to draw attention to their rings without, you know, actually mentioning them — except that it’s the wrong hand. Give her time, she’s new at this.

This week’s alarming search term: “‘Canadian Ballet’ mints”. Classy!

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Panels from: Rex Morgan, M.D., Beetle Bailey, and Blondie, 9/1/04

It’s safe to say that a substantial majority of cartoonists are men; inertia ensures that most of those men are middle aged. I know this because I can see the names on the strips and look up how long they’ve been writing them, but even if all I had to go on was the artwork, I think I could hazard a guess on the gender and age of the artists.

Let’s be blunt: cartoonists like to draw women with big tits. Today we have a bumper crop (so to speak), though it’s by no means far beyond the norm. At one end of the spectrum we have Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley (Miss Buxley! C’mon!), who’s drawn with a certain bathroom-wall crudity; there’s Blondie, who sits demurely through her dinner party, stylized, wasp-waisted, and looking like she’s going to tip over forward at any moment; and then we have Rex Morgan’s Heather, caught in photorealistic mid-jiggle, the shadow work on her mid-torso receiving almost as much attention from the artist as Rex’s chin cleft in the previous panel.

Now, I think it’s well-established that a substantial number of literary and artistic geniuses got their start by channeling frustrated sexual energy while in high school. How many great novels have been written varsity-letter quarterbacks? I’m hoping that this is the driving force behind all this buxomness, anyway, and that it isn’t all some incredibly misguided attempt by King Feature Syndicate to compete with Maxim. Heather’s nice looking and all, but I don’t think she’ll be hanging up on the wall of your local auto body shop anytime soon.