Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/07

More often than not, when I mention to people that I’m a fan of Rex Morgan, M.D., and similar strips, it completely boggles their mind. “But how can you force yourself to read that boring crap day after day?” is generally the sort of thing they ask me. Days like today are the payoffs that keep me going. Sure, the final panel, with Rex going into such paroxysms of shock and horror that his face is about to collapse in on itself, would be hilarious even without context, but you really need to backstory to appreciate all the other psychodrama going on here — everyone’s sneering at Rex’s mothball-scented bid to match his father’s rugged outdoorsmanship, and Niki blowing the whole thing to bits with his city-kid need for creature comforts.

In a conventional narrative, Rex and Niki’s initial antagonism on the trip would eventually soften into mutual compromise — Rex would wow Niki with his fly-casting skills, and Niki would teach Rex hip youth-culture lingo like “radical” and “extreme”; and maybe Niki would help Rex understand why the good doctr needs his dead father’s approval so badly, and that a situation where one is waist-deep in water and short on food isn’t necessarily a Katrina survivor’s idea of fun. But this is Rex Morgan, M.D., a strip whose hero never even tries to grow as a person or engage in a single moment of self-reflection. Niki will be made to hate fishing every bit as much as young Rex did, only to try to force it on his own son years later for reasons he can only dimly grasp. Thank God Sarah Morgan was born a girl, and is thus forever safe from Rex’s relentless Pygmalionesque schemes.

Mary Worth, 10/7/07

And sometimes the hoary old soaps can deliver perfect moments of emo pathos. I have to admit that, while the grinding gears of Mary Worth plot changes are generally audible from miles away, I’m not sure whether this is meant to be a capstone on l’affaire Drew or a setup for more heartstring-pulling to come. Either way, though, I’m going to enjoy imagining these roses sitting on Dawn’s dresser, withering more and more each day, but staying in their vase until they’re reduced to a skeletal mess, and Dawn seeming to draw more and more strength from their death until she’s more powerful than Drew could possibly imagine.

One Big Happy, 10/7/07

Ha ha, this is some of the most dick-tastic dad action in the funnies since — well, since Rex Morgan. One could argue that the point of a school-assigned spelling lists is to teach children how to spell, not how to memorize arbitrary lists of words just long enough to pass a test, and that we should be impressed that Joe has actually managed to get his little pea brain around the concept of homonyms. But then we wouldn’t have gotten to see Joe squirm about in his usual learning-avoiding contortions. Dad’s shown himself to be more of a math guy, anyway.

Spider-Man, 10/7/07

This strip is notable solely for panel five, which contains a passable likeness of Leonardo DiCaprio that apparently absorbed all of the artist’s celebrity-drawing abilities, as nobody else at this “Hollywood costume party” is even remotely recognizable as someone famous. But while I’m here, I might as well point out that this is yet another example of the most irritating weapon in Spider-Man’s narrative arsenal: the dilemma that solves itself in a day or two with no intervention from the protagonist whatsoever (see here for a particularly egregious example from a couple of years ago). In this light, it’s probably impossible to believe that the typically dramatic NEXT! box will live up to its promise. “You can’t go home again — or can you? Oh, wait, actually, I was right the first time. It turns out that you can. Never mind!”

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 10/5/07

My God, what kind of Google search results for “Culver Vale” would be so shocking to Howard Gourwitz that we would be treated to the vision of each and every one of his upper teeth? Obviously mere text couldn’t elicit a reaction of such visceral horror; no, Howard has clearly plugged “Culver Vale” into Google image search. In my unrelenting quest for the truth, and with total disregard for my personal safety, I bravely chose to do the same, and received one and only one result:

“Look at this, Tony! Cully allowed himself to be photographed wearing a conservative suit, and squatting and presumably defecating behind the flag of Oregon! And to think we’ve shared a locker room with this sicko!”

Tony’s search results may have been skewed by the addition of the word “stud”, as the dialog in panel one implies. And no, I’m not searching on that. Bravery has its limits.

Dick Tracy, 10/5/07

OK, now that this Dick Tracy plot appears to be wrapping up, I can say officially that none of it makes any sense. The East German Soviet Sympathizers (EGSSes) kidnapped the Gretchen to exchange for the Baron … why? Once the Baron wandered off, Dick and the CIA guys started treating the EGSSes as sympathetic … why? Gretchen claimed to be giving the CIA guys the frequency to the chip in the Baron’s head, but actually gave the frequency to the chip in her head … WHY? Gretchen had a chip in her head … WHY??

But most of all, what the hell does “trying to revive to Cold War and blame it on Mideastern terrorists” even mean? I’m sure the EGSSes don’t actually want the Cold War back; they just want a different ending for it. Were their ex-Soviet puppet masters going to look at the smoldering wreckage of the Rotunda on the TVs in their underground bunker and chortle “Ha ha, the Americans soon will be invading another Middle Eastern country, but we and we alone secretly know that the Cold War is back on! Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat!”

Spider-Man, 10/5/07

Yes, you … you forgot about airport security. And because you’ve put your spider-suit in your suitcase, and it could easily be written off as a Halloween costume (which I believe is what happened when you flew to LA), the only hitch this puts in your plans is that it might cause you to miss your plane … which … has … nothing to do with superheroics whatsoever argh argh ARGH! Honestly, this strip constantly manages to defy my ability to parody its lameness.

Pluggers, 10/5/07

A plugger’s face is a mass of lacerations and barely-scabbed-over wounds. But at least he’s getting his money’s worth out of that 60 cent disposable razor!

Archie, 10/5/07

I’m sure your beverage choices are very interesting, Betty, but let me offer you some advice, one blogger to another: I think your readers will be more interested if you skip to the part where you explain why you aren’t wearing pants.

Post Content

Archie, 10/2/07

Huh, the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 seems to have put the wrong dialogue into today’s cartoon. Here, let me fix that:

Panel one, Miss Gundy: You feel that our school has singularly failed to inculcate any sort of moral sense into our student body? That we are training an army of sociopaths?

Panel one, Mr. Weatherbee: Indeed! What is it that has hollowed out their spirits from the inside, leaving them only fit to be alternately victims and tormentors in life’s theater of cruelty?

Panel two: [A sickening crunch as Archie’s kneecap fractures, leaving him with a limp that will linger the rest of his life.]

Panel three, Mr. Weatherbee: Perhaps we shouldn’t have painted every wall in the school a blindingly bright white. We sought to inculcate spiritual purity, but instead we created the illusion of a yawning void that reflects the emptiness of the students’ souls!

Gasoline Alley, 10/2/07

When last we left this feature, Slim’s insane meteor plot had landed him in an actual mental hospital. Soon afterwards, his clinician choose to follow an unorthodox treatment regime — sending him and Clovia to the beach — and Skeezix, who is the father of one (possibly both? who knows?) of them, had to take over at the garage and deal with their surly employee, who went out on a call and then vanished. In this strip’s newly found rhythm of veering from dull to insane as the plot develops, Skeezix has tracked the missing mechanic to this creepy old house, which is probably inhabited by a family of inbred murderers wearing human skin suits, or a passageway to the plane of damned souls, or something similarly bizarre. The harrowing adventures in this hell-house will of course cut back and forth to and from the dialect-heavy hillbilly antics of Rufus and Joel, who Skeezix left in charge of the garage.

Spider-Man, 10/2/07

Oh, Spider-Man! Is there any hero in the pantheon of American comics tougher and more noble than you? Spidey and his wife have decided to flee Los Angeles for the safer climes of Manhattan; they’ve been driven out of the city of angels by the twin scourges of the Shocker (a “super” villain whose “super” powers mainly consist of a crippling inferiority complex and vibrating gloves he built in his basement metal shop) and an army of amateur paparazzi. But now he faces his greatest challenge yet: heavy traffic on the 405! Obviously it’s worth Peter Parker betraying his secret identity if that’s what it takes to get to the airport on time; after all, air travel between LA and New York is incredibly sporadic, and if Peter and Mary Jane don’t make their flight, clinging to the landing gear like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon if need be, they could be trapped in Los Angeles indefinitely.

Gil Thorp, 10/2/07

Uh-oh, Howard looks like he’s about to prove that wearing Buddy Holly glasses and being named “Howard” doesn’t automatically make you smart. It’s well known that the Internet primarily exists as a vehicle for anonymous personal abuse. Googling the name of a crappy high school quarterback who plays in a town unnaturally obsessed with high school sports will mainly serve to demonstrate how many ways there are to misspell “YOU FUCKING SUCK.”