Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/1/23

Many, many years ago, God, so many years ago, what have I done with my life, is this all there is … wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right! Niki first showed up in this strip in the mid-’00s, which in the grand scheme of things really wasn’t very long ago at all, when you think about it, and back then he was a little punk with a weird star-shaped haircut and a troubled home life, and who wasn’t above doing a little light erotic banter with either June or Rex if that’s what it took to climb Glenwood’s socioeconomic ladder. And what would that skinny kid think of the hunky young man before us in today’s strip, who has respectable hair and thinks it’s a little “funny” for a guy to wear graduation robes? Those things are a bit too much like dresses, you know what I’m saying? Why can’t we all just wear sensible black polo shirts, the preferred garment of normal teenagers?

Marvin, 6/1/23

My least favorite aspect Marvin is obviously all the pissing and shitting jokes, but another thing about it I don’t love is that the strip refuses to settle on a specific age for the title character. Is he a baby? Is he a toddler? Can he talk in a way that adults understand? Is he in day care? School? Does he have homework? Can any of these life phases be reconciled with the fact that he still pisses and shits himself on the regular? Because, to be clear, he definitely still pisses and shits himself on the regular and he will never stop.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 5/31/23

The whole “Beetle and Miss Buxley are dating” bit is a recent development in this strip and I’m on the record as strongly opposed to it. Today we learn that the whole thing is just a way for Beetle to express his dominance over senior officers in the only way he can. Of course, while this struggle is clearly sexual in nature, it’s several levels removed from actual sex, since we know Beetle simply dozes off whenever his “girlfriend” tries to get amorous.

Dick Tracy, 5/31/23

One of the underappreciated tragedies of the past few years is that spammers and scammers are increasingly turning ordinary phone calls into a widely avoided and increasingly useless form of communication. The federal government refuses to take action, so local authorities in Neo-Chicago are trying to help by issuing every old person a scam-detecting chicken.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 5/30/23

One of the things I’ve always respected about baseball (the men’s version) is that, as with all sports, sometimes a level of disrespect is shown by one player to another that demands fisticuffs, but generally speaking those fisticuffs are extremely desultory, with all the players fairly quickly forming a huge mass in the middle of the field and just kind of shoving each other. My favorite part is watching the relief pitchers in the bullpen do the calculation on how long the scrum is going to last and then slowly jogging in to make an appearance if it doesn’t break up quickly enough. Anyway — and hopefully everyone understands that I’m saying this as a feminist ally — I feel like the girls of Mudlark softball could learn something from the typical low-stakes MLB brawl, because they are going at it, with roundhouse kicks and punching people in the face and such, which seem like the sort of things that could earn you a multi-game suspension at minimum.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/23

Look, man, I hate to be the one who’s more of a purist about a comic’s characters than their creators current maintainers, but Rocky’s one-note characterization is that he’s a rebel who loves the rock music. He’s not some dork who walks around a metal detector! That’s Chip Gizmo territory!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/30/23

In other news, most of the teens in the Rex Morgan gang of teens are finally graduating high school! And thank God, because by the look of them they’re all well into their 30s.