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So, I had a little quickie ready to do for Saturday’s Rex Morgan:

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/18/06

I think it was going to involve the phrase “From the people who brought you the Wildly Overacted Margo Reaction Shot™, it’s the Wildly Overacted Rex Reaction Shot™!” or some such thing. That’s before I saw what a hot, heavin’ hunk of thinly veiled homosexuality awaited me on Sunday and realized that it might not be so overacted after all:

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/19/06

February 19th’s Rex Morgan, M.D.: How gay art thou? Let me count the ways:

1. Panel two: “Define ‘play’!”
2. Panel five: “He said you took lessons from him a couple years back!” Radiating surprise lines. “Uh oh … is my cover blown?”
3. Panel six: Deep, inappropriate discomfort, covered up with tie adjustment. Stuttering. Embarrassment. Desperate attempt to figure out potentially dirty meanings of “saved his life.”
4. Panel seven: “Like I said .. I’ve heard a lot about you, Rex!” Come-hither stare. Potential three-way at 19th hole in the not-so-distant future.

You know who I think is most shocked by all this same-gender loving, going on (almost) in the open? The purple, ghostly shade of LBJ, in the far left of panel one.

And just because Rex is all gayin’ it up (again), don’t think that events in Sunday’s Mark Trail got past me. This edition was about ospreys or some crap like that, but the most important thing about it is that in it Mark appears to be drunk:

“You know what’s awesome? Frickin’ … ospreys!”

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Luann, 2/17/06

Curtis, 2/17/06

Ladies and gentlemen, here on the last day of this Valentine’s Week (yes, it’s a whole week now, didn’t you get the memo from Hallmark and Cathy?), we have a battle royale between two comics love stories that just … won’t … end!

In this corner, in black and white, we have the eternal Brad-Toni-Dirk triangle. See the teasing! The sullen glares! The violation of restraining orders! The gratuitous use of the word “Chunkboy!”

And in this corner, in living color, we have the latest chapter in the Curtis-Michelle love-hate dipole. See what happens when the boy who can’t say “no” meets the girl who won’t say “yes”!

I think we have to acknowledge Curtis as the clear winner here. I’m getting real sick of Toni’s coy little sidelong glances and unnaturally pouty lips. From an artistic point of view, she’s got nothing on Michelle’s hilariously disgusted facial expression in panel three: eyes bugged out, lips curled in disdain, sweat balls flying, motion lines tracking her escape route and a well-placed elbow ready to jab her wannabe paramour in the throat if it comes to that. And while Brad’s wide-eyed, dot-mouthed horror in panel three of Luann is evocative of his new awareness of his own romantic ineptitude, it doesn’t convey bleakness the way Curtis’ lonely, underdressed blizzard trek does. Mostly, though, this Curtis promises to at least end the Michelle nonsense for a few weeks, whereas I have a sinking feeling that the Brad romantic hijinks will continue on indefinitely.

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Dick Tracy, 2/16/06

Popeye, 2/16/06

I recently made the drunken boast that I would start reading a slew of new comics, and today I’ve finally made good on that promise. I expected that it would take me a few days or weeks to get into the swing of things, but even on this first flush I am stunned by Popeye and Dick Tracy, to wit: Popeye and Dick Tracy still exist? Holy crap. I would not be more surprised if I found out that some kind of bastardized Krazy Kat was being churned out by George Herriman’s great-nephew and appearing in a few suburban dailies.

Both of these strips jumped out at me because they seem to be going out of their way to say “Look! We were written just last week, certainly not during the Harding administration! Really!” Dick Tracy, for instance, features an quite lovely picture of one of those new-fangled eco-friendly wind turbines, in flames and tumbling to the ground. Is this strip now focused on the battle for freedom against American’s addiction to oil? The presence of the “evil Oily” would certainly seem to point in that direction. Perhaps we’ll see the Halliburton board of directors armed with Tommy Guns in a future installment.

Popeye, on the other hand, seems to have fallen into a trap I noted earlier: making jokes about technology that nobody involved in the strip actually has a grasp on. Does Olive Oil’s mangled sentence in panel one mean that she’s putting her picture on a Web dating site? Olive Oil? Web dating site? That’s a very disturbing thought to try to get my head around, so disturbing that I’m going to stop … right now. Still, I like the wordless third panel: Olive stalking off hunched over, knuckles dragging gorilla-style, fuming furiously, while a clueless, black-eyed Wimpy can only wordlessly wonder “?” (Twice!)