What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Pinball and Roadside Tourism, May – August 2018.

If you want the most recent happenings in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., good news! It’s here. If you’re reading this not too long after August 2018. If it’s past about November 2018, I should have a more up-to-date essay here. May you find the context for the current goings-on that you need.

Now, if you’re looking for mathematically-themed comic strip discussion, that’s my other blog. That’s a fun blog too, I think. But, yes, consider the person making that claim.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 14th of August, 2002. Part of the same storyline that gave me that great Mary Worth panel. And this isn’t all!

Rex Morgan, M.D.

27 May – 19 August 2018.

Heather Avery was working out the implications of her husband’s death last time I checked in. The big one: she asked the Avery International to continue on being rich and successful. The little one: she was going to sell the now-empty mansion in town. So Jordan, the live-in caretaker, would have to find somewhere else to live, at least once it sells. Her suggestion: that he use this big pile of money from the freezer to open that restaurant he always wanted to. His own “yes, and” idea: that he marry Michelle, his longtime girlfriend and partner in mansion-sitting. She likes the idea too.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 28th of July, 2018. So this is when we reset the ‘days since Rex Morgan last pretended to do something medical’ counter, by the way.

Heather Avery takes her chance to visit Rex Morgan and family. She explains that in light of her husband’s death, and their child’s birth, she just doesn’t think she can bear to be in the comic strip anymore. She’ll stay in touch, she promises, but she’ll leave everyone else to get about their business.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 16th of June, 2018. I honestly don’t know whether I expect this to be Heather Avery’s farewell from the strip. It at least gives good reason not to worry about her until such time as Beatty (or a successor) has a solid idea, though.

That business is Buck and Mindy, pleasant supporting characters. They’re getting married. They’re doing it in Las Vegas, at a wedding chapel that features an Elvis impersonator who’ll walk the bride down the aisle. Nice to see things working out for them. Buck’s kid Corey is happy with the wedding plans too.

It’s a destination wedding. But at least all the characters who’ve been invited are able to afford the travel. And make the time for it. The characters who made the most time are 50s horror-comics star “Horrible” Hank Harwood and his son, Horrible Jr. They started their cross-country tourist-attractions expedition back in May or possibly 1946 and have been going strong ever since. For a while that was just little check-ins, in the disposable title-panel row of the Sunday strips. They’d mention how they were looking at giant ice cream cone guys, statues of Popeye, large soup cans, mystery castles, and so on. All the filming locations of the improbably long-running King Features comic strip Zippy the Pinhead.

(I’m not ridiculing Zippy the Pinhead, by the way. I love the comic. And I feel good about King Features that it keeps running a comic strip that would be hard-pressed to be less commercial. It’s a good legacy for the syndicate that ran Krazy Kat despite that comic almost trying to shake off readers.)

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 1st of July, 2018. At the diner that Hank Senior just happened to stumble his way into. I admit I’m a bit impressed that he could steer a trip designed to be a sort of ambling, shuffling, let’s-see-where-we-figure-on-going-today expedition to get to the diner where his high school romance worked, and in her last week working there. Be a heck of a thing if he’d gone to all that trouble and she was taking the day off, though.

This threatened to completely overwhelm the comic, too, much as Zippy talking to roadside attraction statues took over that comic for about a decade. It was interspersed with Jordan-and-Michelle, and with Buck-and-Mindy, weeks. And then a bit that seriously broke up their looking at the world’s largest strawberry or the Oz Museum or stuff. In a small town diner Hank Senior encounters … Millie Gray. They were a pretty serious thing back in high school, but went their separate ways and had nice happy lives anyway. It’s a sweet little sentimental interlude, closed with Hank Senior admitting to his son that he knew exactly who was working that small-town diner, thank you.

Also breaking up the roster of watching people look at tourist traps: their RV breaks down. They rent an SUV to make the rest of the trip. So that breaks up a lot of them admitting that things are there to be seen. Still, they get to Las Vegas in time for the wedding and that’s all nice. Rex Morgan takes a moment to reflect on how great it is even if it’s slightly daft and hey, did you see where there’s a fourth wall over there? Anyway, pleasant stuff.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 10th of August, 2018. So I assume no cartoonists read what I write. Even though, yes, I know that The Phantom‘s writer Tony DePaul checks in now and then. I’m just not important. But. It’s not literally true that when I’m not blogging I’m playing pinball. It’s near enough. The Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame is one of the major things I hope to get to. And its founders have connections to my hometown, as it’s run by someone who ran Pinball Pete’s, the venerable East-Lansing-and-Ann-Arbor institution. So if I were conspiracy-minded, and thought it even the faintest bit plausible that Beatty knew anything about me including the fact that I exist, I could paint this as a crazily obscure call-out to me. But I’m not, and I don’t, and it isn’t. It’s just a neat coincidence.
Also it is absolutely true that having something big and important and impossible to reschedule to get to will make you have the best pinball game of your life. Nobody understands how this happens, but if the effect could be harnessed it would revolutionize competitive pinball.

If it sounds like not a lot has actually, you know, happened I suppose I can’t argue otherwise. The stories have advanced only in little pieces and none of them has been that dramatic. I say, admitting that one couple has married and another has decided to marry. I do them some disservice by unwinding the story threads like this. It makes the action seems even slighter than it was. But, hey, sometimes everybody’s just having a nice calm time in their lives and manage a pretty good road trip. I say this not two days after my love and I learned that a correct answer to “Just how many tiny public parks with WPA-era 25-foot-long battleships built out of poor-grade ore rock can there be in this tiny copper-country Michigan village?” is “no fewer than two”. Touring quirky roadside stuff is for people who can handle ambiguous directions.

(Also we’re hoping in the coming week to eat at a Li’l Abner-themed restaurant but will be all right if it turns out we’re just not able to.).

Next Week!

It’s time for Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp! So how did The Milford Trumpet’s attempt at journalistic bear-baiting go? We’ll see what Barry Bader has to insist was taken out of context. At least if my plans turn out right.

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