This is not one of them.
Rex Morgan (I think it was once "Rex Morgan, M.D." but he spends so little time doing actual medical stuff that they dropped it) is a serial comic. That's a nice way of saying its stories go on forever and it doesn't have to be funny. Each day, it adds another two panels (three if we're lucky) and maybe three lines of dialogue to its continuing story. This results in a pace so slow that it can take a year to cover maybe three stories. During college, I could return home to visit my family, pick up the newspaper, and read the comic, only to come back months later and find the exact same goddamn story, with perhaps one or two steps made towards getting anywhere.
Basically, it's really slow and boring.
The comic features the titular Rex Morgan, who's some kind of Doctor. That explains why he can spend most of his time on boating trips, or camping, or taking some teenage kid on a boating trip. Sometimes we see him and a patient, which basically boils down to him saying "You need to do something differently. Good luck with that, pal." (Although there was the five months where their secretary won the lottery, they had to sort out a ton of family drama with that, then spend the rest of the time hiring a new secretary.)
There's also his wife, I think she's named after some kind of month. It's not like she ever does anything of importance, so you can ignore her without missing much. They have a daughter, whose name I also can't remember, because her job is to stand around acting cute and innocent while devoid of all the flaws and annoyances actual children have. So I'm going to call her Mary Sue. Oh, and a dog, who is by far the most compelling character, because the reader sympathizes with the poor creature for being bought and named solely because Mary Sue liked a series of books about a dog she named it after, then forced to live with these assholes. Plus, the dog doesn't talk, sparing us from the bad dialogue that permeates the rest of the comic.
In the current storyline, most of the drama revolves around the new secretary and her daughter. She's the typical, stereotypical, rebellious, fatherless teenage daughter, who is really a good girl deep down but is surrounded by bad influences. You know the type; they were supposed to have died out in the 80's, but still exist in the minds of people who are out of touch with reality.
The bad influence in this case is her boyfriend, Lonny "Spider" Webb. Oh, Spider Web, how clever.
Where was I? Something about the plot... she goes to a party, he drugs her, and some teenage kid who hangs out with Rex on a fishing trip is getting all worried about her because who the hell cares? This was about a week ago. Only in yesterday's comic are the drugs starting to take effect, and what did it consist of? The girl says she's feeling weird, and another girl takes her upstairs to sleep it off while saying, "Yeah, you got drugged, I probably should have warned you about that, or even not come in the first place, but I'm hanging around these teenage rapists because I'm a goddamn moron." Meanwhile, Rex and his teenage buddy are still fishing and talking about whether or not they should do something.
Took a while to explain, didn't it? That's because this storyline has been going on for months. And in all those months, not a single fuck was given. Nor in any of the stories before this one, and this is not the first time they've dealt with teenagers drinking, doing drugs, being generally stupid, etcetera. It's pretty clear that the guy behind this has a complete distrust of today's youth, without actually knowing what they're even like. Do some freaking research, man.
As for the characters, they're either cliche cardboard cutouts or idealized nice guys. There's no moral ambiguity - you're either a good person who cares for the well-being of others above yourself, or you're a lowly, dirty scumbag who will screw over your own family. No middle ground.
If you're going to try to have dramatic stories with meaningful characters, at least do it right!
This comic is not meant to be funny, so I can't fault it for failing at that, in spite of being in the newspaper funnies section every day. What I can fault it for, though, is being poorly-written, taking forever to get anywhere, having lousy characters, and generally being boring.
This review was mostly a rant about how stupid Rex Morgan is, as you might have noticed. I could probably say more if it was compelling enough to make me care about anything, but it wasn't. Next time, I'll cover a newspaper comic I actually like.
