Starting the week philosophically

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/15/26 I genuinely love that Mae Mae and this lady from “the media” are having a respectful argument by making statements that are as close as possible to flat, unadorned statements of fact. There’s no big secret here: Mae Mae quit Hollywood years ago. She’s just working in a cafe now. But consider: She’s famous, and her disappearance was a mystery. Well, she was famous, but now she’s just a regular person — albeit, as one cannot deny, a person who was once the top box-office draw in the world. It really lets us quickly and efficiently see that the dispute has arisen over the question of what constitutes a “mystery” — must there be some inherently complex or surprising “solution” for something to qualify? or is a mystery simply a thing that many…