In the Summer of 2005, my friend Nathaniel Bayer and I decided to pick up Rex Morgan, MD—the universally reviled newspaper soap opera comic strip—and take it for a spin, photoshopping in a brand new plot, entirely different characters, and a decidedly awful sensibility. We decided early on, though, that the project would be most interesting if we rewrote every single strip, daily, and kept the soap opera genre in tact. As such, I didn’t expect every comic to have a punch line (though more often than not, we managed).
We released each Tex Moron strip only a couple days after its newspaper counterpart, which resulted in something kind of like comics improv. Each new day’s art had to be quickly wrestled into our own bizarre, divergent storyline with dialogue to fit our abjectly terrible characters.
This often put our two comics at odds: Rex Morgan, MD is structured to remain coherent to readers who only get the comic in their Sunday paper, whereas Tex Moron, DILF had to advance the plot every single day. As a result, we had to write about 7 times the plot as the original comic, completely on the fly. Once the summer ended, and school started up again, this proved to be our downfall.
I haven’t put much of my old (pre-2010) work onto this here website, but I’m still very proud of this strip. Friends have told me they can hear Archer‘s voice in Tex’s dialog balloons which, as a huge H. Jon Benjamin fan, has me absolutely beaming. A small disclaimer: please don’t read if you’ve ever been offended by anything, ever.