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Crankshaft, 3/6/26

It’s been more than three years since Funky Winkerbean ended, but, just as a dying star occasionally fires off occasional bursts of radiation, its sister strip Crankshaft still sometimes serves up new bits of Funkyverse lore. Like, did you know that Pam and Jeff’s son and his partner weren’t married, but now, like several years after having a child, their accountant noticed that they could squeeze out a little bit of extra tax savings for their dying movie theater if they “put a ring on it”? I’m pretty dubious that the numbers on this make that much sense, but as always in Crankshaft, the point is just to set up a truly execrable bit of wordplay, so, mission accomplished, I guess.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/6/26

Oh, man, remember when Truck and Mud were briefly rivals for Wanda’s affections, a rivalry that ended in total victory for Truck? Well, now it looks like Mud, who earlier this week was grousing that the Glenwood Motel’s waitstaff shortage would relegate him to eating alone in his room, is going to have his own small-town waitress to successfully woo … and this one’s an ex-Hollywood starlet to boot! In your face, Truck!

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Crock, 3/2/26

The comic strip Crock and I have long-running and mutual antagonism, so I am generally reticent to say nice things about it, but I do occasionally think them. Like sometimes I think, “Crock sucks, but unlike Marvin, it doesn’t really do gross-out bathroom jokes.” Alas, I was mistaken! Here’s a comic about how the cook at the local fancy restaurant used to piss and/or shit in the food.

Luann, 3/2/26

Ah, yes, Luann’s mom correctly sees her sexual and family history as being of a kind with other roles that define her economic relations with others, a truth as obvious for all of us as it is taboo to speak about. I’m glad someone in this family knows what’s up (other than Toni, who is clearly the smartest as she managed to avoid this get-together entirely).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/2/26

Oh, shit, oh crap, this is it, Rex Morgan, M.D., has been fully hollowed out and occupied by the roots country crowd and they’re about to formally seize control of the strip, they’re gonna make Rex put on some dumb retro cowboy outfit and go up on stage so they can jeer at him

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/1/26

Ah, it looks like our runaway ex-Hollywood starlet, now desperate to eschew fame, is about to run into our own Mud Mountain Murphy, who has something of a complicated relationship with fame himself! You might recall that Mud was so intent on getting a headlining spot at a roots country show that he pretended to shit himself on stage to move his set later in the order; subsequently, however, thanks to the phoney-baloney Mirakle Method, he became a better person. Still, the Method also helped him find fame as “Li’l Fergus”, and he seems very twitchy about how his headshot should be on the wall of this crappy motel lobby, so it might take the love (?) of a good (???) woman to set him straight once and for all.

Mary Worth, 3/1/26

Oh, interesting, it looks like this Mary Worth plot isn’t going to be about sinister AI, but actually about the very grim reality of most so-called pig butchering scams. It turns out that if you got tricked out of tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoin by a fake online romantic partner, the conversations you were having are less likely to be with a cackling Danny DeVito lookalike and more likely to be with one of tens of thousands of people who have been recruited under false pretenses and enslaved in compounds along the Thai-Cambodian border. And sure, AI will end up making lots of white-collar jobs obsolete, but it will probably soon be able to do scam convos well enough that the criminal syndicates that profit off these cons will soon find that kidnapping people is no longer cost effective, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad.