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Crankshaft, 2/22/22

God, I certainly hope this is the setup for an Agatha Christie-style locked room murder mystery, where all of our beloved Crankshaft favorites — you know, Crankshaft, [squints at mailbox] Keesterman, Crank … friends, uh, and the, uh, ladies — are summoned to a mansion for a mysterious gathering where everyone has a secret and nothing is as it seems. Will Crankshaft turn out to be the killer … or, better, the victim, and turns out everyone killed him, just like in Murder on the Orient Express! Uh, spoilers for an 88-year-old novel, I guess. And for a five-year-old movie. I swear I don’t know who did it in Death on the Nile! Anyway, yesterday’s strip consisted of Crankshaft aggressively reading the back of a box of cereal and complaining that he didn’t have a newspaper to read, and the bearded guy with one arm used to run the local paper by himself until he quit to spite the hedge fund that bought it, so I’m betting this is actually going to be a meeting where Crankshaft And The Gang Save Journalism, a plot that will make me so angry that I’ll wish they’d all murder each other and then go to jail for it.

Gil Thorp, 2/22/22

I always find it charming when we get occasional reminders that Milford isn’t so sports-crazed as to be able to afford a full-time assistant coach and that Kaz has to double up as a teacher of some sort. In real-life schools, phys ed teachers/coaches are often enlisted to teach health — I got my sex ed from a guy who insisted we refer to him as “Coach” in the classroom and wore short shorts and a whistle at all times, but the information he imparted on contraception and STIs was accurate and complete — but Kaz seems to teach … geography, maybe? No doubt he’s hoping that he can drag out “Paraguay: South America’s forgotten -guay” for two or maybe even three class periods. Pranit, meanwhile, is learning a different kind of lesson, namely that traditional bookies employ burly men to shatter the knees of recalcitrant bettors for a reason (the reason is that if you don’t, the bettors simply refuse to pay you a lot of the time).

Mary Worth, 2/22/22

Wow, I assumed the inevitable Cal-Toby flirtation would begin with Cal showing Toby a drawing he did of her, implicitly saying “Ms. Cameron, look at how young and beautiful you are … in my eyes.” I’m very pleased to be proved wrong and see that his actual opening move was to give her a dreamy-eyed picture of himself. “Here you go, babe. You can rub one out to this if you want.”