Trouble at home
Post Content
Archie, 5/28/26
I think it’s very funny that Jughead is first forbidden from playing the drums in … his room, I suppose? … and then decides that the next good place to do it is in the living room right next to where his father is trying to read the paper. I don’t like the idea of Jughead as a musician generally — it requires dedication and the motivation to practice your craft, something that I simply don’t think is in line with his character — but I do appreciate that move.
Crankshaft, 5/28/26
Hey, remember last week when I said Crankshaft was going so far up its own narrative ass that it was at risk for tearing the fabric of the Funkyverse apart? Well, it’s happening. It’s happening! Ed’s about to get vaporized by a blast wave of Hawking radiation and I think that’s swell.
57 replies to “Trouble at home”
GT: Is Beth supposed to be chibi in that last panel or has the artist completely given up?
Hey, they ain’t the Archies without the Jughead beat!
So, do we begin the “Oh, it was ALLLLL a dream!” countdown now? But which character dreams? Pam, with nothing better to mull on than her dad? Lillian, finally longing for oblivion? Ed, who’s always craved to truly demonstrate to all the subtle but inherent differences between a black hole and a singularity? Us, that Batiuk is finally ending this wretched strip? There’s options, here!
CS: NASA engineer(?) checks his iPad mini. “Yep, black hole, major anomaly.”
Archie:
“And didn’t you see the sign on our front door, young man? — ‘NO TANK TOPS’ !”
Archie I’m not even sure there’s a punchline here? This looks like a LinkedIn post about outside-the-box problem solving.
CSh God, just imagine that the last thing you heard before you died was one of Ed Crankshaft’s little quips. Then imagine the the massive gravitational force of the black hole that killed you stretched that moment into near infinity, as if you passed ten thousand years with those words ringing in your ears. Truly a fate worse than death (followed by death)
RMMD: “Wow, we’re really busy! Let’s stand around and tell one another things we both already know!”
Crankshaft:
“Gentlemen, do you think this might have something to do with the fact that I jocularly refer to my backyard as ‘Lacuna Beach’ ?”
The really great part is, that isn’t Jughead’s house.
At last, the setup for the Crankshaft/Stranger Things crossover we’ve all been waiting for.
Archie:
Josh may not like Jughead being a musician, but he shouldn’t worry about it—based on the history of rooftop concerts, Jughead’s about to give up on the whole enterprise.
Crankshaft: I will tolerate Crankshaft’s annual Memorial Day grill explosion hijinks as an established running joke in the strip’s universe. But it’s Thursday now! You hear me? THURSDAY! I cannot accept week long “Old man struggles with barbecue” story arcs! Especially when it’s day four and there’s no punchline in sight!
Crankshaft in a “Kiss the Cook” apron is my new emetic.
CS: Someone recently mentioned the Tom Servo advice “don’t mention a good movie during your crappy movie.” Similarly: don’t put your most detestable characters in danger if you’re not going to kill them off.
Pluggers: See prior comment.
FC-Bug watching or bug burning?
MW-In his loneliness Tommy makes a huge mistake by hooking up with Dawn.
Yesterthread from Vanya:
Whatever happened to those girls in Norway? ‘Silenced’ by the CIA as loose ends.
Where is April? As long as she isn’t on panel and the characters aren’t asking ‘Where’s April?’ I don’t give a flying $#@%.
The crazy Slavic guy who took the car? Hopefully off living his best life after selling that swank SUV on the black market.
MW:
“I’m impressed that you’re trying to improve yourself!”
It’s been 59 years but Dawn’s conception of human-like speech has finally surpassed that of the Horta (“No kill I”) from Star Trek.
MW: Dawn and Tommy run to escape the dire situation slowly unfolding at Charterstone, where the residents are apparently at risk of starving. Even now, the hollow-cheeked residents anxiously stand at their condo windows, looking out over the trellised vegetable garden, wringing their hands and praying for a speedy harvest so they can fill their pantries with the promised SUPPLEMENTAL FOOD SUPPLY. In her wisdom, Mary has planted okra. “It’s slimy, I admit, and relatively few people really enjoy it, but it’s packed with nutrients,” Mary smiles. “They’ll eat it gladly, once they get hungry enough. I only hope the rains come….”
Phantom: Once again, Schmelon Schmusk, HE KNOWS NOW THAT IT’S ALL AN ILLUSION!!! And TAKE OFF THAT STUPID MASK!!!
I’ve always considered Crankshaft to be a Black Hole on the comics page.
@Charterstoned: ‘… a real rain that will come and wash all this scum off my condos…’
ARCHIE: I am most impressed by Jughead’s getting the drumset onto the roof. He never comes across as particularly agile.
9CL: We all know who SHOULD have been spayed around here.
GT: Beth is weeping because all of her bridesmaids’ names will end with an i. I would cry, too.
RMMD: Oh, for crying out loud, here’s a little Business 101: Customers=GOOD.
MW: Are we sure that along with the haircut, Tommy didn’t get a little Captain America juice? He’s going to buff his way right out of his tee in a few strips.
@The Quiet Man: That’s not scum. It’s the far flung droppings from Sid’s free-wheeling Doves o’ Love.
DT: Please let the joke be that Liz and the Chief are maybe 5 feet apart.
GT: YES Manga Gil Thorp! Tomorrow will be all in black and white and as Gil dashes around he’ll have speed lines and run with his arms behind him.
JP: Good advice, but the editors removed the middle frame where the cafe owner shakes Judge Parker’s shoulders and gives him a wake up slap. Then the final frame where JP realizes Ann isn’t a 16 year old girl.
RMMD: Nice to see fairness in standing around and talking during a BUSY work day extends to men as well as women. We’ve just established how busy this place is, so the manager decides AT THIS MOMENT to break up the flow of the one actual known cook he has by chatting up some gossip. Good going!
Archie: Jughead set up his drums right next to the chimney. The fireplace is presumably in the living room. He’s risking his own health and safety just to annoy his father while technically following his orders. I aspire to this level of petty.
@Hibbleton: iPad me eye, that’s a Kindle Fire Wire if I ever saw one.
@treetown:
GT: YES Manga Gil Thorp! Tomorrow will be all in black and white and as Gil dashes around he’ll have speed lines and run with his arms behind him.
They’re going to introduce a new student character who’s a ditzy freshman, who’s debut panel is her running late for school with a piece of toast in her mouth.
Her b-plot is going to be how she has a crush on a hunky sophomore on one of Gil’s teams, but IF ONLY HE WOULD NOTICE HER.
Archie: Iggy Pop famously grew up in a double-wide trailer outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He once expressed appreciation for his parents, who gave up the master bedroom so he would have room to set up his drum kit. Jughead is not Iggy Pop, and I never want to see him with his shirt off. Ever.
Zits: Is Jeremy’s mother supposed to be unattractive? She’s in her late 30s and not overweight. Maybe Jeremy doesn’t want to think about his mother in yoga pants but his pervert friends probably wouldn’t mind it.
@treetown: @Anonymous: Aw, I think manga Gil Thorp is cute. Besides, it’ll drive the comment section nuts, which is always a positive with that lot.
Luann: why is Shannon covered with what looks to be feces? If Bwad and Tone-deaf can’t even care for Shannon, what business do they have making a baby?
MW: I’ve made the same mistake Tommy’s about to make. Dude, do NOT fuck Dawn. Both of you are too stupid to use birth control, you’ll break up long before Dawn even realizes she’s knocked up, and then you’re gonna have a baby (and a longterm relationship with each other) that neither of you want. Don’t do it, Tommy. Make a withdrawal from the spank bank if you must, but you do NOT want to wake up to the crack of Dawn.
Tomorrow, the alternate-reality versions of the Funkyverse characters will emerge from the hole, and the entire comics page will be consumed by a multiverse-shattering battle that will transform everything. Will all the characters end up in one massive comics feature? Would Garfield and Heathcliff wage an endless war over which orange cat rules the unified universe with an iron claw?
Crankshaft: Bending the fabric of space-time is one thing, but could we please have more of the original Black Hole, from Funky Calcutta? Surely there are 146 Funkyverse characters and also these dishwasher repairmen we could cram into a 14×18′ room and leave to die from suffocation and heat exhaustion. It’s no worse than the wordplay they’ve inflicted on us!
@brendancalling: I’m not sure where it came from, but my family has a rule stating that one should not stick their d**k in crazy. I think we can expand that to “Don’t stick your d**k in Dawn.”
I guess Jughead’s house looks old enough to not have a garage. Sure, let’s go with that. Ha ha! He’s practising on the roof!
***
It looks like the Funkyverse has a smugness tipping point. Two people must have been discussing astronomy and one of them said “Dying in a black hole would really suck” with just the smuggest expression and the Funkyverse said “Bet.”
GT tomorrow: “And then, boom, Beth turned into Cathy Andrews from the old Cathy strip!”
“That’s terrible!”
“I know! Why couldn’t it have been at least one of the Apartment 3-G women?”
“Margo would have been awesome.”
“I told Barajas I’ll quit before I allow myself to be taped up on mirrors in women’s dorms. Dang I miss sports. Oops, here comes the dog. Heel Electra!”
Dustin: Does the US Marines recruiting just cold call people asking if they want to join? Do they want another Camp Swampy because that’s how you get another Camp Swampy.
Shoe has decided its readers need to be punished with this visual of an old obese bird person in a towel. Please don’t give Pluggers any ideas.
@Anonymous: Bonus points if she has a distinctly-odd hairstyle!
MW: If you can carry on a full conversation while running, you’re not running hard enough!
Pluggers: The way Dr. Dog is glowering at rhino man, and the way rhino man is sitting in stunned silence, it sure seems like “hot dog eating contest” a euphemism for something else!
@Tonio: Personally, I don’t think Garfield could compete with Heathcliff’s hustle. While Garf’s busy hating Mondays, Heath’s grinding broken glass into a fine powder to mix into Garfield’s lasagna.
CS: If the black hole formed in the Marvin universe, would it have an excretion disc?
A: “‘Sugar, Sugar’ paid for this house, old man. I’ll practice where I want.”
@pugfuggly: No, no – mercifully time dilation works so that the person falling in experiences time at the rate they’d expect, heck, you wouldn’t notice passing the event horizon (if you’re not spaghettified first by the tidal effects, that can be before or after the event horizon depending of the black hole mass [= event horizon size]). It’s the observers outside seeing the person falling towards the black hole that it takes an eternity (literally, it will take infinite time with a frozen-at-the-event-horizon endlessly redshifting view of the infall).
The main horror here is that we are now up to a black hole (based on the event horizon size of, oh, about 10 meters) of about 1000 Earth masses, and the difference in gravitational force across a few feet of distance should rip everything apart (when maybe a further 10 meters from it). But they aren’t being shredded. Crankshaft’s town and people were replaced by neutron star material so gradually we didn’t notice…
Archie: Jughead color-coordinated his socks with his drums, and I think it’s neat!
He also grew to enormous size when he ascended to the rooftop, and the musical notes he’s emitting could be dollar signs or grawlixes. Is there a word for that? Less than neat?
LUANN: Poor Tony. He womb is barren, inflected with a nasty case of Status Quo-itis.
LUANN: You know, I suspect Brad and Toni would solve like 75% of their issues by spending less time dealing Shannon and her bratty coitus interruptus antics. (It’d probably also help if they didn’t have a noisy third-wheel roommate furtively masturbating while listening in to their
having sexual intercourseengaging in juvenile ribaldry.)GT No, no – don’t worry your, um, not-as-ugly-as-the-other-deformed-ones little head about what my mother said. We all know you’re just a trophy for me as part of my ex-wife’s “queer saga”, you don’t need friends! or personality traits!
Blondie: A screaming Bob Ross.
“NOOOOOO!!!!!!”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Moy: “That’s not happening. That would ruin every “Dawn” plot I have for the rest of the decade!”
CS — If that’s a black hole, shouldn’t it be sucking Crankshaft into it? For the love of God, Batuik, just let the physics play out!
Archie — That’s great initiative, Jughead, but most of the rooftop performers find a flat one
@Charterstone: Dune:
“MW: If you can carry on a full conversation while running, you’re not running hard enough!”
I don’t get the impression Tommy is that turned on by Dawn but whatever floats your boat.
MW: Long walks, short piers, etc
@But What Do I Know?: It’s not a black hole. It’s Dawn’s cavernous and horrifying vagina.
Imagine being spaghettified in a black hole event horizon due to Cranky’s charcoal.
It would be like being meddled by Mary Worth for eternity.
Sure, all life on Earth will be ended, but this the less horrifying version of what Ed Crankshaft’s black hole could be!
“Yeah, look, you gotta black hole to be sure, but it’s neither in the air nor space. NASA can’t help you. Try FEMA.”
“Sure, it’s bad, but is it really an emergency, much less a Federal one? Maybe EPA.”
“By definition, a black hole is nothingness, kind of the opposite of an environment. It is giving off a lot of radiation, try Energy.”
“Look, man, if it ain’t producing useable energy or an atomic bomb, ain’t Energy’s problem. But I have an idea.”
“Agent Smith, CIA. We’ll take it from here.” Picks up phone. “Boss, I have the ultimate black site, and I think I know who we send in first.” Eyes Crankshaft.
The good news is that so close to a mid sized black hole like that, the gravitational tidal forces are well up into the “rip everything around into shreds” level, so Crankshaft is dead, he just hasn’t realized it yet.
@2+2=7: Also, Tommy’s still talking about Brandy. I was half-expecting she’d be memory-holed to make way a Tommy-Dawn romance, but maybe not? We could still see Brandy return, and walk in on Tommy and Dawn kissing.
That would also give Mary scope for meddling — so far she’s done nothing worth a victory lap. But straightening out a love triangle, especially one involving Dawn? Expert-level meddling will be required.