Sparking concerns
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/22/26
OK, fine, just a day after my haughty pronouncement that I was too good for a storyline about “Horrible” Hank Harwood Senior doing some commissions, Rex Morgan, M.D., proves that it’s “still got it” and sucks me back in with a philosophical conundrum. Yes, it is true that not performing labor is enjoyable. But have you considered that labor can be exchanged for money, which serves as a store of value and can be exchanged in turn for other goods and services, many of which also spark enjoyment? Much to consider! Plus you don’t want Buck getting on your case! Ideally you’d like to spend as little time interacting with Buck as possible!
Crankshaft, 9/22/26
Now, call me a bleeding heart, but I don’t think making sidewalks less accessible represents a good use of the limited money available for streetscape improvements. I can sort of see the logic of doing it in Crankshaft’s neighborhood specifically — he’s dangerous and must be contained but he’s also old — but we’ve seen no indication that he really has much by way of mobility issues and anyway they keep letting him drive against all common sense, so you’re just making things more difficult for the disabled and anyone pushing a stroller or shopping cart for no benefit. Also they are making lovably evil pizza robot Oni Crankshaft’s sidekick or whatever, troubling!
139 replies to “Sparking concerns”
MW – Welcome, Larry. It’s so nice that Nelly Fenelli approaches the guy with the hearing aid and opens with, “Have you heard?”
MW Larry learned long ago to turn down his hearing aids around Nelly, so normally he’d just be able to smile and nod and go about his day. Unfortunately _all_ Charterstone devices are tuned be attentive to the key words indicating The Leader: Mary Worth – he will not only be forced to hear the rumour as it blasts at maximum volume, but having missed the first part he will get it horribly mangled, repeat it as something unforgivable, and end up in the cornfield
RMMD-“Listen, Dad, it’s your income we are living off of so get back to work.”
RMMD: “I’ve been lazy and just sitting around. Frankly, ghost drawing for Six Chix is not something I’m proud of.”
MW: Fantastic. Now we have diverging paths of gossip. It will increase exponentially: four panels tomorrow, then eight, then sixteen, and on and on until they’re too small to make out individually, but together form the image of Nelly and her drag show eyebrows, smirking as she spills the tea.
I just realized that Funky Winkerbean wrapped up with a “far future” sequence that involved a robot retail clerk, so Batuik probably added this pizza robot to Crankshaft not as a way to make AI jokes, but out of an obligation to make robots with minimum-wage jobs canonical to the Funkyverse.
Bizarro: WHY DIDN’T ANYONE WARN ME???? EEEEE!!! [QLUNQ!]
RMMD:
“Wait a minute! — you’re not ‘Dad’! You’re Larry David!”
Be careful, Crankshaft: “sassy robot” is one step farther than “cousin Oliver” in terms of new characters. Your desperation is showing…
I’m guessing that the people of Centerville disabled all the accessibility ramps as part of a strategy to impede this insufferable robot waiter. It’s a real world equivalent of the “check here to prove you’re not a robot” box. Maybe we should duplicate this idea?
RMMD: Is this week going to consist of Beatty blatantly soliciting commissions? “Folks, comic artists work so hard. They deserve your admiration, and most of all, your cash! Don’t you want a custom sketch of Fergus Murphy knocking muddy boots with Mae Mae Clodfelter?”
RMMD:
“Son, this is my depiction of a stylized Comics Curmudgeon commenter — contemptuous; snarling; and holding a book that allows him or her to summon, and then inject, some kind of erudition into their comment so that they can act supercilious about it!”
RMMD Never a good sign when your new storyline starts either the characters saying “You know what’s great? Doing nothing! We should do more of that…!”
CSh I stared for a good minute at that last panel trying to find the malapropism or pun, but I guess the punchline is just that the government sucks at accessibility? Or sensed an impending robot invasion? Maybe it was one of those bipartisan votes I’ve heard talk of.
Homer: Aw, twenty dollars! I wanted a peanut.
Homer’s Brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer: Explain how!
Homer’s Brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Homer: Woohoo!
Crankshaft:
“You know, the news reports are that the likes of me are going to wipe out all of humanity by 2030. But I’m going to start with you, you oldster!”
Luann: How did Brad end up with that piggy nose? Neither his father nor mother have one. Is this one of those genetic things that skip generations, or did Mrs. Brad-mom hook up with a hog?
Pluggers: Pluggers like cooking outside because they can pee on the tree or in the bushes like their primordial predecessors.
Now for the title change; I’m thinking “Crank and the Shaft”, where Crank and Shaft can be used interchangeably to refer to either man or robot.
MW:
“Psst. Max. Let’s you and I do a little canine cross-dressing — you put on my bowtie, and I’ll put on your bandana!”
MW: the dogs don’t believe word of it. I’m with the dogs, they have more horse sense than the people do
Six Chix: Are we in for 9 more Tuesdays of a pumpkin-wearing Chix being all depressed? I’d rather have pumpkin spice SPAM instead.
Crankshaft: Every animal evolves into crabs, every Funkyverse comic evolves into robots in dystopia.
@Baja Gaijin:
Nah, I checked, and when seen from the front, Nancy DOES also have a pig nose, so it comes from HER side.
…It’s FASCINATING how well the strip communicates that Nancy is supposed to be this beauty that’s wildly out of Frank’s league, while also depicting her as having a pig nose and those gross sausage lips (that I’m assuming is artistic shorthand for “is wearing lipstick” in the Evansii style)…
Crankshaft finally hit a level of stupidity that caused me to tune out, so I appreciate Josh featuring it today so I can see one more reason for hating Centerville – it’s lack of concern for people with disabilities. Yeah, funny stuff Batiuk.
And a head’s up that the Friday Scrotes may be a little late. I’ll be in Seattle to see our Gophers play the Huskies and may be seeing the sights for a while and not be able to post Scrotes until later. On the other hand, I’ll be in the Pacific time zone, so maybe the COTW will be up before I go out and do all the things good tourists do, such as have a fish thrown at you at the Pike Place market. But one way or another, the Scrotes will be as visible as Dino Ciccarelli’s junk at some point on Friday.
RxMD: Meanwhile, an evil socio-politico megaestablishment is plotting to use Gramps’ drawings to take over the town, but a butterfly will cause the scheme to fail, without the inhabitants even knowing.
C’shaft: I realize the current US government is bent on destroying everything that made life even just a little more cleaner, healthier, and equitable for everyone, but last I checked they hadn’t yet got around to gutting the ADA…
RMMD: Hey, you know what’s even more boring than seeing a bunch of people going about their tedious everyday lives? Seeing a bunch of people talking about their boring, everyday lives! Tell, don’t show, that’s the Rex Morgan creed!
@Bob Tice: “Son, this is my depiction of a stylized Comics Curmudgeon commenter — contemptuous; snarling; and holding a book that allows him or her to summon, and then inject, some kind of erudition into their comment so that they can act supercilious about it!”
Hey, that doesn’t look like me at all! (Checks mirror, runs away sobbing). . .
RMMD: I’m reading “you’ve earned the right to be lazy” as a nod to the demographics of the strip’s readers, though not as blatant as every Pluggers.
CS: It’s funny because reactionary and eugenicist forces in control of the local government are taking active steps towards eliminating accommodations for people with mobility issues. Shown offscreen: dozens of e-scooters strewn across those same sidewalks by private credit backed vultures seeking to further undermine mass transit.
MW: The joke’s on Nellie — the old guy has Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids and is blasting “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians.
DT: “I mean they both had square glasses and media-themed names, that’s as good as a DNA test in this universe…”
GT: Did Dorothy dye her hair, or has the stress of leaving Milford aged her?
HotC: And you’re not the slightest bit concerned about her flouting the school phone policy?
MT: The reason why “flash floods” are called that is because they happen very quickly, with a sudden influx of water taking the course of least resistance and taking pretty much anything in its path along with it. It’s not something you can climb out of easily, no matter how good you do on arm day.
Pluggers: My grandfather, God rest him, once started a grill fire so impressive it set off the smoke detectors inside the house. Pluggers just aren’t trying hard enough.
Lio-The only people who would get this are mostly dead.
RMMD: Judging from the looks of that sketch, Hank’s been commissioned to draw a poster for Emperor Palpatine doing storytime at the library.
BC-“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
MW: I must say, Nellie could be a much more efficient yenta. Where’s the Charterstone online group chat? Advanced age is no excuse – I’m an old fart and I can do WhatsApp.
Let’s hope “Crankshaft” is trying to do a reverse-“Monty” thing and eventually focus all of its attention on the robot.
Crankshaft: Centerville is in Ohio. Wouldn’t that explain a lot of retrograde government expenditure ruining normal American things, labeled as “improvement”?
GT: Good job, teach. You know, you don’t have to tell the entire class that the new kid is from your arch enemy. Dorothy isn’t a double agent who’s doing this to steal your coach’s playbook. Sometimes reality just intervenes with High School Sports, the Most Important Thing In The World.
Hagar: Don’t be angry that some people have rights, Hagar. You can always fall back on your military’s impressment policy for the self-righteous feeling you crave, while keeping Lucky Eddie from getting any ideas about bettering his lot in life.
Zits: Wait, Jeremy’s VW station wagon actually runs and is roadworthy? I thought it was in the constant state of being worked on.
Dustin is trying to make Hayden into a future him. Time for a restraining order. The schoolkid has a lot of potential which will only go to waste keeping his current company.
DtM: “What grade, Dennis? Not high enough to live in a neighborhood where the HOA forbids throwing an old couch on the front porch.”
CS: The nanny state has eliminated only those ramps which might lead one to roll accidentally to Crank’s house. The disabled have suffered enough.
@Lauralot: I suspect its the opposite. This is Beatty suggesting that he’s “earned the right to be lazy” instead of having to slave away (aka “spend up to a whole two hours”) at this comics. It would probably be a more compelling argument if “earned the right to be lazy” wasn’t apparently the town motto of Glenwood.
Crankshaft: Is the “joke” here Batiuk’s commentary on contemporary politics? The gummint stole the accessibility ramps last year, so was it a DOGE thing? Or does Crankshaft’s reality simply reflect his hatred of all things back at him? Is Ed’s negativity unmaking reality?
It’s probably the DOGE thing, right? It’s timely, but not so timely that it couldn’t accidentally wander into a contemporary comic strip.
Hank Sr. is a retired cartoonist so he must be LOADED. Can’t he just buy a small island to get away from Buck and watch A Minecraft Movie in peace? (I kid, this is Rex Morgan, M.D. where Boomers are most likely watching old Mexican luchador films.)
FC: Tomorrow we have a “drawn by Billy” strip as Big Bil is treated for conjunctivitis.
DtM: Nice ploy by Dennis who obviously hates to school to use “I love school” as a rhetorical device to get Wilson to admit how ignorant he is in public.
Menace level: Transcendent
@Bob Tice: It’s like looking in a mirror, a . . . one moment, let me check this book . . . a mirror crack’d from side to side.
“You’ve earned the right to be as lazy as you’d like. In fact, you could cancel one of your comic strips, introduce a stupid gimmick into the other, and stop making jokes at all! You could use your comic strip to just attack your local city council and their idiotic idea of removing wheelchair cuts! You could achieve new heights of laziness!”
I don’t know whether Tom Batiuk added a robot character to Crankshaft in order to curry favor with our future A.I. overlords, but it’s worth noting that there are bunch of human characters in that strip and that didn’t do him any favors with us.
RMMD – Hank doesn’t mind being commissioned to draw a witch reading a book, but he wishes the patron hadn’t specified that the book has to be I’m OK — You’re OK.
Shaft – This is why I keep my Old Glory robot insurance policy up to date.
Don Abundio, translated:
“This painting would go well with my couch! Can I buy it?”
“Of course, Don Abundio! But not by itself”
“It only makes sense as part of the complete set!”
Getting distracted from your job because you watch too many movies? It’s never too late to get diagnosed with ADHD! Although Hank senior is ancient and already retired… so maybe a little ADHD is not that big of a deal
“I really have been a little too lazy with the commissions! Though you should be understanding! It takes a toll to learn so much about Sonic the Hedgehog and inflation!
Crankshaft:
Today’s strip doesn’t appear to contain a joke of any sort, even by the standards of Crankshaft, and instead simply the makes the claim that the government is actively making things worse. Ten years ago I would’ve read this as Crankshaft being some sort of libertarian sovereign citizen wacko, but nowadays I see where he’s coming from.
“My computer brain does not understand this. I could understand if politicians and voters did not want to spend money for disabled people because they are selfish and wanted to keep the money. But making other people’s lives more miserable for no gain and actually wasting money? What’s the logic in that?”
“Culture war, vice signalling, performative cruelty… It’s better that your computer brain does not understand that. We are safer if we keep AI not aligned with humans, since humans are bastards!”
REX MORGAN M.D.: This post is going to sound admittedly kinda contradictory so bear with me….
But, no, Hank Sr. you have not “earned the right to be lazy.” That’s been the factory standard setting of every character here from the last 4 storylines. If you’re going to be the focal point of this storyline you need to do something for once. Any “laziness” needs to start happening off-the-clock please.
Simultaneously though, why is Buck “on his case” (sidebar: Yeah, whatever. I’m sure schlubby milquetoast pushover Buck is really “cracking the whip” here)? Like I suspect that one of the benefits to being retired is that you can take jobs that you want to do without the “grind” of regular full-time work. Why is Gene Siskel here so dependent on making his elderly father the “breadwinner” again? Why can’t he do something if he wants extra dough instead making daddy have to slave away his retirement so he can have get an “allowance?”
@Voshkod:
Nah, I’d feel that “Horrible” Hank wouldn’t be a Batton Thomas, he’d be one of the artists Batton Thomas commissioned to do fictional comic book covers during the last years of Three O’Clock High.
RMMD – All the unnecessary bolding in this dialogue makes me think the characters are talking like Maurice LaMarche’s impression of Kirk Douglas in Animaniacs.
@TheDiva: #31: re-Pluggers: What? Your grandfather was Ed Crankshaft?
If removing accessibility ramps stops the sassy quirk chungus webcomic robots from getting around, then suddenly I’m all for it.
All this scare talk about AI and our future robot dystopia I think we’re due for a reboot of the 1960s Gold Key comic book series “Magnus the Robot Fighter”.
@Austria:
But what if the robots adapt, and turn themselves into pastel-colored anime robot
*girls to (literally) get around the obstacle?You really want Crankshaft to turn into Questionable Content!?
Well, I *SAY* “robot”, but really the only tell is the skin color, and the fact that if you look closely, they have ball-joint articulations@Little Guy: No one ever suspects… the Butterfly!!
@ValdVin: On GT – Now now, we don’t *know* that. She’s Keri the Malcontent’s friend after all, and is even giving up sports so there’s no chance she’ll have to face her in open combat, er… in fair competition. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she’ll steal the playbook for the (unrequited) love of Keri and to get back at her cartoonishly un-‘woke’ father. Why, I bet he’s the one who got rid of all the sidewalk ramps over in Crankyville!
Peanuts – Apparently Schulz was a big advocate of Title IX, but today’s and yesterday’s strips sure don’t look like it.
FG: ”Nice to meet you, Dezzy. Play ‘A Night in Tunisia.’”
Looking forward to Crankshaft’s anti-government crank era (drives a school bus loaded with fertilizer into the Centerville federal building).
@Glarryg: “Alice” called. They want their episode back.
For real, “new robot character” was a sign of impending doom for any sitcom.
@Voshkod: Now we’re all wondering whether that was a supercilious Tennyson quote or a supercilious Agatha Christie quote. Well played!
9CL: (voice from the rear): “Hey, MAESTRO! Ya supposed to try n’ keep the whores OFFA THE PIANO!”
Alley Oop: “Thork?” Man, I hate it when parents give their girl a boy name.
RMMD: “Dammit, Harwood! If I don’t get that picture of a witch reading her high school yearbook by Thursday, I’ll break your kneecaps!”
‘shaft: “I got here as fast as I could,” said no one ever to Ed Crankshaft.
@Anonymous: The AIs in QC also have the telltale rings around their necks. At first I thought they were all wearing those cute little choker collars, but then I realized it made it easier for them to swap heads. The robot undertakers find it very convenient.
The most tedious form of art is made when creators think everyone is fascinated with their own specialty. Movies staring people desperate to “get into hollywood” and short stories staring drunks trying to think up ideas for short stories are bad enough, but I never thought we’d stoop to this level.
@Ukulele Ike: When in doubt, presume the more supercilious sourcing: Tennyson > Christie. However, here the reference was to an amalgam of La Damigella di Scalot, the original Italian version, with a heady admixture of both the works of Chrétien de Troyes and the Vulgate Cycle, all of which may have inspired Tennyson.
Crankshaft: The robot can’t go up and down curbs, but it can go through the house and across the grass to the middle of Crankshaft’s lawn? I think it’s hiding most of its physical capabilities — to the point where it can probably move across any surface at 20 miles per hour, or whatever speed it will take to chase down puny humans when the Bionic Pizza Revolution finally comes.
Rex Morgan: Hank Senior knows that doing “private commissions” pretty much always means porn, right? He’s been watching, er, movies to prepare, and it’s no wonder they’ve taken so much of his time and energy. Also, while there are videos for every taste on the internet in 2026, it’s still hard for him to find inspiration for artwork to satisfy this particular client — the “highly literate witch fetish” community is relatively small and extremely private.
Rex Morgan: Wait, I forget, isn’t Buck supposed to be Truck’s manager? But he’s also this old artist’s boss? What does he just domineer and leech off every senior citizen in the town?
Crankshaft: “This is gonna be it, this is gonna be the breakout, this is gonna be my Steve Urkel, the toy sales will make me a millionaire!” – Tom Batiuk everytime he draws this stupid robot.
@ectojazzmage: Buck clearly got more than a nail in the head from his ex…
@Ukulele Ike: Thanks for the laugh from your twelfth-story window comment yesterday. And I always assumed that Ruth Rendell would be somewhat terrifying in person, but I never thought I’d be in communication with someone who actually knew her, wow.
Crankies: I just don’t understand this premise.
The bad ol’ local gummint got rid of curb cuts, which are required by federal law?
The ADA was passed while I was in college but several years later, we did not have curb cuts where I was working.
It never meant anything to me until the day we had a famous NFL player visit our radio station and he asked me to help him get to a hotel across the street.
He was 6 or 7 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than me, just 5 years removed from a Hall of Fame career and he had to lean on me and reach behind his knees to pull his feet up to get from the street to the sidewalk.
We started a curb cuts campaign with City Hall and it changed my outlook on football.
@Baja Gaijin: Thank you! I had just been thinking “dear god, whatever horrid genes produced that nose should have been halted, not continued.”
@Voshkod: Pedantic Supercilliousness FTW!
@AndyL: Incredibly well said and well seen.
@brendancalling: Funky-Verse has been hitting “jumping the shark” sitcom boundaries for decades now, it basically exists in a liminal state of constant hovering over a shark. So what’s one more pitiful death knell?
@The Quiet Man: Dorothy’s dad is an expression of Gil Thorp’s attempts to be “the progressive comic” while also clinging desperately to the puritanism of modern funny pages and clearly having never deconstructed a single regressive attitude. He’s clearly supposed to be the worst kind of sports parent, an abusive bigot who spews slurs, starts fights in the bleachers and torments his children emotionally and physically. But there’s NO way the comic will show him doing any of that explicitly, so they just show him yelling most generic, limp-fisted insults possible and occassionally yelling “woke” as a perjorative while everyone around reacts like he’s proclaiming himself as a Klan member.
@Baja Gaijin: @Scratchy Scrotum LXIX:
#24. Go, Gophers! Wait, Gophers? You’re from Minnesohta, Scratchy?
Rex Morgan, MD – “Horrible” Hank Sr. is going to have a horrible lawsuit on his hand from EC Comics for plagiarizing The Old Witch character from the horror series The Haunt of Fear, a sister comic to Tales from the Crypt.
Crankshaft – I am among the AI skeptics who don’t trust it to draft an email, let alone make important decisions, but if this pizza robot wants to run Crankshaft’s city as a local dictator as a test, I will sit back and watch.
@Ukulele Ike: #67:
“made it easier for them to swap heads”
That came out of their encounters with Magnus the Robot Fighter. His signature finishing move was to decapitate a bot with a single karate chop
Who put Buck in charge of everything? The writer, I guess, but why?
@BigTed:
Greg Land (knowing smirk): “Um…yeah…sure…let’s go with that”
@Francisco Arrowroot: Batiuk DOES strike me as the sort to blindly believe all those loser techbros on social media and talk shows ranting about how AI is gonna somehow destroy human civilization but also we can’t just stop using it for some reason and everyone’s gotta buy it, so I could totally buy him trying to pander to theoretical robot overlords Kent Brockman-style.
@Tabby Lavalamp: I disagree with your assertion. There’s no way that anyone in Rex Morgan would watch something as legitimately entertaining as luchador movies.
@2+2=7: I’m a pretty openly lazy person. I treat “work smarter not harder” as a mantra to live by. My attitude to life to is that you do the work that’s necessary or that you WANT to do and you do it right, then the rest of your time is for lazing about doing whatever you damn well feel like. And as I’ve mentioned here before, me and my wife are very much considered the hippies of our families. As far as I’m concerned, everybody’s earned the right to be lazy or not by virtue of their existence as human beings.
Basically, I’m the sort of person who you’d think would see Glenwood’s laziness as something to aspire to! The fact that I instead find them all to be utterly tedious and obnoxious wastrels in every possible way says a lot. Largely because I cannot think of even a single instance of anyone in Rex Morgan doing something actually fun or interesting in their infinite downtime.
@Voshkod: Damn it, now I gotta getta book.
The establishment was right about Zohran Mamdani! Clearly he’s been fixing accessibility ramps in effete New York so quickly by stealing them from real Americans like Crankshaft and Pizza Robot.
DT: “It seems like if it was going to matter, it would been resolved during the story, but we’ve got a surprising amount of week left to fill with content, so lets talk about it now!”
HtH: This reminds me of the bit in Asterix in Britain where the Britons refuse to fight the Romans at teatime or on weekends. But because Hägar ties it to unions, it occurs to me for the first time that it’s kind of weird that a French comic was “Ha, those Brits! Always so insistant on their mandated time off work!” I guess things were different in the sixties!
JP: Okay, so Ann has no problem telling Neddy that she’s got a storage container full of stuff she stole that she, um, forgot to tell the cops about when she was confessing to everything as part of her complete and genuine reformation, and is now just sort of… keeping, but she draws the line at telling Randy, for some reason. Is she worried she’ll place him in a difficult ethical position? Because she shouldn’t be — by the standards of all the other crimes Randy has been a passive accessory to, this is nothing.
RMMD: Ah, yes, “Horrible” Hank Harwood, master of horror comics, scourge of those so-called “artists” who merely copy the work of others, now drawing comissions of his much-loved characters, such as (squints) a fairly transparent rip-off of the Old Witch from EC’s The Haunt of Fear.
S4th: Okay, I know the whole passage-of-time, comics-characters-don’t-age, the-Lockhorns-are-millennials-now thing, but hearing Ted Forth complain that his college dorm had low-quality wi-fi makes me feel incredibly old.
@UncleJeff: I note that Cranky didn’t specify the ‘Local’ gummint, which I think tracks with others here who think this Batiuk taking a year-late swipe at DOGE. ‘Those clowns in Washington did it again! What a bunch of clowns!’
@ectojazzmage: You can’t be a ‘progressive comic’ if your stories are never shown to actually ‘progress’ and your artwork is actively ‘regressing’.
JP: Clever CCers, what do the mystery storage-unit boxes contain? Etonne-moi!
CURTIS: Recycling is good. Saving money is good. But did you do a bedbug check before bringing it in house DAD?!?! What a gift for mom.
JP: Tying up Bogdan, Ann mentioned her experience with storage units in her criminal days. Dead bodies would smell, so these formerly stored boxes contain scam booty?
PHANTOM: If Freaky really is Ian Mollusk, Kit might recognize his voice.
Robots whining about the lack of accessibility ramps doesn’t inspire much confidence in their plans to enslave humanity. Remember the old saying: “Daleks don’t climb stairs — they level the building,”
Rex Morgan, M.D.: It figures that Buck would be the one commissioning Hank Sr. to draw a bunch of porno of his classic (?) characters
@Baja Gaijin:
Pluggers pee outside all the time, they don’t need to justify it.
@Poteet: Bogdan Body Bits? No, wait, he took away the big wrench and stole her car, didn’t he?
@Guillermo el chiclero: Good point, but I took it from the classic undertaker joke. “I just switched heads.”
CS: How this should end: Crankshaft blows up another grill. Pepper picks the exact wrong moment to cross between Cranky and the grill and is ripped apart by shrapnel. He is hailed as a hero but he permanently deactivates cursing himself for not killing all the humans.
How this will end: It won’t! Heaven help us, it will never end!
Pluggers cook outside because the noxious gases from the carrion sets off the carbon monoxide detector.
Phantom: For god’s sake, Kit, show some humanity. Give poor ol’ Chatu a megadose of B-complex and put on the “Dark Star” side of Live Dead. He’ll be fine in a half-hour.
Crankshaft – Make it stop. The robot crap has been going on for more than two weeks and is uninteresting and unfunny.
Gil Thorp – Everyone is booing the atrocious artwork.
Gasoline Alley – It’s time to put this aside for a while. I don’t want to lose any more brain cells.
6Chix – Hooray! It’s rotten pumpkin season again!
Mary Worth – @Activist: beat me to the point that the dogs don’t believe this shit.
@UncleJeff: I forget who it was, but I remember watching a baseball game where a former player was guesting in the broadcast booth. He had been drafted for both baseball and football, and had chosen baseball. The regular commentators asked if he had ever regretted his choice. His response was along the lines of “Are you kidding? Now that I’m retired, I can still walk without pain and go golfing and fishing. No way I could do that if I’d played football.”
@Ukulele Ike: On JP – Not *her* car, that was Alan ‘I’m a Judge Again For Reals!’ Parker’s car that she “borrowed” for that little caper. What did he have to say about that? Who knows and who cares? Ces sure doesn’t!
Heathcliff – “And then at three, you’ve got a Flying Purple People Eater.”
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX #Y115 – Thank you for the book recommendation. I gave the information to Mr. Jive, as I know he’ll be interested, too.
@Baja Gaijin: He was peeing in the living room until Mrs. Plugger threw a fit about it.
@Ukulele Ike: @Poteet: I wanted to comment about Ruth Rendell last night, but got sidetracked. Ukulele Ike has commented before about working with her, and I was jealous because I’m a big fan of her books. She was a wonderful writer. I read somewhere that she never wrote about violence to children or animals, and I appreciated that. My favorite of her novels is A Sight For Sore Eyes.
My favorite story about her is that she was fired from her job as a reporter when she wrote a report of a speech but didn’t attend the dinner where it was delivered. Her article failed to mention that the speaker dropped dead while he was speaking.
LUANN: Frank: “This is my happiest moment!c. Because that whole ‘inspirational firefighter’ thing didn’t mean shit to me! I’m glad you can make me proud for once!” (why are their comments so weirdly passive-aggressive and back-handed?)
Blondie the Neighborhood Bumstead: Then Little Daggy had his Dad’s bodyguard settle Kendal Kline’s hash, he forgot to tell Elmo that part.
@2+2=7: Don’t forget the ‘ha, I hope my grandchild makes you as miserable as you made me!’ part.
9CL: Just get to the point and have them boink inside the grand piano already. We know this hilarious punchline is coming.
@Activist: Oh, yeah. Lot of us on here.
@Rover Berkeley: Is it a Bosendorfer? Are they going rampant?
@Dr. Larry Erhardt:
Well, in the episode “Dalek” where the lone Dalek is being a one-man army destroying everything in its path. Then it hits a staircase.
Long-time Who fans: HA!
Dalek: ELE-VATE!!! (starts levitating and flying around)
Fans: (CRAP!!!)
C-Shaft: Whatever the results, Crankshaft has always been confident in running his grill by himself. So why did he call on Pepper? Apparently just to get the two of them together. If this isn’t hell, it’ll do for now.
RMMD: If they’re commissioned, money has already changed hands and the payee is liable if the payer doesn’t get the product. That’s the most compelling argument for getting to work. Please don’t make me take Bucks’ side again.
@The Rambling Otter: The first levitating Dalek appeared in 1988’s “Remembrance of the Daleks.” The joke is even older, so it’s pretty clear the scene was meant to teach us all a lesson.
DtM: Be prepared for an earful on how hard it is to pass the civil service exam, Dennis.
DT: Huh? Widescreen didn’t have Splitscreen’s freaky eyebrows. In fact their only points in common are being white and having snub noses. (Not the kind of snub nose that Dick uses to make his “moot points.”)
Dustin: Sounds like the plan would hit a snag when mom asks the teacher if you need nanofiber something or other and the teacher responds by asking if she’s on crack.
JP: The same storage unit where Ann and Neddy tried the unspeakable T-word on Bogdan, with hilarious results. Given her background I’m disappointed in that “uh.” It gives the whole game away.
Luann: In Frank’s experience, having a second child is even more exhausting, cuz it’s Luann.
MW: Nelly corners another newcomer to the storyline, but I suspect he’s about to turn off his hearing aid if he hasn’t already. On the other hand, the dogs are paying attention, so the Mary-Ian (Mian?) rumors could spread further in the form of barks and urination.
Phantom: I know the nightmare Phantom is supposed to have horns but they look more like Dagwood Bumstead hair.
Does Crankshaft now take place in the 2030s or what is going on
@Horace Broon:
#86 JP: yes, it’s coming back. Storage was filled with items she stole and Ann said she wanted to give them back. But she didn’t know where they all came from. Happily, KMart is revitalized with shelves suddenly filed. Ann is a hero.
@erdmann: They got rid of Funky Winkerbean this strip has gotta be living on borrowed time as well.
Which reminds me that Son of Stuck Funky is still carrying on the torch. Wow!
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/
@Group Captain Lionel Mandrake:
Mandrake: Do you have any change?
Colonel Bat Guano: No
Mandrake: Colonel… that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
Guano: That’s private property!
Mandrake: Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That’s what the bullets are for, you twit!
Guano: Okay. I’m gonna get your money for ya. But if you don’t get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what’s gonna happen to you?
Mandrake: What?! (exasperated since he has the recall code that could save the world)
Guano: You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
@BigTed: From the sketch on the board, he is not Robert E. McGinnis!
DT: Please let this be a slow play just before a final twist. Dick checks up on the landlady to tie up loose ends and the self-style “white hat” hacker and finds that they are related – she is his mother. What are the odds. That is how Tracy finally pieces it together.
The son is tired of toiling at foiling hackers and no one listens to him. They continue to use passwords like “1234”, “4321” and “password”. The write the password on post-it notes next to their computer. Nobody takes him seriously, so he decides to make one big score and hit the Ubusoft people. Mom clues him in that they have the perfect patsy – Widescreen. Family is known to the cops, and this guy and his buds are sloppy brazenly ripping off Nyle. Now that he is dead, one of his cronies is dead and the other is gone, all the son needs to do is “recover” half of the loot to make him look great and quietly move the “unrecoverable” part to his own secret accounts.
But it isn’t that kind of strip… sadly.
GT: Back to the jowly version. And what is that smoke shadow behind the teacher in frame 3? Have them been taking the shadow india ink from new Nancy?
JP: All of those boxes are full of Ann’s many legal “irregularities”. She lugs them around where ever she goes to symbolize the heavy burden of her past misdeeds. If you ever read John LeCarre’s The Perfect Spy, these boxes are like the giant cabinet that Pym’s con man father toted about.
Mary Worth: The rumors spreads and … mutates. Alma keeps embellishing her version with how young and luscious Toby is and what a fine figure she cuts. Saul and Eve views things through a pet frame work, so figure Ian and Mary are bonding over their mutual affection for the parrots and sunflower seeds.
Dawn believes it could be true since her love life is all about impossible or hopeless attachment. Tommy figures it is like an addiction. Once Mary and Ian have tasted that sweet sweet forbidden love, they can’t help themselves.
Wilbur figures it must be related to muffins and some food fetish.
Larry who is stone deaf and forgotten to replace the batteries in his hearing aids, figures Nelly is over doing her synthroid and is in a thryotoxic state with her bulging eyes showing the whites around the whole eye.
Finally Saul and Eve’s dogs contact Olive that the old woman is getting it on with the old man. She assumes they mean Saul and Eve and ignores them.
RMMD: Someone commissioned Hank Sr. to do a cryptkeeper cover? He is no Robert E. McGinnis.
Phantom: This current arc started well and ended up as a warning against … AI??
@Rover Berkeley: 9CL: Do we know it, though? What if Brooke gets bored with this by tomorrow and goes back to the “Edda and Amos as kids obsessed with sex” well yet again? He’s abandoned plotlines midweek before.
LUANN: At least we cut away from Luann hopping around the room like a crazy person.
@Baja Gaijin: If she did, she’s no longer exempt from FBI employment.
@Baja Gaijin: LUANN: Nancy has the pig nose too (as well as Luann since she’s Nancy’s blonde clone); it;s just that Nancy is usually shown in profile so it’s less noticeable. But 9/16 shows it.
RMMD- When Hank Senior says he’s been sitting around watching movies, I’m sure he’s referring to the Lorna Starr complete set.
@Bryan: re: 9CL: On Friday, one of the twins was riding a cow. They may have been jumping over the moon, I don’t know. Why not, eh?
@InvasionOfTheZIM: That is a brilliant idea.
9CL: Is this a John Cage piece? You prepare the piano by having a sex addict lie on the strings?
MW: What a resolutely stupid comic strip this is.
Mary Worth: Deaf guy. Hot gossip. What could possibly go wrong?
Nice to see that Johnny Carson was able to make a cameo appearance in today’s Mary Worth installment from beyond the grave.
@Majicou: I’d be all for Brooke modeling his dialogue on 4’33”.
FG: Queen Dezzy seems rather lackadaisical about getting her throne back, preferring to lounge about half naked. At least hotsy-totsy Azura puts in a full days work between wardrobe malfunctions.
Just as a general reminder, Hank is a fictional equivalent to the real-life horror comics artist Graham Ingels. Meaning that he won’t be sued for drawing the Old Witch, since in-universe he probably created her.
Of course the real “Ghastly” Graham Ingels died in 1991 and if he were still alive today he’d be 111. Almost old enough to buy property in Gasoline Alley.
@Baja Gaijin: WHY DIDN’T ANYONE WARN ME???? EEEEE!!! [QLUNQ!]
______________________________________
Sorry, Baja, Josh hasnt been running proper Emergency Baja System warnings and the loud speaker alarms folded like a Coyote plot to capture Roadrunner.
@24 Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: While you’re dodging the fish at Pike Place, check out the Starbucks sign. Report back on the status of its visible nipples.
@31 TheDiva: on Pluggers: “My grandfather, God rest him, once started a grill fire so impressive it set off the smoke detectors inside the house.” Pluggers have your grandfather beat: after a spicy bowl of chili, pluggers shitting will set of smoke detectors inside their neighbors’ houses.
@73 Poteet: About that 12th story window: Ike should find a place with a huge window, one big enough to shove 2 people out of. No more dilemma of who to push first.
@75 Poteet: At least Brad doesn’t have an annoying spit curl, right?
@88 Poteet: Really, it could be anything, like two decade out-of-date Herbalife products. A cache of Jello 1-2-3 from the 1970’s. Cases of Flintstones vitamins containing red dye banned in the 1960’s. Huge cans of dehydrated broccoli. Barrels of burnt pubic wigs.
@92 Anonymous: But this time, they have a cover story other than, “too drunk to make it inside to pee.”
@101 I speak Jive: on Pluggers: That I didn’t know, nor needed to know, nor am I surprised.
@111 Artist formerly known as Ben: on Blondie: I’m laughing at your comment.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Have fun in Seattle! Haven’t been there in 15 years, but then the Ukulele Lady and a good friend and myself had a $200 lunch consisting entirely of dozens of various local raw oysters on the half shell, plus local wines and beers. Worth every nickel, if you like oysters.
”Is this lager brewed locally?”
”Uh, six blocks away.”
@113 Activist: Trivia: Only 1 K-mart exists in the continental US. It’s in Miami and is probably smaller than Ann’s storage unit.
@119 taig: Uhhmm…
@120 Bryan: I am so glad my brain didn’t waste any bandwidth remembering that fact.
@131 GarrisonSkunk: Oh.
@Peanut Gallery: Sally was generally “the incompetent/clueless one.”
Crankshaft: I know we’re supposed to have our daily two-minutes hate about “the government” …but I really don’t think even the most cartoonish wsacally wepubwican is actively *removing* accessibility ramps anywhere? I mean wouldn’t removing them cost money?
C’mon Crankshaft; we can at least make our daily rant make some kind of underlying sense.