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Crankshaft, 8/19/26

The last time Crankshaft and Harry Dinkle started an adventure together, Crankshaft looked real cherry but it ended up with Harry confronting the truly depressing circumstances of his father’s death. Now Ed has shown up at his place of work to drag him off on some other journey and he looks pissed, so maybe this time will turn out to be more fun for Harry, or maybe Crankshaft has just decided to murder him and put him out of his misery.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/19/26

At one point the scam twins were thinking about kidnapping a child, but then they realized that would not only get them in a lot of trouble, but also make this strip dangerously exciting, so now they’re trying to negotiate down to an acceptable level of plot development. I love the idea that squatting is too much of a commitment to bother doing. Like, most people squat just because that means they get to live someplace for free, but in the Twins’ conception, they’d be squatting for revenge, which means they’d have to stick around even if it turns out that the Morgan house has bad vibes or is unpleasant to be inside (it definitely does and is).

Beetle Bailey, 8/19/26

Hey, General, I just want to point out that the U.S. has fought in, like, several wars in the time that you’ve been an officer. Heck, there’s one going on right now! I know what you mean is that you want to have been in one of the cool ones, not the cringe wars we keep finding ourselves in lately, but still, I feel like you shouldn’t be quite so vocal on this point at the office if you don’t want to find yourself abruptly in the field.

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Pickles, 8/18/26

Not to sound old, but I do find someone replying “k” to me to be irritating sometimes (and to prove I’m not doing generational discourse, I’ll say these people are as likely to be older than me as they are to be younger). But expecting someone to type out “okay” instead of “ok”? That’s madness. That’s insanity.

B.C., 8/18/26

Speaking of generational discourse, I’m not sure what syndicated newspaper comic strip I would’ve guessed would be the first to go in for “Weren’t things different and better back in the wonderful long-ago year two thousand and twelve?” nostalgia slop for millennials, but I definitely would not have picked B.C.

Hi and Lois, 8/18/26

There are something like 1.5 million real estate agents in the US, according to some cursory Googling, and I don’t think there’s ever been a comic strip dedicated to their specific interests and concerns, so maybe Hi and Lois should lean into that and become primarily realtor-focused. The Roaring ’20s ended and Blondie shifted from being about a cool flapper and her dissolute failson husband to being about a suburban dipshit who’s bad at his white collar job but manages to hold onto it anyway; so too, as America’s economy becomes increasingly asset-based, we must turn away from Hi’s generic office antics and instead focus on his wife’s attempts to facilitate people cashing out their home equity and hoping the money lasts until they die. The creative team will need to do a bit more research on the various dilemmas realtors encounter in their day-to-day life to give the thing a little more variety, though. They can’t all be about hoarders!

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Dustin, 8/17/26

Hey kids! Do you remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that dumped 150 million gallons of oil into the ocean? Well, that happened in April of 2010, which I regret to inform you all was more than 16 years ago. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for someone in their early 20s, as Dustin is supposed to be, to have a memory of this event that includes the total amount of oil spilled over the course of the disaster; I am saying that it’s a testament to the unparalleled period of peace and prosperity we’ve experienced since, given that this is Dustin’s go-to reference for “something world-historically bad happening” within his lifetime.

Crankshaft, 8/17/26

Hey, kids! Do you remember Funky Winkerbean, the comic strip that was originally about wacky high school students in Northeast Ohio who hung out at Montoni’s Pizza, but eventually came to be about depressed adults in Northeast Ohio whose lives all revolved around Montoni’s Pizza in some way, before finally becoming about survivors living in a futuristic sci-fi Northeast Ohio hellscape where books were eradicated in “the burnings” and the last few precious copies are guarded by robots, with the status of Montoni’s Pizza being unclear? Anyway, long story short, Crankshaft hopes you do, because clearly the intention here is that Crankshaft sitting down and saying “a nice big slice of … Montoni’s Pizza” with an extremely knowing expression on his face will have all of us hootin’ and hollerin’ and yellin’ “got the reference” like we’re the live studio audience for Family Matters and Urkel just walked on set.