They don’t have file cabinets on the Moon, they all use computers up there
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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/24
Once upon a time, your average newspaper reader looked forward to the middle of the week with eager anticipation. That’s because they knew that Wednesday was “Miss Buxley Wednesday,” an opportunity to turn to the comics page and briefly become horny from looking at a crude drawing of an attractive blonde woman in a skimpy black dress. But then we all got older, especially the old man who was the blonde woman’s boss, and while we’re still going through the Wednesday motions, nobody’s getting horny anymore, not really. Instead, the old man is getting exasperated by his subordinate, and the blonde woman, even more crudely drawn than before, is quietly typing away in the background, presumably grateful that nobody is getting horny at her.
Dick Tracy, 9/25/24
Speaking of letdowns, if you were a mysterious alien being with innate biological powers, a command of advanced technologies, and a vague plan to conquer humanity, how would you think your Wednesday would go? Probably you wouldn’t guess that you’d be spending it going through some file cabinets, right? But that’s just how it happens sometimes. Into everyone’s life, a little file cabinet searching must fall, even into the lives of aliens from the Moon.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/25/24
Hey guys! Did you know that trigger finger happens with a tendon sheath is inflamed and creates a temporary inability to straighten a finger or thumb? Pretty neat, huh? Not sure exactly what you’re supposed to do about it, but if we’re lucky, we might find out soon!
Shoe, 9/25/24
Oh, the Perfesser’s refill isn’t scheduled for another week but he needs more sleeping pills now? Interesting, interesting. Look, I’m not saying a “the Perfesser gets addicted to downers” would be a great new direction for this strip, but it’d probably be better than [spends 45 seconds trying to come up with a funny and pithy description of what exactly Shoe has been getting at for the past 20 years, then fails and gives up] whatever it’s doing now.
87 replies to “They don’t have file cabinets on the Moon, they all use computers up there”
BB: Miss Buxley hasn’t been the same since the stroke hit her. Not her, specifically, but whatever middle aged intern took up the mantle that day.
MW: Estelle, you put up with that Arthur guy scamming you out of thousands of dollars and Wilbur being the boyfriend from hell between the animal abuse, the gaslighting, and making you think that he was dead. Meanwhile you went to one venue and a bakery while Ed was at work (during normal working hours) but you threw a fit because he couldn’t be there to feed you cake. And then an emergency happens the very night of the engagement dinner and it goes horribly tragic but you’re upset because you couldn’t make your estranged cousin impressed and jealous of you by shoving Ed in her face.
Either you lost your tolerance from dating Wilbur or you’re just a self absorbed bitch. I lean towards both.
RMMD: Truck has a look on his face that suggests he’s never dealt with a woman with more education than he’s had.
Shoe: I’ve never heard of C-Span before, and now I definitely won’t watch it, because Shoe told me that it sucks ;-p
Reading Rex Morgqn right after Dick Tracy,I briefly thought “Trigger Finger” was a person.
Shoe: Doesn’t the Perfesser get enough sleep at his work desk?
RMMD:
“We arm-wrestle to loosen the tendons, Mr. Tyler! — en garde!”
@Pozzo: I thought the same thing, but for Painful Snap.
MW: Estelle’s vulnerability has tripped Wilbur’s Desperate Woman Alert. The fly is in the web. The pudgy spider waits, crouched in the shrubbery.
RMMD: Occupational therapy. Might as well widen the base of people at whom Truck can grouse and grumble.
Beetle Bailey: I just realized that I have no idea what Lt. Fuzz’s job is at Camp Swampy.
I presumed that maybe he was Halftrack’s personal assistant, but then I thought… his job is literally blocking Halftrack’s view of Buxley at all times. (Per the restraining order)
RMMD:
“What do we do about it?”
“We make shadow puppets to bring blood flow into the inflamed areas, and then throw in a little verbalization to make the exercise more enjoyable. Here’s a duck, Mr. Tyler! — quack, quack! Gosh — that reminds me of Rex!”
@Needless Exposition:
MW: If she goes back to Wilbur it will be the biggest hatewatch in history
Those flesh-colored antennae on Dick Tracy’s moon people have always bothered me. I mean, the coloration makes them look somewhat flexible (I’m sure you can all think of other appendages that are flesh-colored and somewhat flexible — but I didn’t SAY that, nosirree). As opposed to, say, cow horns, which are not flexible at all. Are there muscles in there — can they MOVE them? (Or maybe it’s just batteries? Cuz look at the zap lines coming out of them, weird.) Now imagine having to soap the damn things in the shower. Or figure out how to wear a hat. Ugh. I can’t even.
DT: “Let’s see. Space aardvark plans, space advertising plans, space bananas, space baseball, space coasters, space coitus, space cooties, space croupiers – wait, too far – space cottages, space countertops… here it is! Thank God, I knew I put my wallet in this cabinet earlier! Now I just need… damn it, I left my car keys on the other side of the laser grid!”
RMMD: June’s hairstyles have always been awful, but this takes the cake, the cake platter, the tablecloth, and three of the dining room chairs.
JP: Jesus. Never mind explaining why Neddy is particularly nervous at all, now we have to account for why Neddy is now so terrified that she’s lost all awareness of everything around her and forgotten how to act like a human being. It’s wildly out of character and the situation doesn’t prompt it at all. But this is what inept Joss Whedon copycats think humor is, so here we are.
Luann: No one asked what sex with Gunther was like, but Bets is telling us anyway, and it’s unsurprisingly so unerotic and unengaging that Bets mostly just zones out and listens to Les in the next room as he plays Apex Legends and talks to his cat about his internet passwords and medical history.
RMMD: Truck had the worst fate a Boomer white musician could get: he received a trigger warning
MW: Estelle, having spent the better part of her afternoon getting gussied up for the failed engagement dinner, stews in frustration at all her fruitless effort and angrily removes her taupe wig. Underneath the polyester tresses, her scalp reveals an array of tattooed glyphs from her home planet, the instructions for insinuating herself into a human alliance that will provide a foothold for the coming invasion. The Leader would not be pleased.
RMMD – I thought Trigger had hooves.
BB – Don’t let it get you down, General. The world is still tottering on the brink of annihilation….
DT – The Governor is here, huh. Well, Ron DeSantis was bound to pop up in the newspapers again somewhere….
RMMD – It’s also called Dipshits Contracture….
Shoe – If he follows that Rx, next week he’ll want assisted suicide….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@1 Needless Exposition: on Mary Worth: The brain worms finally found Estelle’s brain.
CS: Goddamn it, I wasn’t going to do this but Batiuk has already spent half a week on this aggressively moronic backstory and it’s beyond obnoxious.
First, the obvious one – the timeline. It’s completely fucked. Ed Crankshaft’s age is in the mid-70s at most. I can find very little concrete Crankshaft information online, but most indications suggest Ed’s baseball career preceded his service in WW2, which would make Ed well over 100 years old. Which he isn’t, and it’s not much better even if Crankshaft’s baseball days were in the later ‘40s instead. At this point Ed is the same age or younger than the high-schoolers he used to drive to school in his 50s. Hell, Comic Time has rendered him roughly the same age as his own daughter. You can’t have it both ways, Tom.
Next, the Mud Hens. Batiuk would have you believe Crankshaft was playing for some backwoods beer league team. Wrong. The Toledo Mud Hens were (and, despite a number of franchise relocations and restarts, still are) a professional baseball team that played at the second-highest level of competition. The pay probably sucked, but the players were professionals and during the season this was their full-time job, and they would have been expected to treat it like a job. Pro starting pitchers don’t just get to turn up once a week for a few hours to throw their innings and then leave until their next scheduled start; they are on mostly the same schedule as everyone else, practicing, planning, assisting, studying opposition, being available to step in if needed, and supporting their team when they’re not playing. The idea that Ed thought he could just fuck off from his job for a couple days without talking to his coaches, manager, catchers, and other teammates, all because he was told a piece of paper on the wall said the pitching rotation had been reorganized, is literally unbelievable. This would not and could not happen. It’s even more ridiculous if we take Ed’s “big league dreams” seriously, as that would mean he should have been all the more eager and insistent to remain plugged in and involved.
As for the scouting, of course this isn’t how it worked. Even before universal MLB affiliation, major league teams would of course have been keeping close tabs on talented players in other pro leagues that they might be able to poach, and they would have been far more interested in longtime consistent performance than whatever some guy happened to see on a single day they sent someone to watch a game in person. The notion that Ed could have been a major leaguer but lost his one and only chance by missing this one specific game is just stupid.
Everything about Ed’s illiteracy and how he dealt with it is also contrived. So many pointless self-sabotaging and stupid things have to be true about Crankshaft to even have a chance of reaching this possibility, far past any level of sympathy. Over 97% of the US population in 1940 was illiterate, and it’s not like baseball teams comprised snobby intellectuals. So on top of yet another case of flagrant hypocrisy with Ed lying to his team about being able to read out of shame, it makes no sense because most of his peers would have been illiterate as well. Even if Ed had it worse than they did, even if he somehow came to Toledo with total unfamiliarity with the written word, he should still have been able to quickly learn to recognize single-digit numbers and what arrangement of squiggly lines equated to his name, and he should have been especially motivated to improve with his supposed passion to reach the next level of pro ball. There are so many points where something reasonable or downright inevitable derails this nonsense event from mattering or even occurring. Instead, everything is forced to manufacture the end result that Batiuk wants, reality be damned.
And today Ed claims this experience motivated him to learn to read so he wouldn’t miss anything ever again, but he didn’t actually do that until decades later. Even when Ed takes a break from destroying property, bullying his coworkers, abusing animals, mocking elderly rape, and endangering the lives of everyone around him with reckless driving – and, oh yeah, fire – so that he can share a decent (albeit incongruous) life lesson, he is still self-servingly lying with every foul gust of halitotic air that escapes his scowling mouth. This comic sucks.
(Meanwhile, if you want a better anecdote about someone who really had their life destroyed by not being able to read something, ask our brave and wonderful heroine Lillian about her sister Lucy. Seriously, this comic sucks.)
We’re aliens on the moon,
We act like baboons,
For they ain’t no files
So we use our guile
And sing our alien tune
FC: They’re called ‘Spells,’ Dolly.
Rex Morgan, M.D.:
“You’ll need some, ah, physical therapy.”
“Sorry, I’m not sure I follow.”
“Some hand exercise.”
“Hmm…”
“When you’re alone.”
“Say more?”
“And thinking about sex, maybe.”
“So when I’m sitting on the park bench?”
“You know what? Yes, exercise your hand on the park bench.”
“Right-o, will do!”
“Make sure to make a follow up appointment for six to ten months before you leave!”
Crank: “Like, there was some kind of war going on in Europe at the time, but I never did catch all the details.”
BF: The past two days were comic strip-coded “This was all a dream!” Now we’re told Slut Friend really DID lock tonsils with her boss and agree to go on a two-week automobile fuck tour with him? This is wrong in nearly every way.
RMMD ”Well, it would be bad if it spread to your heart, so the finger will have to go.”
“Are you sure you’re a girl? I have a lot more hair than you do.”
“Did I say finger? I meant arm.”
“Failing and giving up” is actually a pretty good description of the last 20 years of Shoe.
Beetle Bailey – General Halftrack was having a good day. He was thinking about the sun smiling down on all of humanity, and the beauty of it all. He even thought of Beetle’s niece who is friends with the sunbeam. For a man whose profession is war, it’s a nice moment to realize what he’s supposed to be defending.
But his heart freezes as he walks into the office. Miss Buxley’s look of horror and Lt. Fuzz’s excessive chipper demeanor can only mean that Fuzz used his connections at the Pentagon to approve one of his deranged plans to bring carnage on the civilian population of one of the US’s adversaries. In fact, it was code named “solar flare” and would… Halftrack couldn’t even think about it. There is nothing in this Universe of mysteries, wonders and transcendent moments that mankind couldn’t weaponize against the enemies it created for politically and economically expedient reasons.
He wanted to say “God help us all”, but Lt. Fuzz has accounted for that. May God save himself as well.
Dick Tracy – The advance species of Moon aliens are technically more advanced than us. They know it better to keep some files hidden than inevitably hacked due to lazy tech company security. It might be slower, but at least their data isn’t breached every other day like Terrans.
Rex Morgan, MD – Truck doesn’t truck will overly long exposition dumps.
Shoe – Once there was talk of turning Shoe into its own TV Show, but the FDA used their authority to prevent it due to harmful side effects! The Surgeon General even threatened to use lethal force, a little known and rarely used provision of the office’s authority that allows him to use recalled food and banned drugs in assassination to protect the public welfare
BB: Lt. Fuzz has finally worked up the chain to tattle about Sarge eating at his desk.
RMMD: I hate it when my sheath gets inflamed and then there’s a snap.
Shoe: Obviously, The Perfesser used seven of his sleeping pills in his failed suicide attempt, but it didn’t work. Sorry for being so dark.
I guess the US congress in Bird World isn’t the batshit clown show that it is on ours, because if the Perfesser was human then the pharmacist might realize that’s the very reason he can’t get any sleep in the first place.
RMMD-June will get the bone saw. “How well can you play with one hand?”
MW-“Ed ruined my chance to show up my cousin Pam and make the dinner all about me.”
FC-“Here’s one from my friend Mary Worth. Oh we had such a falling out over a man named Wilbur.”
Beetle Bailey-Lt. Fuzz is in the office and Ms. Buxley’s wearing a bra.
Frazz: I’m imagining this girl shrieking everything in her dialogue balloons at the top of her lungs.
Luann: Yeah, Gunther definitely covers his face with a pillow.
CS: Forget about a Pulitzer, this little vignette barely works as an ad for the Reading is Fundamental program.
9CL: This absolutely must be taking place in an alternate universe.
MW: Hoo boy! We’re being treated to a whole week of Estelle talking herself out of getting married.
Zits: I’ve got to say, Discovery Channel’s Radish Week is less thrilling than its Shark Week.
FC: “She also likes to reminisce about the letters she stole from her sister and cackle.”
@jroggs: In addition to your impressive list of Ed’s crimes, don’t forget negligent homicide in the case of “Pops” Clutch.
MW: Tear him a new one, Estelle! Then dump him!
RMMD: “What do we do about it? Well, studies have shown that picking your nose is an excellent therapy.”
CS: So tragic. As a child, Ed wasn’t able to read comic books. So now as an adult, he has no points of reference and thus no point of entry into the pinnacle of Centerville-Westview social life, which is hanging around the Comix Corner nerding out with Jeff, Divot-Head, Mopey Pete, Darren, Crazy Harry, Batton Thomas, et al.
Also, this might explain why he despises schoolchildren so much.
My wife had trigger finger. I bet she’ll be really excited when I tell her that Rex Morgan M.D. is featuring HER problem only in the comic strip it’s being suffered by a secondary character, who’s this old guy who plays country music and usually spends a lot of time sitting in a diner I think harassing the waitress but he’s spent the last few weeks instead just sitting on a bench talking to random strangers and… you know what? I’ll keep it to myself.
OMG! This morning as I read CC, I turned to my non-comics-reading wife and said, “At last all of my comics reading has paid off! By reading Rex Morgan M.D. I have learned that the problem I am having with my pinky finger is called “trigger finger” and that an inflammation of the sheath around a tendon causes it.” She said, “Great. Do they tell you how to fix it?” I laughed and laughed, and then explained that it could be days or weeks before they reveal that information. Of course, Rex Morgan will probably tell me before I can get an appointment to see my doctor.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: On the moon, there is no crack;
That’s why we bring it back;
And if you think it’s not a fact;
Next week we’ll be mainlining smack….
RMMD: June tells Truck; “Don’t worry. We’ll finger it out.” As she tries to bring some warmth to the practice with a little medical humor.
“Hey, Truck.” She goes on; “Can you play guitar by ear?”
Why, yes. Why do you ask?
“Because you’ll no longer be able to use your finger! Heh, heh.”
@jroggs, CS: Damn, this is Reading-TruFans Level of Talking One for the Team. I salute you.
Rex Morgan: Beatty cares so little for the medical aspect of this medical drama comic that I’m fairly certain he just copy and pastes medical information from Wikipedia to save time so he can get back to writing about his true passion: old or middle aged people sitting around making weird faces at each other while they talk about roots country music.
Shoe: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if a pharmacist randomly refused to fill my prescription for what I presume are mental health drugs and than made a pithy joke about it, I’d probably put my fist through his skull.
DT: If I were an alien race advanced technology and psychic powers, and I was planning on taking over the world and had enlisted some human traitors who were willing to sell out their planet on the assumption that they would be spared in the ensuing holocaust (spoiler alert: they won’t), I would question whether light corporate espionage was really the best use of my skill set.
RMMD: The sad thing is that June quoting from a WebMD page is the closest this arc has gotten or will get to any genuine drama.
Shoe: “I can’t fatally overdose on C-Span, you idiot!”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: And now, Truck can’t come within 1,000 feet of schools and parks….
“OK, files PE-PR, let’s see, Plans for Coffee . . . Plans for Cogwheels . . . Plans for Corgis . . . Plans for Croquettes . . . wait a minute, where’re Plans for Conquest? Oh, of course, let’s see, files CE-CR, we’ve got Cheese, Moon Made of . . . Chompers . . . Craters, Creative Uses of . . . god damn, no Conquests, Plans for! OK, think, think, don’t panic, maybe it’s under Earth Conquest? Damn this byzantine filing system, but I’m impressed by their dedication to security through obscurity.”
@jroggs: I can’t find detailed statistics, but rather than 97% of the U.S. population in 1940 being illiterate, it was more like 90% who were literate. As minor league baseball players were mostly in their late teens and early 20s, who had grown up in the era of universal education, it’s unlikely that any significant number of Crankshaft’s peers were illiterate as well.
However, I agree that it’s implausible that Ed Crankshaft would not have memorized what his own name looked like so he could recognize it.
BB: do they no longer salute in today’s military? Do they shake hands today.
This “Trigger Finger” arc is great for the RMMD strip. The artist(s) get to do RMMD Trademark giant hand strange gestures a lot!
The General never asked for this responsibility. He never wanted to be in charge. He just settled into a desk one day and coasted and thirty years later somehow people are expecting him to know things and make everything run when he just wants to play golf and nap.
The General is Beetle after an accident with a time machine is what I’m saying.
“What do we do about it?”
“Well, if we get you on a strong enough painkiller, you can get rid of your drummer!”
MW: So now that, in panel one, we’ve gotten a little bit of a pull-back view of Stelle in her car, I feel pretty confident that it looks like she’s driving some sort of a Volvo, and I tell you, these last several strips have actually been a really nice advertisement for one. It appears as though, with all the emoting and I think dancing (?), that Stelle has done in the front seat of this thing, that it not only drives itself it’s got a heck of a lot of room in the front seat. I’ll DEFINITELY be looking at one for my next vehicle purchase. Thanks Mary Worth!
C’shaft: @jroggs #18 amply covered everything that is wrong with this on a narrative level, so I will contain my frustration to how this is supposed to be tying in to the whole banned book debacle, seeming to imply that the advocates of censorship don’t appreciate the power of reading. The opposite is true: they’re very aware of its power, which is why they’re so desperate to limit accessibility to certain kinds of information like “gay and transgender people not only exist, but have thoughts and feelings like everyone else” and “the United States can actually be a pretty crappy place to live, especially if you’re Black or Native American.” I suppose you could tie this back to the idea to limiting information accessibility as a means of control, but then you run into the problem of Batiuk not being able to frame any issue in a way that doesn’t center on his white, middle-class, Midwestern characters, because he cannot write any perspective or voice other than his own.
Dustin: Is it just me, or has everyone in this strip been off-model the past couple days? Are Kelly and/or Parker suffering from trigger finger?
GT: Marty and Marty’s Color Guy talk like the sports version of the DJ 3000 from The Simpsons.
JP: “Also you’re not pressing the doorbell; you’re just putting your finger to the door frame and yelling ‘DING! DONG!’ over and over again.”
Luann: I do not believe that Bets and Gunther are engaged in any kind of physical intimacy. If I did, however, I would believe that Bets would find Les’ conversations with his cat far more interesting.
MW: I don’t know if anyone deserves Wilbur, but damned if Stell isn’t coming very, very close.
RMMD: Trigger finger? I thought it was going to be ATTR-CM.
@Joshua K.: Yeah, that was a big oof from me. Google’s AI told me the US literacy rate in 1940 was 2.9%, and it seemed weird to me, but I looked up a source that seemingly confirmed that while suggesting a high standard for literacy levels. Instead, it’s the EXACT opposite of that; the AI (and then I) misread the chart which was actually showing illiteracy rates. Please feel free to snicker at my foolishness.
I still stand by the second half of that paragraph and most of the conclusion derived from it, though. If anything, this revelation makes it even worse; far from trying to fix his total illiteracy, Crankshaft seems to have been working hard to maintain it despite living in a world were it was expected.
@TheDiva: “Dustin: Is it just me, or has everyone in this strip been off-model the past couple days? Are Kelly and/or Parker suffering from trigger finger?”
Some brave soul here figured out that yesterday’s strip was from 2010, this one probably is, too. The creators are probably taking a
well-earnedvacation.@Liam: Truck: “Eh? I play with one hand all the time.” (beat) “Oh wait, you’re talking about something else, ain’t cha?”
Dick Tracy-Aha! Roadmaps!
MW: Oh…my…gawd… Estelle, grow up. GROW UP. You don’t deserve Ed.
@Professor Well Actually: Yeah, there was an old computer game back in the day “Codename: Iceman” which was a military themed game, but seeing as the casual player wouldn’t know enough about the military (or other required knowledge of procedures) to actually get anywhere in it, it just boiled down to:
“Do what the manual tells you to do: The Game”
For example, the first “puzzle” was doing CPR on a drowning victim… the manual tells you all of the procedures to type in.
And if you don’t salute to the American flag every time you pass it, you get a game over.
But the most hilarious part, was the poker(?) mini-game, where if you are doing terribly and keep reloading your save for better results, the opponent eventually gets so annoyed for you cheating that he deletes your save file entirely.
MW: Tomorrow, Stell heads straight to Wilbur’s pad, for revenge sex. Meanwhile, Mary Worth takes note of the Volvo that is taking up two of Charterstone’s precious parking spaces. I’d hate to be Stella.
Rex Morgan – “So, that finger – is it itchy? Oh, mother of all that is holy, please don’t tell me you have an itchy trigger finger! No, I’m not making a joke, I’m ruling out MRSA!”
Wow! Comics Kingdom is slow. I just got an email that two comments I made back in June have been approved to be posted.
@Liam: These things must be done DELICATELY.
RMMD – Truck’s just lucky he doesn’t have a nodule. Otherwise, his finger picking days would be over and he’d be stuck strumming the three chords he knows for the rest of his life!
@jroggs: CS: Apparently we have an illiteracy crisis among our AI.
BB – “Ah! What an absolutely perfect day!”
“Hello, sir!!”
“Absolutely ruined.”
There.
@Joshua K.: @jroggs: And again, illiteracy was more common among marginalized groups–women, minorities, immigrants–than it was for white men. Not saying that Crankshaft couldn’t have been illiterate, but it just goes back to Batiuk’s inability to address an issue unless it affects him/his mouthpiece characters specifically.
Also apparently Crankshaft was a bus driver for years despite not only being monumentally terrible at it, but being unable to complete the required training and testing for the job.
Shoe: Not that any young people read this strip, but if they did, they’d be asking “what’s a rerun?”
JP – The worst sitcom in the 1960s rejected this plot because Neddy’s behavior is too off the wall and inconsistent, not to mention stupid.
Aunty Acid – She’s also doing fake knitting.
Frazz – Criticize directly to who you were critcizing? Don’t you know that our policy is to criticize behind other people’s backs? Like how in a few minutes Frazz and I are going to cut you up behind your back.
Rex Morgan – First Truck will have to jump through the insurance hoops with therapy, drugs, and whatever else the insurance company requires. Then Rex will perform the surgery. I hope he doesn’t get confused and think he’s performing eye surgery again.
Bizarro and 6Chix – Great job, Sid! And it’s one of the Chix who can draw!
REX MORGAN M.D.: Truck: “That’s exactly it? What do we do about it”
June: “Stop shooting at random people, you sadist, and then you won’t get ‘trigger finger’!”
REX MORGAN M.D. (2): Truck: “Doc, as long as I’m here I…er…have another ‘inflamed sheath’ that has a painful snap when it ‘releases’ (and then creates a temporary inability to ‘straighten’)….”
SHOE: Sigh. Leave it to Shoe and it’s always up-to-date “impeccable timing to try way too late to horn in on Mary Worth‘s “Tommy the Tweaker” mania.
@taig: Re FC – You beat me to it. However, just imagine that HTT Grandma’s evil sister stole the proposal letter from Dead Grandpa. The melonheads wouldn’t exist!
@Briane Pagel: You might want to tell her if she starts throwing coffee cups around.
Has the author of Shoe even seen the news lately? Watching C-SPAN is as likely to keep you up all night.
DT: “Here it is….Diet Smith’s top secret recipe for Everlasting Gobstoppers. My Terran pal, Mister Slugworth, will be very pleased!”
@TheDiva: The original storyline isn’t readily available online, but I found an article about Crankshaft’s illiteracy:
https://www.deseret.com/1988/10/3/18781799/ed-crankshaft-and-creator-tom-batiuk-examine-illiteracy/
That was published Oct. 3, 1988, and says, “‘Crankshaft’ reveals a deep, dark secret about the title character’s life starting Monday, Oct. 3 …. The cantankerous bus driver, Ed Crankshaft – like over 27 million other Americans – can’t read. … Crankshaft will learn to read, but it will be an on-going two year process that’s more like what it would be in the real world, instead of the way things usually work in imaginary comics land.”
So Ed’s retelling of this story in today’s strip is misleading at best. In the 1940s, he was humiliated by not being able to read, and he decided to learn to read because he didn’t want to miss anything again … but he left out the part that he didn’t actually go about learning to read until more than 40 years later.
I wonder if Moy realizes that soap opera comics aren’t like a syndicated series in the fact that the misdeeds of characters aren’t wiped away from memory at the end of the episode. People still remember Aldo Kelrast’s death, Ian going berserk about Hanna Dingdon, Dr. Jeff crying at the sight of Mary’s pussy(cat), Dawn being a weepy mess while watching Game of Thrones, and Wilbur’s repeated acts from animal abuse to faking his own death.
Estelle is going to be remembered as the self centered bitch whose love of animals better not get in the way of her being the center of attention.
@I speak Jive: What a world that would be. I’d probably have to starting following Dustin again.
@Ukulele Ike: It’s complicated being Slut Friend.
FC: HTT Grandma is chortling over all of the people her age whom she’s outlived.
CS: To become a school bus driver, besides the obvious road test, there are several required written tests. Did Ed pay someone to take the tests for him?
CS: Strange how Batiuk never used an underlying medical condition, like dyslexia, to explains Ed’s illiteracy.
@Philip: @I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Between the two of you – Truck sitting on a Park Bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent – and – If Jesus saves, he’d better save himself, I feel like I need to listen to the whole Aqualung album now!
RMMD: “What do we do about it?”
(June reveals a very large cleaver)
@nescio: I thought the same thing, but for Painful Snap.
Deadly Boredom is the villain name you are looking for, in a Rex Morgan-inspired scenario.
@richardf8: I heard Aqualung in a grocery store the other day.
Eh. It’s “classic rock” and our customers who were kids when it came out are now in their 60s.
RMMD: June, if you consult a mirror, you will see that your hair looks worse than Truck’s hair. Worse. Than. Truck’s. Hair. That’s not a wake-up call, it’s a fire alarm.
@Poteet: I’m suggesting that the next new character in RMMD be a hair stylist who re-locates to Glenwood. She could be booked-up from opening day.
Did anyone ask Jeeves “Can birds swallow sleeping pills?”( Number 8 will surprise you!)?
@Poteet: #80: I didn’t pay attention to June’s hairdo first time around but your comment made me take a second look. She buzzed off the tail of her mullet. All she needs now is a flannel shirt, dungarees, and trucker’s chain wallet.
Roy Rogers discovered Trigger finger one day when he was out on the range with his horse, and stuck his finger where it didn’t belong.
@Guillermo el chiclero: My great-aunt, back in the 40’s or whatever year it was, to get her driver’s license, she just bribed the instructor a massive bottle of rum, and he passed her.
Thankfully that would never happen today, but still pretty shameful.
Phantom: Hero took care of Avarice with a quick buck and kick, but we all know that Stripey’s going to take the credit.
FC: HTT Grandma is reading letters from people now dead.
“She should’ve quit smoking when I warned her, stupid bitch.”
“Ooh, what do we have here? Mr. High School Football Star, who stood me up for the captain of the varsity cheerleader squad. I go to the cemetery every week and dance on both your graves.”
@UncleJeff: (June reveals a very large cleaver)
_______________________
About time she did something about the Beaver.