Monday is for troubling revelations
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/21/25
It’s Monday, y’all! Monday, the beginning of a new week in the soaps, with promises of exciting setups playing out over the next few days in increasingly intriguing and twisty ways, especially in this Rex Morgan plot about literal murder, and … wait, what’s that? The murderer has announced his intention to turn himself in and is apologizing to anyone his murderous ways might have inconvenienced? Hmm. Not really what I was hoping for. I guess we now have three to six thrilling days of everyone standing around awkwardly waiting for the cops to show up to look forward to.
Hi and Lois, 4/21/25
Ha ha, yes, that certainly is a pickle, you guys. It’s not fair, college wasn’t so expensive back when you embarked on the project of having a family with four children back in [does math] 2009? Can that really be right? Kids who are in high school today were born in 2009, a year when I and my contemporaries were already fully mature adults? Seems wrong. Seems very wrong indeed.
Crankshaft, 4/21/25
“Look at this ring … I’m married? To you, I guess? What the hell?”
97 replies to “Monday is for troubling revelations”
H&L: “Well, maybe Chip will get a scholarship.”
[Both burst out laughing]
Crankshaft:
“I’m not a polydactyl anymore!!!”
RMMD:
“Of course, the smarter thing for me to do would be to see if you actually got arrested; and, if you did, then to come in and confess. If you never were to get arrested because of the absolute lack of physical evidence connecting you to the crime, you’d be out of the woods, and I’d remain free!”
Hi and Lois:
“And what exactly would you do if you got a hot sports car?”
“I’d drive it cross-comic over to Beetle Bailey and see Miss Buxley!”
H&L: HGTV has certainly had an impact on modern culture. Women in comics no longer dream of owning a fur coat but rather redoing their kitchens. Now if only Hi would get with the program and dream of a man cave.
“Have you ever really gotten into your hand, man? All those little lines. They look like a tiny expressway. And your thumb is an off ramp.”
Me, looking at the backs of my hands after cataract surgery: “Shit! I’m old!”
This strip about gazing at your hands full of wonder should have run on 4/20
@Bob Tice: No, that’s not Hi, he’s completely sexless. He would drive to BB to play golf with Halftrack
MW: Belle gives ALL of us the heebie-jeebies – and she’s not even real!
RMMD: This is still Summer and Augie’s first official date, right? If he doesn’t scrawl an X on her front door and run like a rabbit, he’s the world’s biggest fool.
H&L: Is everyone going to age proportionally, or will they be attending college as they are? Trixie at a kegger would be awesome.
GT: A girlfriend who knew nothing about the sport once went with me to a minor league soccer game. She would have said exactly what the announcer did about the kind of shot, which foot it came off of, where the attacker was, where it was placed, and how close the goalie was to at least getting a hand on it.
BG&SS: Snuffy’s savings won’t even exist til the point he discovers online gam(bl)ing, will they?
DT: Auntie clearly forgot the old adage: it is the poor worker who blames their tools.
MW: Bats and Wilbur having a tickle fight? What will her third attempt be? Hit and run? Push down a flight of stairs. So judging by the meals it has been 2 days since Bats arrived?
RMMD: ziptone killer dad violates the rule of show don’t tell. Go and confess! Augie and company will learn soon enough. Another strip would have used the Sunday strip to show killer dad driving to a police station and circle around but ultimately drive off to wait and see – we see he considers confessing but decides not to.
Don’t worry too much, Hi and Lois, your kids are not smart enough for college
RMMD – The Death Wish-a-lizer….
H&L – Um…your kitchen remodel stash wouldn’t cover a semester at Santa Royale Community College with Professor (Chinbeard Windbag) Cameron….
Crank – Try a good soaking in dish soap. Seriously – they’re piling up….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
“Look at my hands! There’s a normal number of fingers! We are not AI, someone put effort to draw us! But why?!”
RMMD: A weird thing that I’ve noticed in this strip is that no-one is depicted with their mouth open when talking, so I like to imagine everyone talking through a funny mouth-trumpet kind of voice. Go ahead, read it again with that in mind — it’s 10x more interesting that the ‘plot’.
H&L: What I’m getting from this strip is that Hi is a fan of Lamborghinis or that Lois has an industrial-scale kitchen. Or that this strip takes place in France.
Crankshaft: ‘Pam tries LSD’ is not a storyline that I would have expected here but very much going to enjoy, I think…
RMMD: There was just a new episode of Midwest Safety (police bodycam videos with commentary) where a man decided to turn himself in for a murder he committed 15 years ago. It was absolutely gut-wrenching. The man was so overwhelmed by guilt that he called the police and straight-up confessed, including telling them where the body was, and wondering why the police apparently never investigated his friend’s death.
My point is, even if you want to take the narrative path of having a random person be randomly murdered and then having another random person show up and confess to it, there are ways to make it interesting.
Pluggers: If other people can actually buy you t-shirts as gifts, and they still fit you, you are very much not a plugger.
MW: Remember when I said Dawn Weston would fit perfectly into Luann? Imagine if it were Bernice on the other end of this phone.
RMMD: After Arthur Treacher confesses to Summer, he demonstrates just how on Augie. “There! It’s done. Oops, Does this state follow a stacked charges policy?”
That’s it, Dawn. You’re finally starting to use the few brain cells in your head. Baby steps. Now, maybe take a look around the living room and you might see the picture of you that Belle grotesquely defaced several days ago, yet neither you or your foob of a dad have noticed. The ask yourself how someone who your father swore is “immersed in her work” manages to be on perpetual vacation.
Ah, who’m I kidding. This is Dawn Weston, who can’t even successfully choo-choo a spoonful of food into her piehole.
MW: “Well, …for starters, she dyed all the Easter eggs black.”
MW: “I mean, for starters, she and my dad are currently slow-dancing on the couch.”
CS: “It feels like only yesterday that I was looking at my hands, doing the Safety Dance.”
H&L: “Or we could repaint the walls so that they’re the same shade of green.”
Rex Morgan, M.D.: “While we wait for the cops, I’m just going to call my friend Belle real quick. I’ve got a few pointers for her.”
CS: Doesn’t make sense until you realize Pam sees the red blood of guilt on her hands from a murdered Crankshaft lying in the basement. Sometimes fan service is a little obtuse to the general audience.
Also Rex Morgan, M.D.: The only way this whole thing could be less interesting is if Murdery McGee had driven himself down to the police station and sat quietly leafing through a magazine in the waiting room until a detective came to get him. I’m surprised they didn’t take the opportunity.
RMMD: Welp, that was easy!
JP: If Sam n’ Abbey aren’t thinking by now that maybe it’s better if Sophie just goes off to Norway and they never have to deal with bullcrap like this, then they’re denser than Luann. Speaking of which…
Luann: ‘You know what, honey. You’re still too young to be by yourself while Mommy and Daddy are away, so we’re having Great Aunt Hildegard come and babysit.’
‘But MOOOMMMMM!!!! She smells like mothballs and always tries to pinch my cheeks!’
Crankshaft: I don’t like this homage to the famous sequence in Disney’s adaptation of Snow White* where the Queen turns herself into the hag.
*The 1937 one, he said as his eye twitched in exhaustion from the culture war’s latest idiotic controversy…
MW: “I feel uneasy around my dad’s new gf, I don’t know why”
Is it the maniacal laughter? I bet it’s the maniacal laughter…
@Mark Jackson:
Wow. Your resume is eye wateringly impressive.
@LTJpezcore1: why didn’t she say that in her letter to Wendy?
Rex Morgan, MD – Hallmark Channel would reject a Rex Morgan, MD series based on too low stakes and predictable in its plots
Hi and Lois – Hi and Lois are already in their punchline free era, and now, in the depth of late stage capitalism, the 1950s suburbia strip based on the premise of infinite prosperity forever has no answer for the economic crises of their middle class values, and revert to their Econ 101 ideas of opportunity cost to try to dull the sharp edge of decades of public disinvestment in education spending.
Crankshaft – Yesterday was 4/20, and Pam is still coming down from overindulging on special brownies and wondering about the miracle of the primate hand.
The colorist at Crankshaft forgot to color in Pam’s stigmata after they went through the trouble to write an Easter tribute.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV:
FIFY
RMMD: The police are called but before they arrive, murderer guy drops dead of a heart attack. Cop looks at Augie through angry eyes and says “Now you’re just fucking with us.”
C’shaft: These MS-13 knuckle tattoos, where did *these* come from? And who’s that pounding on the door and yelling ‘”ICE?” We didn’t order any ice!
Spent a while trying to figure out what Crankshaft is actually trying to say and I realized (a) they’re probably setting us up for an explanation tomorrow and (b) I had just spent a while thinking about Crankshaft. And now I am MAD.
@Ettorre: I regret to inform you that Hi is perfectly willing to drool over much younger women.
MW – “Ever since she’s gotten here, it smells like almonds. I don’t know. Something about it is just weird. Anyway, I’m kind of lethargic. Talk to you later!”
@matt w: I had a horrifying moment where I realized that one of those girls is named Julie and that the one time we heard the name of Chip’s girlfriend it was Julie but I went back to the girlfriend’s last appearance in Josh’s archive before being named and it’s not remotely the same girl. Thank you, Hi and Lois team’s lack of object permanence.
RMMD: There’s still time for this to degenerate. Imagine – Summer calls the police saying the killer is in her home, the cops launch an overly-enthusiastic SWAT response and riddle the place with bullets, and the survivors are taken to the hospital, finally giving Rex Morgan a chance to show up in his own strip.
Hi & Lois–I realize the Hi-and-Loisverse has been ageless for decades, but it might be time for them to consider starting to age. Like most youngish families, both parents work. I’ll assume they managed to buy a house during the housing crash in 2009, so they have that going for them. College was already getting expensive then, so that can’t be a surprise. But with four kids, they do stand out from normal families these days. That’s a lot of kids to think about putting through college.
I figure in ten years, their kitchen table conversations about college costs will involve possibly selling off a few organs. The fact that the Flagstons, maybe in their 30s, can even own a home will make no sense at all. Maybe they should just freeze time in 1960, like how Henry was frozen circa 1935? Maybe Chip can dream about growing up to own his own TV repair shop or something.
@matt w: Julie doesn’t appear in the strip where she’s named because she was dumping Chip by texting him ghost emojis, which (I’m sorry Josh) was a good joke!
Rex Morgan, M.D. should just give up and change it’s name to Generic People in Any Situation Standing Around Talking at this point if we’re just going to have boring murder cases instead of boring medical cases.
***
That’s the horrified face of an AI “artist” who has spent so much time doing her “art” that she forgot what hands actually look like.
@Philip: Meanwhile, in the real world, the US spends more money on education in both absolute and relative terms than most other first-world nations.
H&L: If you really want to feel old, consider this: the average college graduate this year was born after 9/11.
A very happy Dyngus Day to one and all!
CS: “It’s not a freckle, or an age spot… melanoma? Irregular, large… Is the author seriously hitting me with mela-frickin’-noma?! I told you we should have bailed when Funky ended, I told you all the storylines would devolve to cancer here!”
@Professor Well Actually: Something something, not the brightest bulb, something something
“When did this happen? Wait . . . did my Dad accidentally cut off my hands with a hedge clipper yesterday? And as he was clumsily sewing them back on did he say something like ‘here, I’ll give you a hand’?”
CS: Pam finally realized Dan Davis has been drawing her all this time.
RMMD: Will this strip feature the first instance of “suicide by cop?” Doubtful.
HnL: Compromise and get a hot sports kitchen.
Crankshaft panels 4-8:
PAM: “My hands are AGING! It’s HORRIBLE!”
JEFF: “Accept the misery, Pam. It’s the background radiation of this comic-strip universe.”
PAM: “No, no, Funky Winkerbean was the ‘time moves ever forward’ strip! WE get to stay at a fixed age forever, so my father can still be young enough to be a comical crankypants instead of a vegetable in a nursing home! That was the deal! THAT WAS THE DEAL!”
JEFF: “I don’t think your father is some kind of magical ward that prevents us from getting older.”
PAM: “THEN WHY HAVEN’T WE KILLED HIM YET???”
RMMD-“It was me. I was the one armed man.”
MW: something that puzzles me, which I should have mentioned yesterday, does Dawn honestly not realize her father is Wendy?
MW: I’d be uneasy if someone was lavishing quite that much attention on Wilbur. Maybe I’d actually be queasy. Either way…
FC: Kittycat is going to get a big head and demand everyone call her Kittyjesus.
Dustin: Maybe Hayden has a crush on your sister, Dustin. She might only be nasty to you and the rest of your family.
H&L: College may be expensive, but I don’t know why the Flagstons are worried. Their smartest child is a baby that thinks a square of sunlight is her friend. Buy that hot sports car, you won’t regret it.
JP: “Sophie, how’s your sweet and sour chicken? Would you like some more sour cream with your baked potato? How about a whiskey sour?”
MW: A spiky . . . un-combover? Let’s hope she makes Wilbur wear it like that all the time.
Phantom: Hey Kyabje, you sure you don’t wanna hit that before you boot her out?
GT: I think if my job was doing daytime radio broadcasts of high school girls’ soccer and wrestling matches I’d wonder if there isn’t maybe something a little more in life. No wonder Marty drank so much.
RMMD: “Um, you could have just gone straight to the police and turned yourself in instead of coming over here and scaring the crap out of us.”
“Yes, I could have, but that would have deprived me of the opportunity to make this bizarrely noble gesture and prove to you what a decent, upstanding, and righteous man I really am — you know, for a murderer. Plus, I’m a little COO-koo, COO-koo, COO-koo . . .”
C’shaft: “My hands are absurdly tiny! Look at me; I look like a political caricature of Donald Trump!”
H&L: Hi and Lois haven’t quite openly admitted that none of their children are college material and the money they’ve been setting aside for education would be better spent elsewhere, but they’re skirting the edges of it.
RMMD: I love how the strip removes every possibility of drama even from the characters’ perspective. Summer and Augie don’t have to worry about if the confessed killer is going to turn on them next, or attempt to persuade him to do the right thing and turn himself in–everything’s been taken care of; and they can just sit back and watch the (for lack of a better term) action unfold.
Luann: Gawd had nothing to do with Bernice, Frank.
9CL: I really, absolutely, positively do not want to know how Brooke came up with the idea that a look of “ecstasy” is similar to one of stifling a yawn.
CS — “I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness – until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”
Pam Muad’Dib
The Weston House of Tonsorial Terror
Wilbur’s UnCombover
Dawn’s Hair by Hedgeclipper
Three hairdon’ts fighting a cage match to the death on top of Batts’ head, and all of them are losing.
Blondie: Um, we don’t really want to go where this is leading, do we? I mean, c’mon, it’s the day after Easter.
CS: “My fingers are all pointy. Like claws! And I can’t see myself in the mirror!”
CS: maybe she’s upset that she has 5 fingers unlike most other cartoon characters. I refuse to check the archives to see if people in Crankshaft have always had 5 fingers
H+L: It’s worse when you’re a college prof teaching technology, when you say things like “this computer standard is recent, coming out in 2005” and then realizing that was before most of the class was born
Pluggers: Wait, does Claude Manx have children and grandchildren? I always thought he was a confirmed bachelor. This must mean he’s a widower – Pluggers don’t get divorced. Now I have to wonder what type of species-hybrid he was married to. I had enough to deal with today already without this.
@Tom: In the 2020s, the average college graduate is a high school graduate.
@Ukranazi Stepan: With a 1969 graduation. Nice!
What sorts of pranks did you do at Cal Tech, Mark?
Crankshaft: Ah, the beginnings of Pam developing comic existential awareness. She has realized that countless artists in the medium have shorted their characters’ fingers for drawing ease. Tomorrow she will turn toward the viewer and finally grasp the pen-and-ink essence of her being. Two possible outcomes: she will curse out Batiuk and Davis and demand they give her better storylines, or the two of them will step into the comic to deliver some Grant Morrison philosophy.
DT: Smart move, sending your bumbling duo relatives to do something you could have managed much faster online.
GT: By Milford standards, this counts as enthusiastic Latin-American “futbol” commentary.
JP: So I guess these three idiots just sat their in uncomfortable silence with the exception of Abby repeating “Soph, you haven’t said a word since we got here!” like an actor repeating an unanswered cue line.
Luann: I’m not sure if this setup is absurd because Luann is a legal adult and her parents should be fine with leaving her alone for a few days by now, or if it’s absurd because nobody in their right minds would leave an idiot like Luann unsupervised.
MW: Belle is chuckling evilly while staring manically at Wilbur’s disheveled combover. “Uneasy” is the mildest term I can think of for the proper emotional response to that.
Phantom: “We’re under martial law. You killed a man who, past crimes notwithstanding, is a high ranking official. Lots of angry men with guns will have a problem with that. Jesus H. Buddha, woman, do I have to draw you a diagram?”
Pluggers never go anywhere.
Mary Worth: That expression on Wilbur’s face – damn, is he a partner in Belle’s murderous scheme?
9CL – When you married a virgin in his 70s who wears a sweater vest all the time, little warning lights should have gone off in your head that maybe he wasn’t the best choice to keep up with a twenty year old nymphomaniac.
Another good warning to consider would involve the question: “If he is a billionaire who can buy a 12 million dollar viola on a whim, why is he not only still single but still a virgin? Are those possibly red flags, especially given that I’m apparently marrying him for all the great sex that I expect we will be having?!”
They’ve been together for a week, and she’s already staring off into space and wondering if she left the humidifier on while he struggles to service her.
@Cleveland Mocks: And I hope you have a happy dyngus, too.
FC-“I’ve seen how much you weigh. You don’t need the candy.”
@matt w: Notice that he only feels arousal when he can associate women to golf
@matt w: So he’s pretty much Clark Griswold if you remove all of his positive aspects.
H&L: We’ve already seen Chip’s future, and it does not include years spent in academia. Chip’s the fat guy with the cigar who collects garbage along with the scraggly little guy with the pipe.
@TheDiva: JP: So I guess these three idiots just sat their in uncomfortable silence with the exception of Abby repeating “Soph, you haven’t said a word since we got here!” like an actor repeating an unanswered cue line.
Woody Wilson’s JP was occasionally insane, the protagonists too often fell bass ackwards into unearned wealth but– by god– since he left, the strip has been nothing but soul-deadingly ponderous.
We interrupt the levity to bring you this important message:
Dow Jones is down 700+ again.
I don’t know how much more Golden Age we can take.
MW “Oh Wilby, I love it when I rub a balloon on head, it’s like all your hairs are standing up to wave at me—heh heh!”
@Tonio: I’ve been wondering about this for a few strips now, is Wilbur wrestling with the dread of killing his own child? Has Moy finally had enough of our complaining about Wilbur?
CS: “And I’m surprised that I haven’t killed myself yet.”
MW: “Cathy, this woman actually likes my dad! Only Mary Worth and I like my dad.”
“Dawn, do you even know what kind of person your dad is?”
“He’s my hero! I want to be just like him…well, except for when he got scammed…and how he’s messed up all of his previous relationships…and how I’m turning into him…but, Cathy, he’s my dad!”
“Now I know why you didn’t want to get a dorm together this year.”
“Anyways, Cathy, how do I get this insane Karen out of my house so I can have my dad all to myself? Hello? Cathy?”
Crankshaft: In H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal The Shadow Out Of Time, a scholarly alien species has the ability to swap minds with other creatures and uses this to infiltrate human society to gather information for their great library. During the time where the aliens are piloting human bodies, the people around said aliens tend to be upset and disturbed by the strange behavior of the host, sometimes even believing them to be victims of mental illness. My suggestion is that Pam has had her mind replaced with one of the Great Race of Yith, who is struggling to come to terms with the transformation, such as why he has hands instead of pincers or what the joke of this comic is.
@ectojazzmage: I liked it, but that would require a level to storytelling not heretofore seen in Crankshaft.
Moral of the story: never underestimate Rex Morgan‘s ability to have nothing interesting happen, no matter how interesting it may seem in the moment. I thought you’d learned better by now.
CS: “Look at my hands. They’re old man’s hands. How did that happen?” Doctor Who did it better and at least Old Billy had the good graces to die shortly afterward. You think Pam will show us that sort of consideration? I very much doubt it.
JP: I hate Sophie
We don’t know if this is the first time Jeff saw Pam with her arms thrust forward towards him like that and asked “Is something wrong?” But I bet the _last_ time will be at the end of their visit to the Grand Canyon.
Cathy (Ack!) is probably one of the sanest people in Mary Worth which is probably why she never appears for long in a story. She pointed out that Dawn was being a total skank and taking advantage of Jared’s trust so Dawn shot down that idea. And I’ll bet you anything that she would have told Dawn to get actual help regarding Dirk instead of going to Mary Worth for platitudes and to her simp and his blow up doll to mildly inconvenience and embarrass Dirk.
RIP Pope Francis. He was 88.
Crankshaft: I recall a Judge Judy case, where a little girl was a witness and Judge Judy was asking her questions but first she asked.
Judge Judy: Do you think your Mom is pretty?
Girl: Yes.
Judge Judy: Do you think I’m pretty?
Girl: No.
Judge Judy: Why not?
Girl: Because you’re OLD
Judge Judy laughed that off, but honestly, that girl could give current Dennis a run for his money in the “Honestly menacing” department.
Yep, only Rex Morgan can make murder boring. Although Mary Worth does a pretty good job on the attempted variety.
Oh, Hi, will you ever be able to afford that midlife crisis you were promised?
Telling people that we’re all mortal and one day will die and slowly be forgotten that we ever existed is probably the most difficult part of being a comic strip writer.
@Needless Exposition: Perhaps Mary Worth runs the Meddler’s Mafia, getting rid of all of Santa Royale’s therapists to keep everyone coming to her.
@The Rambling Otter: Mary strikes me as being from the generation that doesn’t believe in therapy because everyone should have to “tough it out” and pretend that they’re happy so that they don’t inconvenience others.
H&L — maybe Chip can enlist for the GI Bill, or go ROTC… he’s GOT to be a better soldier than Uncle Beetle.
Phantom: ”Well, I was going to explain it in the morning, but then it occurred to me that I could come up in the middle of the night and see you in your underwear.”
9CL: Nope, uh uh. One glance at that woman’s face lying underneath the 70 year old fiance and immediately scrolled to the next strip. Nope, not readin’ that.
@Guillermo el chiclero: Look for the “JD Vance fucks couches” meme to shift to “JD Vance killed the Pope.”
I went to the beach and saw a man drowning. I said to the lifeguard, “Aren’t you going to save him?”
He replied, “Naw, he’s a hippie and he’s too far out, man.”
Crankshaft: A lot of men lose interest in patty cake when they reach middle age. It’s completely normal.
Crankshaft: “When did this happen — my ability to burn down the kitchen with the wave of my hands, I mean. Also, sorry about the third degree burns, Jeff.”
“My hands, when did this happen?”
“Primates evolved bipedalism between 4 and 7 million years ago, so you’re a bit late to the game.”
Alternately:
“We gave up walking on four legs after they murdered Snowball.”