I can’t imagine Ed Crankshaft watching a movie made in the last ten years. Seems very wrong
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Crankshaft, 10/26/25
Mr. Crankshaft, I know Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood Bumstead is a friend of mine. He puts together comically large foodstuffs that no ordinary human could even get their mouth around, let alone chew. Those are just normal-ass pastries you bought at a gas station. Mr. Crankshaft, you’re no Dagwood Bumstead.
Pardon My Planet, 10/26/25
I love the contrast between the blond guy at the bar and the bartender as this strip’s beloved (?) Bitter Late-Middle-Aged Man unloads a monologue that’s dark even by Pardon My Planet standards. The young man sees how grim this is and is genuinely disturbed; the bartender, who spends his existence serving up brain-numbing hooch to the hateful drunks who populate the PMPiverse, has long ago become numb to this sort of thing.
Marvin, 10/26/25
“Hello neighbors! I want to offer you nothing but love and compassion. Anyway, it’s come to my attention that some of you are leaving the hallways smeared with feces.” Perfect Marvin strip, no notes.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/26/25
Writing a syndicated newspaper comic strip is of course a great way to write off the cost of a cruise on your taxes as “research,” but remember, you don’t always have to aim so high. Do you want to draw an almost perfectly realistic plate of delicious pad thai? Well then, you’d have to order some delicious pad thai, wouldn’t you? You know, for professional reasons! It sure does look great, doesn’t it, Augie? Just like the real thing!
109 replies to “I can’t imagine Ed Crankshaft watching a movie made in the last ten years. Seems very wrong”
RMMD:
There once was a teacher named Augie
Whose dating decorum was foggy
He told Summer, “Hi! —
My pad after Thai?”
She dissed him, thus rendering him groggy
JP: I dunno, the pad thai looks less “drawn from life” than “traced off a local Thai restaurant’s menu”. Possibly even the Noodles & Company menu.
MW-Is today’s quote a foreshadowing of the next storyline? We’re going to be treated to a Wilbur story?
MW-“And if Olive knows what’s good for her she won’t talk about her visit to me.”
MW-The way Mary talks in this comic it sounds like she’s implying she did “things” with Olive.
FC-“If we were we would eat up that chocolate and be out of this place so fast.”
FC-Interestingly my ‘Family Circus’ comment has been rejected by Comics Kingdom. I guess they don’t like chocolate.
Crankshaft: New worst combination of words: Crankshaft going out for a quickie.
Marvin: I don’t think picking up after your dog is anything like picking up after your husband, actually! Unless what goes on between married couples in this apartment complex is horrid and scatological even by Marvin standards.
RMMD: where did that random finger in the final panel come from?
RMMD:
“When you find something that works for you, stick to it, I always say. And when you don’t have an original thought in your head — as is obviously the case here with me — just say something that someone else has said, to try to make yourself look smart or clever.”
RMMD – YUM! Lemon cow pie with mold garnish!!!!
CS: Pam knew enough to wear pants to wipe her hands on. Ed hasn’t bought a napkin since 1972.
RMMD: I’m missing an off-panel speech bubble of “WORK IT LIKE A CLAW!”
Crankshaft:
“Let’s make it a triple feature. We’ll follow up by noshing on bananas while watching ‘Bananas,’ and then I’ll get you some popped kernels so that you can be ‘Children of the Corn’ while watching that movie!”
MW: I think we’re all ready for some classic Wilbur idiocy. What HAS that rough diamond been up to?
MARVIN: My dog’s droppings would be piled up in front of Bea’s door with a sign reading, “SEXIST MUCH?”
PMP: Martha hasn’t had alcohol in years. She only pretends, so that old carbuncle will get out of the house every day.
Can’t believe Disney allows this strip to profane the Simpson’s IP “Quickie Mart”. I can just see the legal arguments now: “But we spelled it without a ‘K’, that’s not infringement!”
“We’re Disney, and infringement is whatever we damn well say it is! We might not WIN a lawsuit, but we can drag this out unto your family’s seventh generation. You want your great-great-great grandchildren eating out of dumpsters? We can arrange that.”
On the other hand, I can COMPLETELY see Ed buying rotting food from a gas station.
CS: Yeah, sure, Cranky is familiar with Napoleon pastry and doesn’t muddle the name, a 7-11 type convenience store sells it, and he would associate it with the movie they’re watching (which must be the 1927 Abel Gance version)? I can believe all of that. Was the baker who sold Ed the pastry named Millie Feuille?
Marvin: Well, when your comic strip’s new “alien toddler” (?) character isn’t setting the Internet ablaze like you hoped he would, go back to your “strengths” and make poo jokes. By the by, is Bea saying infering she walks behind Roy in the park with a plastic bag on her hand?
Beetle Bailey: You know you’re in trouble if Zero is pointing out what you’re doing wrong.
MW: “I was a sensitive child much like Olive…back when I was selling apples from cartons on the streets of New York during the Great Depression!”
“I’m glad you’re friends with her, Mary! Yes sir, there’s nothing I enjoy more than taking you out to the same seafood restaurant on our one ‘romantic’ get-together every month, and then getting to spend the entire evening listening to you yammer on about how you’ve made friends with a tween Carrie White in training! Check, please! I’m late for my monthly cold shower!”
RMMD:
“We probably should have gone to a Chinese place instead, because the publisher only offered me a dim sum for my manuscript!”
RMMD: “When you find something that works for you, stick to it.”
Whether it works for the reader or not is debatable but Beatty is telling us we’ll be seeing a lot more of these narrative types.
Csh: There’s something odd about the art in this strip — the weird blackened spotlight background, the couch that suddenly changes — which makes me wonder is this is a dream or something. I think it’s probably Jeff’s dream, seeing as (a) Ed is being nice to him and (b) it’s the kind of dull, clunky interaction that could only come from such a boring mind.
PmP: “So we didn’t! Did one of you ask me about the secret to a successful marriage, or did I just imagine it? That happens sometimes…” /vomits, passes out/
Marvin: Notice that Bea doesn’t make any reference to an apartment building, just an apartment, so I imagine that she’s going to print and post a single column ‘newsletter’ to the fridge she shares in what could be the most passive-aggressive act I’ve ever seen.
RMMD: “Ooh — that sounds like good news! That is good news, right? I mean I know that the word ‘war’ is usually bad, but the word ‘bidding’ is good, when you’re the one selling something, right? Because the price going up would mean more money for…you? Can you walk me through it, I’m intensely stupid!”
Too bad the weren’t going to watch Jaws, Ed could have bought jawbreakers that would shut everybody up.
Crankshaft : a movie came out a while ago, is now available on demand. It shares a name with a type of pastry. This is humorous somehow.
(Maybe the strip was aiming for heartwarming, what with Cranky being uncharacteristically nice?)
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Frazz : I’d talk about how there might be a misunderstanding between Frazz and Caufield regarding what “crust” represents in this metaphor (ie, it’s possible that Frazz thinks it’s the best part of the pizza, while Caufield thinks it’s the worst part), but then I see the way Frazz is holding the slice in the last two panels, and decide I’d rather mock that.
************
Pardon my Planet : “And I don’t mean beer. LSD, cocaine, shrooms… we were doing it all back then.”
************
Rex Morgan M.D. : What Augie doesn’t know is that the publishers are bidding to be the ones who DON’T end up having to publish his stupid novel.
************
Slylock Fox : …the solution is “Because they’re the only ones who weren’t affected, they MUST be the guilty party”!? That’s even more bullshit and circumstancial than these things usually go!
Marvin: Police do a wellness check on Tom Armstrong after his obsession with fecal matters coincides with strong odors emanating from his condo.
PMP — Is there a joke here? There seems to be a surfeit of curmudgeon and not much comic in this one.
Marvin — From advice to nagging in three sentences! There’s nothing like making a statement of purpose and then immediately doing something different.
RMMD:
“I’ll tell you about the publishing state of affairs, Summer, by soliloquizing this piece of stir fry!”
“Now, that’s using your noodle!”
Whoops, looks like I mixed JP and RMMD. I blame RMMD for stealing JP‘s “character with no evidence of skills is showered with money” trope.
“Sex Organ V.D.” turned into “The Augie That Ate New Jersey” so quickly, I hardly noticed!
@Professor Well Actually: RMMD: where did that random finger in the final panel come from?
____________________________________________
That’s the complementary table nose picker the restaurant provides to every paying customer! This is a classy joint,Prof!
Crankshaft: Ed also served venison when they watched Bambi, popsicles when they watched Titanic, and hush puppies when they watched Old Yeller. Because he’s a snack master and also a sociopath.
Pardon My Planet: This bar is so classy that it has two different types of beer glasses, yet they’re all cleaned with the same dirty rag. Weird!
Marvin: The correct pun here would be “Bea My Neighbor.” Except that Mr. Rogers was someone whom people actually liked.
Rex Morgan: You know how the mark of a good Thai restaurant is that it has a lot of customers who are actually Thai? Well, this restaurant has… no other customers at all. Which is either a sign of a bad restaurant, or that boring oldsters Augie and Summer like to eat dinner at 4 p.m.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – Augie and Summer have become Mary and Jeff, and not just because of ordering the same damn thing every time along with a platitude for not ordering something else. But also, they’re not having sex. The only difference is in RMMD, it’s the male who refuses to put out.
What A Frazzhole!: For once, Frazzhole is literally talking out of his butt, his mouth full of pizza in the last panel!
RMMD: do you get less of a tax write=off if you “research” is shown in the throwaway panels?
Well, this wraps up the latest episode of JUNGLE JIM!
Sad ending. All the saber-tooth tigers are dead.
Next week… RIVER PIRATES!
Slylock – Count Weirdly is as dumb as I was as a kid. One time, every garbage can on our block was knocked over. Except ours.
And there was the time in high school when two miscreant friends and I set off a 9,000-match smoke bomb that cleared out the school in January. We may have looked suspicious standing outside with the others when we were the only three who had our coats on.
FC: Responsible parent Bil keeps his souvenir Flying Guillotine on top of the fridge and out of Billy’s reach.
Crankshaft – Napoleons are delightful, delicious, and I wish I had one right now. But they’re a FANCY pastry. You’ll never find Napoleons at anything called Quickie Mart! (Hastily Googles “Little Debbie Napoleons” just to make sure.) This stupid strip is making me so angry! HULK SMASH!!
Crankshaft Where do they live that a convenience store sells a fancy millefeuille-and-pastry-cream item rather than – at best – jam-stuffed doughnuts?
Blondie throwaway panels – is… is Dagwood OK? Is the authour? Has he forgotten who Daisy is? Or even himself? Which is worse – the mirror acting like a mirror, or getting a response from it?
MW Having retreated to the “Mary is good and her friends are good!” platitudes after a week of “Olive will lead the way to a future of all humanity using its full telepathic and ESP gifts!”, I note that the Sunday readers only had Mary *thinking* about Olive being “gifted” a week ago and therefore missed out on the wild turn of Mary preaching the Indigo Child-led future to Jeff. Maybe this will continue until the Sundays and weekdays are as separated as the two Phantom stories, with Sundays living in the mundane world while Mon-Sat is Mary-Is-the-New-Xavier mutant school.
Come on, “Crankshaft” – a whole comic about Napoleon pastries and not one execrable pun? You could at least have Ed show up with a single Napoleon and say “I was going to buy three, but the store was *two short*!”
CS – Who knew a Lloyd Bentsen jab at Dan Quayle from 1988 would have legs. Kudos, Josh!
Marvin – Yeah, this newsletter is bound to be terrible, but if they have the good taste to publish it in Courier New, I’ll take a glance at it.
What are we eating when we watch Cat Woman?
@Hibbleton: CS: Pam knew enough to wear pants to wipe her hands on. Ed hasn’t bought a napkin since 1972.
***
And Pam hasn’t bought a napkin since menopause.
@Roscoe:
Or at least have him say, “I wanted the Chinese pork bone soup I brought to be more flavorful, so I took the bone apart!”
RMMD, penultimate panel: Talk to the hand, Augie. If we all have to look at it, you have to talk to it.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Good news, Godinez. You’re being promoted!”
“No, boss. I prefer to stay here”
“But… You’re the only man for the job!”
[Sign: ACCOUNTING]
“You could promote one of the women!”
Well, Peanut Gallery, at least you got the gist of the first panel!
CS: Missing panel shows Ed digging the Napoleons out of the dumpster behind Blondie’s pastry shop thus tying in the Bumstead reference and providing a punchline, sort of.
Marvin & Family is not just about a horrible shitbaby, today’s strip is about a horrible shitgrandma and horrible shitdogs.
“I had to pee before we started the movie, so I went to the water loo. And, much like Napoleon, I made a mess of it.”
Marvin: So, is “Bea, Your Neighbor” being written on the computer then being sent to–i don’t know, where do they print things nowadays, Kinko’s? Instyprints?–for conversion to paper, to be slid under each apartment’s front door? Seems it would only be fair for this old bat to post her thoughts about gender normative roles on NextDoor, where she can be appropriately mocked in the comments section.
Pardon My Planet: Everyone in this scene, including the bartender, has a red nose. Just sayin’.
MARVIN: So, Bea starts her illustrious career as an “advice columnists” by immediately invalidating her own premise, utilizing terrible and inaccurate similes, failing to offer any advice, and instead goes on an enraged, demanding rant.
Ooh, Wilbur Weston, it looks like you have some competition for Advice Columnist of the Year!*
MARVIN (2): Also, note to Bea: If you want to do petty gripes about personal grievances, you don’t become an advice columnists, you big dummy. You become a comic strip creator. Duh!
*Well…not really since Wilbur is on his 40th vacation of the year right now, so you’tr a shoo in, Bea!
Crank: Surprising to see folks whose idea of fine cinema is 1940s “Spaceman Sid versus the Martians” serials sitting down to a classic art film like Abel Gance’s Napoleon. We went to a 1981 screening with the full orchestra and triple screens (5 1/2 hours) without eating anything first and when we got to the scene in the middle of a military campaign where the shrimpy general stops at an inn and tells the boniface to give him “bread, wine, olives….and silence” we all moaned softly.
Blondie: Ah, a little of the ol’ slapstick that made the funny pages worth reading back in the Golden Era! Normally one would include a bar of soap or a banana peel to explain such a tremendous spill, so I like to think that Dagwood, filled with morning joie de vivre, spontaneously decided to turn a backflip outside the bathroom door.
DT: Now Costello-free!
MW:
“…and I grew up wishing I had someone who accepted me as I was; but my mom was a bitch and my dad was a drunkard.”
“That explains a lot.”
“What!?“
PMP – “Yep, our entire college career is a blur for both of us. And don’t even ask about our wedding reception.”
@Buck Ripsnort: ‘But, but our lawyers Marley, Scrooge and Billings said it was okay!!’ Seriously, if a massive frivolous lawsuit from The Mouse is what it takes to finally force Batty into retirement, I’m all for it.
MW: That quote is Moy warning us that as disgusting as this storyline was, just imagine how much worse it would have been if Olive had been a person of color.
DT: Sigh… I cut this strip a LOT of slack out of respect for what it was during its best years, but seeing it devolve into this cutesy fanservice is just painful.
RMMD: Hey, Baja! Congratulations on hitting the big time! Getting your Late Night Cuisines into a major strip is a big step up! Next I hope you can get into the strip proper instead of just the throwaway panels.
JP: Awww, poor wittle bwonde wich girl, all alone in beautiful Norway, where she could pick any man she wants for some ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ action! I feel so sorry… for everyone having to deal with her sullen ass.
PmP: The bartender is thinking ‘Martha never existed. This guy’s brain is so fried from the booze and drugs I sell him he just makes shit up. Don’t listen to him son and decide to change your own life, just keep buying my booze!’
MW:
The bespectacled psychiatrist leaned forward, addressing the middle-aged woman who sat facing him on the other side of his heavily carved desk. He tented his fingers and directed his intense gaze at the woman.
“Your daughter, I’m afraid, is a very SENSITIVE child,” he began in his heavy European accent. The r’s rolled off his tongue in a way that made the woman wonder if Dr. Fredu was, perhaps, from Transylvania. “Dis is not, in itself, a serious condition,” he continued, stretching out his words for emphasis. “Many children are sensitive. But your daughter is, I believe, suffering from a more DESTRUCTIVE delusion which tells her she is not ACCEPTED. Dis is the CRUX of her deep, psychological PSYCHOSIS.”
The woman gasped. “Psychosis?? What does that mean, Dr. Fredu?”
“She is not in immediate DANGER,” he assured the woman, getting up from his chair and beginning to pace the room thoughtfully. “No. But there IS some danger. IF she persists in dis delusion, she will become increasingly focused on forcing acceptance from those around her. At firrrst, she may try to BUY acceptance, giving small tokens to others in order to currrrrry their favor. It might be something as simple as a muffin, or more subtle such as a full pan of an exotic recipe…!”
“But we have nothing, Dr. Fredu! We lost everything we had, and our only income is an apple stand–my husband is out of work, and Mary has to give up her time every afternoon and all weekend, selling apples just to keep us from starving!”
Dr. Fredu stroked his white beard. “Yess, I understood from de start that you could not pay ME for my professional work, examining your child, Mary. But I agreed to treat he because I knew from the start that she was psychologically DEFECTIVE. I found hers to be a very interesting case that, I think now, will form the basis for my new experiments.”
The woman gasped again, her alarm heightening. “Experiments? On my Mary?”
Dr. Fredu patted her shoulder soothingly. “We will talk of those later. At this moment, we want to be certain that Mary gets the help she needs. Otherwise, she may become lost in her delusions, not merely wanted to be accepted by others, but forcing them to accept her. Yes, and everything she says, without question! She will become dangerous to the people around her, making them give up their own thoughts and beliefs in favor of the things she tells them to think and believe. How to act, what to feel, what to think about themselves and others.”
The woman gasped. “That sounds awful, Doctor! What can we do??”
“Leave it to me,” he said gently, as she got up to put on her coat. “And thank you again for the salmon squares.”
CRANKSHAFT: Jeff is clearly not keeping up with his storylines, because Cranky is being more like Rex Morgan M.D. at this point. (Phew! thought Ed. Looks like this makes up for going to Truck Tyler’s wedding without them.)
PARDON MY PLANET: It won’t get really depressing until he starts going on a bitter rant about his personal war with Dennis.
Pardon My Planet: That bartender totally served these guys piss in a glass instead of beer.
Rex Morgan: Rex Morgan characters were never meant to express positive emotion through smiles this much. It’s unnatural. Let’s get back to placid, mildly irritated frowns ASAP.
We can only see the corner of the piece of furniture they’re looking at and it would make perfect sense for people in the Funkyverse to be watching the movie on one of those CRT televisions built into a long wooden cabinet. And no doubt they’re also getting sloshed on Napoleon brandy.
***
Pardon My Planet, why did you say that name?
***
“Bea”? I could have sworn her name was Karen.
***
No joke for Rex Morgan because I get it. My favourite restaurant here in Edmonton, Alberta. Canada is DaDeO on Whyte Avenue and I always get the bayou jambalaya. Tell them Tabby Lavalamp sent you They’ll stare at you blankly because they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about, but you’re going to have a great meal anyway so why not?
@Professor Well Actually: “Smell my finger.”
There was an “omake” bonus strip in one of the Iron Wok Jan manga volumes (about chefs competing in the high-stakes world of top-level Chinese cuisine) where the publisher tells the artist the food doesn’t look authentic enough. And the artist replies that he’d like to do more personal research, but he can’t afford to eat at that kind of restaurant.
@Gil Bates: “AND CALL ME AUGIE.”
@Peanut Gallery:
Al parecer, sólo las morenas son lo suficientemente inteligentes como para trabajar con números.
FC: If the were they’d be dead, you greedy little turd.
@49 Hibbleton: I love it! I love your comment so much I enshrined it in comic strip form!
GA: Walt beheaded? Twice? This is the best Halloween ever!
FC: You need to put them on the scent, Billy. Feed each dog about a pound of high-cacao dark chocolate right now, and your problem will be solved for good.
Edge City: Again with the punchline exploiting an infamous anti-Jewish slander. You would think the LaBans were….up to something. (Twain pulled this off as “Yankee Ingenuity” with Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, but making the trickster/cheat a Jewish kid casts some ugly shade)
9CL: And the twins are young again. The family is sitting on the edge of pool with no water. Edda and Amos ignore their children and start to make out. The twins chastise their father as he grabs a breast, reminding him of their presence. Amos’s legs are crossed. He would rather not know what his children mean than to actually talk with them. They all go back to staring blankly forward. The End.
@51 The Quiet Man: The “Cuisine’s” have been featured in Mary Worth for years…
@Anonymous:
Yes, you’re clearly an authority on getting the gist of things.
@Anonymous:
I’m realizing I wasn’t signed in under my name, so that whole thing just got rather meta.
Pardon My Planet: Sartre was wrong. Hell isn’t other people, it’s this one guy in a red V-neck.
@Ukulele Ike: Yes, they’re definitely going to watch the Abel Gance 1927 5 hour silent. The 4 hour directors cut of the 2023 Ridley Scott bomb doesn’t exist in their universe. Not Crankshaft, of course. He’ll take 10 minutes to finish his pastry then pass out.
REX MORGAN M.D.: Nice try there in panel #4, Augie, but with “…remember, you don’t always have to aim so high”, our boy, Josh, has already come up with the ultimate Rex Morgan M.D. credo (and even he gets it a little off, because regular readers here know that “aiming high” for Terry Beatty is “loving” depictions of dried out, lukewarm meatloaf not this “animated” Photoshop filter he put over whatever popped up in the Google image search.)
REX MORGAN M.D. (2):@pugfuggly: To be fair, you can’t blame Summer’s confusion, giving that Augie merely just said “The news” is that there are multiple publishers interested in his sure-to-be-terrible book. I mean, that “bidding war” might mean (gasp) conflict in the milquetoast world of the Rexverse, so maybe Augie wasn’t sure how to take it either. It is good news though! The bad news is that the horrible angle we have to gaze at Augie in the last panel makes him look even more schlubbier and dorkier than usual. Yikes!
MW- Moy just phoning in as expected.
I’ve found something that I hate more than Blondie characters validating Dagwood. Characters in other strips validating Dagwood and validating Tom Batiuk’s pathetic wordplay while using a whole Sunday strip for a gag that could have been one panel, or preferably zero.
RMMD: Pad thai is my go-to for Thai. The three (not one) lime wedges are an odd touch. As a citrus lover, have I been getting ripped off all these years?
Pluggers gets a nod for the Codgers drawing and “Ancient Mariners”, but missed “Giant Moles”, “Support Sox” and “Unathetics”!
Blondie should have saved this one for the start of Daylight Savings Time.
BG&SS: Six months ago:
“Where should we put our next Starbucks, ‘Hootin’ Holler’ or ‘Iqaluit’ ?”
“Iqaluit sounds sorta foreign. Let’s stick with the suburbanites in the good ol’ USA.”
MW: Did Jeff put on an undershirt between the boat cruise and dinner?
Crankshaft: Are you sure Crank is referring to the 2023 Joaquin Phoenix movie? He could be referring to the five-plus-hour long 1927 silent version directed by Abel Gance. That seems more like the kind of movie he would grouch all the way through.
C’shaft: You get Dagwood Bumstead’s name out of your dirty mouth, Pam. You think he would content himself to a small pâtisserie for his Napoleon-themed snacking? Oh no, he would have a multi-course feast of regional snack foods tracing Bonaparte’s Corsican origins, his campaigns in the Arabic world, his tumultuous reign as Emperor, and finally his ignoble end in a dilapidated farmhouse on St. Helena (commemorated with fried rat).
Marvin: Sometimes I think that the running gag about Marvin and poop jokes is an exaggeration, but then I see a strip like today’s and I’m reminded that no, they really are 100% committed to that bit.
RMMD: Oh great, are we going back to the “improbable good fortune” days of Rex Morgan? Is Sarah going to renew her old mob ties?
@Baja Gaijin: But never in such lovingly detailed form!
@2+2=7: The Buckification of Augie has begun… the next time we him talking on the phone with his ‘publisher’ it will be one of those grotesque upnostril shots with his free hand randomly splayed out. Then he’ll inexplicably develop a taste for triple-thick milkshakes and triple patty BBQ burgers. When he takes Blondie to Wanda Wanda Bo Bonda Banana Fana Fo Fonda Me My Mo Monda’s diner (now with 100% more Truck!) for their next date, he’ll be unrecognizable.
Today’s Mary Worth quote is one of those that is so busted that there’s already an article about it. Originally from a 1975 blurb in the Indianapolis Star about National Children’s Dental Health Week, got brainyquoted onto Douglass in the mid-90s, though from my own research I can add that by 1984 Haki Madhubhuti (in “Hanging Hard in America”) had written “raise strong, loving and sane children and / we will not have to repair broken adults” so it did get used in a context pertaining to African-Americans before someone tacked Douglass’s name on.
@2+2=7: Now that I look at the strip again, Blondie’s face is looking rather bloated in the bottom panels. The shlubification virus must be transmissible to women now too! Soon she’ll ditch that ponytail for either a pink-tinted moptop or a beehive hair helmet with the little doily hat! There’s no escape!
DT: Okay, I wasn’t expecting a Minit Mystery after a week of setting up the next arc, but I’m here for it. I hope everyone in it continues to talk in exaggerated Victorian English vernacular. I want every panel for the next two weeks to be laden with “I say,” “pip-pip,” and “Cheerio!”
Dustin: Ed Kudlik has the psychological maturity of a six-year-old, part 5,251.
JP: “I’m so BORED here in Norway, and nobody is fixing that for me!”
“I know how you feel! I’m putting exactly zero effort into being a good caregiver for Charlotte and it’s not working!”
Pluggers aren’t as original as they think they are.
‘shaft: As much as Jeff (justifiably) hates Ed, he gets a little nervous when Ed is away for too long. The truth is, Jeff’s entire personality is dependent on Ed. Deep down, he knows: without that deeply unpleasant old man, I’m nothing.
PMP: Here’s a fun idea for Halloween week: change the name Martha to Wendy and swap out that red V-neck sweater for a plaid flannel shirt, and this becomes a Shining legacy sequel.
Marvin: It did not take long for Bea to become totally enraged while writing this column. I’m guessing she took on this assignment specifically to air some grievances, but she knew she had to disguise it with a thin veneer of “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” bullshit.
RMMD: I do not buy this “bidding war” story at all. I’m reminded of that song, “It Never Rains in Southern California,” specifically the lines: “Will you tell the folks back home I nearly made it? Had offers but don’t know which one to take. Please don’t tell ’em how you found me. Don’t tell ’em how you found me. Gimme a break. Gimme a break.”
The “& family” after “Marvin” is very threatening! “You think this horrible baby is an abomination, a freak accident? Wrong! He comes from a line of horrible people, their genes are everywhere, humanity is already polluted!”
To be fair to Terry Beatty, pad thai is potentially tax-deductible and more interesting than any Rex Morgan, M.D. character in the last ten years.
Curtis: Wait, isn’t Barry supposed to be genuinely disturbed by Curtis’s horror stories, rather than enjoying but snarking about them?
DT: Once again we interrupt this Eric Costello guest story for a different Eric Costello guest story. And it’s a freaking Elseworlds set in Mary Poppins London. I hate literally everything about it already, and we haven’t even got to the part where the solution doesn’t make any sense.
(To be fair, I will concede that it would be possible for me to hate it more. It could be set in Scotland with everyone wearing tartan and saying “och aye”, and DCI Tracy wearing a bright yellow tam o’shanter.)
MW: I was going to snark that, as a kid with an active imagination, I recognise there’s a difference between that and being delusional. Then I remembered that Mary doesn’t think Olive is delusional because she believes she’s an actual psychic. I am so glad I didn’t know Mary when I was Olive’s age — I’d probably have ended up having to explain to her that I couldn’t really talk to the cat, it was just fun to pretend I could.
RMMD: A character mentions being a multiple-failed author for the first time on-panel, and suddenly people are fighting for the privilege of giving him money. Somewhere, Woody Wilson is smiling.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Except maybe Mud Mountain, but that just ends up in the same place as pad thai: the shitter.
I have the opposite objection to today’s “Crankshaft”. Dagwood is a big eater, but he is no gourmand, he basically only eats food from the children menu. A Napoleon is too good for him
“How is your Napoleon?”
“Mediocre, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It should have been great but it isn’t!”
“You shouldn’t expect too much from minimum wage workers!”
“Ridley Scott gets minimum wage?!”
Pardon My Planet: Martha’s dead, right? That’s the whole joke, that broody drinking guy killed Martha and buried her under the bar, along with the bartender whose soul is slowly collapsing under the weight of his terrible secret, leaving behind only a pair of lifeless eyes? I may be reading too much into this.
PMP: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, twenty years after.
@Baja Gaijin:
Perfect! Just like I imagined it.
“There’s a bidding war…”
“What does Mary Worth have to do with your book?”
“Bidding, not biddy war”
The great mystery of our age is “Who is keeping ApplePlus… sorry AppleTv afloat through subscription?” Surprisingly, the answer is “Crankshaft”
“I have two publishers making an offer! Sure, the offer is to buy the rights to prevent the book from being printed, but an offer is an offer!”
Remember that Blondie is so ancient that even Batiuk, a veteran of fifty years of newspaper comics, is a young Turk challenging the establishment!
@Baja Gaijin: Superb!
“Is a bidding war good news? I never passed my economics class, so I don’t know how supply and demand works. To be honest, I am also bad at parsing meaning from contextual clues and social signals. But if I weren’t, I wouldn’t be dating you!”
Have we considered that everyone on “Marvin” is so unpleasant because they live literally surrounded by human and animal shit? That would make them understandable! Understandable not sympathetic mind you
@The Quiet Man: Augie’s going to have to work on getting a stupider, outdated hairstyle for the occasion then.
CS: Since most convenience stores are now owned or at least run by Middle Easterners, and judging by that layer of green in those Napoleons, maybe they’re one of those new Dubai style Napoleons, with pistachio paste.
Luann – so we are back with a filler? Or was the last episode with Luann and Bernice where they were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning and hallucinating?
DT – Okay, a slow build up in the main strip – that is okay. The problems lately haven’t been with the art or the even the basic idea, but with the plotting and pacing – especially the endings. Hope this one pays off better. For these little side stories – why not treat them like The Treehouse of Horror episodes of the Simpsons? Around the holidays, do these goofier odd ball tales. DT in a British cozy murder; DT meets Hercule Poirot; DT steps into a midst of armed robbery gone bad; DT tries to help a little kid find his missing dog; DT embarks on an international adventure to locate King Ottokar’s Scepter.
Judge Parker – Back to Norway? At least Charlotte going ga-ga for a squirrel pet now makes sense.
Mary Worth – The Bum Boat is bussing tables fast! No dishes left around. OK – the inevitable point – that Mary is also special.
Phantom – a bold move to fly the wing under the waterfall! Strong gusts of wind with the density of air being a fraction of water have flipped planes but OK – since the art is so good, let’s forget physics for now.
Rex Morgan -Yes, the RMMD team needs to think bigger, – like a trip to Norway (see JP), bidding war over an unknown author’s first novel? OK – possible, but rare. Usually it is some celebrity or established author.
Slylock – ?Uh, how does that prove anything Slylock? Eats some candy, I think you are hypoglycemic!
RMMD So this conversation is so annoying the customers at the table behind these two sat down, got their water, then left before ordering anything, is that right? Management is gonna be plenty pissed. Maybe they’ll stick Augie and Summer with a 10% “you don’t come back, okay?” surcharge.
Crankshaft: As a lover of fine baked goods, I know that napoleons are a real treat. They’re tricky and time-consuming to make, and go bad very quickly as the cream soaks into the crispy pastry layers. If I found a gas station sellling a pastry labeled “napoleons,” I can’t imagine actually wanting to eat the abomination on offer.
I will grant that Ed has powerful Dagwood energy today. It reads just like some cheap Blondie gag where Dagwood sees Alexander messing around on a laptop and saying “I need to adjust my cookie settings!” and next panel Dag is in the kitchen setting the oven to bake a batch of cookies (and delivering a bit of wordplay in case the audience didn’t get it). But “running out to buy special treats for his family to enjoy” is so at odds with Ed’s usual behavior–which is mostly characterized by mispronounced words and sourness and spite–that the Dagwood energy really undermines the joke. Since when does Ed care about making his family happy? What is his goal here? Too many sinister questions.
@Anonymous (possibly Violet): I didn’t notice that! But it is the sort of assumption the authors of this strip would have made.
FC – However, I did find four bottles of Mommy’s special juice. *Hic*
Frazz – Notice that the insufferable little shit is eating lunch with Frazz. He doesn’t have lunch with kids his age because none of them can stand him.
JP – Reena is spending all her time with her Norwegian boyfriend, and Sophie is spending her time painting and hiking. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Sophie hired to run an alleged charity set up by Glenn’s family?
Mary Worth – Well, there went my breakfast. Please make it stop. MAKE. IT. STOP. I don’t want to hear one more word about dear girl Olive, the smug, self absorbed, special little egomaniac. This story has accomplished something, as she’s now the second youngest character on my most hated comics characters list. Caulfield is the youngest.
It does look like MW might move on to a new story soon, possibly tomorrow. Considering the downward spiral of the past few stories, I don’t have high hopes.
CS: Once again confusing Napoleon films, Crankshaft brought pastry when he should have provided tater tots and pan fried steak.
@matt w: So, what Douglass really said was “It is easier to build strong teeth when you’re a child than repair them when you’re an adult.”
@Baja Gaijin: Yes!
Red and Rover: For some reason I found this funny.
@TheDiva: Seconded. What I would really like to see is the Dick Tracy version of VIZ magazine’s Raffles, the Gentleman Thug.
From one of the best scenes in the 1942 war comedy To Be or Not to Be:
Gestapo Officer #1: “So, Hans, what does your father say about our Fuhrer?
Little German boy: “He likes to say ‘Napoleon became a pastry, Bismarck is a herring, and the Fuhrer will be…’”
Gestapo Officer #2: “….a piece of cheese!”
Gestapo Officer #1: “WHAT????”
Gestapo Officer #2: “It’s….it’s the obvious thought!”
Gestapo Officer #1: “WHAT????”
Gestapo Officer #2: “Uhhhhh….HEIL HITLER!”