Into the Curmudgeonverse
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Oh my gosh it’s the very last day of the 2026 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser! Hurry! Thank you!
Crankshaft, 7/24/26
Boy, these multiverse stories sure get complicated! Like when Barry Allen Flash teamed up in the past with Jay Garrick Flash to battle The Thinker, The Fiddler, and Shade so Barry could persuade real-world writer Gardner Fox to write a comic book about their adventures! Or when Spider-Men Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire team up to defeat Electro, Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man: No Way Home to keep the hordes of people who know Spidey’s not-so-secret identity from overrunning our world. Or here, where transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas” teams up with opaque actual author self-insert character Tom Batiuk, presumably to Fight Crime. I don’t know, but if I were Lillian Mackenzie, Harry Dinkle, or Ed Crankshaft, I’d watch my back—these guys are cartoonists—they have erasers and they know how to use them.
Bizarro, 7/24/26
Whoops, looks like the stress finally got to our guy. Forget what I said yesterday.
Crock, 7/24/26
“At last! Our comic strip is saved!”
Phantom, 7/24/26
Chatu “The Python” has surrendered and put on the AI-enabled “Tokoloshe” control anklet, and I’m frankly a little disappointed in him. I mean, this is the guy who tried to Ebolify the whole world through an infected fruit-bat scheme, and blew up half of downtown Mawitaan just to get back at his nemesis the Phantom. He may or may not be a coward, but there is no way he’s gonna let some rich upstart out-evil him! All those years in that cage must’ve softened him up, or maybe he went mad from that interminable drum solo. Either way, get ready for an epic supervillain match-up and battle—now enhanced with AI!
No Comments of the Week on my watch; last week’s victor Victor Von gets a twofer.
—Uncle Lumpy
19 replies to “Into the Curmudgeonverse”
Crankshaft: Want a story about aging nerds in a comic book store entering the multiverse? We could either watch “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” or read Crankshaft. They both feature characters we thought we were done with but who will seemingly go on forever, but at least one of them is kind of funny. The other is technically “the funnies,” but we know how misleading that term often turns out to be.
Crock: Since this strip is from 1998, it kind of makes sense that someone would “email” them “jokes” rather than sharing memes on social media. On the other hand, MapQuest first went online in 1996 — if they have an internet-connected computer to receive emails, can’t they use it to help the Lost Patrol navigate their way home? Of course, they’d better hurry, if they want to get everybody back safe before Y2K destroys the world.
Bizarro:
Gosh, that one Smith Brothers cough drop guy has sure fallen on hard times, hasn’t he.
Phantom:
“Now the AI drone will visit ridicule and opprobrium on him for sporting that declasse tank top! — my subjugation is complete!”
“At last! Our comic strip is saved!”
No COTW this week but deserves notice.
MW: No sooner does Wilbur have his epiphany, than a huge tentacle rises from the lake…
RMMD: I’m starting to anticipate the moment that those twin smirks are wiped from their faces.
The Familliar Mucus: Billy and Dolly are exposed to “69 Weirdchick Lame”, engage in elbow sex,and cause Thel’s face to melt! An action packed episode!
Bizaro: ZZ BOTTOM.
Sex Organ V.D.:Finally some justice as Background guy proudly urinates in Thing #1’s soda!
Crock: Wait. Email? Not, like, carrier pigeon mail? …You printed an email? …….Email exists?
FW: That guy in the first panel is drawn way too detailed to be a made up background character. So who is it? Has a second Tom Batuik entered the strip?
Hagar: Freud would say that the last panel really indicates that Lute is going to play his instrument by himself now that the date is not going to happen.
Crankshaft : …Wasn’t Earth 2 (at least the version Bat
iukTON THOMAS openly pines about) destroyed in 1985?“I wanna live in a fictional parallel universe” nothing, there’s the obsession with something that stopped being relevant 40 years ago!
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Flash Gordon : …I forget, does Frigia know Bok and his friends keep LOSING that shield, over and over? I feel like she’d be less permissive about letting them use the one memento she has of her lost lover, if she knew they keep misplacing it all the time.
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Ripley’s Don’t Believe It :
a) Wait… Tofu, in the 18th century? Is that a “Doritos were invented in Ancient South America” thing?
b) If you are not american, this is the only thing you’ll ever know about Zachary Taylor (should have included which number president he was, so people know where he fits in the timeline)
c) In retrospect, advertising that he would meet ANYONE who came to him, and that he’d let people come into his house within derringer-range of him, was kind of a bad move on McKingley’s part (even if it did win him the election)…
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Sally Forth : If I was Katherine, I’d be a lot more shocked that the picture these total strangers showed seem to include me (Jackie *IS* her exact lookalike) before recognising an elderly person as an older version of a roughly-same-age sibling.
…Too soon?…Ah, remember when the worst kind of spam email (a new term at the time) you would get was a bunch of bad jokes? Mid-1990s to early 2000s, say? Well, with Crock, you can never be sure whether this is a reprint from that time or if they’re genuinely writing new strips and just don’t realize times have changed.
In a way, you feel just as lost as these legionnaires! Immersion!
Crock: Today’s strip is almost 30 years old. Just sayin’.
Mary Worth Mashup: @5 MKay inspired this mashup. Whaddya think?
Bizarro: Look at the signature – this comic was written by a Waymo. Not content with being superior to human drivers (under certain controlled conditions that some experts argue are not a fair comparison), now they’re proving that they’re superior to… well, not comics artists in general, but the ones who do Bizarro, anyway.
Sex Organ,V.D.2 :”We scored Free Big Salads™! Wait’ll Uncle Georgie Costanza hears about this! Don’t forget I get credit for this scam!”
RMMD: well you could try to seduce Rex. Who knows he may have a twins fantasy.
@17 Professor Well Actually: Yes, Rexy has a twins fantasy: two pieces of wedding cake gets him off.
Batiuk and Battom would team up to read comic books and wallow in nostalgia.