Ominous developments
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Crankshaft, 8/19/26
The last time Crankshaft and Harry Dinkle started an adventure together, Crankshaft looked real cherry but it ended up with Harry confronting the truly depressing circumstances of his father’s death. Now Ed has shown up at his place of work to drag him off on some other journey and he looks pissed, so maybe this time will turn out to be more fun for Harry, or maybe Crankshaft has just decided to murder him and put him out of his misery.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/19/26
At one point the scam twins were thinking about kidnapping a child, but then they realized that would not only get them in a lot of trouble, but also make this strip dangerously exciting, so now they’re trying to negotiate down to an acceptable level of plot development. I love the idea that squatting is too much of a commitment to bother doing. Like, most people squat just because that means they get to live someplace for free, but in the Twins’ conception, they’d be squatting for revenge, which means they’d have to stick around even if it turns out that the Morgan house has bad vibes or is unpleasant to be inside (it definitely does and is).
Beetle Bailey, 8/19/26
Hey, General, I just want to point out that the U.S. has fought in, like, several wars in the time that you’ve been an officer. Heck, there’s one going on right now! I know what you mean is that you want to have been in one of the cool ones, not the cringe wars we keep finding ourselves in lately, but still, I feel like you shouldn’t be quite so vocal on this point at the office if you don’t want to find yourself abruptly in the field.
69 replies to “Ominous developments”
Why the zoom-out to reveal Halftrack’s golf clubs? Isn’t the running gag there that he’s not good, and dresses like an asshole? You’re not a legend at that either! Way to suck, guy!
“Here, Harry, are the remains of the Starlight Ballroom, where your father played!”
“Been ditching your Coping With Senility classes, Ed?”
“Who?!”
Beetle Bailey:
No computer or phone at the General’s desk. How does he communicate? — no wonder he never became a war hero.
Crankshaft:
“Next stop…Willoughby!”
Assume Miss Buxley means that a Halftrack is all bad, since she hasn’t been struck down by lightning from heaven for her filthy lies.
RMMD: There are a million vids on youtube about vacation scams. These two need to cut the cord and start streaming if they ever want to be successful.
RMMD You know what’s *also* too much of a commitment? Drawing this every day! Artist must be just as tuned out, the P2 Foreground Twin didn’t even have a hand gesture adjustment from yesterday.
“We need an idea, sis! If we don’t make a plan to destroy the Morgans, we’ll never be released from this powder blue void!”
“Well, let’s hurry! Judge Judy reruns start in 20 minutes! I hope it’s the one where she yells at people!”
RMMD:
“Why don’t we bore him to death with interminable conversation between the two of us about what we’re going to do to him?”
“Well, we’re already doing that!”
Wrecks Moregone:
“Can we menace them with our comically enormous hands?”
“Now you’re talking!”
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Wary Morth:
Meanwhile Tommy has stolen the background to sell for drug money.
RMMD:
“Let’s talk him into creating an OnlyDocs website by telling him that people will pay to watch him do nothing!”
CSh: Im guessing that Ed got tickets to the Michael Jackson Revue, as he seems to be moonwalking his way out of the church.
RMMD Its incredible how this strip manages to take any interesting story subject and find the most boring direction to take it in. A couple of teenaged twin scammers with a desire for revenge? What if, instead of watching them pull scams, we spent weeks with the brainstorming scams ideas, and rejecting them all for practical reasons? Maybe we could also put them in a blue void, just to make sure that there’s nothing interesting going in on the background…
Send Halftrack to Hormuz. He can whack golf balls across the Straits and everyone on all sides will just give up and go home in disgust.
CS So, bets on how a pizza parlour photo will tie into the Dinkle story? On his way to his bus driving heart attack, Dinkle Sr stopped for a slice, was recognized as this great band leader, and got his photo with a “Best Band Director Ever” cardboard crown? While holding a hand-drawn sign saying “I Love You, Son!”? How glurgey can this story get??
RMMD: Are the twins actually that experienced, or have they just heard about all these crimes? (I mean, I know about them too; I just like true crime) They had to be told how serious a kidnapping could be – EVERYONE knows that!
All we’ve really seen them do is Fake Violin and “We’re from the safety inspection department.” And that second one wouldn’t have worked on anyone with half a brain.
FC: Billy continues: “And as oldest son, I’ll be the new head of the family.” Starts rocking boat violently.
Beetle Bailey : Amos merely assumes the US has not participated in any armed conflicts since WW2 because if they had, SURELY they would have called on Camp Swampy to help, right? It’s not like this “military base” is just a dump for all the rejects that are kept away from the fighting because they’d do more harm than good, right?
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Crankshaft : So, it’s not a robot waiter, because if it was, why the hell would Cranky feel the need to tell HARRY, of all people.
ALSO : Cranky can just run all the way from Montoni’s to St. Spire Church on a whim, those two locations are now essentially right next to each other.
ALSO ALSO : this is something so urgent and troubling Crankshaft must tell Harry to come over in person, in person. What are those “telephones” you speak of? Sounds way too new-fangled for this strip!
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Luann :
a) YOU’RE NOT SURE!? You spent three days waving that sonogram around, talking about how it was living proof you were going to have a baby, and you’re not SURE!?
b.1) Toni has no family to tell about this. She doesn’t have a brother, a niece or a still-living aunt who practically raised her when her parents died to tell about this.
b.2) Once again, Toni Daytona has NO relatives/friends/acquaintances/supporting cast of her own, and thus when the strip needed to do the “expecting woman is given contradictory, absurd advice” bit, it had to be total strangers accosting her for no visible reason.
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Rex Morgan M.D. : “Small potatoes, huh? You mean, mind control the whole town into becoming their enemies and attacking them?”
*“Come on, Jane, you know our latent psychic powers due to being twins are limited to a simple telepathic link between us.” “I’m Jane, you’re Jean.” “SEE! It’s not even a GOOD telepathic link because it doesn’t even help me not CONSTANTLY get that confused!”*My attempt at referencing the current summer blockbuster movie… and hey, the character who does it is ALSO called JEAN!*************
Safe Havens : Uh… the way I understood it worked, you don’t have the metabolism of a dove when you’re not in dove form. It’s why the “let’s expand our lifespans by spending the entire summer as mermaids” works!… Or did you guys forget that the whole reason you spent summers as mermaids was because you needed someone’s biological clock to stall for a year?
@A Grave Mind:“Been ditching your Coping With Senility classes, Ed?”
“No! Microwave Cookery!
….no, wait. Coping With Senility…”
Halftrack, pulls M16 out of his golf bag. “Well, that ends now!” Declares war on Dubuque, Iowa.
Is Miss Buxley shooting for a raise? I’ve never heard her be anything but dismissive of the General before. Maybe she wants to be the next Natalie Harp.
BB: I hear they’ve got some nice golf courses along the Gulf of Oman, General.
Blondie: Now you’ve done it, Dagwood, you’ve pissed of Pazuzu, who’s apparently been running a doughnut shop since the events portrayed in The Exorcists.
FC: RIP, Daddy, murdered by your melon-headed children and made to look like a boating accident.
@pugfuggly:
Fist bump.
I was halfway to becoming the next Patton. I routinely slapped my enlisted men, all I needed was some sort of military achievement.
RMMD: Can we please skip ahead to when Grandpa Ollman storms in and clunks their heads together like a Three Stooges bit?
Beetle Bailey:
What General Halftrack really needed to become a legend was to stop wasting his time staring at blank pieces of paper. Look, Miss Buxley’s even brought him another one!
C’shaft: Crankshaft is a member of the choir now, having been recruited because he’s a) male and b) technically alive, so why is he barging in on a rehearsal that he very well should be at already?
RMMD: The twins want revenge on the Morgans, but they don’t want to put too much risk or effort into the process. They may not be the villains this strip needs, but they are definitely the villains it deserves.
@Hibbleton: pulls M16 out of his golf bag
Shades of General Ripper!
I’ve always been at a bit of a loss to figure out why McArthur was considered a genius at anything other than self=promotion. Don’t know whether Gen. Cummings in the Naked and the Dead is supposed to resemble him but I’ve always liked to think so.
Family Circus: Daddy’s not wearing a “life preserver” because they’re filled with lead, not kapok. He’s not going down with the ship!
“Well, good news! President Truman is relieving you of duty!”
Beetle Bailey: After half a century at his present rank, Halftrack finally realizes that he has received his last promotion. Were some major world war brewing, he would be among the first group to be politely thanked with a firm handshake and ushered out the door (like what Gen. Marshall did in the run up to WW2). Camp Swampy is where they put everyone who is deemed too ineffective to deploy but not so horrible to dismiss outright. They would surely become casualties due to enemy action or just accidents and that would hurt public opinion. Lt. Fuzz hasn’t figured out that his posting at Camp Swampy means he is being fast tracked to oblivion.
GT: Surfing is good fun! Gil’s family is on vacation on the coast? Is Milford on the coast? That board is really a BOAR, square cut end!
JP: What is the age range for Abbey, April, Neddy, Sophie, Ann, and Ronnie? They all seem sort of the same. Only the judge has noticeably aged.
MW: Good for you Wilbur, you are just a self-centered uncouth blob but no hypocrite! NOT a hypocrite. He should have a shirt made.
Dick Tracy: Please correct me but Widescreen diverted a Schroedinger to his place, and then shipped it to the pseudonym of Fritz Ann using the three cats shipping company or did he repurpose a cat food carton from his old lady neighbor? I’d like to think the latter since it would be another reason why she despises him.
RMMD: Many maybe surprised that the twins seems aware of the nuances of many scams yet oblivious to the larger significance of their actions. That just supports the notion that they are high on the psychopathy scale. Please let the twist be that uncle Lyle calls the girls up and tips them off that Rene is ratting them out.
BB: I can’t decide if the references to Patton and Macarthur — dead for 81 and 62 years respectively — are a nod to the demographics of the comics-reading public, or a recognition that no subsequent generals have earned similar stature. (Well, maybe Norman Schwarzkopf.) Probably a little of both.
GT: So the Thorps having the kids along on their post-wedding trip isn’t entirely unusual–“familymoons” are fairly popular for couples with children who want to celebrate not only their union, but that of their families (though Beth, being the perfect trophy wife, doesn’t have any family or other baggage which Gil would be obliged to take on). What I do find notable is that everybody in this newly formed clan is off doing their own thing–Jami wants to dig to China like a five-year-old, Keri’s sitting under an umbrella doing the too-cool-for-everything teenager act, Beth is surfing and spouting outdated slang and Gil’s just griping about how much he hates the beach. Nobody in this family wants to spend time with anyone else in it, and honestly I can’t blame them.
JP: Grief, booze, six on one hand…
MW: Wilbur needs to hear things about a dozen times before they even begin to stick, which explains so much about why Mary likes to hang out with him.
Beetle Bailey: The lettering is so tightly packed that I found myself wondering who or where Beanother Patton is.
H&L: Hi with his statement seems to be warning Trixie (AKA Baby Huey) to keep off his hammock lest she busts it. Seriously, what’s up with the perspective in P1?
“Harry, come with me if you want to live!”
“Well, now I don’t know if I want to come!”
Dick Tracy: Some European countries (Germany, Austria, Denmark) use almost the same logo on their postboxes as the horn logo on the building. Neat detail.
FC: And guess what Daddy went down on last night.
Crankshaft: Who barges into choir practice and screams that the choir director has to leave without any explanation? Crankshaft, I know the answer is Crankshaft; it’s rhetorical. It’s outrageous behavior, though, and there’d better be a magical fire that only Harry’s piss can extinguish; that’s all I’m saying.
Crank: “You need to come with me, Harry!”
Just when I thought ICE recruitment standards couldn’t get any lower.
“General, I thought you got some medal for your service: First Gulf War, Afghanistan, ISIS campaign”
“Yes, but those medals were from Saddam. the Talibans and Al Baghdadi”
Rex Morgan, M.D.: What?! A “Squatter Takeover” is a common enough thing to have its own name? with its own methodical rules and mores (“if you have bad knees, try crouching part of the time!”)? I think there ought to be commercials during morning broadcasts of Bonanza, with some guy in a trench coat walking toward the camera, telling viewers how YOU can protect yourself against a Squatter Takeover.
GT: Beth really doesn’t need a surfboard with those huge feet.
BB: Halftrack never made it to the top because of his lack of a PR-ready nickname. No president today wants to appoint “Raisin’ Halftrack.”
Crankshaft-“Oh is this going to be like the time were forcibly compelled to follow the band director and were incredibly bored learning about his father?”
RMMD-“How about if we squat on their lawn then?”
FC-I notice how PJ has been conveniently left behind.
FC-Do any of you kids know the ‘Hail Mary’?
The Morgans are not too smart to fall for such scam, but they would not fall for it anyway, because they hate charity and generosity
Beetle Bailey-“Then Vietnam happened but fortunately I was cleared of war crimes.”
Ph: ‘I’m sorry, Schmelon, I cannot do that. And take off that stupid alien mask or I shall do it for you…’
S4th: ‘I’ll bring the reality check, and here it is: You are a bad friend who constantly ropes us into your wacky schemes and wastes our time. It is only through the will of our cruel master Ces ‘I’m Endearingly Quirky!’ Marculiano that we are forced to remain your ‘friends’. Will you just shut up for once, go catch up on your sleep, and leave us be?’
MW: Every shot of Wilbur talking (or Dawn, or Tommy, etc.) I imagine them just going ‘duuuuuhhhhhh’. Every. single. one.
RMMD: Maybe you can just burn the house down while they’re on vacation? Arson’s been in the news a lot lately!
Luann: Does that shredder also burn the paper, ’cause it looks like you just dumped a bucket of ashes on them.
CS: Oh, COME ON! We just sat through six weeks of this boring-ass non-story. Can we have Batton Thomas back? At least he’s worth hating.
Crankshaft is the Angel of Death. When he’s not escorting people like Harry Dinkle off this mortal coil, his personality is making them wish it would all just end.
***
Now I’m just a humble city non-lawyer in another country, but I’m pretty sure squatting isn’t that easy in most of the US (except maybe the woke cities because there ain’t much left there as they’re mostly burnt to the ground). Wouldn’t that just be breaking and entering? I honestly love these two. They want to crime so much but they’re too lazy and not that smart and they don’t prattle on about, say, Bakelite housewares or some other such nonsense like the rest of that town.
BB: “You can’t argue with the math, General.” Says Buxley.
Halftrack + Half bad = Half assed
RMMD – Hang on. You have these precise, extremely uniform bobs, the exact same shade of Tang. Matching tops and matching manicures – but squatting is too much of a commitment?
Uncle JimmyRene Belluso would be ashamed to call you his nieces.@Lauralot: He needs to do that during the next prison visit, so Unca Renimmy can go ‘woop woop woop! Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck!’
@Anonymous: “Not sure” means waiting until the miscarriage rate goes down to where the need to disclose outweighs the chance of having to tell bad news later.
Do you mean pissed in the English sense? Because I don’t know what is hanging from Ed’s wrist, but at a glance I thought it was a bottle of booze.
Crkshft: Did Crankshaft’s grand entrance cause such a spatial anomaly that they executed a high-speed, military-grade tactical swap, or are choir pews equipped with a secret Lazy Susan mechanism for emergency relocations? Either way, moving that fast in a church without interrupting Crankshaft takes a level of stealth that deserves its own comic strip.
@The Quiet Man:
On Sally Forth :
CHOOSE ONE : “It’s funny because Nona
a) USED to be the ‘wacky’, nonsense-spewing idiot of their friend group before Ces took over.”
b) HAD a way OUT of being stuck as Hillary Forth’s friend; by just accepting never being forgiven for secretly banging Hillary’s summer boyfriend the entire time they were together.”
…That was a whole thing, right? That it turned out that the guy Hillary met every summer that seemingly only existed during the summer in some weird Brigadoon-type deal actually spent the rest of the year being NONA’S boyfriend in secret, and Hillary almost permanently stopped being friends with Nona over it?
MW – “You don’t want to say ‘Ok for me but not for thee.’ It’s perfectly ok for your daughter to get dumped for someone who’s far more attractive too!”
@Hibbleton: But didn’t you hear? Watching a video is “too much of a commitment.”
@Bob Tice: “Also, They’ve lived in Glenwood too long and are immune to that by now.”
@Downpuppy: Yeah, even with a reasonable heart rate on ultrasound, the risk is pretty high till about the 12-week mark.
@Ken: That’s General Westmoreland erasure!
@Anonymous: I’ll take C) It’s funny because Ces doesn’t know how to write consistent, appealing characters due to his overweening need to be seen as the next Steven Spielberg or creator of the next ‘Stranger Things’.
Crank – This is a ripoff of the Hardy Boys and the Mystery of Finding One’s Asshole With Both Hands….
RMMD – How ‘bout we dope up Rex and take some pix of us all naked, together in bed? Naw…everyone will know that was a set up. But maybe with June….
BB – And then there was the time I confronted the bunker single handed. I grabbed my trusty 9 iron and began my approach….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@TheDiva: Boy does that encapsulate Rex Morgan M.D. perfectly! The real villains here are risk and effort.
@But What Do I Know?: My father was a WW2 army veteran who served in the South Pacific. He said the historic photo of MacArthur wading ashore at Luzon was a staged photo opp.
Shaft – “You need to come with me, Harry. I warned you about preaching that ‘Love thy neighbor’ stuff. I’m going to have to burn you now”
@Ken: There were many other famous WW2 generals but they went on to things far beyond their military career. Eisenhower became president. Marshall become a secretary of state and thanks to the Marshall plan helped to rebuild western Europe after WW2.
More recent generals didn’t have the multiyear publicity that Patton and MacArthur both had.
@Baja Gaijin: That’s the Thurn und Taxis crest–from the family which used to have the postal monopoly in much of Europe. Ever read The Crying of Lot 49?
Crankshaft-Yes, Ed. Everyone already knows about the “Dogs Playing Poker” picture.
FG: Fuck me! It’s the Fire Wights!
Cue up the Johnny Cash!