Post Content

Crankshaft, 4/16/16

Hey guys, remember Ed Crankshaft, the almost wholly unlikeable protagonist of the comic strip Crankshaft? Well, Crankshaft and Mary, who is a perfectly nice person, have been going on dates, and other people have noticed, and somehow Crankshaft is the one who finds this embarrassing, though he claims that it’s only because his relationships all seem to go south whenever they’re recognized or acknowledged, in some kind of Romantic Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or something. Anyway, Mary now knows she’s truly been claimed by the ’Shaft, because her relationship is now being labelled with a terrible and unfunny malapropism, in line with his personal beliefs and lifestyle.

Beetle Bailey, 4/16/16

Haha, it’s funny because Sarge would rather look like a dope and fail to clean his stinky feet than appear even slightly feminine, even for a moment, and oh my god wait is he just full on nude in the comics pages??? That water droplet is extremely strategically placed so as to obscure his entire butt crack, but that doesn’t make this acceptable at all.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 4/14/16

You might not believe it based on the nonstop stream of cruel vitriol I heap upon comics creators daily, but writing this blog over the years has actually given me a lot of sympathy for the people who write these things. Coming up with a joke a day within the same little world, every day, for years and years is hard, man, even for the team of people they have down at ol’ Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC. I mean, I get it. Some days you’re just staring at a blank panel and are trying to figure out how you can wring a few laughs out of it, and clearly, as the deadline loomed, today’s jokesmith could think of nothing except for falling off a cliff into the sweet embrace of death, which might be something they should talk to a trained therapist about. But anyway, I’d argue that the second panel here is wholly unnecessary. Beetle and Killer dully contemplating the fact that their fellow soldiers just can’t stop falling off cliffs, while staring at a handwritten note on a bulletin board that, in a plea for sanity that will surely go unheeded, urges everyone to “AVOID CLIFF”, is the funniest thing in the comics today, and probably the funniest thing to happen in Beetle Bailey ever.

Gil Thorp, 4/14/16

Boy, the softball action in Gil Thorp sure is a lot more exciting when it’s drawn like an German expressionist film, right? Pitcher and catcher stand at opposite ends of some long corridor, then suddenly are practically on top of one another, representing the way the emotional space between us can sometimes collapse into sudden moments of terrifying intimacy.

Pluggers, 4/14/16

The look of profound shame on those he-pluggers’ faces makes me think that the caption to this panel should actually be “plugger moms seem to be the only ones in the house who actually use toilet paper.”

Post Content

Spider-Man, 4/9/16

“Oh, thank goodness! Another, better superhero is awake! We’ll be free in no time!”

Beetle Bailey, 4/9/16

We all remember the famous Blondie unspeakable filth strip, but that was just accidentally about dog-fucking, or at least had plausible deniability. This … this is just straight up about dog-fucking, right? Or at least human-dog romance? There’s not really another interpretation, right?

Crankshaft, 4/9/16

Ha ha, it’s funny because Crankshaft’s body is failing, to the extent that even his favorite pastimes are physical agony to him now!