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Crankshaft, 8/1/25

OK, fine, I guess if I’m doing Crankshaft two days in a row, I will explain why Ed and Jeff were in an airport yesterday: It’s because Pam accidentally spilled bleach on Jeff’s inexplicably beloved Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt, and so to make it up to her husband she bought tickets to an actual Blue Bombers game for him and Ed, and now they’re flying from Cleveland to Winnipeg (a route many in the aviation industry call “the saddest city pair in North America”) to see some red-hot Canadian Football League action. Anyway, today I’m mostly mad about Jeff saying “No pun intended,” for two somewhat contradictory reasons. On the one hand, “passed the quarterback test” is barely wordplay, like homeopathic levels of wordplay, like “pass” and “quarterback” are in the same sentence but they’re not really relating to each other in any kind of grammatical sense applicable to football; and yet, on the other hand, because this is Ed Crankshaft we’re talking about, a pun was absolutely intended. The man hasn’t gone more than three sentences without intending a pun in his entire life.

Beetle Bailey, 8/1/25

Say what you will about Beetle Bailey, but I always respect just how grim the strips about the Halftracks’ failing marriage are. Like, look at the General’s face here. A lesser strip would have him be cheerfully blotto, but he actually looks genuinely distressed, like he spent the entire trip home perseverating about the fact that he’s returning much later than he promised and he knows he’s really going to hurt his wife’s feelings. And for what? Booze? He doesn’t even really enjoy it anymore! He’s got a real problem!

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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/25

There’s a lot of Beetle Baileys where the joke is that Sarge has beaten Beetle into an undifferentiated mass of broken limbs and shattered organs for some minor infraction, but for my money this one is much, much funnier. Just imagine Sarge going red-faced with rage over this extremely sub-par bit of wordplay, grabbing Beetle by the shoulders and huffing and puffing a bit as the two of them grapple, and then stalking off, leaving Beetle with his uniform hiked partway over his head as we see here, unhurt but also humiliated. All the while Killer stood absolutely still, watching the whole thing go down and hoping he isn’t next.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/29/25

I took Snuffy’s whispering in the first panel as a sign that he wanted to go easy on Horace, either because he genuinely didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings or because he knew that any perceived slight could lead to violence in Hootin’ Holler’s clan-based culture. But it turns out he’s willing to take some risks! Congrats to Snuffy Smith for producing a strip that actually subverted my expectations, for the first time [checks notes] ever???

Curtis, 7/29/25

Curtis has gotten a summer job helping take care of a semi-comatose old woman who turns out to have telekinetic powers, which I think is a pretty normal sentence to write, and the plot hasn’t risen to the interest level necessary for me to blog about it, until today. Static snow is, of course, an artifact of the age before the transition to digital TV in 2009, which now gives it a sort of old-timey spookiness, and it has always been foreign to smartphones and similar devices. A video taken on your phone that’s just been deleted is a mild mystery; a video taken on your phone that’s been replaced with static snow is deeply unsettling, and Curtis, as an aficionado of the horror genre, should hopefully recognize the truly terrifying situation in which he’s found himself now.

Heathcliff, 7/29/25

One thing I love about Heathcliff doing elaborate bits in Heathcliff is how everyone else seems to view them mostly with gentle bemusement, even the very elaborate ones. I’m not sure if Heathcliff built this stadium, a project that would’ve cost tens of millions of dollars and taken years, or if he merely somehow managed to gain control of an existing facility by agreement or force, but either way there would’ve been a lot of steps leading up to this moment, which presumably Grandpa and Iggy watched with their hands in their pockets, mostly in silence, before finally remarking, “Ah, yeah, this looks like an opening ceremony of some sort.”

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Beetle Bailey, 7/25/25

This strip is a pretty good demonstration of the fact that comic characters even within the same universe each have their own distinctive design, and, unlike actual humans, the wide variations in their head shapes means that you can’t just slap glasses on someone who doesn’t usually wear them and expect it to look not insane. But no matter how uncanny Sarge looks in this final panel, it’s all worth it to deliver this joke about wearing eyeglasses in order to disguise the fact that you’re crying, the normal and relatable thing that we all do and that would definitely work.

Blondie, 7/25/25

Hate to be churlish, but today’s Blondie doesn’t include what we in the biz call a “joke,” and while I’ve given the ennuimeisters at Hi and Lois permission to explore this discursive mode, I do not grant the same dispensation to Blondie. The last panel here should definitely have included a thought balloon in which Dagwood imagines himself winning a sandwich-eating competition in front of thousands of cheering fans, if only to distract us from his increasingly inexplicable relationship with Elmo.

Wizard of Id, 7/25/25

Oh, hey, the Wizard is still on his kick of forcing animals of different species to mate with each other, I guess. “But Josh,” you’re probably saying, “this is some kind of fantasy setting, and maybe that sort of thing is normal there.” Wrong: this random knight (?) is clearly horribly burned in the final panel, but his moral disgust at the unnatural act that produced this fire-breathing dog is so profound that he says “ew” instead of “ow.”

Pardon My Planet, 7/25/25

This lady straight-up murdered her husband! And she’s bragging about it! Right here at his funeral!