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Crankshaft, 10/9/25

Look, characters in comic strips are, ultimately, not real people, and while you can chuckle at their antics, you ultimately shouldn’t feel bad for them. Especially not Ed Crankshaft, who’s a real asshole. Still, I can’t look at panel three here, where he has an extremely bleak facial expression as he’s compelled, apparently against his will, to make wordplay with “wiener” in it that doesn’t make sense at all but vaguely sounds like he’s referring to masturbation, and not feel a frisson of sympathy. He doesn’t want this! Nobody wants this!

Blondie, 10/9/25

You all know that I depend on Blondie, whose characters are spiritually boomers even if they’re younger in age as drawn, to find out what old people are doing on the computer. It’s not gambling, I guess! They’re still doing that the old fashioned way, by handing over wads of cash to some guy in their office building. They’re leaving losing life-damaging sums of cash on absurd parlays via an app to the young people, and, you know what, good for them.

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Blondie, 9/21/25

Comics Time is a damn complicated thing. Dagwood and Blondie are both relatively young parents of teenagers, which caused some of you to push back on my contention last week that “Blondie in the year 2025 is your go-to for the pettiest boomer gripes about everyday suburban life imaginable,” given that, going by age alone, the Bumsteads are, like the Lockhorns, Millennials. The thing is, though, that their every word and deed proves that they are not Millennials, but rather exude powerful boomer energy and just happen to be drawn as if they’re 40. If you need more evidence of that, take today’s strip, in which, based on the way Dagwood is holding his phone, I assume he has its speaker set at maximum volume and he’s forcing all these other people at the airport to listen to the conversation he’s having with his boss about yet another nephew who’s stealing his whole bit.

Crock, 9/21/25

Imagine a crazed terrorist bomber running straight for you and yelling “It’s kibosh time!” This may be the first time I’ve ever laughed at something in Crock that I’m reasonably sure is supposed to be funny. It’s not the punchline, of course, but baby steps I guess.

Dennis the Menace, 9/21/25

“Working from home? That sure would be a hassle if your kid was notorious menace Dennis Mitchell. You’d probably prefer not to do it.” –The Dennis the Menace creative team a full five and a half years after the COVID lockdowns led to an unprecedented explosion in remote work, apparently

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Blondie, 9/20/25

My favorite part of this Blondie strip is “40 reps of what?” Like, she knows that this is some elaborate Dagwood bullshit and she’s trying to cut to the chase and find out exactly what kind of bullshit it is. Sadly, it’s dumber bullshit than she could’ve possibly guessed.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/20/25

We must of course never forget that the first time we met Mud Mountain Murphy, he was sharing a bill with Truck and pretended to shit his pants on stage just so he could get a better spot in the order. Subsequently he joined a scam cult that accidentally made him into a better person for real, and I think we can all agree that there would be no funnier time for his cult conditioning to abruptly wear off than right now, when he once again is on stage with Truck, and his ego might be a little bruised because he’s not the center of attention but he can fix that with one weird trick (the trick is pretending to shit his pants).

Crankshaft, 9/20/25

As America’s preeminent newspaper comics blogger, one of my important jobs is to point out when syndicated strip creative teams seemingly forget long-established lore. Take today’s Crankshaft, for instance, which features the title character experiencing shame, something he would simply never do!