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Archive: Crankshaft

110

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth

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Dennis the Menace, 4/26/25

Obviously my “is this menacing or not” bit is done mostly in jest, but I genuinely think this is menacing behavior. Making unbroken, angry eye contact with his mother as he lets milk overflow the glass all over the table, while nonsensically blaming her and her glass-acquisition choices for the whole situation? Really unsettling stuff, I would be quietly calling a child psychologist in this scenario.

Shoe, 4/26/25

Normally I don’t have a lot of patience for “kids and their damn phones” jokes like these, especially given that the behavior in question is so omnipresent among people of all ages that there’s an industry term for it. But I do have to say that if Skyler isn’t going to be fully engaged during his TV-watching experience, he shouldn’t be making use of the living room’s only chair.

Crankshaft, 4/26/25

You might recall that Funky Winkerbean’s beloved (?) Mopey Pete ended up in a relationship with Crankshaft’s granddaughter, which meant he successfully escaped the collapse of the Funky Winkerbean dimension and has survived in its formerly ancillary Crankshaft zone, which has survived as its own space-time continuum in the aftermath. Anyway, we’ve finally learned what can briefly make him slightly less mopey: the prospect of interrupting his in-laws while they fool around in their car.

146

Monday is for troubling revelations

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/21/25

It’s Monday, y’all! Monday, the beginning of a new week in the soaps, with promises of exciting setups playing out over the next few days in increasingly intriguing and twisty ways, especially in this Rex Morgan plot about literal murder, and … wait, what’s that? The murderer has announced his intention to turn himself in and is apologizing to anyone his murderous ways might have inconvenienced? Hmm. Not really what I was hoping for. I guess we now have three to six thrilling days of everyone standing around awkwardly waiting for the cops to show up to look forward to.

Hi and Lois, 4/21/25

Ha ha, yes, that certainly is a pickle, you guys. It’s not fair, college wasn’t so expensive back when you embarked on the project of having a family with four children back in [does math] 2009? Can that really be right? Kids who are in high school today were born in 2009, a year when I and my contemporaries were already fully mature adults? Seems wrong. Seems very wrong indeed.

Crankshaft, 4/21/25

“Look at this ring … I’m married? To you, I guess? What the hell?”

119

Not taking questions on which “biz” I’m talking about

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/18/25

The chronology of this Rex Morgan storyline flashback has now looped back around to the point where the beat cop who’s been summoned to deal with this inconvenient corpse is like, “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice if I could successfully pin this on literally the first person I talk to, even if it is the guy who called it in to begin with,” and The Stalker Strangler: The Man Who Only Strangles Stalkers doesn’t like what he’s hearing. This was probably his first strangle, and he’s only now coming face-to-face with the dilemma of performing high-profile acts of righteous but legally unsanctioned vengeance: on the one hand, you don’t want to get caught, because you want to have more strangling opportunities, but on the other, you put all the work into strangling a stalker and then some other guy is going to get credit for it? Doesn’t seem fair, really.

Heathcliff, 4/18/25

I refer to our cats, who are both well into cat middle age, as “babies,” but that’s because they are not bipedal sapient comic strip cats but rather real-life cats who, like human babies, are tiny and cuddly and pretty stupid. The question of “is Heathcliff an adult” is complex, but the fact that he has a steady girlfriend and needs ED drugs in order to have sex with her is a good sign that he should be thought of as one, and thus today’s strip, in which his human companions have dressed him as a baby, taken him in an old-timey pram to the city dump and its vast open field piled high with undifferentiated brownish slurry, and declared that “it’s baby’s feeding time” while he eagerly licks his lips, is what we in the biz call “real sicko shit.”

Crankshaft, 4/18/25

Not much to say here about yet another Crankshaft word-mangling bit, though I do enjoy learning that Ed finds the daily grind of his existence disappointing. Mostly I want to point out the very purposeful way the waitress is striding away from the gang in panel two, probably because one of them said something really off-putting.