Archive: Crankshaft

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/16/25

Poor Slick Smitty. He thought he had found a way to beat Slylock at his own game by not technically lying as part of his scheme. Even Slylock had to chuckle ruefully and acknowledge that the sign said “see the signing clam,” not “hear” it! Sadly, if you flip your screen upside down, you will learn that Slylock was able to “convince” Smitty to return his customers’ money, presumably by threatening him with the full force of the Forest Kingdom’s monopoly on violence, even though he violated no law, because that’s just how the new regime rolls when it comes to humans. The clam presumably remained enslaved.

Crankshaft, 11/16/25

Look, not to get close to finding Crankshaft relatable or anything, but a thing about getting older is that you’ll think “C’mon, this aspect of culture is relatively recent,” and then you look it up and it’s actually like 10 or 15 years old, and there are plenty of people who are full-on adults now who would never remember a time it didn’t exist. Anyway, I was about to go on a quest to figure out when the whole pickleball craze took off, got as far as some suggestions that the game (which has been around since the ’60s, and was invented by the last Republican to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Washington) became popular as an outdoor activity during the COVID-19 lockdowns, then dug into my archives and discovered that these teen twins were tweens or maybe even younger in a 2021 strip and decided, you know what? I’m gonna let this one go. I’ll allow it. Ha ha, to a young person, ping pong would seem like a pickleball variant, wouldn’t it?

Dick Tracy, 11/16/25

“Oh ho ho,” quite a few of you said, last week, “I’ll bet Rojo Ozob is some kind of villainous clown, what with ‘Ozob’ being an anagram for ‘Bozo.'” Well, you were right. There he is, plain as day: a villainous clown, realistic, tough-looking, and maybe even a little sexy. I hope you’re all happy. God have mercy on your souls.

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Crock, 11/9/25

Now, obviously part of the whole deal of Crock is that it takes what’s objectively a pretty grim situation — a remote outpost of an army engaged in a grinding colonial war that we know with the hindsight of history that they’re going to lose — and uses it as a setting for a mostly light-hearted and zany series of comical vignettes. Still, sometimes the grim seeps through more than others, and you gotta admit that “angry troops attempt to lynch their commanding officer, only for him to trick them into falling to their deaths in turn, leaving him alone to wander the desert” is one of those times.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/25

Now, you may wonder why Hagar, who seems well aware that his years as a notorious pillager have created a very lucrative brand, doesn’t simply cut out the middleman: instead of letting the Duke of York profit by association and then stealing said profits, why doesn’t Hagar simply charge visitors to his own village, go on a highly paid speaking tour, and publish Horrible, and Profitable: What Today’s Leaders Can Learn From My Years Of Terror Around The North Sea Littoral, which will be bought by CEOs at airport bookstores everywhere and handed over to their assistants to summarize? But Hagar is savvy enough to understand that his brand wouldn’t survive any such attempt to “go legit,” so any profit he’d gain from such a move would be fleeting. Plus he can’t read, so the book thing probably hasn’t even occurred to him.

Mary Worth, 11/9/25

No offense to David Attenborough, but I’ve never really cared for birds. Like, I guess I don’t dislike them, and of course they’re beautiful to look at, but I’ve always found them off-putting up close — they just seem clearly further away from us, evolution-wise, than cats and dogs, and looking into their eyes they always feel kind of alien to me. The fact that they’re actually quite intelligent just adds to my unease. So, no shade on the many fine people who are bird lovers out there, but I’m just saying that for me personally, if a parrot I had encountered outside had figured out where I lived and begun rapping on the windows demanding to be let in, I would not be quite as enthusiastic about it as Toby is here.

Hi and Lois, 11/9/25

I really love Hi’s quick three-panel transition from triumph to anxiety to crushing depression. Honestly, the final panel with the “punchline” is completely unnecessary and even detracts from things a little bit.

Crankshaft, 11/9/25

The name of this painting is of course a Crankshaft-level bit of awful wordplay, which is why it’s great that he looks so horrified. “Oh god, I talk like this, don’t I? Why haven’t they murdered me in my sleep?”

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Crankshaft, 10/27/25

“I mean, I get it! We’re all thinking it. We’re all thinking about the guy who dresses up in pizza boxes and how he’s mortal, and how he’s going to die someday, maybe right here in our restaurant. We’re all thinking about how we might have to pull these pizza boxes off his corpse and look at his face, for the first and last time. We all think about it all the time! But we don’t talk about it. You’ve got to learn not to talk about it.”

Hi and Lois, 10/27/25

“We also text each other about our husbands! Uh, all good stuff.”

Dustin, 10/27/25

“Anyway, long story short, I ruined my laptop.”