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Crankshaft, 7/24/26

Boy, these multiverse stories sure get complicated! Like when Barry Allen Flash teamed up in the past with Jay Garrick Flash to battle The Thinker, The Fiddler, and Shade so Barry could persuade real-world writer Gardner Fox to write a comic book about their adventures! Or when Spider-Men Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire team up to defeat Electro, Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man: No Way Home to keep the hordes of people who know Spidey’s not-so-secret identity from overrunning our world. Or here, where transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas” teams up with opaque actual author self-insert character Tom Batiuk, presumably to Fight Crime. I don’t know, but if I were Lillian Mackenzie, Harry Dinkle, or Ed Crankshaft, I’d watch my back—these guys are cartoonists—they have erasers and they know how to use them.

Bizarro, 7/24/26

Whoops, looks like the stress finally got to our guy. Forget what I said yesterday.

Crock, 7/24/26

“At last! Our comic strip is saved!”

Phantom, 7/24/26

Chatu “The Python” has surrendered and put on the AI-enabled “Tokoloshe” control anklet, and I’m frankly a little disappointed in him. I mean, this is the guy who tried to Ebolify the whole world through an infected fruit-bat scheme, and blew up half of downtown Mawitaan just to get back at his nemesis the Phantom. He may or may not be a coward, but there is no way he’s gonna let some rich upstart out-evil him! All those years in that cage must’ve softened him up, or maybe he went mad from that interminable drum solo. Either way, get ready for an epic supervillain match-up and battle—now enhanced with AI!

No Comments of the Week on my watch; last week’s victor Victor Von gets a twofer.

—Uncle Lumpy

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Beetle Bailey, 7/11/26

The thing about the daily comics is that they’re still drawn as if the black and white version is canonical, even though probably most people who read them now see them online, in color. That means that if you want your imagined audience to know that Sgt. Luggs really dolled herself up for this date only to be humiliated by Sarge’s combo gluttony/cheapness, you have to draw her lipstick in black, even though you’ll give online readers the impression that she’s “gone goth” in an attempt to distract Sarge from his pathological need for food (it didn’t work).

Hi and Lois, 7/11/26

Genuinely love that Lois just had the Flagston home inkjet printer spit “NO JUNK FOOD” in 490 point font out and handed it to Hi on his way to the supermarket. I assume he doesn’t even have a list beyond this. “Just follow your instincts and then buy the opposite,” she said.

Crankshaft, 7/11/26

Real talk: I have zero idea who these people are supposed to be. Is it Mopey Pete and Mindy, and he’s put on a lot of weight in the last year and she’s caught whatever he has that causes the visible eyebags? Or are they day players, hired because everyone in the regular cast steadfastly refused to deliver the line “I’m glad we went with Harry to that abandoned amusement park today”?

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Mary Worth, 7/5/26

For years, one action item has popped up repeatedly in Charterstone condo association meetings: replacing the doors on the apartments, because they’re cheap and thin and easy to hear through. “Anyone walking by can snoop on your conversations!” residents complain. “Well, we’re going to have the improvements subcommittee look into that,” Association President Mary Worth says. “We’ll need to research new doors that can offer more privacy, but won’t cost too much — after all, a big expenditure like this could cause your association fees to skyrocket! And then we need to find a reliable contractor, of course.” In reality, there is no “improvements subcommittee,” and Mary has no intention of taking away one of her prime tools for assessing when her meddling intervention might be required. And now poor Tommy is paying the price, hearing something that nobody should ever have to hear: Wilbur Weston, of all people, shit-talking him.

Crankshaft, 7/5/26

I referred to the Starlight Ballroom (in Chippewa Lake Park) as “bombed out” the other day, and was mostly joking, but, uh. This panel pretty much makes it look like a bit of loredumping background detail in a post-apocalyptic movie, a monument to a dead but once-great civilization (ours) tagged with some of the most depressing lyrics penned by the Kinks (people living in post-apocalyptic ages love doing pointed, arch graffiti that caters to Boomer cultural knowledge, this is just science).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/5/26

Boy, wow, Rex and June both seem real intense about the twins’ extremely low-level “scam,” huh? Almost like they’ve been fleeced by more ambitious scams before and are very bitter about it. Well, have they considered that if they provided goods and services worthy of repeat business, they wouldn’t have been grifted in the first place? The twins are happy to hand over hard-earned (via scamming) money to Jordan in exchange for his delicious food, so maybe the Morgans just aren’t operating at a don’t-get-scammed level.

Dick Tracy, 7/5/26

So the mysterious hacker gang members are named “Wallhack,” “Lootbox,” and “Widescreen”? Come on. Come on. I’m a 51-year-old man and the last video game I was fixated on was Civilization II and even I can immediately tell how incredibly cringe this all is. And Widescreen should have a big wide flat head, to match his name. Come on! This is Dick Tracy, have some self-respect.