Archive: Crankshaft

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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?”

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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.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/5/25

Wow, I had always assumed that Hootin’ Holler was cut off from outside civilization to the extent that it’s blessedly not affected by unrealistic youth and beauty culture, but here I see that not only am I wrong but even the local chthonic witch is feeling insecure about herself. Fortunately, she’s invented a potion that can magically tailor clothes, and if she can refine it to be more easily controlled she’ll be able to afford all the more conventional beauty enhancement treatments she wants.

Dennis the Menace, 4/5/25

Usually it’s Dennis who interprets a normal turn of phrase in a way that’s wrong and kind of insulting, and I like his facial expression here in panel two, in which game seems to be recognizing game.

Crankshaft, 4/5/25

I’ve only started revisiting Crankshaft again in the past couple months but I’m sincerely glad to have gotten here in time to see Pam discover that her husband has been draining the family bank accounts to buy bootleg Huckleberry Hound DVDs. Do you think they’re going to divorce over this? I sure hope so!

Luann, 4/5/25

“Oh,” you’ve probably been thinking, “I guess Brad and Toni are doing a whole week at the amusement park, but at least it probably won’t end with them fucking in their car in the parking lot.” You fool. You idiot. You naive simpleton.