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Crankshaft, 7/9/13

One of Crankshaft’s go-to humor-producing techniques is “olds say the darndest things,” which I’m assuming is what this is supposed to be. Or maybe it’s “Grandma Rose is heartless and cruel and always will be,” another classic Crankshaft comedy gold mine. Whichever it is, though, today I approve of it, because it produced “Your father puts ketchup on so many inappropriate things,” which is surely the greatest sentence that will appear in the comics all week, and perhaps all month. It’s positively poetic. In fact, I urge all of you poetically inclined folk to make it the first line in a poem of your own design in the comments. I expect Pulitzer Prize-winning greatness.

Spider-Man, 7/9/13

Holy crap, you guys, today’s Spider-Man pulls back the curtain on a White House scandal worse than the IRS + Benghazi + NSA spying times one billion! First we learned that the President answers each and every phone call from befuddled TSA agents nationwide, which surely isn’t an efficient use of his time. And he uses this bureaucratic power that he’s arrogated to himself to allow whatever liberal masked hoodlums he holds in high esteem to board our nation’s otherwise well-secured aircraft. But most damning is the fact that hanging in the Oval Office is a ghastly, miscolored parody of our national flag. That flag is red, white, and black — the same colors of the banner of Nazi Germany. WHEN WILL YOU WAKE UP, SHEEPLE?????

Apartment 3-G, 7/9/13

Well, I guess I was wrong about us never seeing any of the fancy clothes that Lu Ann is being forced to try on by the creepy governor’s creepy svengali! Here she is wearing a fancy new gown. That’s what a fancy new gown looks like in real life, right? With a lacy collar? And a belt? And it’s all the color of Pepto-Bismol, including the collar and the belt? And it covers every inch of flesh below the collarbone and (I assume) above the wrists? This is high fashion?

Gasoline Alley, 7/9/13

Oh, goody, idiot man-child Slim, having been abandoned by his wife and obviously being unable to fend for himself in any way, is descending into catatonic depression. He’s already had one brush with insanity that he bounced back from, but we can only hope that his current downward spiral is permanent.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/7/13

There are many mysteries about the process by which our own, human-dominated world became the Slylock-era planet ruled by animals of various degrees of sentience, living it up in the ruins of our civilization, with a few scattered remnants of Homo sapiens surviving here and there. One of the more minor ones is this: why is Count Weirdly, supposed human, green? Ironically, all we learn today is what isn’t the cause of his odd coloring: Weirdly’s grandiose claims of expert genetic engineering turning him into a human-plant hybrid turn out to be nonsense. But the very fact that the claims were made just raises more questions. For instance, would having some non-human DNA boost Weirdly’s status in this post-human hellscape? And, given that we know that genetic experimentation is forbidden by law, how shocking or embarrassing is the real reason, to prompt Weirdly to make these dangerous claims? Is it just body paint? Did he just start painting himself green in a moment of madness, and now he feels like he needs some higher-tech explanation, to protect his reputation? You shouldn’t be embarrassed by body paint, Count. Your antagonist is a fox wearing pants.

Crankshaft, 7/7/13

In today’s Crankshaft, one of the main characters experiences a brief, fleeting moment of happiness before being subsumed by a crushing wave of anxiety. I guess we’re meant to feel good about this, though, because in panel two Pam looks unbearably smug, presumably in a narrative bid to make the audience clamor for retribution for her hubris.

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Crankshaft, 6/27/13

When? America demands to know. When will we get Crankshaft making dickish puns about New York City, like we were promised? Well, it seems that after a week of Crankshaft being an asshole at the airport, we now have to deal with a week of Crankshaft being an asshole on a plane. Today’s strip actually nicely encapsulates what I frequently find off about the tone of this strip: this is a fairly zany gag, and an impossible one at that — you can’t actually open one of those doors in mid-flight by accident. It should be played pretty broadly. And yet everything about the art is actually pretty serious. Like, instead of just looking bored or wry or something, the flight attendant is actually running towards the back of the plane in panic. And Crankshaft’s face! That’s the face of a man who knows with absolute certainty that he’s about to die horribly, due to his own poor decisions. It’s the face I’ve wanted to see on Crankshaft for years, so I guess I’m not sure why I’m complaining so much about this.

Judge Parker, 6/27/13

Speaking of things that have been dragging on for two weeks against all expectations, Judge Parker Senior is still really mad about a bad review of his trashy mystery novel! The war criminal who dared disparage it is a professor at Princeton and Yale, which (a) isn’t a thing that happens, generally, but (b) should provide the Parker-Spencer-Drivers, who are fantastically wealthy and always get everything they want without putting forth any effort whatsoever, with a great opportunity to rail against “elitists.”

The Phantom, 6/27/13

UGH, the Phantom thinks World War I was still happening in 1919. Can we trust the veracity of any of the information from the Chronicle Chamber now?