Archive: Crankshaft

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 4/13/26

Look, in general I’ve been in favor of Marty Moon’s sartorial evolution, but I think that maybe, with this white suit and flowered shirt with matching pocket square, he’s gone a bit too far in the dapper direction. It is, frankly, not really his vibe, and when the country club on whose grounds he is 100% not authorized to be present gets wind of him and the makeshift studio he’s broadcasting from, he’ll have to flee on short notice, and in the very likely scenario where he trips and falls in the process, the grass stains will never come out of that jacket.

The Lockhorns, 4/13/26

I stand by my earlier complaint about strips where we start in mid conversation but one character is just repeating back to the other one material covered previously in the conversation, but honestly, given that The Lockhorns is a one-panel strip about a married couple locked in a continuous argument that will never end until the universe achieves its final heat death, it’s kind of impressive that they don’t do it very often.

Crankshaft, 4/13/26

Holy cow, doing a Santa-related pun … in April? Christmas was months ago, do people even remember what Santa’s whole deal is? Better put in a panel depicting him doing his trademark laugh, just in case.

Alice, 4/13/26

Oh, man, social media … you guys heard about this? You heard about how addictive it can be? Alice has just gotten into social media, and it is not going well.

Post Content

Rhymes With Orange, 4/9/26

I assume the intended joke here is that George forgot his glasses somewhere else — at his home, maybe, or maybe just in the other room — but I can’t stop imagining a truly nightmarish scenario where when you die you become a spirit cursed to haunt the world of the living but not be perceived by them, and if you had bad vision when you were alive you still do, but you can’t wear glasses because you’re a spectre without physical form and/or you don’t have a nose. Anyway, that ghost is gonna fuck that cabinet, right? That’s definitely what’s on the menu here?

Archie, 4/9/26

Jughead, sad that his conversations with his best friend aren’t as sparkling as they once were, has hired this high-tech young woman to, in his words, “Cyrano” for him, monitoring Archie’s mood on a tablet and relaying instructions into a hidden bluetooth earpiece. Unfortunately, it turns out she may have overrepresented her talents.

Hi and Lois, 4/9/26

Don’t have much to say about the Flagston twins’ specific conundrum here but I do like the expression on the bus driver’s face. That’s someone who’s extremely sick of these kids’ shit. Not sure if it’s about Dot and Ditto specifically or just children in general, but either way I’m enjoying it.

Crankshaft and Shoe, 4/9/26

Hey, uh. Um. How to put this delicately. I think if you’re involved in the process of churning out a legacy comic strip, maybe you … shouldn’t … do jokes that are like, “You know what’s better than a hack writer? AI! Ha ha!” Just, like … don’t give people ideas, you know? About your job?

Post Content

Family Circus, 4/1/26

Happy April Fool’s day, everybody! As I’ve noted over the last few years, the “trick” the passage of time has played on me is my growing appreciation of the Family Circus’s whole deal, which is that the kids are annoying on purpose, like that’s the whole joke. Look at Ma Keane’s face here! She wants to die, and maybe also to kill!

Crankshaft, 4/1/26

If I’m remembering right, for a long time Lena was a never-seen off-panel character that the other characters at the bus depot would constantly complain about, and then we started seeing her in person and she was always depicted as a perfectly nice woman that everyone is unfathomably cruel to for no reason. Look, in this one she briefly believes they’re being nice to her! That’s the “prank”!

Pluggers, 4/1/26

At least that’s intelligible as a prank, though. Is the prank here … on us? Like we’re supposed to believe that Mr. Whipple sent a letter to Pluggers HQ from beyond the grave encouraging them to do a panel where his successor as Charmin spokesbeing comes into a plugger’s home and takes a huge dump? “Look, pal, you’re in the wrong house,” says the bear-man, in what is becoming less and less what anyone would consider a “prank.” “I don’t get all that excited about toilet paper. I appreciate its utility in keeping my butthole and buttcrack clean of feces, but I’m not really invested in it emotionally.”

Intelligent Life, 4/1/26

Not even going to engage with the prank content on this one. These guys know what movie tickets cost! They see movies in the theater all the time, and talk about box office numbers while they’re there! Instead, I just want to point out that in panel one Skip has responded to “Wow … it’s April Fool’s Day,” with “Woot!”, which is absurd. Nobody’s excited about April Fool’s Day. This is just another example of these losers responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval. It says a lot about society, and it sickens me.