Post Content

Crankshaft, 12/6/21

Look, it’s not that I want to be a comics curmudgeon, all the time; sometimes it’s just important to me that comics do a better job of really zeroing in on the ideas they have instead of just running with the first iteration of a gag they come up with. So, like, with “Crankshaft is befuddled and angered by the modern world”: the thing where Ed’s favorite gardening catalog and then went out of business but got bought out by a blog or something is dumb and I don’t care for it. But Ed getting conned by a nootropics snake oil scam, which he presumably got wind of from a Facebook ad or an email forward, is definitely something I can get behind.

Blondie, 12/6/21

I think of Dagwood and Blondie as “old people,” to go along with the title of this post, because they were adults when I was a kid, but I guess they’re actually not old at all. They’re probably younger than I am now! Ha ha! Oh, life is so short and so fleeting! Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what sort of sex stuff these two are into, it turns out it’s somehow both more banal and more distasteful than you could’ve imagined.

Post Content

Crankshaft and Curtis, 12/1/21

I’m genuinely of the opinion that “gaslighting,” as a word, at one point conveyed a useful concept but has had its impact significantly reduced by ever-broadening use. But still! These two strips use a structure common to mild domestic comedies, where a child or old person is unfamiliar with or confused by a concept intuitively understood by an adult of a normal age. But in this case, the concepts are, respectively, “There’s a thing called a ‘smart pad’ that everyone has, maybe everyone is required to have” and “ghost flush,” and gosh darn it if I don’t feel as if I’m Ingrid Bergman being manipulated by Angela Lansbury and Charles Boyer! Am I an old person, like Lillian, flummoxed by the “smart pad” revolution and unable to remember where I put mine and increasingly suspicious that I don’t even own one? Am I a child, like Curtis, who has never heard of a “ghost flush” and would immediately assume that it was about a ghost, flushing? Am I full-on in the Berenstein Bears universe now? WHAT IS HAPPENING

Dick Tracy, 12/1/21

Oh wow, it looks like Dick’s decision to dabble in hoodies was actually just a way to help him to transition to full on disguises, huh. You know, I never pegged Dick as a supergenius or anything, but I have to respect the fact that he saw the flaw in in this criminal gang’s “Let’s wear identity-obscuring gimp suits at all times, even when we’re just hanging out with each other at the office” shtick before they did.

Post Content

Crock, 11/29/21

“Hmm,” I bet you’re thinking, “a four-digit number that turns out to be the price in dollars and cents of an entire barrel of wine sure is a forced way to do a ‘Ha ha, Maggot is cheap!’ joke.” Well, consider this: 1830 is actually the year the French began their conquest of the Maghreb. So perhaps this is actually a way for French Legionnaire Maggot to taunt his Algerian wife Grossie over her colonial servitude! Surely this is so grotesque a possibility that we can’t blame the waiters for desperately trying to spin some other possibility into existence.

Crankshaft, 11/29/21

Hey, remember a couple weeks ago when Lillian browbeat a local youth into helping her do a Zoom book panel and then was a real dick about it the whole time? Well, turns out that she tried to do a slideshow using an actual slide projector in the process, which I’m sure was a big disaster that she probably blamed the local youth for.

Gil Thorp, 11/29/21

Ah, yes, finally, the big mystery of “Is Chance Macy going to play college football and if so where” is about to get resolved, and frankly if none of the actual characters in this strip are going to get excited about it, I’m not sure why we should even try.