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Crankshaft, 6/9/21

Congratulations to Crankshaft for delivering a strip whose meaning isn’t immediately obvious, but in a way that makes it feel like maybe there’s going to be some character development in the next few days rather than just “oh no, the wordplay is too opaque, we need to ratchet it back by two or three notches.” Anyway, who wants to guess what exactly the ‘Shaft is going on about here? Did he watch the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic and how it caused so many younger people to put their dreams for the future on hold, and it made him realize that he had done that for himself long ago, without even realizing it? Or did he just get bored one night and watched a bad basic cable documentary about REM sleep or something and thought “Huh, I never remember my dreams. Does that mean my brain doesn’t work right? Is that COVID-related? Can I sue someone over this?”

Dustin and Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/9/21

Because human beings are capable of abstract thought, we’ve managed to turn the genetic impulse to look for mates who are physically strong and instead map that onto more abstract signifiers, like the ability to use physical strength for useful purposes, or the acquisition of stored labor value in the form of money. That’s what you’d think based on these strips, anyway, though keep in mind that the message is coming from comics artists, who generally don’t have any of the above qualities to recommend them.

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Mark Trail, 6/7/21

Mark is off battling influencers, and Cherry is about to do battle with an HOA over native plants, so where does that leave Rusty? Well, Rusty is about to have a sleepover pizza party with Oscar winner Robert Shaw! What do you think they’re going to talk about? Jaws or The Sting would be the obvious choice, but you never know: Rusty might want to hear stories about his time in the ’50s doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He’s not a baby, after all!

Mary Worth, 6/7/21

Oh, dear, it looks like we’re getting to that time in a great Mary Worth storyline where I just post every strip! Anyway, today Ashlee asks Drew if he’s bummed about killing someone on the operating table but it turns out he’s just sad about his fancy watch, which she stole, and I challenge anyone working in comedy today to come up with something funnier than this. You can’t, it’s the peak of humor and we’ll be talking about this day for years to come. (Drew did kill someone on the operating table, of course, but he stopped feeling anything about that sort of thing years ago.)

Marvin, 6/7/21

Speaking of people feeling things, Marvin’s grandfather’s stunned facial expression in the final panel here is wholly appropriate. “Gee,” he’s thinking, “I thought we were best friends, but I never guessed how bleak and loveless his marriage was! I suppose you truly never can know another person.”

Crankshaft, 6/7/21

Wow, pretty rude of Crankshaft and his girlfriend to be going on and on about how great drive-in theaters are just days after his own grandson’s movie theater closed due to lack of customers. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign of respect that Crankshaft never went and had sex and/or made terrible puns in Max’s place of business.

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Baby Blues, 6/5/21

Imagine that you were on the verge of experiencing some marital intimacy with your husband, when suddenly you realized your cheek was resting on his huge, fleshy proboscis, which is longer as his arm and twice as thick. Truly harrowing. You too would find whatever way you could to short-circuit the romantic moment as quickly as possible.

Crankshaft, 6/5/21

Were you worried that Max and Hannah (I accidentally called her Mindy the other day, apologies, Mindy is his sister with straight blonde hair and Hannah is his wife with wavy blonde hair, we regret the error) weren’t going to stay horny for one another now that their business has gone under and their dream has been crushed and they’ve been forced to move in with Max’s parents and his terrible grandfather, Crankshaft? Well, don’t worry. They’re still horny for each other! Funkyverse characters do not get less horny when confronted with despair, because otherwise their world would’ve been depopulated generations ago. If anything, the gloom just eggs them on!

Mary Worth, 6/5/21

A fun thing about Mary Worth is that it wants to depict Ashlee’s upbringing as unspeakably depraved and the reason why she’s a broken, amoral grifter, but it’s a newspaper comic strip and can’t get too dark so instead her dad just got arrested for unspecified reasons and her mom had a job where she had to bare her midriff to serve chicken wings to bronies. Seems perfectly wholesome, honestly!