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Archive: Crankshaft

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Unpleasant Friday

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Beetle Bailey, 9/26/25

Perverts turned on by crudely drawn cartoons everywhere were devastated this week when Beetle Bailey skipped its usual “Miss Buxley Wednesday” to do a strip about Sarge eating a pizza with a big pile of meatballs on it. But, good news: Miss Buxley is here on Friday! Bad news: it’s “casual Friday” which means she’s not wearing her sexy formal (?) little black dress. But good news: there’s some shoe stuff involving Private Blips! Bad news: the shoes are so crudely drawn that you can’t even tell what they’re supposed to look like, but you can tell that they’re definitely not very sexy. This whole week has been a real roller coaster ride for perverts, I tell you what.

Crankshaft, 9/26/25

More bad news for very specific and esoteric perverts who get off on Crankshaft’s malapropisms: today’s is no good! His dumb addled wordplay is supposed to be full of accidental polysemy, or should at least sound like it makes sense at first but upon examination doesn’t quite. This is just a wrong word that sounds like the right word! I refute this!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/26/25

Is that … the possum’s … rib cage? I’m with you, Snuffy; I don’t care for this either. I don’t care for it at all.

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Up up and away

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Mary Worth, 9/22/25

As promised/threatened, Mary has taken Olive to the Santa Royale Hot Air Balloon Festival! You know, hot air ballooning, the classic California Central Coast activity we all know and love. You’d think Stanley would be a trustworthy and experienced balloonivator (?), based on his old-timey turtleneck/suspenders combo, but he’s too set in his ways to handle Santa Royale’s increasingly erratic weather patterns, and is forgetting the old balloonivation adage: “Pink skies at night, balloonivator’s delight; pink skies at morning, balloonivator take warning.” I actually don’t know what time of day it’s supposed to be but feel free to swap those around to get the correct answer, which is that we are clearly about to see a tragic balloon accident that Olive’s powers, attuned as they are to New York City-specific dangers like air conditioning units falling from the sky, were simply unable to predict.

Dick Tracy, 9/22/25

Sorry I haven’t really covered the Dick Tracy plotline about the two lesbian scientists using their ray gun to kill various dubious men (cartoonish loan sharks, sexually predatory venture capitalists) who stand in their way, and probably some nice guys too. Still, today’s strip is important, in that we get to see some masterful and highly technical investigative work in action. “Hmm, this woman who seems to be at the center of our investigation … what if I looked her up … in the newspaper … on the computer?” Once Dick finds out that you can use the website “google dot com” to look up someone’s name on all publications simultaneously, it will truly be curtains for the villains of Neo-Chicago!

Crankshaft, 9/22/25

Crankshaft experiencing shame? No, I don’t accept or believe this. Crankshaft looking in the mirror and feeling the dull blade of despair? Yes, now we’re talking.

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Not even going to get into how sad having Buck as your best man would be

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Blondie, 9/20/25

My favorite part of this Blondie strip is “40 reps of what?” Like, she knows that this is some elaborate Dagwood bullshit and she’s trying to cut to the chase and find out exactly what kind of bullshit it is. Sadly, it’s dumber bullshit than she could’ve possibly guessed.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/20/25

We must of course never forget that the first time we met Mud Mountain Murphy, he was sharing a bill with Truck and pretended to shit his pants on stage just so he could get a better spot in the order. Subsequently he joined a scam cult that accidentally made him into a better person for real, and I think we can all agree that there would be no funnier time for his cult conditioning to abruptly wear off than right now, when he once again is on stage with Truck, and his ego might be a little bruised because he’s not the center of attention but he can fix that with one weird trick (the trick is pretending to shit his pants).

Crankshaft, 9/20/25

As America’s preeminent newspaper comics blogger, one of my important jobs is to point out when syndicated strip creative teams seemingly forget long-established lore. Take today’s Crankshaft, for instance, which features the title character experiencing shame, something he would simply never do!