Archive: Crankshaft

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Crankshaft, 11/25/20

Aw, look at Pam’s little smile in panel three! She’s like, “Normally Dad’s malapropisms make me cringe, but that one … that one’s OK.” She’s wrong, it’s not, it sucks just as bad as all the rest of them. She’s trapped in a horrible wordplay version of Stockholm Syndrome.

Mary Worth, 11/25/20

Tommy, no! Your descent into opioid-fueled madness began when you threw out your back lifting some heavy boxes! You’ve made so much progress — don’t fall back into addiction by eagerly volunteering to tempt fate just to impress Brandy or (even more pathetic) your boss!

Daddy Daze, 11/25/20

Today’s Daddy Daze dispenses with the pretense that the Daddy Daze baby is a “ba”-based interlocutor and shows us its reality for what it is: the Daddy Daze daddy just blathering baroque nonsense to nobody.

Slylock Fox, 11/25/20

I know I say a lot of Slylock Fox scenes have powerful “IT BEGINS” energy vis à vis the moment when the animals rise up to destroy human civilization and create the animal-ruled world where Slylock plies his trade as a detective, but you have to admit that the “IT BEGINS” energy in today’s strip is in fact extremely strong. Those birds are going peck that kid to death, then they’re going to eat the whole bag of birdseed, then they’re going to figure out how to run the birdseed factory, after pecking to death everyone who works there.

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Mary Worth, 10/20/20

Folks, we got a real situation on our hands here, by which I mean we’re in that rare, golden period where every day’s Mary Worth is going to demand constant attention and analysis. Here’s Tommy’s old dirtbag buddy Vin, who, say what you will about a gap-toothed back-alley crackhead, but he immediately recognizes an old friend in a low emotional state and offers to share a hit or two of hard-earned crack cocaine, despite his clearly stated plan to consume the entire pipeful himself. Anyway, let’s give a big shoutout to new-ish Mary Worth artist June Brigman, who has successfully rendered a recognizable crack pipe, in contrast with Apartment 3-G, which featured characters smoking “rock” or maybe “dope” out of some sort of tube, or old-school Mary Worth, in which Tommy the dealer had a big brown bag o’ meth.

Shoe, 10/20/20

Wouldn’t have picked Shoe as the newspaper comic strip that was going to perfectly capture the mood of America in 2020, but, well, congrats to Shoe for perfectly capturing the mood of American in 2020!

Crankshaft, 10/20/20

Does … does Crankshaft think that “transporter” is trademarked but “Star Trek” isn’t

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Crankshaft, 9/7/20

HOT TV RECOMMENDATION FROM JOSH: I have been enjoying Trapped, an Icelandic mystery show set in a remote, isolated small town. It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime and watching it in Icelandic with English subtitles triggered a Remembrance of Things Past-style flashback to one of the many books I had as a kid in a genre that basically could be described as “Do You Have An Extremely Dorky Kid And Wikipedia Hasn’t Been Invented Yet? Here’s A Phonebook Sized Book Full Of Interesting Facts Without Really Anything By Way Of Organization,” which had a section on the Icelandic language, which is basically still Old Norse. It stayed archaic for so long because Iceland was historically so isolated, but as the modern age dawned, the country made a conscious effort to keep neologisms out of the language, using native words for new concepts instead; the example given in the book is the word for telephone, sími, which is based on a Norse word for thread, referring to telephone wires. This is funny to me in Trapped because people talk about phones all the time, and of course exclusively use the word to refer to cell phones, which use no thread at all! Anyway, this is just to say that I was enjoying some fun etymology stuff about words we use to talk about phones and how they work, and how they embed older, outdated notions into our current speech, until fuckin’ Crankshaft came by and ruined it with a dumb joke about “poking,” ugh.

Dick Tracy, 9/7/20

I am absolutely cackling at the image of Professor Stokes or whoever using this prototype vampire chassis and biting into some guy’s neck and starting to pump with its inadequate motor and the victim just being like “Hey, uh, what’s going on? That … that tickles, knock it off, guy. If you’re trying to drain my blood, you’re not doing it very well!”