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Crankshaft, 3/26/18

Oh hey what’s up how are you feeling on a Monday morning are you emotionally prepared for Crankshaft’s daughter walking in on him surfing for cyberporn, right there at the desk in their home office??? Of course you aren’t, now here’s a closeup of what Ed Crankshaft’s face looks like when he finally finds some porn he likes:

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/26/18

Oh, I’m sorry, did you find that unpleasant? Do you want to purge the image from your mind? Here, here’s one to replace it: a beloved dog with all of its flesh peeled off its skull, exposing the glistening bone beneath, yet somehow still alive, his eyes goggling in unimaginable horror but his jaws, no longer attached to any muscles or tendons, unable to open, so he must remain silent for what presumably is the very short remainder of his life.

Six Chix, 3/26/18

Ha ha, after all that, today’s Six Chix, about a woman who keeps three children (possibly hers, possibly not) prisoner in her basement seems positively wholesome!

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Mary Worth, 3/19/18

Hmm, how does Mary Worth fare on the suddenly very relevant Soap Opera Comic Museum Verisimilitude Test? Well, significantly worse than The Phantom, which meticulously reconstructed a room at the Met for its protagonist to ruminate sourly in. It turns out that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is in the Uffizi just to the left of the same artist’s Pallas and the Centaur, and not, as today’s Mary Worth would have you believe, next to Some Trees Or Whatever.

Spider-Man, 3/19/18

Oh, man, remember the tense drama that arose in this strip when, for for reasons that were explained in only the sketchiest of ways, Bruce Banner could no longer turn into the Hulk? Well, good news: now he can turn into the Hulk again, with no attempt to explain it at all.

Crankshaft, 3/19/18

Don’t get your hopes up, people. Last year’s Funky Winkerbean strip where we finally had it confirmed that Crankshaft’s moldering husk is still technically alive in the ten-years-ahead section of the Funkyverse’s fractured chronology wasn’t just weird and distasteful; it also robbed us of even fleeting moments of anticipation that Crankshaft might actually die in his own title strip.

Dennis the Menace, 3/19/18

The vision of a child stuffing cookie after cookie into his mouth from a trash can infested with chittering vermin as he mutters “Still clean enough, still clean enough for me,” is … uh, menacing, yes, let’s say that.

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Crankshaft, 3/3/18

So I didn’t cover Crankshaft this week because it was boring and mawkish, but basically the deal was that there was a little girl who had a book on “layaway” at the bookstore Lillian runs in her attic without a permit or a business license or proper fire escapes or anything like that — layaway in the sense that the girl would come in every once in a while and pay a few pennies towards the ultimate purchase price of the book, and then be allowed to read a little of her book before leaving it behind. Crankshaft, still hanging around the store after his futile attempt to get a different child interested in literacy and/or baseball, saw this touching scene, and decided to pay off the rest of the girl’s debt so she could take her book home the next time she stopped by. But! In possibly the greatest denouement of a Crankshaft storyline since Crankshaft’s best friend lost the mayoral election because Crankshaft forgot to vote, the whole thing, which we assumed was an attempt by the comic strip Crankshaft to manipulate our emotions, was actually an attempt by this little girl to manipulate Crankshaft’s emotions! And it worked! And she and her friend are pulling the same scam at bookstores all over the state! I want this pair of elementary school book-grifters to get their own comic strip, stat!

Mark Trail, 3/3/18

I guess it’s just going to be an occasional thing in Mark Trail now where an ancillary character tells an absurd shaggy dog story whose action we occasionally catch glimpses of, like the time we saw a walrus give birth in an SUV last year. I’m in favor of this development, obviously, just like Mark is obviously in favor of drunk, disheveled, injured clowns lurching out of the graveyard and sending innocent little children fleeing into the woods in a state of utter terror.