Archive: Crankshaft

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Beetle Bailey, 2/4/18

Wow, this is a … very specific brand shout-out when it comes to Otto’s wine pairing? Really makes you wonder why he isn’t identifying the manufacturer of all those snack foods he found in his bed. Lay’s® classic potato chips! Snyder’s of Hanover® pretzels! Potato Stix, from Utz®! Really monetize this business! Anyway, if the point was to build brand awareness of Grand Estates Merlot from Columbia Crest Winery, mission accomplished, but if this was supposed to be a call to action, I regret to inform you that the Columbia Crest website currently appears to be inoperative.

Crankshaft, 2/4/18

Wow, considering Elvis probably died in part from all the prescription pills he was taking, that’s a spectacularly grim reference in the second panel! Crankshaft would be able to put himself out of his own endless misery, if he weren’t such a butterfingers.

Mary Worth, 2/4/18

Finally, someone has come up with something that could tempt Mary to make her deal with the devil Ted Miller and start hawking her muffins nationwide: the ability to afford a pied-à-terre in New York so she can live near handsome Broadway legend Ken Kensington, with whom Mary experienced a near-romance in a classic 2014 plotline. She could have Ken as her lover on the east coast and Dr. Jeff on the Pacific! You really can have it all … when you’re rich!

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Crankshaft, 12/6/17

Every year Crankshaft takes a job as a mall Santa, and every year he’s a sullen dick about it, like he always is about everything. This year the mall closed down, though, and Crankshaft felt bad about that, presumably because he missed being cruel to children. Now it appears Lillian has hired him to play Santa in the unlicensed book store she runs over her garage, which as far as I know has never had a customer, so I guess she just wants him to sit there scowling in the suit all day while she putters around, which I dearly hope is not a sex thing.

Mary Worth, 12/6/17

“I just made a very expensive purchase and our entertainment budget is a bit crimped at the moment. On a completely unrelated note, what would you say the resale value of, just to pick something at random, all of our kitchen appliances would be?”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/6/17

I bet when you give this tour in Memphis, when you get to this part you have old white people loudly finishing your sentences for you and trying to change the subject a lot.

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Six Chix, 12/3/17

Congratulations, Six Chix: You’ve created a snail-inhabited Christmas cartoon where I have literally no idea what’s going on! Like, the fact that there are anthropomorphized snails in the foreground implies that we’re in a parallel universe where snails are the intelligent, dominant species and have built a civilization that rivals our own. And yet outside they see not a snail-Santa driving his sleigh, but rather a snail in chains apparently used as a beast of burden. Then there’s the combination of obvious alarm about Christmas’s lateness on the part of our snail-speaker — whatever snails’ other evolutionary advantages in this reality, they’re clearly still comically slow — and “not again!” implying that this isn’t the first time the delivery of presents around the globe was entrusted to an individual wildly unsuited to getting the job done in a timely fashion.

Finally, there’s the real question underlying all of this: if there’s such a thing as snail Christmas, that means there was definitely such a person as Snail Christ.But how do you crucify something that doesn’t have any arms?

Crankshaft, 12/3/17

“The gold was just lying around here. Kind of like the dismembered body parts of all the people I ‘murder[ed] in the bookstore.’ Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”