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Archive: Crankshaft

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The transition to pluggerdom is so subtle that you barely notice it

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Pluggers, 5/25/17

Here’s a true story: I turned 40 just before I moved to LA, and for like a solid year, I thought, “Wow, this place is so hipper-than-thou that they have low mood lighting in all the restaurants! I can’t read any of these menus!” It wasn’t until the day I took my wedding ring off to read the inscription, only to find it had somehow become a series of illegible blurs, that it occurred to me that maybe it was my eyes that were the problem.

Now I wear bifocals and getting them honestly made me feel like I had been faith-healed, and so when I stumbled on this panel, in which a dog-man is reading his anniversary date off the inside of his wedding ring without any vision correction help, I had to ask myself: who’s the real plugger here? This dog-man, whose eyesight is as keen (and presumably whose sense of smell is as powerful and coat is as shiny) as it was the day he was married? Or me, who looks at his wedding ring inscription through glasses for sentimental reasons only, since my anniversary (and a one-week-in-advance alert) has long ago been synced to all my devices’ calendars via iCloud?

UPDATE: haha, he IS wearing glasses, darkness is closing in all around me, welp

Crankshaft, 5/25/17

Haha, yesterday Lillian proposed to these girls that they do some “research” and I almost made a joke that they were off to do some murders or something! Anyway, obviously this is just classic harmless old lady stuff where you do suspicious things and offer no explanation because how could anyone suspect you of being a bad person, and I’m very much looking forward to Lilian’s trial for attempted murder and child endangerment.

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One-panel Thursday

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Crankshaft, 5/18/17

I admit despite myself that I’m weirdly fascinated by this Bubba Watson cameo in Crankshaft this week, which has mostly served as a variation on one of the strip’s running “jokes,” which is that the guys are cruel to and dismissive of Lena, who has never been show to be anything but a nice person. Anyway, one thing that’s really jumped out at me is that Watson’s caricature hasn’t had any actual dialogue, as if he’s in this strip because he actually lost a real-life bet, but has negotiated some concessions to retain a smidgen of dignity.

The Lockhorns, 5/18/17

I guess Leroy’s diagonal lean is supposed to represent the fact that he’s getting down from the barstool and heading home to spend time with his hated wife, but I prefer to believe that he’s just about to teeter over into drunken unconsciousness, and “unhappy hour” is his little nickname for being face-down blackout drunk on the filthy floor of a bar.

Family Circus, 5/18/17

Yes, Kittycat does pray before meals. She prays to Bast, the cat goddess of the Egyptians, a much more ancient god than the one her cruel, melon-headed captors worship. She prays … for vengeance.

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FUN FACT FOR THE DAY: We’re all slowly dying!!!!

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Judge Parker, 5/16/17

Everyone who had “the kidnapper is Abbey’s half-sister from her dad’s secret family” in the pool, stand up and take a bow! I’m enjoying the punchline of “Sam doesn’t recognize what his own wife looked like as a child,” though I suppose in a scenario where you see a picture of a kid that looks more or less like pictures you’ve seen of your wife as a kid, and the kid in the picture is standing in front of someone who’s definitely your wife’s dad, you would just kind of assume. Plus the hair! Who else would have that clownish color of hair? It must be a Spencer gene that passes down through the male line but only expresses itself in females! The fact that the grownup kidnapper has bland brown hair means nothing: clearly she’s keeping her Spencertude in disguise, waiting to reveal it at just … the right … moment. Either that or the syndicate coloring folks have been doing it wrong this whole time, ha ha, who can tell!

Pluggers, 5/16/17

A Twitter follower pointed out to me last week that the length of time I’ve been writing this blog is longer than the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes, which is definitely a fact that doesn’t make me want to hop into a coffin and close the lid behind me, at all! Anyway, one of the signs of time’s inevitable passing and my own impending death is the treatment of technology in Pluggers. Way back in the early years of this blog, in the mid ’00s, pluggers hated and feared the Internet so much that they’d rather thumb through an almanac than get access to the wealth of knowledge online. Today, they’re still eschewing the Web’s more educational functions, but they are definitely not above joining their children and grandchildren in the performative dance of social media, in which our every waking moment becomes a quantum of digital information to be shared and ranked.

Crankshaft, 5/16/17

At least I’m not so old that I’m excited about the appearance of some pro golfer in Crankshaft, though! CONFIDENTIAL TO PEOPLE WHO EXPERIENCED ANY GLIMMER OF ENTHUSIASM FROM READING THIS STRIP: it’s just a drawing, and there are lots of reference photos online, he didn’t actually have to participate in the creation of it in any way, SORRY