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Hey, it’s Spring, and May, and Sunday … and from the look of things, everybody’s feeling pretty darn good about themselves.

Crankshaft, 5/1/16

Here, Team Crankshaft congratulates itself for its tortured “blacksmith/booksmith” wordplay by showing in-strip proxies Lillian and Jeff gushing over it. But adopting Crankshaft’s sloppy malapropism will doom Lillian’s fledgling used-book business.

Sure, throngs of would-be readers will stream through Lillian’s quiet residential neighborhood, walk past her second-floor shop, and glance up at her sign. But being literary folk who know full well that a booksmith is a person who makes books, they’ll pass on the chance to climb all those stairs only to find an author, a publisher, or a bookbinder shooing them away.

Perhaps they’ll mutter as they pass by, “If only this town had a decent bookmonger — somebody could make a lot of money!”

The authors also missed the obvious opportunity to call the place “Mom’s attic” and sell old comic books. It’s like they lost track of the strip’s core mission.

Phantom, 5/1/16

Appearances aside, that’s not Disco John Belushi. It’s Hojo, recently destereotyped and crossing over from Lee Falk’s other creation, Mandrake the Magician. Hojo is fluent in six languages, head of global crimefighting outfit Inter-Intel, and a 10^th-degree black belt in some martial art or other. But here, he’s just pleased as cheese to be out in the Seven Nations working together with his good buddy Phantom to suppress political opposition to Lothar’s brother. Lucky we can’t see his face when he learns they whupped the wrong guy; poor fella must be shattered.

But hey, why is that Phantom-cam shot of Otanko taken from the perspective of someone flat on his back? That can’t be good!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/1/16

June squicks out Rex as a form of bedtime recreation; it’s the only kind she gets. “Because you’re a doctor and she respects your judgment — despite your hilarious discomfort with anything even remotely biological. You think reproduction is icky, ‘doc,’ take a whiff of this guy.”

– Uncle Lumpy

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Crankshaft, 4/16/16

Hey guys, remember Ed Crankshaft, the almost wholly unlikeable protagonist of the comic strip Crankshaft? Well, Crankshaft and Mary, who is a perfectly nice person, have been going on dates, and other people have noticed, and somehow Crankshaft is the one who finds this embarrassing, though he claims that it’s only because his relationships all seem to go south whenever they’re recognized or acknowledged, in some kind of Romantic Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or something. Anyway, Mary now knows she’s truly been claimed by the ’Shaft, because her relationship is now being labelled with a terrible and unfunny malapropism, in line with his personal beliefs and lifestyle.

Beetle Bailey, 4/16/16

Haha, it’s funny because Sarge would rather look like a dope and fail to clean his stinky feet than appear even slightly feminine, even for a moment, and oh my god wait is he just full on nude in the comics pages??? That water droplet is extremely strategically placed so as to obscure his entire butt crack, but that doesn’t make this acceptable at all.

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Spider-Man, 4/9/16

“Oh, thank goodness! Another, better superhero is awake! We’ll be free in no time!”

Beetle Bailey, 4/9/16

We all remember the famous Blondie unspeakable filth strip, but that was just accidentally about dog-fucking, or at least had plausible deniability. This … this is just straight up about dog-fucking, right? Or at least human-dog romance? There’s not really another interpretation, right?

Crankshaft, 4/9/16

Ha ha, it’s funny because Crankshaft’s body is failing, to the extent that even his favorite pastimes are physical agony to him now!