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Crankshaft, 2/12/16

I know I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the antimatter brownie plot in Crankshaft, but the short version is that Crankshaft convinced Lena to bake her brownie batter into a bowling ball for him, one that, due to its extremely scientifically inaccurate properties, repels pins and scores perfect strikes every time. But the new balls she baked for everyone else for the championship game don’t work. Throw away all the goofy magic bullshit and basically Crankshaft has asked Lena (who, for the record, has never been anything but sweet to all her co-workers, who trash-talk her baking constantly) to help him cheat, and now that that hasn’t worked out, he’s literally descending into a spittle-flying temper tantrum, as she looks like she’s about to burst into tears. Fun times!

Gasoline Alley, 2/12/16

“But anyway, you got your scrapbook back, and that’s the important thing! Sorry it smells like the burned hair and seared flesh of your dead bear friend.”

Mary Worth, 2/12/16

“Hello? Lady? I don’t feel so great. I think I might have a concussion. Can you hear me? Why are you just standing there talking and not helping me?”

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Crankshaft, 1/20/16

One of Crankshaft’s running jokes/verbal tics is calling Google “Granpa Google,” which I actually sort of like. It’s fun and whimsical to imagine Google as a helpful, chatty elderly relative, rather than what it actually is, which is to say an unthinkably vast database of information with a shockingly efficient search algorithm owned by an immensely powerful and inscrutable dystopian corporation. At any rate, Granpa’s got this one wrong! A real anti-matter brownie would in fact instantly explode into an tremendous blast of destructive energy the moment it came in contact with the air, wiping out these bus drivers and everyone else for miles around, which, you know, we should be so lucky.

Wizard of Id, 1/20/16

As like a million people pointed out to me when I wondered about it, the new-ish artist of Wizard of Id is none other than Mason Mastroianni, grandson of strip co-creator Johnny Hart. Considering how famously devout Hart was, it’s interesting that the big innovations in this strip over the past few weeks have been highly sexualized supernatural beings.

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Judge Parker, 1/12/16

Oh, hey, remember back in October when April said she had just one last war crime to commit in the Balkans at the behest of her shadowy taskmasters, and then she’d come home and start churning out the next generation of Judges Parker? Well it turns out that it isn’t quite so easy to walk away from the murderous world of undercover intelligence work. Can the Parkers get April to give up the dangerous, exciting world that she loves and get domestic? Can they convince the U.S. intelligence establishment to let her go? Will several large checks make this problem, like all other problems that afflict the Parkers, go away?

Crankshaft, 1/12/16

I’m … pretty sure the joke here is that Pam calls Jeff “Jeffrey” during sex, and has for years, and is suddenly only now being made aware that this is also something his mother, who lives with them, calls him, and that he hates it when she does. Has their entire sex life together, presumably spanning decades, been an awful, Oedipal punishment for him? No, don’t worry, he assures her, when she calls out his full name while they have sex, it’s … kind of sweet. Kind of sweet! I guess that’s better than “when I’m inside you I see my mother’s face on your face,” right?

Hi and Lois, 1/12/16

OH MY GOD DAWG HAS EVOLVED OPPOSABLE THUMBS

RUN, FLAGSTONS, RUN

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES