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Crankshaft, 2/14/16

Here’s today’s Crankshaft! It’s about a mom who thinks her son accidentally sending her a message of romantic love intended for a woman she’s never heard of is “just as good” as him sending her a message of her own on purpose.

Momma, 2/14/16

Here’s today’s Momma! It’s about a son who seems to loathe his mother and yet can’t stay apart from her, delivering a her a bouquet of flowers and declaring her his “best girl” in the privacy of his own thoughts, before scooting off to a date with some woman whose name we’ll never hear again. Look, he’s literally quivering with mingled eroticism and terror in the second panel!

Beetle Bailey, 2/14/16

Here’s today’s Beetle Bailey! It’s about Plato using the power of his very persuasive mind to convince his friend to go to sleep under a blanket of numbing snow, until he slips away into unconsciousness and then death without feeling any pain! You might think this is a little grim, but at least it’s not a Valentine Day strip about a dude’s relationship wth his mom.

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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.