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Crankshaft, 7/24/26

Boy, these multiverse stories sure get complicated! Like when Barry Allen Flash teamed up in the past with Jay Garrick Flash to battle The Thinker, The Fiddler, and Shade so Barry could persuade real-world writer Gardner Fox to write a comic book about their adventures! Or when Spider-Men Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire team up to defeat Electro, Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man: No Way Home to keep the hordes of people who know Spidey’s not-so-secret identity from overrunning our world. Or here, where transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas” teams up with opaque actual author self-insert character Tom Batiuk, presumably to Fight Crime. I don’t know, but if I were Lillian Mackenzie, Harry Dinkle, or Ed Crankshaft, I’d watch my back—these guys are cartoonists—they have erasers and they know how to use them.

Bizarro, 7/24/26

Whoops, looks like the stress finally got to our guy. Forget what I said yesterday.

Crock, 7/24/26

“At last! Our comic strip is saved!”

Phantom, 7/24/26

Chatu “The Python” has surrendered and put on the AI-enabled “Tokoloshe” control anklet, and I’m frankly a little disappointed in him. I mean, this is the guy who tried to Ebolify the whole world through an infected fruit-bat scheme, and blew up half of downtown Mawitaan just to get back at his nemesis the Phantom. He may or may not be a coward, but there is no way he’s gonna let some rich upstart out-evil him! All those years in that cage must’ve softened him up, or maybe he went mad from that interminable drum solo. Either way, get ready for an epic supervillain match-up and battle—now enhanced with AI!

No Comments of the Week on my watch; last week’s victor Victor Von gets a twofer.

—Uncle Lumpy

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Shoe, 7/22/26

NO MUFFY NO HE’S REACHING FOR YOUR BEAK HE THINKS IT’S A [horrible wrenching sounds, bird-agony noises].

Crock, 7/22/26

… and maybe a thesaurus?

Say, doesn’t that bird look awfully glum for somebody in the cheer-distribution business? Sure, most of your clientele in that game will be sad sacks like Figowitz here. Maybe you even bear their burdens, like a sad clown or depressed comedian. But if you’re doling out industrial packages of cheer, who’s going to complain if you skim off a little for yourself? It’s not embezzlement, it’s self-care!

Mark Trail, 7/22/26

Happy Trail ditches his evil grifter fiancée Gail at the altar to care for the gorillas suffering from her neglect. Mark can’t just stand there; he has to do something—but there’s not a single villain in punching range.

Judge Parker, 7/22/26

Sophie didn’t mean to walk that way, just like the artist probably didn’t mean to slap down that inscription without correcting the perspective—but you go with what you got, I guess.

Hey, is this when manipulative brat adorable pixie Charlotte learns Sophie’s tragic backstory? It’s time that child learned how the world works: You can’t just shoot people for money like her Mom does, you gotta go out and inherit it!

—Uncle Lumpy

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Crankshaft, 7/3/26

Ugh, fine, I guess I’ll update you on what’s going on in this Crankshaft flashback: Harry Dinkle’s drunk dad was all set to debut a new song at the Starlight Ballroom, but then nobody showed up because they all liked Elvis now, and he threw the sheet music to the ground and stormed off, and later Eugene and Lucy picked it up. Anyway, then Dinkle Sr. drove away in a white-hot rage right into the lake, where he died! “That’s how he would’ve wanted to go out,” says Harry, about to play his father’s last song in the bombed-out ruins of the Starlight Ballroom. “At a real emotional low point.”

Judge Parker, 7/3/26

Hey, remember the early days of my coverage of this strip, when Sophie was a weird, unsettlingly adult-like child? Well, Neddie has scooted off to take a Hollywood meeting (you can tell because of the sunglasses) with her former roommate/writing partner and left Sophie in charge of Charlotte, who is the strip’s current weird, unsettling adult-like child, I guess to help her learn that someday she’ll grow up and become as normal and annoying as everyone else in this strip.

Crock, 7/3/26

Wow, a nose so big a maître d’ mistakes it for an entirely separate person? Can you imagine? That’s definitely the sort of thing that would lead someone to seek cosmetic surgery!