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Crankshaft, 2/22/22

God, I certainly hope this is the setup for an Agatha Christie-style locked room murder mystery, where all of our beloved Crankshaft favorites — you know, Crankshaft, [squints at mailbox] Keesterman, Crank … friends, uh, and the, uh, ladies — are summoned to a mansion for a mysterious gathering where everyone has a secret and nothing is as it seems. Will Crankshaft turn out to be the killer … or, better, the victim, and turns out everyone killed him, just like in Murder on the Orient Express! Uh, spoilers for an 88-year-old novel, I guess. And for a five-year-old movie. I swear I don’t know who did it in Death on the Nile! Anyway, yesterday’s strip consisted of Crankshaft aggressively reading the back of a box of cereal and complaining that he didn’t have a newspaper to read, and the bearded guy with one arm used to run the local paper by himself until he quit to spite the hedge fund that bought it, so I’m betting this is actually going to be a meeting where Crankshaft And The Gang Save Journalism, a plot that will make me so angry that I’ll wish they’d all murder each other and then go to jail for it.

Gil Thorp, 2/22/22

I always find it charming when we get occasional reminders that Milford isn’t so sports-crazed as to be able to afford a full-time assistant coach and that Kaz has to double up as a teacher of some sort. In real-life schools, phys ed teachers/coaches are often enlisted to teach health — I got my sex ed from a guy who insisted we refer to him as “Coach” in the classroom and wore short shorts and a whistle at all times, but the information he imparted on contraception and STIs was accurate and complete — but Kaz seems to teach … geography, maybe? No doubt he’s hoping that he can drag out “Paraguay: South America’s forgotten -guay” for two or maybe even three class periods. Pranit, meanwhile, is learning a different kind of lesson, namely that traditional bookies employ burly men to shatter the knees of recalcitrant bettors for a reason (the reason is that if you don’t, the bettors simply refuse to pay you a lot of the time).

Mary Worth, 2/22/22

Wow, I assumed the inevitable Cal-Toby flirtation would begin with Cal showing Toby a drawing he did of her, implicitly saying “Ms. Cameron, look at how young and beautiful you are … in my eyes.” I’m very pleased to be proved wrong and see that his actual opening move was to give her a dreamy-eyed picture of himself. “Here you go, babe. You can rub one out to this if you want.”

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Mary Worth, 2/18/22

Look, I’m not going trying to draw any particular conclusions here, but it is really true that a surprising number of Mary Worth plots involve romances with eyebrow-raising age gaps! You know, Zak-Iris, Dawn-Harlan, Dawn-Dr. Drew, Ian-Toby … and now Toby-Cal? Toby has been whining about her birthday all week, but maybe she’s finally hit that magical age when she can stop being inappropriately young for her sexual partners, like Dawn, and instead can start finding sexual partners who are inappropriately young for her, like Iris. The c-i-i-r-r-cle of life!

Pluggers, 2/18/22

Wait. What. What? You’re telling me there are European pluggers? No. Absolutely not. Actually, hold up, that’s not a very Italian looking name, which leads me to believe that this is an American living in Rome. The only thing less plugger than a European is an American expat in Europe. I demand that this panel be stricken down by the plugger court of arbitration (which consists of three manimals lingering over all-you-can drink coffee at a diner somewhere, to the annoyance of the wait staff).

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Zits, 2/17/22

Do we, in fact, live in a fallen world of filth and degradation, where our young people are engaging in all sorts of nightmarish sex stuff that would set their chaste grandparents spinning in their graves? Well, the numbers don’t really seem to support this — US teen birth rates are at record lows, and the average age of a person’s first sexual encounter is higher for those born in the 1980s and ’90s than it was for previous cohorts. But, on the other hand, in 2009 the Zits creators could note in the intro to one of their books that they would get in trouble for using the word “sucks” in a strip and now they can just do “this kid’s dick looks like the Loch Ness Monster” jokes like it’s no big deal.

Mary Worth, 2/17/22

Oh, wow, it looks like Toby needs more help fighting her midlife crisis than we thought. “OK, let’s see how you did on this week’s assignment: drawing me as an adorable anime teen. Cal, what the hell is this? This isn’t anywhere near kawaii enough. You get an F! Get out of my sight!”