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Crankshaft, 3/11/21

OK, so we’ve been having a bit of fun with “The current run of Crankshaft strips were probably written in the early days of the pandemic, with somewhat amusing results.” But I think we can all agree that it’s a little uncanny that, in the year-ago writing strategy sessions, Funkyco decided that by March 2021 necessary post-pandemic fiscal stimulus would be held up by partisan legislative wrangling. Like, it wouldn’t have been impossible to predict, but I’m honestly pretty impressed — impressed enough that I was going to forgive today’s strip for neglecting to actually include a joke, until I remembered that mixing together two common and semantically related turns of phrase counts as a “joke” in Crankshaft.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/21

God, think about how sad it is to have a little kid visualize her dad wearing vaguely old-timey clothes while talking to his boring-ass real-life friends vague acquaintances, and saying that represents her “imagination run[ning] wild.” Guess that head injury was even worse than we thought, huh?

Mary Worth, 3/11/21

In other news, I’ve figured out what the absolute grossest phrase you can use while flirting is, and it’s “The dogs are chowing down … and now it’s our turn!”

Pluggers, 3/11/21

TIRED: Pluggers represent the “forgotten man” (and woman), the ones who keep their heads down and keep this country running despite tough times and the disdain of the elites.

WIRED: Pluggers have mastered the technology to send their enemies to the Phantom Zone. They experimented on their own parents to hone this weapon and will surely show us no mercy!

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Pluggers, 2/23/21

I have become increasingly concerned that there’s some kind of edict coming down from Pluggers HQ that all Pluggers panels have to be broadly relatable, and so we’ve started focusing less on pluggers and what makes them special and instead are just getting panels about things that literally all humans do. The worst thing about today’s panel is that this plugger has a sly look on his face, like he’s getting away with something. Sir, the doctor is literally getting a more accurate assessment of your weight this way! There’s nothing sneaky at all going on here!

Slylock Fox, 2/23/21

In the first panel, the guy at the window is thinking “God damn it! That rotten kid has used all my good sausages for his dumb little snowman tableau!” In the second panel, he’s thinking “Oh my god … the snowman has come to life … and he’s got a taste for flesh.”

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Mary Worth, 2/16/21

OK, I don’t want to tell anyone how to open up and share their past trauma, but I do think it’s wild that Eve led with a big reveal that her late husband used to trip her, a sinister but relatively mild form of abuse, only to later casually drop into a fun conversation about how great dogs are the fact that, oh yeah, he also tried to murder me with a gun except that my dog saved me by getting shot in the neck. Don’t worry, the dog is fine, though! He’s right there in that strip I linked to above, looking fine! Unless Eve has had … a series of identical dogs named Max? Who she treats as the same dog? Best not to think about it, although now I can’t think of anything else.

Pluggers, 2/16/21

I didn’t think anything could make me more simultaneously angry and confused than “pluggers like to ‘accidentally’ drop their pants in public,” but “non-pluggers get food particles out from between their teeth like this, but pluggers get food particles out from between their teeth like this,” so, uh, congrats to today’s Pluggers, I guess!

Shoe, 2/16/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Shoe, the character, doesn’t know what an escape room is, and possibly Shoe, the comic strip, doesn’t either!