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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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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/9/21

Aw, man, I guess when Sarah said she was thinking of ensuring that her father stopped being a doctor, she just meant she was going to use the power of her imagination to pull that off, which: snoooooze. I guess it could be mildly interesting to see Rex be sullen and dickish in a time and place where you’re much more likely to get shot for having a bad attitude, but honestly I’m worried this Old West sojourn is going to be find itself focusing on Buckley, husband to the local shopkeep and friend to all the “roots” cowboy musicians passing through town.

Dick Tracy, 3/9/21

Dick Tracy is a comic that features a rotating cast of freakishly malformed villains and a main character whose granddaughter is literally half moon alien, but by far the most unrealistic thing that’s ever happened in it is a cop having a legit reason to enter a house without a warrant and being disappointed to find a bunch of drug paraphernalia.

Gasoline Alley, 3/9/21

Gasoline Alley is the only strip with the nerve to have a main character turn to the audience and say “It sure looks like those two guest characters are about to have an interesting storyline, doesn’t it? Well, we won’t be paying attention to them anymore.”

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Dennis the Menace, 3/7/21

Look, I’m not going to say I’m a fan of Dennis the Menace, the character, exactly, but I also don’t think he should be muscled out of his own strip by Mr. Wilson, of all people, and relegated to a ghostly Barney Google-style existence. At least the Mr. Wilson-focused strip from a couple weeks ago featured our man George seething with rage about Dennis even though the lad himself was absent. In today’s strip, he’s just making a sandwich to irritate his wife, and I fear some line has been crossed.

Family Circus, 3/7/21

Not sure what I find more unnerving about this comic: the beginning of the sequence, where PJ floats as a pre-born soul on a heavenly cloud, or the end, where we learn that adults are shadowy figures forever imprisoned in some kind of internment camp called “Grownup-Land.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/7/21

God, I have waited for years for sinister, scheming Sarah to come back, and I am very much looking forward to our next plot, Sarah Faxes The Medical Board Some Financial Records They Might Be Very Interested In Seeing.