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Crankshaft, 8/8/14

Good news, everybody! Despite the grim foreboding, this week’s Crankshaft food truck storyline has ended with smiles all around. Weird, blissed out smiles from everyone emerging from a fenced off zone in which the fully tricked out food trucks, each of which contains expensive kitchen equipment and represents somebody’s entire small business, rammed into each other repeatedly for the crowd’s amusement, until only one was still (barely) functional. “Pure carnage,” says Crankshaft, as if that were a … joke, or bit of wordplay, or something? Maybe one of the trucks was full of meat, meat that could have fed dozens of happy customers, meat that instead was ground into the muddy, oily earth. Or maybe just lots of drivers died in the conflagration. Who knows? Everyone sure seems happy, though!

Shoe, 8/8/14

Man, for someone who literally reads the comics every day for a living, there sure is some stuff I don’t pick up on. When I read today’s Shoe, for instance, I immediately thought, “Hey, how long has Shoe’s desk just been an overturned trashcan? Is that some commentary on the poor financial state of print newspapers?” Well, jokes on me, because Shoe’s trashcan-desk has been around for at least seven years. And really, how badly can the The Treetops Tattler-Tribune be doing, considering it operates in a market where people still call into the newspaper to find out what the weather is going to be like?

Six Chix, 8/8/14

Well, I guess you could have asked! Or maybe going to a restaurant so dedicated to meat consumption that they trot out live cows to your table is something noteworthy enough to be brought up in advance, I dunno. Certainly if your relationship has advanced to the point where you’re basically sitting in each other’s lap at dinner, you’d think the topic of dietary preferences would’ve come up.

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Shoe, 7/30/14

I kind of like the fact that the nonconsensual photo of a drunken senator taken in panel one, which will presumably be posted on various social media platforms and go viral for certain low-grade political scandal definitions of “viral,” isn’t really remarked upon by anyone here, except as a launching point for a terrible bit of wordplay. And why should the senator care? Used to be that a guy — even someone with an important job — could spend his afternoon enjoying a beer or six and nobody would think twice. Used to be that a guy dressed up in a fucking wizard costume in the middle of a restaurant would get a lot more disapproving looks than an upstanding, suit-wearing citizen who happened to be getting a little buzz on. I guess times really have changed, though I’m not sure if technology is the culprit here.

Heathcliff, 7/30/14

Port-o-Johns rent for $85 a month if you want them serviced every other week, so I’m not quite sure Heathcliff’s owner-grandpa’s math really checks out. If he really wanted to save money, they could just let him use their bathroom? I could see why they’d be hesitant to go down that route, though.

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Sally Forth, 7/26/14

It’s lonely being strange. Boyfriend Jon showed Hilary a way to escape the refuge and isolation of her family, leaving Sally to consider whether a life of surrealist Monopoly games, chocolate bunny ears, thwarted Paris vacations, and the Star Wars Holiday Special would be enough to sustain her, even if they did come with the love of a good — well, let’s go with “man.”

So she coaxed Ted to the neighborhood barbeque, even though parties are minefields for them — over the years, they have managed to offend the few neighbors whose names they know, share none of their interests or experiences, and always wind up in a corner numbly wisecracking to one another, trying not to drink too much and sneaking looks at the time.

Neighbor Tom Racine, a sensitive host and a decent man, sees, understands, and deftly relieves their discomfort, leaving Sally in stunned gratitude for the three seconds it takes Ted to fuck it all up.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/26/14

Herb congratulates himself for a jerk tactic that hasn’t worked in all of history.

Shoe, 7/26/14

The Perfessor’s butt is so big OSHA makes him wear a vehicle motion alarm.

Has anybody else seen A Thousand Clowns? What I mean is, I think Sally Forth is A Thousand Clowns, which means Sally herself is Barbara Harris and I need to rethink my life.

— Uncle Lumpy