Post Content

As I head into my birthday weekend and reflect on my own impending Crankshaft-like senescence, enjoy your youth, and your comment of the week!

“Dear Gil Thorp narration box: I know you may not have liked Addison Radley but it is still pretty rude to boo her at her own funeral.” –Zootyr

Your runners up are also very funny:

“Dennis’ dad gets his scotch in clear plastic tetrapacks, because when you buy in bulk you’re really paying for the bottles.” –pugfuggly

“I suspect the whole refrigerated-apple business is just an excuse for some new artist at the Hank Ketchum studio to test a prototype for his planned spin-off strip, Alice Mitchell Bends Over To Pick Things Up.” –seismic-2

“I’m going to doubt that Mayor Kane specifically mentioned school buses falling through bridges in his statement to the local press. That horrific image must have come directly from the mind of one Ed Crankshaft. ‘Can you imagine it, Pam? The shattered glass. The squealing tires. Metal being torn like paper. Rubble falling like rain. And, louder than anything, the screams of the children. It would be beautiful … I mean, terrible. It would be terrible.’” –Joe Blevins

“She’s doing it to be close to you! In contrast, my motives are entirely honorable. I’m only in it for the money!” –hogenmogen

“If you think about Boo’s death, I’m the real victim, since I feel guilty. But no, actually her death was total meaningless chance. Did I mention I’m not good at eulogies?” –Steve S

“Today’s Six Chix depicts a bizarre scene, as an insane nurse lies on the floor of the hospital nursery practicing her ventriloquism act. Reaching up through the bed, she prods one baby to get it to point towards the viewing window, creepily treating the infant like a living puppet.” –Betrayer

“I … wow, gosh. Dagwood warned me you were a dick, but … Mister Tightwad? You know you’re the one who asked me to come here, right?” –Chyron HR

“Looking at the evolving symmetry version of Tommy who lives in Mirror World, I’d have to agree that the meds are definitely working!” –Chareth Cutestory

“Tommy: ‘I don’t want my girl to forget what I look like.’ Iris: ‘Well, how about if I go down instead? That should remind her.'” –Pozzo

“‘You see, a flash mob is–‘ ‘I’m well familiar with it, demon! You just spent the last three panels explaining it, devil! Repeated exposition serves no purpose, fiend!'” –enlong

“Curtis is too young to be a millennial. He’s a member of whatever generation both Gen X and millennials will call lazy and entitled in 15 years during the climate-change-driven great migration northward, which I believe is referred to as a ‘flash mob.’” –Steve S

“Animal Collective? Isn’t that the union we belong to?” –handsome Harry Backstayge, idol of a million other women

“Based on the rating and the bottoms of the last few letters on the sign, the movie could be Marley & Me. The IMDb plot keywords for that movie include ‘pet funeral’, ‘miscarriage’, and ‘south Florida’. I hope tomorrow’s comic shows them coming out of that movie.” –A Concerned Reader

“And the painkiller helps me see you better, baby. Oh, and did I mention I’m on painkillers? Painkillers, baby!” –Christine Lehman, on Facebook

“It’s a shame we start in medias res, because I think Leroy would have a great hot-take game: ‘Pokémon Go tells you to enjoy catching monsters, but there was nothing fun about the monster I caught.’ ‘After Brexit, Nigel Farage needs to lead my Leave campaign.’ ‘If you call Trump a tyrant, but not my wife, you’re part of the problem.’ ‘Face it: all lives matter, except my wife’s.’” –Schroduck

“A down on his luck Satan tries his hand at temptation at a church festival in Westview, Ohio. God on his throne laughs as the original snake in the grass realizes that there’s a Hell far worse then the one beneath the earth.” –Voshkod

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! And let’s give thanks to our advertisers:

• Bluebeards Original is proud to join The Comics Curmudgeon as an advertiser! Company owner Paul Kaniewski is a longtime follower of this site, to the point that it inspired him to created the famed Aldo Kelrast MySpace profile. Bluebeards has been making top-rated beard care products for ten years now, so any bearded folks or those that love them, please check out the site and try their stuff.
• Oh, yes, and my novel is something you should buy, in hardback, paperback, or ebook form! It’s called The Enthusiast, and it’s about trains, comics, stealth marketing, capitalism, and joy

If you’d like to buy advertising on the site, you can do so on a CPM basis through BuySellAds. To find out more, you can go to my BuySellAds page or just click here.

Post Content

Crankshaft, 7/15/16

The punchline to today’s strip, in which Crankshaft responds to an church volunteer’s innocent attempt to play-act as a carnival barker by pointing out life’s essentially random cruelty, is par for the Funkyverse course, so instead I’d like to point out that our hero is just straight-up covered with filth here. This is actually some admirable continuity from earlier this week, where the jokes were about how Crankshaft is incapable of eating fair food without soiling himself, but it gives a nice touch to today’s strip, where it looks like he’s wandered out of a scene of unspeakable carnage. He gets to lay down this truth bomb on poor straw-hat-boater guy because he’s seen some shit, man.

The Lockhorns, 7/15/16

I guess Leroy’s supposed to have a black eye here, indicating that once again a potentially pleasant evening has ended with him getting punched in the face? But all I can see is the eye makeup that Alex wore in A Clockwork Orange, so I’m assuming that the argument was over whether it’s socially acceptable to cosplay as literary characters when you go over to someone else’s house for drinks.

Post Content

Pluggers, 7/14/16

I’ll say this for today’s Pluggers: it’s managed, without having heard of any of the bands, to put together an actually realistic summer concert series lineup, in the sense that it runs the gamut from relatively popular, relatively current acts (Animal Collective) through jam bands that had a minor mainstream breakthrough years ago but have been touring the festival circuit more or less nonstop both before and since (Rusted Root) to bands that were popular in the early ’90s and subsequently broke up but then a subset of the original members gained legal control of the band’s name and now are cashing in with a bunch of new people (Color Me Badd). We’ve rounded out the list with two separate bands who were apparently mistaken for one (Slightly Stoopid and SOJA, who are touring together this summer) and, apparently, just to stick it to know-it-alls like me, the truly obscure “Kongas,” which as near as I can tell was the name under which Marc Cerrone, an “Italofrench disco drummer, composer, record producer and creator of major concert shows,” released a couple of albums in the late ’70s. I guess it’s probably more likely that this is a mistake for Kongos, a band that’s in that first category with Animal Collective, but I want to believe that we’re talking Italofrench disco drummer here.

Mary Worth, 7/14/16

Oh man, it looks like Tommy’s upcoming opioid addiction’s going to arise from a bad interaction between a lower back injury … and broken heart. I guess this is why you shouldn’t start dating someone before you start growing your hair back out. The relationship begins under false pretenses. They won’t know the real you.

Family Circus, 7/14/16

Mommy’s grim facial expression tells us exactly what she thinks of the MPAA’s censorious reign of prudery and its effect on film as an art form. “More like a Profoundly Grotesque stifling of cinema’s ability to shock us out of our comfort zones,” she thinks, glowering at her hopelessly middlebrow children.