Post Content

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.”

Post Content

Blondie, 2/21/22

You all hopefully know my strong feeling on putting a hat on a hat, which is to say combining two jokes together in a way that each of them detracts from the other. Well, I am afraid that comics are at it again, in this regard! The idea of Dithers building a golden idol to himself is … well, not funny, per se, but is a perfectly acceptable joke-like Blondie punchline. Meanwhile, the thought of Dagwood’s cranky old boss becoming obsessed with 3-D printing has the potential to be actually funny, like if we really saw him getting into it, but since we don’t, this is an Elmo wants to save his bitcoin to buy a drone-level “have you heard of this technology?” joke. Anyway, two crappy hats on top of each other don’t make a good hat. Also, is that statue gold? I’m pretty sure you can’t 3-D print with gold.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/21/22

Look, Hagar, the whole thing about being a Viking is that you sail far away from your icy Nordic home and seize loot from from the wealthier and weaker kingdoms in Europe, then come back to live high on the hog. You don’t steal from petty nobles who live on the next fjord over, and this is exactly why!

Post Content

Panels from Slylock Fox, 2/20/22

Today’s Six Differences offer an even more disturbing and nightmarish world than usual. The vision of a giant bottle containing four enormous and very much alive flies, which presumably this frog is going to somehow suck out through the nipple, is extremely disturbing to me. Plus you’ve got to take into consideration the fact that an actual baby frog would be a tadpole, so this is clearly an adult engaging in some kind of weird infantilization fetish play with the “nurse” cat. And all out in public to boot! That owl and that rabbit are absolutely correct to be angry about this.

Dustin, 2/20/22

God, look at Dustin’s dad’s hooded eyes in that final panel: he is so unpleasantly proud of himself for coming up with this bit, which I guarantee the car scammer heard exactly two words of before he realized his grift wasn’t working and hung up the phone. Dustin’s mom is loving it, though! These two deserve each other.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/20/22

I’m posting the whole strip here just so you can see the latest legally dubious plot developments, but all I want to talk about is Rene striding into this room like a king and confidently bellowing “Rene Belluso is here. Let the meeting commence!” This would absolutely set a great tone for any meeting of any sort, whether held in person or on Zoom, and I urge you to try it at the next opportunity. You can say your actual name or just say “Rene Belluso,” I’m sure either would work great.