Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for May 12, 2023

“Now let’s drink from these squeeze bottles of mustard! No sense in wasting this stuff on our overpriced hot dogs!”

A rug pull?

It looks like they’re toasting with baby bottles.

“Oh, that’ll be $8 for…whatever this stuff is in the yellow bottle.”

No you’re not, you’re just standing around drinking bottles of turpentine.

“Back on your feet”? You both had good jobs at the TV station that you left for this fleapit.

Covid changed a lot

The official pandemic may be considered over, but the after effects will continue for a long time

A steady income? Nah, who needs that? They’re doing‘Art for art’s sake.’

A toast to handouts from morons.

If a “mega chain” like AMC have a hard time emerging from the pandemic, fighting against streaming tv, I can imagine how a small, independent, “classic” house, might have an equal, or, greater difficulty.

Thanks to a complete lack of imagination, we’re back!

Nice way to hide liquor in the theater…..

Get Crankshaft back in the ‘toon or change the name………

Hu Rah……

So Batty has basically combined his two strips into one. He can keep the same lame characters and story-lines, even though they were a decade apart.

They trust someone named mason jar?

Yeah, right, it’s the COVID’s fault. Never mind that everybody in central Ohio who wanted to see Gene Autry in “Phantom Empire” in a theater did so, or that when you bought the Valentine the timeline was still set a decade in the past.

Also, how many times did Batiuk work Mr. Jarre’s oh-so-punny name into this week’s “story”? There’s no reason Mxx and Hnnh couldn’t have just said “Mason” today (or a couple times earlier), but we benighted must be reminded on a daily basis the TB is indeed the Lord of Language.

Since they didn’t specify The Actor, Mason Jarre I assumed it was a different guy.

Maybe They’re Liquid Pledge floor polish.

“It was a real rug pull,” said nobody ever. Darn that COVID! They were pulling in upwards of 3 customer a week with their vintage movie theme. Now they have to rebuild.

So where is the joke here? Or any remotely interesting content?

Made me sad when our local theater shut down. Granted I hadn’t been to it since the 1st X-Men movie came out in 2000, but I’d always hoped to go back 1 day.