Tom Batiuk has repeatedly championed his work, with media interview pieces saying and supporting the same, on the basis that the characters have a continuously evolving storyline and age over time.
We’re just lucky that the strip ended here, instead of the final panel being Pete sulking like a petulant child in response to Ed’s “barb”. I guess that could be tomorrow’s strip.
On that subject, though, the barb would have been sharper if Ed’s line was “and your comic book posters…”.
(Even better still would have been “Aren’t you a millionaire?”, but we can’t have nice things.)
Though he still may yet be corpulent for a 60 year old WW2 vet living in 2024, Crankshaft still needs to eat food too. Where’s Crankshaft?