The Return of Frank Cranmer

Although some would tell you they knew otherwise, the fate of the infamous Frank Cranmer following the "Diversity in the Workplace" disaster remained, for a long time, a mystery. Most who knew of the incident assumed he simply jumped off a bridge somewhere, while others suspected that, after bringing about the complete ruin of several dozen lives, he was finally at peace with the universe that had broken him. There was, of course, a school of thought that suggested that perhaps neither was the case and he was simply in hiding, waiting for another opportunity to strike. Some time last week, the latter were proven correct in a rather brutal fashion.

In what can now only be called the aftermath, facts emerge and are pieced together; it seems that Cranmer did indeed go into hiding, taking the money received from his insurance company (and, it seems, a bit of a cut from the coffers of the now-defunct Harborside Publishing Company) and working various unextraordinary jobs under an assumed name. Before long, he managed to get a job at the Daily Express, a newspaper in the Midwest. It was desperately understaffed, and before long he got a feel for the way the paper was run, eventually discovering that no one really bothered to proofread the children's activity section in the weekend edition, as it was something of a no-brainer, and usually no one who wasn't paying attention even saw it between the editor's desk and the newsstands. Cranmer, working under an assumed name, earned the trust of the higher-ups long enough to be saddled with the duty of the activity page. The rest is not hard to imagine.

Roughly two hours after the Express's weekend edition hit the stands, there was an unprecedentedly furious picket outside the Express's office, peopled mostly by parents who had given the activity page to their children without looking at it first. A spokesperson for the paper emerged to calm down the screaming horde; ten minutes later he was hospitalized. About four and a half hours after the weekend edition hit the stands, the editor-in-chief of the Express, a likable fellow named Roy, hung himself in his office. Frank Cranmer was nowhere to be found, and remains at large. Printed below, for the first time in wide release, is a copy of the activity page.