In Like a Lamb…

Not much to go on for Monday’s Crankshaft, as people in GoComics were guessing, Max and Hannah’s news could be anything from a move to another pregnancy to an official marriage ceremony to make this common-law arrangement religiously blessed. (Bonus points for me if they bring up Covid as a reason they didn’t have a ceremony before)

And bonus points for TrespassersW who guessed yesterday on GoComics.

Love seeing the official Crankshaft comments section popping off like that. It’s the kind of passion and engagement that has Andrews McNeel Universal paying Batiuk the big bucks!

Here in Iowa we were supposed to start off March with 3 inches of snow Sunday night, but instead got nada. The old farmer’s wisdom of my father says that it means the end of March is going to be nasty. In like a lamb, out like a lion.

Speaking of the dramatic juxtaposition of ferocity with helpless infantilism.

Chihuahuas.

In my doggy deep dive of last week for the backstory of Homer II, another pooch popped up. Grandma Rose Murdoch’s pet Chihuahua, Tinkerbelle.

Similar to Homer II, Tinkerbelle’s origin seems to be sometime in the 90’s. The earliest reference I could find was this strip during Crankshaft’s near death experience in Strike Four!.

Grandma Rose staying for a few days was a regular fixture during holidays, and always brought the pocket dog along with for Crankshaft to complaina about.

Tinkerbelle would also have to stay over after Rose had fallen on the ice. Unlike poor Homer chained to his doghouse, Tinkerbelle had the full run of the house.

News alert! Roland/Rolanda wasn’t the first transgender character in the Funkyverse! She was beaten out by decades by a dog who somehow changed pronouns in 2006. Should we chock this up to Batiuk forgetting that he’d once thought it was funny to name a boy dog Tinkerbelle, and regendering it by accident? Probably. Is that what I’m going to do? No. I’m going to imagine that Rose replaced the male Tinkerbelle with an identical but female dog. She seems like the type.

When Rose moved in with Pam and Jeff, Tinkerbelle was also allowed to join the household. She didn’t take kindly to Homer or Pickles, and they didn’t seem too enthused about her either.

Pickles hated her so much that the GoComics coloring monkeys accidently turned him orange.

And boy that first panel’s Pickles looks familiar…

Gotcha Davis!!!

Crankshaft had nothing but disdain for the yappy ankle biter…until one two week arc in 2009.

Did Tinkerbelle’s brave sacrifice mean that Crankshaft would stop hating on the sweet little pupper?

Nope. And Crankshaft’s cold rejection of Tinkerbelle eventually drove the dog to depression.

And finally, in 2010, rumball assisted suicide.

Seriously.

Tinkerbelle’s last appearance is much like Homer’s: ingesting chocolate before disappearing forever.

Homerward Bound, The Uncredible Journey

Mr. Finkle….LORD HAVE MERCY.

So Batton Thomas’ wife is just Cathy? No cute rearranging of syllables? No inversion of letters. Just Cathy. Fine.

I hate it.

Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate Batton since I began to blog. There are 547 published blog posts on this site I have posted under my name. If the word hate replaced each letter of each word of those 547 blog posts, it would not equal ONE ONE-BILLIONTH of the hate I feel for Batton as I type this. For Batton. HATE. HATE.

I do not hate Tom Batiuk, no. Tom Batiuk is a real life human, with real thoughts and real feelings and a real family. He has enjoyed hot, fresh pizza. He has seen the beauty of fall leaves. He has felt pain. He has made others smile. I can lay no irredeemable crime against humanity at his feet. I cannot hate him. Pity him, yes, but not hate.

But Batton is a fictional device. Batton is a narcissistic conceit. Batton is made of thoughtless, heartless computer goo and transmitted through wires and radio waves. He’s not a real life person. And I HATE him. Like I would hate the melanoma growing from an ugly tattoo on the back of a stranger.

This week is miserable. Almost makes me nostalgic for last week, when we got to watch uncanny traced photo people converse about the unnecessary renovations they were doing to an abandoned doghouse.

Abandoned? Indeed. For Homer the dog was last seen August 6, 2010. Wherein E fed him chocolate cake. And I guess we can surmise that the elderly dog died. Because we never see him again.

Yes, Cranky, as opposed to those things you ignorant git. Unless vermin contain caffeine or theobromine, or cat poop is laced with the methylxanthines that block adenosine receptors.

In truth, this last appearance of Homer is shocking, and not because of the dog murder. It’s because Homer had already disappeared for two whole years before this. He hadn’t been seen since taking stock of Grandma Rose’s chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, in July 2008.

I don’t know how often the old dog showed up in the 90’s. But in the 2000’s he was very much on the back burner. Heck, he wasn’t even on the stove. He was in a coffee can of grease kept in a cupboard above the stove.

He was allowed in the house on Christmas Day 2007.

He slept through fireworks on July 4, 2006.

Cranky took him on a walk to piss on Lillian’s saplings in March of 2006.

He briefly escaped being chained up to a flimsy doorless doghouse in the dead of winter in January 2006. Wonder if Tom got some hatemail for this one.

On September 27, 2005, he goes comatose with boredom.

In June of 2005 Homer gets his last proper full week arc, where we learn that his ‘boy’ doesn’t care for him and can’t even remember his name.

21 years ago Crankshaft enslaved his elderly dog and forced him to shovel snow. The GoComics coloring monkeys decided the sight was so horrific it turned Pam’s hair white.

October 2, 2004, we got a lovely little wordless strip. No notes here.

August 12, 2004, the Murdoch/Crankshaft household was kind enough to make sure Homer wasn’t Toto’ed in a twister.

July 25, 2004, Homer is let in the house to get his treat ration, and Mindy proves she’s Pam’s daughter by asking the classic Pam question.

May 30, 2004. Ayers draws an adorable pupper cowering behind his flimsy doghouse.

This strip displays something I wish Ayers and Batiuk had consciously cultivated, especially in their later years: put kids and pets in the damn background of strips! I’ve talked at length how the consistency of the physical locations in the Funkyverse give it real tangibility. I wish we had that same consistency with the people living in those locations.

We wouldn’t be asking ‘Where’s Wally Jr.?” or ‘Wait, who the f**k is Pickles?’ or ‘Does Mitch even live with the Murdochs anymore?’ if they had been placed in the background or foreground where appropriate. I will say Ayers was better at this with Pickles up through the early aughts, where the cat is often drawn just standing around in the yard while Ed yammers about his brand new combine harvester. But there’s a million million yard strips where he could have doodled ol Homer to remind us that the dog still exists.

May 4, 2004 is the earliest GoComics strip I could find with Homer.

Homer isn’t in the first four Crankshaft books, so they must have got him after, maybe sometime in the early to mid 90’s if Mindy’s age in this strip from Strike Four! is anything to go by.

In Roses in December, Homer has his Lassie moment, sort of.

And this brings up that Homer is actually Homer II. Named, (presumably) for Ed’s childhood dog. Long Dead Homer was mentioned long before Homer II was introduced.

Poor Homer II, named for a long dead and better loved dog. Neglected, forgotten, dismissed. He wasn’t even Ed Crankshaft’s favorite pet.

Crankshaft Awards 2025, Day 7: The Worst is Yet to Come.

Ending The Crankshaft Awards 2025, and giving out the award for the worst strip during a Batton and Skip arc feels appropriate, doesn’t it?

After expressing my personal affection for Ed Crankshaft as a character yesterday, today the more objective part of my brain has to admit that Crankshaft as a strip this year was pretty meh. Davis is phoning in the photoshops like never before. The GoComics colorists are similarly lazy. Cranky was more befuddled than properly cranky, and almost all the best jokes were recycled.

The only thing Batiuk shows any passion for is pandering to whoever will give him a nod and breaking his back shoving his nose into his navel for another abysmal Batton interview arc.

Where is Batiuk taking us this year? I have no idea. But we’ll be here to point and laugh, and reminisce about old times good and bad. And who knows, maybe next year it’ll be harder to pare down the list of shitty strips to just eight.

The Worst Crankshaft Strip of 2025

Nostalgia Blinders

Dinkle’s Wet Dream

A Fitting Memorial

Check Please!

No Politics

That’s Not Humor

Linus’ Blankie

Trigger Happy

And your winner is…

Dinkle’s Wet Dream

The nitters have spoken. In a year with a month and a half of Batton strips and given four, FOUR, Batton strips nominated, you all decided, albeit not in a landslide, that a sweaty somnolent Dinkle having Old Testament flavored dreams of his own greatness was worse.

Now, you all want a Homer deep dive? Because that’s what I’m working on next!

Crankshaft Awards 2025, Day 6: Twilight’s Last Gleaming

First of all, I want Banana Jr. 6000 to take a big bow. He very politely asked if he could interrupt the ceremony to celebrate Crankshaft’s fictional birthday, and I was pleased as punch to put things on pause for a couple days.

I have a very weird and very personal perspective on Crankshaft being a permanently 65-75 year old-ish WWII veteran born in the 20’s. I selfishly want to keep it. Because that puts Cranky and his cohort in the same generation as my grandparents and I want to live in a fantasy world where they lived forever as the greying but still active pillars of my childhood.

My affection for Crankshaft, as a character, in spite of his creator, is born from how I can see myself in Pam and Mindy (horror, I know) and see in Ed echoes of my own emotionally constipated, obstinate, and odd, dad and grandpa.

It’s a very personal bias that I’m not going to hide or apologize for and I don’t at all expect everyone to share.

But it does mean it’s easy enough to find a handful of genuinely funny Crankshaft strips every year. Even this year. Which kinda sucked.

Your nominees for…

The Best Crankshaft Strip of 2025

Suave for Men

May the Fourth Mayflower Be With You

Chiropractic Cosmic Irony

Going Nutmeg

Famous Last Words

Don’t We All

Acer Insomniatias

Who Counsels the Counselor?

And the winner of the Best Crankshaft Strip of 2025…

Acer Insomniatias

Wait. No. That’s the best Crankshaft Strip of 2017!

No! That’s the best Crankshaft strip of 2004!

Darn, so the best joke was recycled. Eh, I’ll still give it a pass. For me the statute of limitations on recycled jokes for a long running comic strip is once every decade or so.

Still, I can’t believe Famous Last Words did so poorly! That one was far and away my favorite. But once again, my bias is showing.

Happy 107th Birthday, Ed Crankshaft!

We interrupt the Crankshaft awards to bring you a breaking story in Major League Baseball!

Bill Mazeroski died this weekend. Mazeroski is a Baseball Hall of Fame member, who hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history. It was the first ever World Series-winning home run. This has only been done one other time, by Joe Carter in 1993.

Why are we talking about baseball necrology? Because former Major League Baseball player Johnny Lucadello was born on February 22, 1919. Lucadello was also the youngest player on the 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, the real-life baseball team which Ed Crankshaft canonically also played for. (Ed also has a real-life retired jersey number.)

For that reason, I view today as Ed’s birthday, because it’s the latest possible day he could have been born. And I think Lillian McKenzie was in his high school class – because this is the Funkyverse – which makes her well over 100 as well.

Ed’s baseball career, with its early integration experiences, and winter ball in pre-revolution Cuba, fits this time frame. So does Lillian, Lucy, and Eugene being young adults whose lives were interrupted by World War II. So does Pam’s life, centered around the 1970 Kent State shootings. Ed would have been about 30 at her birth.

I want to stress that 107 is the youngest Ed Crankshaft could reasonably be in 2026. The average player in the 1940 American Association, and on the Mud Hens themselves, wasn’t 21 years old: he was 27. If Ed was 27 in 1940, he’d be 113 today. Which would almost make him the world’s oldest man. (Unless Walt Wallet from Gasoline Alley also counts.)

We can’t move Ed’s birthday much later than 1919, because then he’d be too young to be drafted into the military. What if we gave him Joe Nuxhall’s backstory (pitched briefly in the majors at age 15, making Ed’s birth year 1925)? Ed would be way too young to join the military legally, much less be drafted.

Which would have made Crankshaft extremely likely to reach the major leagues, no matter how illiterate he was. MLB teams in 1942-1945 were eager to employ players who weren’t subject to being drafted. And since some were already missing, the standards were lower. A player too young to be drafted, who was also good enough to pitch in AA (the top minor league level at the time), would have been given plenty of chances. Especially on a mediocre team, which the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians (both implied to be the Mud Hens’ parent club at some point) and St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles, who was Toledo’s real-life parent club in 1940) were.

The optimal birth year seems to be 1922. That would make Ed 20 in 1942, which is the youngest that would have been drafted that year. So maybe he’s only 104 now. Which would also make him extremely young for AA baseball, and by definition a phenom. But let’s solve one problem at a time here.

So how many inches from reality is Ed Crankshaft’s life?

Out of 35 players on the real-life 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, only two lived to see 2003! They were Jake Wade (1912-2006) and Harry Bailey (1918-2014). Six others made it to the 21st century: Armond Payton (1917-2000), Daniel Scudder (1916-2000), Tommy Criscola (1915-2001), Lucadello (died in 2001), Hal Spindel (1913-2002), and Robert Jones (1916-2002). A ninth player, Harry Kimberlin, died on December 31, 1999 at age 90. Kimberlin was the last former Major League Baseball player to die in the 20th century.

Bill Mazeroski’s famous home run was in 1960. He was born in 1936. He was 89 when he died this year. Ed Crankshaft is 15-20 years older than all of those standards. Look at the photos of Harry Kimberlin and João Marinho Neto in the above links. That is what a very old man looks like.

On top of that, Ed is absurdly active. He still works as a bus driver, bowls regularly, goes out to eat with friends, portrays Santa Claus, sings in a choir, gets into arguments with cartoonists, goes to the fair, has traveled to New York, Winnipeg and Columbus, performs frequent physical feats, and builds an AI-powered smart garden. Very few people on earth have the expertise to build an AI-powered smart garden. And few centenarians on earth have the ability to do any of the other things.

So, Ed, since you like gardening so much, why don’t you dig a 6′ x 3′ x 3′ rectangular hole in the ground? I’m sure we’ll find something useful to do with it. Oops, I mean “you’ll” find something useful to do with it. Happy birthday and many more!

We now return you to the Crankshaft awards!