What? I’m staring at this thing, trying to see if maybe I’m missing something but I can’t for the life of me figure out what the joke is supposed to be here. Did he mean to say “hearsed” in panel three? I mean yeah, that’s awful but at least there’s a logic to it. If this is how he meant it to read, well, he’s got bigger issues than stupid boring pointless crossover arcs to worry about because this one is troubling-ly terrible.
Until this week I honestly had no idea that Crankshaft was just as full of contrived drippy pathos and attention-seeking melodrama as FW is. And here I thought it was all gags about the elderly and dumb malapropisms, but it turns out that’s merely half the story. It’s just like FW except instead of constantly whining about getting old, the CS characters already ARE old. It all makes such perfect sense now.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Funky Winkerbean should show Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchum coming into One-Trick Armed Becky’s office to arrest Harry Dinkle for crimes against humanity.
Oh, come on! We’re in the middle of a Dinkle-Crankshaft Thunderdome smackdown, so naturally we will focus, laser-like, on something completely irrelevant to any of the threads begun in the last six months. It’ll probably be Mopey Pete or Murdered Dad Jessica.
And if it isn’t, Tom Batiuk, I win!!
What?
No seriously, what? Is the joke here that the normally obsessive Harry Dinkle is letting his band go to a performance (one in front of his colleagues, no less) absolutely cold? That Crankshaft has met an even greater insufferable language-mangling asshole than himself? That we’re still reading this?
Well, that was redundant.
There have been FW gags in the past that took me a few minutes to get but this one’s a real head-scratcher. If it’s a mistake I can’t believe it slipped through (chortle) quality control and if it isn’t I just can’t believe it. Period.
Isn’t it incredible how he’s ALREADY done a crossover arc that’s even more pointless and listless than the Dick Tracy one was? It’s like a baseball player making six errors in a game and following it up the next day by hitting into a game-losing triple play. Last week he reduced DT to the role of box-lugging lackey and this week the feared Crankshaft is being bullied into submission by a baton-wielding guy wearing frilly gold shoulder pads. If TB keeps this up he won’t be able to keep attracting these prestigious guest stars anymore, you know?
I think this whole week was just Batiuk building up Dinkle’s street cred. “You thought Crankshaft was a tough S.O.B.? Just wait till you see what a badass Harry Dinkle, The World’s Greatest Band Director, is compared to him!!!”.
The “joke” is that for some reason, Crankshaft stubbornly refused to give the World’s Greatest Band Director his due obeisance. Dissonance Accelarando DARED instead to treat him like some obsessive and delusional buffoon who refused to admit that no matter how spiffy his uniform is, he too is bound by the same laws of physics and traffic as normal people.
Simply put, Ed is bad because he treats a vain chump wasting his life because he little a very little bit of authority go straight to his empty head like a vain chump who let his job take over his life.
The real joke here is that Brendan Buford apparently had no problem with this strip whatsoever.
Is the joke that Tom Batiuk got the word “hearse” into the strip? As in, a car used to transport dead people. So is Becky listening to Dinkle’s ghost carry on about nothing, or has she flipped over into Les’ Talk With The Dead Dementia?
2 Strips
1 Plot
0 Jokes
Well, as someone whose paper used to carry Crankshaft for years on end, I’m here to tell you that, yes, it’s always been about the melodrama. After all, we led off with an arc that had Pam and Jeff discover that Ed didn’t know how to read…..which led to an arc that explained that Bull’s granddad exploited this weakness to destroy his chance to make the Majors. Then there was the whole mess with the letter from Lucy’s fiancee that had him say “Meet me at the bandstand or I’ll know you want to move on” and the years of misery that caused.
Is Ann Fairgood still coaching girl’s hoops without a background check, or did that program get shuttered when the Specialist Snowflake left?
Is Nate Green still looking the other way while adults perform shady acts in his school?
Is the disembodied gay teen voice still haunting Westview, or did it melt away with the ice sculpture after a Very Special but Gutless arc?
These are just a few questions that could be answered with arcs. But I guess Tommy has to push those old band books and shoes somehow.
Dinkle’s epaulets look kinda like little rowboats in panel 1. I cannot think of a single other thing to say about this strip…
If you read it in the order of Panels 3-1-2, it makes a little more sense. It’s still not funny, but that’s usually not the intent anyway.
“”Today’s Funky Winkerbean should show Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchum coming into One-Trick Armed Becky’s office to arrest Harry Dinkle for crimes against humanity.””
Only if Dick Tracy shoots Becky for not raising both hands up.
maybe this is some sort of meta thing where the narrator (the older Dinkle) is having some sort of seizure but we just don’t know it yet so that is why the punchline makes not bloody sense as we’ll find out tomorrow was they are putting Dinkle into an ambulance and he’s still trying to tell the story “and the the snow, talking dogs attacked the pope no fault of mine…no no no it’s C-sharp banana cream tortoise shell suit my cuff links I leave to you Becky…”
I have half a mind to buy the book “Comic Strip Writing for Dummies” and hand-deliver it to Batom®.
The Crankshaft story arc with Rose and hiding the letter from Lucy’s fiance is easily the most depressing thing I have ever seen in the newspaper comics pages.
There was a meanness to Crankshaft that never really showed up in FW, and I think it’s because the “protagonist” in the former is such a hateful prick. So much of the humor in it is about tormenting or hurting people who don’t really deserve it, or if they were shown to, it’s been so long and forgettable that no one remembers. Look at all the mothers who chase after Crankshaft as he gleefully drives away from them in spite. Think about all the strips where the joke was about Crankshaft destroying that guy’s mailbox again and again because Crankshaft’s a huge prick. The MacKenzie sisters would get jerked around again and again. Notice in the sequence you reference, bobanero, that the story wasn’t used to redeem or resolve anything. It was just used to torment Lillian, the living sister, after Lucy’s death. Also notice how the nasty of the two MacKenzie sisters was the one who survived, while the nice one died.
Unlike FW, Batiuk knows that Crankshaft is a prick, and revels in it. Les may be the biggest prick of the numerous pricks in FW, but it’s pretty obvious that Batiuk doesn’t have an idea of how they all come off.