Okay, guys, I’ve seen the jokes and the rants but Mason Jarre was the main male lead of Lisa’s Story. So it’s a perfectly acceptable choice for the new owner of the theatre to pick. Furthermore it is a local story based on the family friends and accquantances of the people running the theatre. So it makes sense. It makes perfect sense.
And the return of The Valentine means the return of Masone Jarre. Which means the return of THE MASONE JARRE ART SWAP REPORT.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Um, just what in the blue hell is going on here? It’s like my fevered nightmare dreams are coming to life in comic strip form.
So…you’re reading Crankshaft in the GoComics era.
Only when you make me, CBH! I am amazed that he’s STILL pimping “Lisa’s Story” six months after FW croaked, although I really shouldn’t be. He’ll surely have that park bench etched onto his tombstone someday.
Or his tombstone etched onto that park bench.
Romanesque countenance? Is tha a thing people say or have? It sounds like a church in an architectural guidebook.
Google informs me that the phrase occurs, yes, in descriptions of church architecture. Also 3 instances of newspaper articles where it referred to men’s faces – one from 1895, one from 1909, and one in 1978 by a WaPo sportswriter.
Which one did TB read? (We know Crankshaft was still illiterate during that timespan.)
Okay, so maybe some of us were a little hyperbolic, but we all sorta knew what was coming?
Apropos of nothing, was it ever established that the film’s crew ever did any location shooting in Westview or the surrounding communities? If not, why did TB overlook the hilarity of them turning Montoni’s into a movie set for a couple of days? After all, they shot some of “Starbuck Jones” (2?) in Centerville, didn’t they?
Also, sharp-eyed snarker JPuzzleWhiz commented (on GC, of all places) about why the film poster at the Valentine reads “Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe.” As far as we ever heard, there was no subtitle for the movie, just “Lisa’s Story.” Obviously someone cut and pasted the book cover, but why leave that in there? It’s the most confusing compound cinema title since “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” or “The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia.”
Lastly, wait ’til you read Monday’s rib-tickler of a joke.
I interpreted the ‘Lisa’s Story: The Last Shoe’ movie poster as TB shilling the book. We all know Batiuk has no scruples about that. The entire final week of Funky Winkerbean was a sales pitch.
TB: Look at the movie poster. You will buy my books. Look at the movie poster. (gestures hypnotically)
“Crankshaft” Reader: *ching* No sale.
Given his backstory, it’s logical for him too. He grew up in a small town and kind of likes strolling through Memory Lane.
No CBH, none of this makes any sense at all. Why was a movie made based on a crappy story? How did it win any awards? Why would the lead actor purchase a crappy theater?
This is just Batty bringing back stories/ characters that should have ended when the plug was pulled on FW. These characters and stories have no basis in Crankshaft.
Sure Les has appeared in this strip before, so sadly, I guess he can stay. But Lisa’s Story, no way. Stop promoting this failed story. Nobody cares about it. It was a poorly written attempt to tug at people’s heartstrings, and it failed. It did bring a lot more misery to the comics page and in that sense was successful.
LOL, I guess my sarcasm wasn’t clear enough. I think the Valentine showing Lisa’s Story is ridiculous and stupid. No matter how plausible it would be in a real life situation.
“Why was a movie made based on a crappy story? How did it win any awards?”
I said the exact same thing about A Star is Born.
Why would the lead actor purchase a crappy theater?
Now that is a bit more of a mystery. But I’m guessing Batiuk was ripping from the headlines again.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/quentin-tarantino-buys-vista-theatre-sunset-hollywood-1234977694/
Ha, no I got the sarcasm, I was just playing along.
Now that headline makes sense, an actor buying a theater in Hollywood, sure I can understand that.
Maybe Mason will be like the Kevin Smith of maudlin cancer movies. The Valentine will only screen films where the love interest gets cancer, dies, or both. Then Mason could do audience Q&A sessions about cancer, cancer-centric movies, and people who died young. Granted, such a thing would probably play better in Westview proper, but still. Centerville doesn’t appear to be a barrel of laughs either.
And maybe Mason could do a series of stoner comedies, where he hangs out with his hilarious sidekick in front of cancer drug pharmacies, selling medicinal pot to cancer patients. They’d get into all kinds of wacky adventures, and he’d get his Hollywood pals to do zany cameos. And then the sidekick could get cancer, and die after a lengthy brutal struggle. The gimmick would be that the sidekick would always come back and die again in each new film. I’m seeing Owen in the sidekick role, as he already wears a hat anyhow.
Hey, at least Lady Gaga can sing.
What I found most irritating is Les’s obsessive need to tell the story his way. At first, I thought that it was so he could make himself the hero. Now, it’s so people won’t realize that he and Lisa are the sort of people who’d find it too much like effort (which wouldn’t be nice) to not get run over by a steamroller by moving to the left five inches.
I view Les’ need to control Lisa’s story as his need to cover up his own failures. For all his constant handwringing and charging into danger over Lisa, he never did a thing to help her. And on some level, he knows it.
Yes, it’s a reasonable choice. I would argue it’s also completely irrelevant to the story, but there is no story. All Mason is doing is standing around spewing banalities at one-armed Skip with the word “Lisa” in the background. That’s it. That’s the entire point of an arc Batiuk has been building for months. Tom Batiuk had Mason Jarre buy the Valentine Theater just so can insert Lisa’s Story into the background as many times as possible. He’s that desperate.
At least the unintentional comedy is back. “We want the Valentine to be a refreshing experience.” Yeah, there’s nothing more refreshing than a tedious cancer drama. And that “try to stop him from talking about himself!” line is something I’d write into a parody of how self-unaware this whole world is.
It’s so embarrassingly shameless. FW is dead, and so is “Lisa’s Story”. Few cared at the time, fewer cared after, and no one cares now. Most “artists” strive to equal or surpass their masterworks, but BatYam prefers to keep trotting along on his endless victory lap, forever reminding his readers of the great thing he did sixteen years ago.
Him and that stinky old movie house. They should have bulldozed that dump when they had the chance. Imagine Batty’s perfect downtown. The crappy old movie house, a typewriter shop, a shoe cobbler, an old-fashioned drugstore full of spinner racks, with malts on tap…that guy sure does miss 1954, doesn’t he?
It’s so embarrassing that someone should put a stop to it.
It’s absurd. It’s a sixteen years old story arc from an entirety different comic strip. It’s just amazing to me that he isn’t bored with it yet.
It’s like watching a young man try to “win back” the girl he lost. Some girl who dated him briefly, had better options available, and was never all that serious about the relationship in the first place. We’ve all seen this. For Tom Batiuk, that girl’s name is Pulitzer. And he has never stopped pursuing her, coming up with more and more desperate and ridiculous plans to do so, 15 years after she married someone else.
This is what I meant by “it’s so embarrassing someone should put a stop to it.” Because most of us men have been that guy once or twice in our lives. (I certainly have.) But if you have good friends, one of them will take you aside and say “you need to stop this. It isn’t going to work, and it’s making you look like an undateable psycho jackass.”
Tom Batiuk appears to have no such friends in his life. I would think Tony Isabella or Chuck Ayers or John Byrne or somebody would say “dude… let it go. You didn’t win the Pulitzer, and you’re not going to now.” Or show him what his own online fan base is saying. The people who normally defend Crankshaft from people like us, are as fed up with Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam as we are.
But there he is, outside the window with the boom box again, as if he were John Cusack in Say Anything Part XIII. He’s still trying to woo Ione Skye for the first time, while her youngest child is leaving for college.
Thanks to CBH for her continued good work here. It’s nice to see things are continuing even six months after TB pulled the plug on the strip.
Mason ranks as one of my least favorite characters in the strip. Something about him always rubbed me the wrong way and would lead to Cindy–who, despite her marriage to a raging alcoholic, at least got the hell out of town unlike Donna and Holly–offering the trademarked TB smirk. We have some pretty good examples above. TB seemed to want to paint Mason in some generic “Hollywood sucks and movie stars are shallow” tropes but even he had to bow to St. Les and St. Lisa.
As for my take on the crossover that nobody ever wanted to happen, Lois Flagston is a successful realtor in Connecticut, a largely upscale suburban state. I don’t think she is going to head out west to slum it to make sales in a dying Rust Belt town in Ohio.
Yeah, it’s almost like Mason made a Heel-Face turn. Or became a religious convert to The Church of St. Lisa. He was originally conceived as a vacuous Hollywood actor, but he saw that Westview was better than Hollywood, and immediately became yet another pizza-swilling, comic book-consuming dork.
Because good guys are always pizza-swilling, comic book-consuming dorks. Except Bill Clinton. He was portrayed as a good guy who swilled pizza, with no mention of comic books as far as I remember.
What an interesting world TB has constructed. I mean that seriously. I can’t think of any other long-running fictional world that has such incredibly specific and irrelevant markers denoting “good” and “bad.”
Good: Likes comic books, reads them in the right way, and profits from them in the right way. Likes pizza. Likes small towns. (Optional: Likes “The Phantom Empire” and old movie theater stuff in general.)
Bad: Absence of the above.
That’s it. That’s what denotes a character as bad. Even Chester Bestertester, the “Chiseler,” eventually morphed into a good character, because he loved comic books. (And because TB needed a deus ex machina to make his childhood “bullpen” fantasies come true.)
There’s a thesis in here for someone going for a psych PhD.
I regret to inform you that Willie being a Lover Of Comic Books is within FW canon:
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2020/10/17/it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-the-word-is-is/
So you’re still correct, but not even a President of the United States is exempt from that definition.
@#$&@! Batty.
Batty loves ol’Slick Willie and so of course he has to be a comic book fan.
Coming soon in Crankshaft: Ed mutters “Lisa would have smites that”
Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing was the easiest punchline of the 90s, but Batiuk couldn’t even make him a band geek. It had to be comic books.
Oh no, he made him a band geek too. And his mentor…
Dinkle.
I feel like a “bonus round”/epilogue to the John arc would be an attempt to comb through Act 1 to see exactly how often comic books came up and how revered they were in contrast to their treatment in Act 2, where John’s arrival was the Hearld of their nostalgia-worship taking over the strip.
Lot of work though to comb through 20 years though. More of a goal for anyone with a library that somehow has all the Act 1 collection books, probably.
The Flagstons seem to live somewhere upscale, like maybe Stamford, but apart from upscale coastal or NYC-proximate enclaves, a lot of Connecticut is also dying or dead industrial towns. More rust-belt than you’d think.
Yeah, I have family near Waterbury. It’s a lot like the Cleveland area, just much more expensive.
Here in CT, we consider Fairfield County “New York City East.” I live in REAL Connecticut, and half my town was a major mill city until the Depression. Those factories are all apartments/condos now. Most businesses are retail.
To add to my comment:
“Most businesses are retail. There are no comic shops within 2 towns, but we have a lot of ‘smoke’ shops!”
CBH, I must commend you for your amazing de-teck-a-tive skills. I especially love the continued re-use of the “I’m stoned out of my goddam gourd” Maison.
I can think of something “refreshing” to do with Lisa’s Story. Midnight showings, à la Rocky Horror, where people dress up as Les, Lisa, Le Chat Bleu, etc, and scream “WHAT ABOUT THE PLAYGROUND? IS IT CLOSED?” at the appropriate times.
Or arrange for the MST3K/Rifftrax people to come and do a live performance.
Or do a “What’s New, Pussycat”-style overdub contest, where the winner gets a week in Maison’s maison on the beach (and I do mean quite literally on the beach), before it washes away with the next high tide.
Or have a Les dunking booth. Only what looks like water is hydrochloric acid.
DSH John, rolling his eyes: “Duck, I believe you are confusing ‘What’s New Pussycat,” with ‘What’s Up, Tiger Lily.’ It is a common misconception to whom have never…fully appreciated the Woody Allen oeuvre such as I. I will now retire to my quarters and read some Byrne classics.”
Bill tS, guilty as charged. but how could I … appreciate the oeuvre of someone who has never shown an affinity for comic books, pizza or small towns? HERESY! What’s that you say? He’s in a band? Well, now, that’s a different story — oh, an actual band that plays in a jazz club, not one that is forced to wear uniforms and march in the rain? Then, sir, I shun the man and his works!
“Hi, I’m Mayonnaise Jarre, star of such family films as–” (stares at cue card) “But–That’s my birth certificate! WHAT?! My parents named me MAYONNAISE JARRE? Oh, the indignity! No wonder they laughed every time they called me ‘Mayo’! Or when Dad said ‘Hellman, it’s a Miracle you don’t get Whipped!’ That’s it! I’m not going to see ‘Lisa’s Story’! I don’t care about Lisa’s Story! Why does no one care about sob! MAYONNAISE JARRE’S STORY?! sob!”
(suddenly straightens in his chair) “Why, I could get a Hallmark movie deal out of this! I could be the star of such Lifetime DTV movies as ‘The Boy in the Mayonnaise Bubble’!”
(strangely calm) “Hi, I’m…MANSON Jarre, star of such future family films as ‘Freaky Friday the 13th” and ‘The Parent Trap–With Punji Sticks at the Bottom’!”
“Here’s today’s strip–Why’s it missing the last panel? You know, where the joke goes? WHAT?! Is this for the mechanical department? I’ve read funnier service manuals! That’s it, I’m done.”
“I gotta call my sister!” (phones) “You will NOT believe what I found out today, Mustard!”
These Dan Davis art swipes are fantastic. It’s like he’s turned Crankshaft into a Quark XPress tutorial!
As dull as “Funky Crankerbean” has become, certain aspects of this Valentine Theater reopening arc are amusing. I doubt Batiuk is doing it intentionally but Masone appears to be taking a beating in the strip.
I used to equate Masone with real-life box office draw Chris Pratt (sorry, Chris, nothing personal). Like Masone Jarre, Chris Pratt didn’t hit the big time until starring in the comic book/Sci-fi hit, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ Likewise, Masone worked on mediocre titles like ‘My Dog Pookie’ before hitting the big time with ‘Starbuck Jones,’ an alleged comic book/Sci-fi hit.
List of indignities:
1.) Masone’s alleged loving wife, Cindy, does not accompany him on this trip. Why not? She was with Masone when he bought the Valentine. Is she still upset with Masone’s decision to buy the Valentine? Does Cindy want nothing to do with that dreadful movie, ‘Lisa’s Story’? What is Cindy doing that is so important she has to stay behind? Working on her tan?
2.) Masone flies commercial? Alone? No security? No personal assistants? Does anyone here think Chris Pratt flies alone on commercial flights? Did Masone have to sit in the back of the plane near the restrooms? Was he in the screaming baby section?
3.) No limo? No rental car? What happened to that nifty convertible Masone drove when he bought the Valentine several months ago? No Lyft or Uber drivers available?
Why Crankshaft’s bus? Oh, the indignity! Why not send Mitch to pick up Masone on his Big Wheel™?
Mitch: Sorry, mister. You’re too heavy. You’ll have to do the pedaling.
4.) Masone is greeted at the Valentine by a whopping crowd of four people. His two employees who were too busy (too lazy) to pick him up at the airport. Skip Rawlings who seems to be there in a professional capacity as the sole writer of the local town rag. Does Skip represent the local paparazzi? And finally, Ed Crankshaft is still hanging around. No rush to return that school bus to the garage, huh, Ed?
Where is everyone else? Nobody in Centerville cares that Starbuck Jones is in town? Ouch!
5.) Where is Masone going to spend the night? In the theater? Sleeping in the theater seats wrapped in a fire curtain?
Considering all of these indignities, I have to ask:
– Why is Masone traveling on the cheap? Is he destitute? Did he sink all his savings into ‘Lisa’s Story’ and the Valentine?
– Did playing Les Moore in ‘Lisa’s Story’ ruin Masone Jarre’s career? Is he now box office poison? Is Masone persona non grata everywhere? Rental car agents refuse to rent him a car?
– Is Cindy the sole breadwinner now? Is that why she couldn’t accompany Masone to the reopening?
Let’s check the unofficial ‘Lisa’s Story’ scorecard. Masone Jarre is ruined. Les Moore got an Oscar. Typical. When you’re dealing with Les, no good deed goes unpunished. Ask Bull.
Cindy the sole breadwinner? She works for BuddyBlog, which doesn’t do real journalism.
For Batty, newspapers and broadcast TV are the only legitimate journalistic outlets.
That leaves succubus. Cindy absorbs the youth of her male suitors and steals their worldly possessions.
Wasn’t blogging for BuddyBlog an unpaid gig? Asking because I don’t quite remember.
Yes, I believe you are correct. Just another jab by Batty as he hates things he doesn’t understand.
The online world isn’t an authentic news source in his opinion.
As is often the case, the story Batiuk doesn’t realize he’s telling is more interesting than the one he’s trying to tell.
This is like the first act of Galaxy Quest, where the actors do humiliating public appearances to show how irrelevant they’ve become. But Mason loves it. He couldn’t be happier. Which could be an interesting angle, but Batiuk doesn’t even realize it.
This is a very long thunderstorm we’re having at 2AM. I’m awake…ish, so might as well look at CS 6/27/23.
Mason: “Well, there is that NO screen theater TWO areas over. They ask people to just chant the Butter Brinkle movies from the great silent era of 1941! But let’s just say—I don’t know that! Let’s just keep this between ourselves, HMM?” (hands Skip a shiny dime) Skip, shifting from leg to leg: “This dump still got a working bathroom? That’s all I came in for!”
Ohhhh, a theater as a Time Machine, that could be interesting if a real writer were writing for this strip. Alas, we will get pointless nostalgia from some stupid event in Batty’s past.
Oh well, let’s see if that old man in Mary Worth had a heart attack yet. That story has been dragging on for weeks. Yeah, I know, dogs are good.
If it were a real time machine, it’d be showing black and white double-features for a dime, with a newsreel and cartoon. And there’d be a chance that at least one of those things would be outstanding.
“Lisa’s Story” would not be part of the equation.
Yeah, everything must hit that narrow window of 1961 Akron.
Yes, but… I mean, it’s weird. If you were nostalgic for single-screen movie theaters in Akron circa 1961, what might you be nostalgic for? These are some of the films that Puff Batty might have seen in such a theater in that year: 101 Dalmations; The Parent Trap; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; The Absent-Minded Professor; The Comancheros; West Side Story; The Guns of Navarone; The Hustler.
Some great flicks in there. But have you ever heard him wax nostalgic for the films of his childhood?
Maybe he was more of a TV guy. Top shows of 1961 that might have interested a boy of his age: The Flintstones; The Andy Griffith Show; The Jack Benny Show; My Three Sons; Bonanza.
Nope, never heard him sigh over those either.
It’s almost as if he weren’t nostalgic for his own actual childhood, but an imagined childhood of 20 years earlier. Thus the obsession with Golden Age/Timely comics, and Butter Brinkel, and The Phantom Empire.
I’m on the record about what condition I think Tom Batiuk has that makes him this way. And he’s sure not doing anything to disprove that theory.
Hi, I’m Math Jarre and here’s a quick look at the strip since the Valentine entered into the art. A quick rundown of my preliminary findings:
Strips: 4
Panels in those strips: 11
Panels with Lisa’s Story featured: 7
Ones with the poster visible: 6
Current record: 6/27, with two panels and four Lisa’s Stories
Future archaeologists: “There appear to be four distinct periods on this planet, based on the lifeforms that dominated. Stromatolites, Trilobites, Dinosaurs, and some crap book no one ever read.”