I’m busy with family right now, literally burning money in the most beautiful and sparkly way ever. And I hope all of you also have fun things planned for Independence Day.
Due to the two weeks of recycled Lisa’s Story regurgitation we were subjected to the last week, I wanted to remind myself why I sometimes found Crankshaft good. I decided to pull up a quick vertical slice of 20 years of Crankshaft’s 4th of July strips. Some are festive, some are fun, some are nonsensical, and some are just dumb. But seen as a whole, the downward trajectory is clear. Let me know which of these, if any you find funny/infuriating.
Love you all!
(Sundays for the first several years weren’t available, so that’s why some years are skipped. )
Son of Stuck Funky 
Thanks, as always, for your good work CBH. I wish all of you and yours a safe and happy Independence Day.
Many years ago, I spent an entire Saturday watching the rise and fall of a top-level fighter, going through his early fights, his championship reign, and reliving the melancholy of the tail end of his career. Over eight wasted hours, I was left with a memorable take.
Thanks to CBH for the window into TB’s decline, like T.S. Eliot’s “heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.”
There’s something buzzing alright.
I really liked the one about Homer loosing his hearing. The artwork is beautiful.
Happy 4th of July to CBH, and everybody with SOSF!
🌈🔥☄️💥🎆🎇🧨🫂♥️💖❤️🌺💐🌹
Pardon me for intruding.
Dan Davis gets a lot of crap, here, for recycling artwork. While at the same time, folks who criticize this, extol Chuck Ayers as some kind of wondrous genius, because he draw Funky Winkerbean forever and his shoddy terrible craftsmanship should be awarded kudos because…well, there’s feels involved.
Well, Dan Davis did the work I would have done, had I been handed Crankshaft and was told “Draw. And also write, until I kill my prestige strip. At which time I’ll take over the ‘writing’ and drive it into the ‘Lisa’s Story’ grave.” I would have done the minimal work required and cashed the checks with no guilt.
Dan Davis is the hero of the Funkyverse. Chuck Ayers is the worst enabler ever.
We’re on a spectrum of disagreement here, BC, and I relish every minute of it. I think Ayers at his best was charming. But I agree that Ayers at his worst was a lazy droopy faced nightmare.
Constantly pointing out the art swipes is a crusade for me now, because I was caught out comparing Davis favorably to Ayers in the past, saying that Davis was better at drawing than Ayers. When I realized this was only because Davis was picking less nightmarish Ayers references and pasting them together, I felt like I’d been tricked.
I’ve basically turned into one of those assholes online always correcting people that the pyramids weren’t built by slaves or that Cristopher Columbus knew the world was round before he left.
The embarassment of having once believed a falsehood COMPELLS me to correct it every time it is seen. It’s like trying to go back and save myself for ever being that naive.
You are perfectly right in that the Crankshaft we’re getting these days doesn’t deserve original artwork… I have no personal animosity toward whoever is actually behind the ‘Davis’ intern conglomerate putting the strip together. I wouldn’t call him a hero, but gotta respect the grift.
You’re the best, BC.
YOU are the best, CBH. You can see the art behind the smirk. I, on the other hand, can only look at the effort and judge what I would have done. Tonight, I’ve drawn six different positions of white gloves for what might appear in a future project. Or they might not. Had I access to an archive of white glove drawings, well…
YOU are the heroine that the Batiukverse needs. (That is intended as a compliment, though I can see other interpretations.)
Nooo, compliments! The bane of my existence!!! ❤
Future project you say? Funky related or not, you know we're gonna want to see it when you deem it done!
Well, why should Davis put any work into his art? The art is clearly unnecessary to for Batty’s “storytelling.” Go ahead, white out all the art, leaving only the word balloons. Does the strip lose anything? Does the story disappear? Nope. The art is superfluous, because to Batty it’s all about the words.
If anything, the Funkyverse lends itself well to re-using art. All the characters ever do is stand around and talk at each other, in the same handful of locations. Rarely is the art necessary for a joke to work. Even more rarely is a character expressing an emotion beyond smirking and eye-rolling.
Which reminds me of some of Bill Watterson’s commentary on his “Calvin and Hobbes” strips in his collections, particularly the 10th anniversary book. He talked a lot about how he worked, and how he was really an artist first and a writer second. He noted that on several strips, he felt the story itself was kinda weak, so he went all-out on the art. Said something along the lines of “good art can save weak writing, but good writing can’t save weak art.” I think he’s right in the context of a comic.
Not that I’ve ever seen what I’d call great art in either “Funky” or “Krankus.” But I’ve never heard Batty refer to himself as an artist, only as a writer.
To paraphrase the Simpsons: Celebrate the independence of our nation by blowing up a small part of it.
Happy 4th of july, everyone!
Seen online today: “For several Americans today, this 4th of July is the last weekend they’ll have all their fingers.”
For Becky, that was July 4, 1997.
A huge thumbs up for your comment.
Sorry for posting this. It’s in bad taste. Someone sent it to me, and at the time, I thought it was kind of funny. I remembered @Bill the Spluts post here. (hanging head in shame)
No offense taken if the moderators decide to remove it.
When I was growing up, my brothers never took firework safety seriously. They would often engage in dangerous activities like bottle rocket fights, and my younger brother even used to sit on firecrackers before they exploded. They were lucky.
Back in 1980, when I was a semi-responsible 26 years old, I launched bottle rockets from the cast on my cracked wrist.
We all did dumb things.
Not to discount the hazard of playing with firecrackers, but I will note that one of the largest causes of digit amputation is (drum roll please) doors. Seems several thousand fingers a year are snipped off by doors closing. Having (as a child) smashed my thumb bloodily (though not enough to require removal) in a car door, I am not surprised. Sharp edges abound on these things.
BTW, apparently a Bad Internet Night: I spent an hour or so earlier unsuccessfully trying to establish an account with the DNR so I could renew the registration on my boat, and now all the post authors are listed as “[1]” on this comment board.
It’s bad enough that Ed’s a destructive nitwit who seems to take delight in ruining things for other people without having to deal with the universal response to his gracelessness: futilely frowning at a man who wants to smite the world to punish it for punishing him for his own laziness, arrogance, ineptitude and gutlessness.
Batiuk tries to downplay Crankshaft’s assholery by giving him a Hidden Heart of Gold. But it doesn’t work. His assholery is too big, while his good deeds are too small and too out of character.
Kranky has a heart of gold: all cold, hard and yellow.
And his attempts to explain away his loutishness only serve to make him a worse, lazier and more reckless nincompoop. He’s not stupid because it took him until he was in his sixties to learn to read and write. He’s stupid because he never saw it as a problem until long after the fact.
…even though his illiteracy was supposedly the reason he missed out on a promotion to the major leagues! You’d think that would have motivated him to learn to read, but I guess not. Just another resident of the Funkyverse suffering in silence for a lifetime, instead of making a small effort to fix a solvable problem. And then being held up as some kind of noble victim of it all.
Wow, a great July 4th strip today. Why would ignore the holiday? Today is perfect for a lazy one panel strip with fireworks or a grill scene.
I’m just glad it wasn’t about Lisa’s Story. I think Lisa would have liked that.
A few interesting things popped out at me in that useful retrospective. Great idea, CBH, to trace the decline and… continued decline.
The P1 art of strip #6 was recycled not only for the current Crankshaft masthead, but also for P1 of strip #13. I have a feeling that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Seeing these strips reminded me of the Ralph Meckler/cute carhop arc. In my opinion, it’s the best arc of the last decade, and actually a very well-done piece of work. Let me count the ways.
1. It’s a slice-of-life arc that actually feels real and not forced
2. No terrible gags or breaking of character
3. Minimal word balloons and several wordless or nearly wordless strips
4. Doesn’t drag on — tells the story quickly, then ends
5. Ralph’s radio plays “I Can’t Get Started” by Bunny Berigan (1937). He tells Sandy, the cute carhop, that it’s “before her time.” (Is Ralph as old as Ed? Is 1937 actually his time?) She shows polite interest but clearly isn’t going to suddenly embrace Big Band music the way young people in the Crankerbeaniverse embrace 50s serials and Silver Age comics. This is a lot more realistic than anything we saw in FW.
6. Ralph’s reaction is poignant and realistic for a lonely old guy. He mistakes the girl’s friendliness for some kind of affection. (A surprisingly common mistake for men, and I’m really surprised TB had the perspicacity to notice it.)
7. Ralph’s letdown is realistic. A coworker at the restaurant tells him Sandy is gone and tells Sandy in the back that some creepy guy was asking for her. She thanks him for lying on her behalf. Ralph goes home sadly and… is sad. That’s the end. And for that arc, that’s realistic. There doesn’t need to be anything more.
Was this a late-in-life return to form? Was it ghostwritten? It’s such a startling standout in a sea of crap.
I agree, it was a nice arc. No comic books, no Lisa, no nonsense.
Tom Batiuk can still write a good comic strip once in a blue moon. There was one day in the CTE arc I really liked, where Bull is angrily demanding the car keys and looks like he might actually hit Linda. And the punchline was “caring for someone with CTE has made me a skilled liar.” Which is genuinely insightful, if you’ve ever had to do that.
The Ralph Meckler/Car hop/Bunny Berrigan story arc was indeed a good story arc. Ralph got all spruced up and took his trumpet to show Sandy. The story arc ended with a dejected Ralph sitting all alone on his front porch. I genuinely felt sorry for the guy.
Also, I joined Disqus during that story arc (Joined Jul 11, 2018). There was a pompous Bunny Berrigan know-it-all telling everybody to “Get a grip!” I created an account to mock the loud mouth. Too bad those comments are now lost. Thanks a heap, Comics Kingdom.
@The Duck of Death, I have a comment stuck in moderation. Your bad luck must be rubbing off on me. 🤨😩😫
LEROY!!!
Leeeeroy…. Oh, LEEEEEROOOOOY……..
Just remember to be patriotic today!
This, along with “I can get her to the hospital faster,” is Les Moore’s defining moment. Look at him charging blithely into a goddam terror zone. He’s too late, has no clue what to do, and no skills that could possibly help anyway. His primary concern is making sure everyone notices that he ran all the way down there. Even though driving would have been faster. What a glory hound.
Never saw the original. Was the lettering really “USA”? No one was fired?
No, it was originally “LISA!!”, but it looked a LOT like Les was shouting “USA!!”. So I just did a little tweaking and closed the small gap between the “L” and “I”.
The original for comparison:
Thanks. I’ve seen it posted several times and thought it hilarious. I can see how someone taking a quick glance, or a slight printing error could definitely be seen as USA
My current reading is Tom Hanks’s “Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,* which includes a couple of comic-book sequences.
One reminds me of the reason Marvel changed the name of the photographer in *Millie the Model.* “Flicker” Holbrook became “Clicker,” because an editor was afraid that the “L” and “I” might merge into one another and create a “U.”
In one panel of Hanks’s story, that does happen, and it doesn’t seem as if someone is going to “flick” an igniter, so much as have intercourse with it!
Hanks generally makes up his own comics in the book, but his reference to *Little Dot* is anachronistic. She first appeared in 1949, the year *Flash Comics* was discontinued, not in 1947.
The greatest moment in FW history.
I’m sorry, but the greatest moment in FW history would be him screaming “ZANZIBAR!!”
This scene is almost as Narm-tastic as Masky McDeath. Look at this nonsense. Les is running into the shot just as the police first arrive, which means he was half a block away, or he’s The Flash. (Bear in mind Les is known for being unathletic.) There’s no fire trucks yet, and no crowd has formed, but the heat and smoke suggest it’s been burning awhile. The art is almost designed to reassure you that Les and Lisa are in no danger whatsoever, so she is safe to pointlessly die of cancer so Les can have his writing career.
The “LISA” looking more like “USA” is the cherry on top. The word “narm” itself came from a similar incident, where a character was trying to say “numb arm.”
In fairness, he was at Montoni’s at the time, which doesn’t appear to be that far from the post office. (I’m 99% sure that’s Montoni’s in the upper right of the panel, with the stairs to the upstairs apartment/comic book shop/whatever facing us, and the two figures standing next to the building look like Tony and Funky.) (In the original story, the explosion broke the windows at Montoni’s, and we can see broken windows on the other nearby buildings as well.) (It’s kind of hard to tell some of the details, though, given the resolution of the picture. Sometimes I think CSI lies about computers’ ability to “enhance” pictures just by enlarging them.)
(Granted, the layout is kind of odd; the apartment stairs are usually shown to be in an alley, but the distance between Montoni’s and the neighboring building appears even wider than the streets, like there’s a small empty lot next to Montoni’s?)
Honestly, the more impressive thing may be that the emergency services (the police at the post office, and there’s a fire truck passing Montoni’s with an ambulance right in front of it) managed to get there in the time it took Les to run down the block. Either they knew something was about to happen and were already prepared to move out, or Les is REALLY slow.
If the bomb blast was close enough to blow Montoni’s windows out, the post office was right next door, or the blast was so powerful it would have vaporized Lisa. Probably both. We somehow have an Oklahoma City-level act of domestic terrorism that everybody walked away from, and did no permanent civic damage. All in the name of talk radio, which the story blamed for the incident. Give me a break, Tom.
This is what happens when “storytellers” put fishing for awards first, and storytelling a distant second.
Between this and the “bouncing Betty” incident with Wally, we can safely add “explosives and their physics” to the list of things Batiuk knows nothing about.
Today’s CS:
After like 3 years of interminable Mayonnaise Jarre smuggery, it’s just random strips, teleporting in from Dimension X. I wanted Tom to tell me how I was going to classical concerts wrong!
But…but…who are Pam and Jeff? His cousins? Two golden retrievers? The ghosts of the unquiet dead?! I need DNA tests on every Crank family member to get the joke!! (checks Wiki) Oh. Pam and Jeff are the names of 2 of Ed’s nose blackheads.
Looks like it’s scrap week. Batty is using up the stack of garbage strips he has laying around his studio.
I guess The Valentine is already bankrupt and closed down.
It’s garbage week, and TB never sorts his recyclables.
It’s
plotpourricrappourri week.Contemporary Crankshaft “comic strips” are so good because they’re made with such care. TB just wants them to “age” properly like fine wine. /s
Tom Batiuk: I will publish no comic strip before its time.
If that were true, he’d never publish a strip.
Going down the list of July 4 strips…
1) Wow that’s a downer. Hey, it’s the fourth, let’s celebrate by getting all maudlin about how one of our friends is losing her ability to live independently. (Never mind that the whole point of assisted living is to provide an option to live as independently as possible, rather than being in a nursing home.)
2) Actually a decent strip. This kind of slightly irritated old man observing something obvious while deflating a cliche is Krankus at his best. Tom gets a thumbs up for this one.
3) Back to the suffering and misery of old age.
4) Ewww… so Kranky would serve his family burgers that might contain Shards O’Glass™? Makes his casual mailbox vandalism look downright tame.
5) Totally out of character for a guy who’s constantly blowing stuff up, but what’s continuity when there’s a weak pun to be made?
6) Wait… a string of firecrackers in the BBQ grill? This man needs to be put in an institution for his own good. And what’s the setup? Did the previous day’s strip establish that he’s planning to light the grill with the firecrackers? Or has the put the end of the string into the already hot grill, and will the next day’s strip have them exploding from the other end and blowing his hand off?
7) Never use one word when you can say the same thing with ten.
8) Meh.
9) Actually a pretty real concern. I’m not sure I’d dig into the crack between seat and back in an NYC cab either. But a clunky setup and delivery.
10) Hmm. Copyright 2014. Nine years after Hurricane Katrina made the phrase “FEMA trailer” into a late-night comedian’s joke. Think anybody even remembered what Batty was referring to?
11) Going to the bank on the Fourth of July. When the banks are closed. Right.
12) An OK riff on the joke that only in baseball and weather forecasting can you be paid for being wrong 2/3 of the time. Not a great execution, but I’ll take it.
13) Ralph is gonna die, but he’s gonna die with a full belly. And he’s not going to get laid.
14) Yeah, charcoal lighter fluid is radioactive. Right.
15) For a guy who likes to wear his liberal/progressive credentials on his sleeve, Batty sure likes to have his characters echo conservative talking points.
16) The long-awaited crossover with Family Circus. “Imnot” meet “Ida Know.”
17) Another of Batty’s incomplete strips. Where is this going, if anywhere? Did the 7/5 strip continue this into a joke? Enquiring minds want to know.
GoComics will let you read these. The week of July 4 2022 saw Ed trying to exterminate bees that burrowed into his house.
https://www.gocomics.com/crankshaft/2022/07/05
Thanks for the link. It appears that in 2022 Tom just blew off the entire fourth of July week in favor of a series about Ed doing predictably dumb things around a bee nest. The closest thing to a joke was when he caulked up the entrance to the nest, and in the last panel Jfff is dealing with bees in the kitchen.
The next strip, on 7/11, is only notable for the word “reno” (for renovation) leaking from “FW” into “CS.” And being applied to road repairs. I guess that was the joke.
Never mind that the whole point of assisted living is to provide an option to live as independently as possible, rather than being in a nursing home.
This is a great observation. When Batiuk does write a coherent joke, it often misses the point, in a way that betrays his ignorance of the subject matter.
Other comments:
6. This is a perfect example of Batiuk’s visual jokes being too extreme and too tame at the same time. Those people shouldn’t be recoiling in horror; they should be running for their lives. And if Ed actually lights this, we need to see the aftermath, but Batiuk always cuts away from it. Next panel: the fire department putting out the harmless fire that does no permanent damage, and someone saying “oh, that wacky bus driver!”
11. The penny sock is rude and disgusting. At least take the pennies out of the sock first, you complete slob.
13. If he was going to have a cheeseburger, french fries and a milkshake already, the onion rings don’t make it any worse.
16. This at least needs to be something that sounds like a name, like Y.B. Careful.
Yeah, that penny sock bit always grosses me out.
And for 13, Ralph is old enough to eat whatever he wants and a real writer could make a funny strip out of this. Something like: “At my age it’s a miracle that I even woke up this morning, I’m eating whatever I want!”
that penny sock bit always grosses me out.
I retired from 45 years of retail recently. We’ve currently got a heat index of 99F here in CT. You know what’s super gross? Bra money. Grosser? SOCK MONEY.
Okay, there was that time a woman wearing a crop top with a strip club logo on it (no, not the Valentine) paid me entirely in ones.
There is a grosser way to carry money. One of my motorcycle supply catalogs lists “Greg Frazier Stash Pockets.” These are little cloth pockets, a bit larger than standard US currency, that are intended to be Velcro’d into your motorcycle boots so that you can sneak cash past the guards at the Corruptistan border on your ’round the world motorcycle trip. Seems there are some places even the greediest third-world border guard won’t look.
Yes, this is a real product, made by a company in Duluth and named for a famous round-the-world motorcycle traveler (who may have the stinkiest feet on the planet). They are also priced at a ridiculous 25 bucks.
7/6:
Well, it’s sort of a pun. But you know what happened 17 years ago this month? Twitter was founded. I’ll bet sometime between 2006 and today someone has made this “witticism.” And when Tom wrote it a year ago, he really thought Twitter would last forever! Like when he thought “MyFace” would be relevant!
In tomorrow’s strip, Crank says: “Sure glad I put my century of life savings into these Bored Apes NFTs!”
That’s more of a 2027 joke. And the punchline will be that he should have invested in the Lisa’s Story NFTs.
7/7:
omigod I can’t stop laughing. I’d have to start laughing first.
Is it just me, or are CS strips like 4 panel jokes that just abruptly end in panel 3?
Meanwhile, Cayla is saying “LES! Hurry up!”
Les hisses as he covers his reptilian skin: “I’m putting the Hu-Man flesh skin on as fast as I can!” (angrily eats a large bug; smugs when he does)
“I am Number Two! You are Number Six!”
Patrick MacGoohan: “And who is Number One?”
“I…guess everyone right now?”
(They run down beaches chased by Rover)