Well, I’m back, from Outer Space (Seattle). I just walked in to see Cranky sitting there with that dumb look upon his face.
Specifically this one,
And if Cranky seems unfazed to be haunted by the disembodied soul of a former coworker appearing to give him advice, well…
This isn’t Ol’ Ed’s first Dickensian Rodeo.
Once again, Tom is pulling an old running gag outta his tattered old gag bag. Treating us to an entire week of that famed Bus Barn mentor and legend, Pop Clutch. And giving me another opportunity to sit awkwardly on the floor of my kitchen taking pictures of Crankshaft trade paperbacks that I’m holding open and flat with my toes like some kind of spy gorilla.
Interesting to see Pop in the ectoplasm this week, as I don’t know if he’d ever been visually represented in the strip. But he goes way way back. Getting about a mention a year for decades.
Don’t know when he went from retired to dead. But in the first few years of the strip he seems to still be in the land of the living. And who knows, given Batiuk’s record, maybe he still isn’t dead. Ghosts aren’t proof of death in this universe. As Ghost Eugene, Ghost Tony, and Ghost Phil have all proven.
I see people commenting a lot that Crankshaft is a terrible driver who should have been fired. He consistently aims for kids missing his bus, kids stepping into puddles, backing up traffic, running over mailboxes, and mothers chasing him. But when you really dig into the culture of The Bus Barn in Crankshaft, you realize this is some weird nightmare reality, one in many in a multiverse of madness, where bus drivers are rewarded for these things and could even be fired if they refuse to engage.
You might look at all these disparate strips and go, ‘Hey, this doesn’t make sense! When did Pop retire? Didn’t they ask for his resignation? How does this all work?’ But I forgive it. These strips are still in the good old days of anything for a punchline. A time when the Funkyverse, Zucker style, was ready to throw an anachronistic pottery Nazi off a roof for a joke, and then immediately cut away without explaining.
After flipping through my paperbacks, which cover the first five or so years of Crankshaft, I jumped onto the GoComics archives and, sure enough, Pop Clutch was still getting the occastional shoutout.
Oh, and I found some additional Johnson Girl material as well!
And there were some of you wondering if she ever got some comeuppance, well I found these.
And then…in 2004.
So here’s a question for our commenting audience? Crankshaft has always had it’s share of callbacks and retrospectives, but with two sets of callbacks in a row, and remembering how nostalgia tinged the last year of Funky was, could it be The Crankpocalypse is near?
Thanks for Banana Jr 6000 for his great post while I was gone! I hope to get future installments in his TB Tropes series soon. As someone with amateur literary aspirations, I’m always looking to learn more to improve my hobby. And you can learn a lot from dissecting a trainwreck.
Happy Harvest!
Son of Stuck Funky 
The dead giveaway is how gutted he looks when it looks as if he might get his comeuppance for being an assbucket. He really does think that the point of life is his running over people and not having to answer to anyone.
(In the last strip we see) Cranky driving home after a colonoscopy. I assume this means he had it done without sedation — all the better for a discussion with Dr Johnson.
[I’ve had the procedue done without sedation — it was the right choice for me, except for the hassle of clearing it with the medical establishment.]
But when you really dig into the culture of The Bus Barn in Crankshaft, you realize this is some weird nightmare reality, one in many in a multiverse of madness, where bus drivers are rewarded for these things and could even be fired if they refuse to engage.
But it isn’t. There’s no dialogue or activity in the strips that suggests this world runs on perverse incentives. Nor does it have any other surreal elements. It’s… all together now… “a quarter inch from reality.”
You can certainly interpret the world of Crankshaft as a twisted hellhole. But the Funkyverse spends so much time enforcing its own explanation of the proceedings – Lisa’s death was a global catastrophe, Les has suffered more than anyone in human history, Dinkle really is the world’s greatest band director – that it doesn’t leave room for alternate interpretations.
I don’t know… the line about the school board asking for his resignation the day after the “Masked Mother” finally caught the bus seems to indicate that the whole school system was in on it.
On the other hand, the principal made him pick up all the cupcakes he caused a child to spill.
So… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, it’s also inconsistent. Batiuk changes reality as needed to make today’s joke work. There is no coherent overall tone or canonal fact. The anachronistic pottery Nazi in Top Secret! works because the rest of the movie is just as silly. The Funkyverse is more like a shattered pottery Nazi in Untergang.
Reading a painful amount of Crankshaft shows there were plenty of perverse incentives on display, at least among the community of School Bus Drivers, from the Bus Barn score sheets, to the Bus Driver’s Rodeo, to the Bus Drivers’ Awards Banquets. Characters never presented as meanspirited in any other context, like Andy, Rocky, and Lena all participate. I can pull some strips if anyone is interested. They range from funny, to boring, to downright abysmal.
The inconsistency is whether or not the principal and school board were for or against the bus drivers being purposely terrible. That flipped on the ‘whichever is funnier’ dime.
Inconsistent yes, but early Cranky and Funky were pretty inconsistent. Which isn’t out of the ordinary for sitcom/gag-a-day storytelling.
Inconsistency doesn’t bother me as much in jokes as it does when someone is trying to be serious. I’ll suspend disbelief for a laugh, but not if you’re asking me to grieve or preaching at me.
Inconsistency doesn’t bother me as much in jokes as it does when someone is trying to be serious.
Fair enough. But I draw the line at actively undermining your own joke, by having Crankshaft pick the girl up to set up 2 1/2 weeks about how he failed to prevent the girl from boarding his bus. Rule of Funny only goes so far.
“But I draw the line at actively undermining your own joke, by having Crankshaft pick the girl up to set up 2 1/2 weeks about how he failed to prevent the girl from boarding his bus.”
Oh, when it comes to this arc, the inconsistency is infuriating. And it would be so easy to fix. Just flip a few things. The strips of Grandma J trying to get little Cindy to catch the bus via trickery should have come first. Maybe with a few strips of Cranky wondering about who this wiley old lady who knows all his tricks is. After all Cindy’s last name probably isn’t Johnson. Maybe then transition to whatever stupid Pop Clutch dream nightmare we’re having now.
Then, have the strip where Grandma J lifts her bathrobe, finally disarming Cranky with the power of elderly lust. When Cranky stops the bus we get the strips of introductions and realizations of past history. Last strip of this arc is the, ‘No hitting on my Grandma”, one.
i think the Funkyverse is essentially an form of “Hell on Earth” where bad people (like Crankshaft and Les Moore) get rewared and good people (like Wally Winkerbean and Ralph Meckler) get severely punished or much worse
Well, there is at least one other Batiukverse character like Andy Clark… in that his name is also Andy Clark.
Also, Rocky should NEVER be allowed to take off his hat again, I don’t care if ‘Shaft is getting an award or not. The only person who can pull off the Clint Howard haircut is Clint Howard… and even then he only really does it in Rock ‘N Roll High School.
I’m guessing the woman is supposed to be black, but it looks more like she has a five o’clock shadow going on.
Better than giving your child a toy made out of the GUN THAT MURDERED HIS GRANDFATHER.
I do have to admit, at least Pm’s “Christ, what an asshole” look in that last strip is the appropriate reaction to Ed.
Now we just have to figure out how Batiuk managed to remember that The Little Johnson Girl’s name was “Amy”, yet somehow forgot things like Mopey or Flash’s last names, or the name of Rachel’s son.
probably the reason why Batiuk is forgetting Mopey McMopester’s surname and Rachel’s son is probably because he’s too busy focusing on comic covers, Dead Saint Lisa and Crankshaft
Words, words, words
In an issue of *Green Arrow,* Oliver Queen goes to England, and we have a three-panel gag about the slowness of clearing customs.
Panel 1: A couple behind Oliver has a “Just Married” sign about them.
Panel 2: The woman in the couple is pregnant.
Panel 3: As Oliver reaches the clerk, the couple have three children of varying ages.
I suppose that with only three small panels, *Crankshaft* does the best it can, but if you don’t drive — as I don’t — it’s not side-splittingly funny.
“I grow old, I grow old/some I sent up for life have been paroled,” as “The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover” would have it.
Speaking of humor: the psychological view of humor is that it’s hostility, and I think the hostility of Ed doesn’t work for me because it’s aimed at people who are relatively powerless. It’s why “Columbo” usually had the good lieutenant face off against rich and powerful people; had there been more episodes like “Swan Song,” with Johnny Cash, where the killer is not to the manner born, it wouldn’t have been as memorable.
The Little Johnson Girl seems to be more competent than Lisa’s doctors — or else for her revenge is a dish to be tasted not only cold, but slow.
> If a high school kid is still riding the bus, they deserve to be bullied.
huh what’s the logic on that one? Some of us lived more than a few miles from school, and also weren’t rich enough to have our parents give us cars on our 16th birthdays.
Good point. My school was small enough that almost every high schooler was expected to participate in extracurriculars both before and after school. So barely any highschoolers ever rode the bus at all. I rode it home once my junior year and I felt like I was a zoo keeper that had fallen into the marmoset pen.
CBH:
A simile to cherish, much like Philip Marlowe’s view of Moose Malloy in *Farewell, My Lovely*:
“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
― Raymond Chandler
Bravo!
What a fascinating trip down Crankshaft Memory Lane, CBH. While I didn’t actually laugh at those early strips, I do recognize the humor in them. Really, that was pretty cromulent comic-strip writing. As one of TB’s fiercest critics, I’m honor-bound to acknowledge when he got it right.
What the hell happened?
My theory: A tone shift that was only partially acknowledged. You can either set your work in a fantasy world where vicious bus drivers are celebrated for their viciousness, OR you do 1/4″ from reality. You really can’t straddle the line, and that’s what TB has been trying to do for the last decade or more in Crankshaft. Once you do A Very Special Crankshaft (eg, Crankshaft Learns to Read), you’ve left the land wherein torturing schoolchildren is funny.
That’s going to be a TBTrope I plan to explore at length. I even have a name for it.
The Crankpocalypse is def happening in 2024, as BatBoy himself has already said. But it could be sooner. It was this time last year that we found out that Funknarok was coming in December.
You guys are smarter than me, which I admit is not a super high bar to climb; you could go to the produce section of your local grocery and grab a random root vegetable and you’d have a 50/50 chance that it’s smarter than me. (Yeah, but I used a semicolon! TRY THAT, zucchini!)
Is September when cartoonist’s contracts come up? I would not be surprised if Crank ends this year. The Johnson Girl wins.
I could go on, but that cucumber is super giving me the side-eye.
Oh Splut! Yes, you charm me.
Hypnotize me through and through.
Like a fool lord, I’ve been chasing
Yellow bus driver’s lying blue eyes.
Crank, a short time, I have loved you
And I thought that you loved me too.
But just this morning , over the puddle
Your lying blue eyes just told on you.
Your bus didn’t stop to let me ride.
Even hiked my robe by the driveway
Fifteen blocks later, I did catch you
Now social media done owns you!
(After a 3am bathroom break, see what you make me do to fall back asleep, Splut!)
The consensus here seems to be that The End is Nigh for Crankshaft. TB has mentioned “the Burnings” will be featured in 2024, but has he actually hinted that Crankshaft will end then? Or are folks here just trying to read the tea leaves?
I’m not on board with the theory that Crankshaft is ending in 2024. Wishful thinking, sez I. Crankshaft just picked up a bunch of new papers … which means I don’t think the syndicate wants it to go away. And I can’t imagine TB shutting it down voluntarily.
I agree. I don’t think Gannett/USA Today would have added it for all of their papers if it was about to be cancelled.
Now I’m not so sure either. If “The Burnings” are the end of the Funkyverse, why would he do a Burnings story in Crankshaft in Fall?
1. Crankshaft will somehow continue after the burnings arc.
2. The strip will end later in October or so, not at the end of the year.
3. Reasons that make sense only to Tom Batiuk.
So hold everything here. Am I correct in assuming that the little girl Crankshaft used to torture for his own amusement grew up to be a doctor, then got her revenge on Ed by rectally assaulting him? Because that’s how it reads. This is why I still refuse to follow “Crankshaft”. It’s like FW’s convicted sex-offender cousin.
I’m cutting out today’s Crankshaft so I can yell at it every time I can’t find something on the Internet Archive.
A new Annotated Funky, and it… huh, that can’t be right, can it? It actually gives an interesting and not-at-all obvious piece of information! Byrne based the design of Robbie, the bookstore robot, on the robots from Magnus, Robot Fighter. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have made the connection, both because I haven’t read a lot of Magnus and because Robbie only sort of looks like them, but it’s not supposed to be an exact copy. (Of course, Batiuk calls it an “hommage”, and calls the comic Magnus the Robot Fighter, because proofreading is for chumps.)
On the other hand, he also points out that not only is the picture on the wall of Lillian, but it’s also of Lillian accepting her Ohioana Library Book Award. And he says of the Robbie/Magnus thing:
Batiuk. Batiuk never changes.
Honestly, what did he need being “saved” from? Did he think he was going to end up in dreary and hard path of office/retail work before comics gave him the “spark” of inspiration that led him down the rough path and a big lucky break in the comic business? No career’s sunshine and rainbows, Watterson’s books talk about how much his art career was a struggle before and even during Calvin and Hobbes.
As a robot affectionato, I at least appreciate the inspiration behind the bookstore robot finally being explained, though I only half see the resemblance, I admit. Only in the torso, and I’d certainly would want to know more about the idea behind its wheeled lower half.
Plus that does lead to the still-unexplained logic behind this abandoned book shop. Does the robot just never leave the building or can they specially articulate to climb steps? How sentient is it, is it self-sustaining who could even maintain it if it’s in an abandoned area of “Badlands” (assuming they don’t have a sort of national-preserve situation going on). And how the bloody heck is it functioning as an “active” store where future people are still cordial enough to “buy” the books? The sign’s not even on right!
Maybe some of these will be answered over the next Cranky year when we get a story right out of Rocky 4 when DSH John buys Lillian the robot as a birthday gift after she finds Action Comics #1 under her bathtub.
I believe folks on here were making the Magnus connection to Batiukverse robots a few years back, the first such robot appearing in a 2013 Starbuck Jones Sunday comic cover strip illustrated by Joe Staton.
Magnus was an action-packed comic that plays its whole concept unwaveringly straight (to silly, but enjoyable results). I’m surprised TB ever got anything out of it.
I always think of the character as “Magnut, Robot Biter,” because of a parody in *Not Brand Echh* in which he fought “Ironed Man.”
I (North Am) what I am, an’ tha’s all I (South Am)…
Yes, we see this word again and again, repeated like a mantra: Saved. Saved. Comics saved me.
He says it in his own writings and he puts it into the mouths of his characters.
Dammit, saved him from WHAT? It’s flatly incoherent to say repeatedly that you were saved but never even hint at what you were saved from.
Boredom? Depression? An unbearably tense and abusive home? A dreary future in a factory? The attentions of icky girls? Hopelessness? Teen angst? Existential dread? Terminal Weltschmerz?
We’re meant to be moved, even awed by the use of the word “saved,” with its exalted religious implications of one’s soul being saved by the Holy Book.
Instead, we roll our eyes at the typical Batiukian vagueness.