In all seriousness, today’s Crankshaft floored me. Again, we’re not going to make this a Crankshaft blog, but this is a big enough development to talk about.
Here was my initial reaction:
I absolutely didn’t expect this. What does it say about the Funkyverse that starting a story with a plot point, and then actually resolving that plot point, is a shocking outcome?
And honestly, it’s kind of sweet. I have to give Pete credit for an elegant and well-executed proposal. Sure beats Eugene’s “check yes or no” snail mail proposal to Lucy, John Howard’s awkwardness, and that “in the main” word salad Les spewed at Cayla. Mindy’s “I must be crazy” reaction was also sweet. She is crazy, and not for the reasons she thinks, but she finally got what she wanted. For one day, I’m rooting for this couple. They’ll probably destroy that tomorrow morning, though.
Because I think these are the first shots of the Funky Winkervasion. The annexation of Crankshaft by Funky Winkerbean has been building for awhile, but this arc is the declaration of war. Mason Jarre showing up to buy the Valentine theater, as forced as it was, at least had some connections to long-running events in Centerville. Montoni’s wasn’t even relevant in its own strip; its closure was trivial. But here it is, being brought back to life, presumably so it can become the new social hub of Crankshaft – which is set in a town some distance away. That’s not how small-town social hubs work.
Will tomorrow’s strip be more sweetness and light, or is it straight back to Pete’s nonsense plan to revive a dead restaurant with this dollar-store corporate mascot? Or worse, discussions of how they’re going to merge their comic books?
I want to hear what you all think about this, so I hope you’ll weigh in in the comments.
Son of Stuck Funky 
I checked the archives once for the Greatest Story Ever Told. You know, Talking Murder Monkey When All Else Was Silent. The day we were gobsmacked with the entirely normal revelation that he can talk!!…I think there were 16 comments. You get more than that in 16 minutes now.
I’m not complaining.
While this is an elegant and well-executed proposal by Batiukverse standards, I don’t believe it achieves such acclaim by real life standards. I mean, I’ve seen worse, much worse even, but I wouldn’t clap for this one just because of that.
Issue is that it revolves pretty much entirely around Pete. Of course, marriage proposers do not have to exclusively pander to the proposee, places and elements special to them can and should be part of a proposal as well, but the person being proposed to should feel special for reasons beyond just the fact that they are being proposed to. Doubly so when they’ve just sat through a business presentation involving a dead restaurant and a cardboard Bibendum.
How meaningful this proposal situation actually should be to Mindy would be clearer if we ever spent time with this couple or if Mindy ever said anything about Montoni’s being special to her. I guess we can grant Pete the benefit of the doubt that Montoni’s means something to Mindy and to them as a couple, as she did once work there and the two had at least a couple of dates there. Even assuming that, Pete gets an “eh…” at best here.
I was limiting the scope to just the proposal itself. But I agree with you 100%, there’s plenty to object to in the larger picture. He shouldn’t have done both proposals on the same night (and also in front of his business partner). It merges the business and work proposals in ways they shouldn’t be. My parents owned a small business, and if I learned anything from it, it’s to keep work and family separate. It borders on manipulative, but I’ll give Pete the benefit of the doubt for now.
You didn’t even mention the worst part: how little Pete cares about what Mindy might want. Maybe she likes working at Atomik Komix, and doesn’t want to quit the industry. It doesn’t even occur to him to ask.
And hey, Tom Batiuk, what happened to empowering women in comic books? Shouldn’t it be a bad thing that one’s dropping out of the industry to get her MRS degree?
We have to understand that Batiuk feels as if he’s being bullied and manipulated when people ask him the cruel, unfair and incomprehensible question “Shouldn’t a wedding proposal be special for both of them?”
The man, after all, has no theory of mind. People are being stubborn and mean when they want their likes and dislikes injected into the conversation because people only pretend they don’t like things to be cruel to Batiuk and to bully him and make him miserable.
Well, it’s hard for Bats to undershoot my very low expectations, but I’m agog today.
No more talk of marriage. No smiling. No hugging. No dreaming about a future together; no planning a wedding. That’s all done. Today Pete talks about lancing a boil.
Mindy asks the obvious question that would occur to any woman who just accepted a long-awaited proposal: If they buy Montoni’s, won’t Pete miss writing comix? No, says Pete. He’ll be like a doctor who removes a boil for nothing: A freelancer!
P(B)M again horns in to ask essentially the same question Mindy just asked, the one Pete just answered.
What a romantic, intimate marriage this will be, what with the P(B)M there to add inane color commentary to every important moment.
Plus, even with all the fun of investing in resurrecting a failed restaurant, running the place, and freelance writing for comix, I’m sure they’ll find oodles of time and energy for building the relationship.
As an aside, I wonder how long Bats held on to that brilliant “freelancer” witticism before trotting it out at the most “romantic” time?
What a romantic, intimate marriage this will be, what with the P(B)M there to add inane color commentary to every important moment
THERE IT IS! The elevator pitch for the new sitcom, “Dork and Mindy and Pizza Monster”!
Every ep ends with Pete and Mindless failing, eating only the old, sodden pizza that is Montoni’s no one ordered (PETE: “That random family comes back tomorrow, I bet!”), while P(B)M says “Sorry about quitting komix NOW, morons?!” (laugh track explodes; followed by end credits, and an announcer saying “Next Week: Which of them will die of starvation first? Tune in for more laughs!”
How long before we see a sideways Sunday of Pizza Monster #1?
This proposal is terrible IMO…but is it the MOST TERRIBLE proposal ever in the Funkyverse?
Well…at least he didn’t spend the entire proposal talking about his dead wife…
It’s not even the most terrible proposal Pete has made to Mindy if we’re counting the engagement tiger thing… But that is close to lowest of bars to clear, and with today’s swing back to comic books, it is now only clearing it by millimeters.
Les: HUMPH! I guess some WHINERS were left behind!
(Les waddles off, but gets run over by a bus, then gets gnawed on by dogs, blown up by Dick Tracy’s gun, and then finally soul ripped out by Sonic.exe)
His proposal almost seems like an afterthought. I’m surprised it wasn’t prefaced with “Oh, by the way…”
Maybe it was an afterthought, since you’d think it would be Mindy’s concern, but instead we’re back to running Montoilet’s.
I can actually see that with Pete–“Oh, I should give the PBM his five bucks…wait, what the heck is this in my pocket? Oh. Oh!”
So twice now Mopey has made a terrible joke, with another character responding “Are you sure you want to leave comics”, with the obvious implication being “If you want to make jokes, shouldn’t you stay in comics”. An odd stance to take, given Batiuk’s insistence that “comics don’t have to be funny”, but I guess I’m just being another one of those hidebound literalist beady-eyed nitpickers or something.
I thought PBM’s response in Panel 3 was going to be “how did you get into comics, if your joke writing is this bad?” That joke was AWFUL. It’s not even a Dad joke. At least Dad jokes make sense, and are constructed correctly.
My comment on the proposal:
Here’s how it went with me. We’d been living together for 8 years. One day one of us (not sure which) said at dinner, “You know, we really should make this official.” To commemorate the occasion, after dinner, we bought a necklace from a guy selling fossil pendants on the street. (It was an ammonite, for the record).
That’s it. No getting on knees, no ring. And we were both very happy with that.
I present that story not because it’s interesting in itself, but because you should know that my standards for “proposals” are very loose. Traditional is great, but nontraditional is also great.
Having said that, this proposal was a disrespectful, selfish trainwreck from a man-baby and his creepy stranger-danger clown confederate.
Mindy actually accepting it fills me with the kind of sadness I feel when I hear that someone has left their abusive husband but later felt sorry for him, and gone right back to the violent creep because “he needs me.” It’s depressing. At least she knows better than to kiss Pete or even look at him affectionately.
Your Grease:
Nancy sings “As Long as He Needs Me” in “Oliver!” (Yes, Sammy Davis, Jr. gender-flipped it to “As Long as She Needs Me,” thank you, Rolanda.) it’s about what Charlie Malloy of “On the Waterfront” would call “an unhealthy relationship.”
It doesn’t end well for her, and in his later years, Dickens apparently made a magnificent set piece reading relating just how wretchedly it finished.
To stay with Lionel Bart a little longer;
“If you don’t mind having to deal with Funky, it’s a fine life…”
Sorry to introduce something unrelated to today’s strip, but I had to share this.
Remember the Westview Band selling mattresses as a fundraiser? Apparently it’s a thing.
https://www.facebook.com/events/oconomowoc-high-school/oconomowoc-band-1st-annual-mattress-fundraiser/354728626977341/
“Order before midnight tonight, and the bedbugs are FREE!”
Oh yeah. Our district’s been doing it for years. However… it’s not some idiot dragging a mattress door to door. Kids take home flyers announcing the thing, and that there will be an open house in the school gym on a particular night where parents can look at mattresses and place orders if they want. It’s all run by an outside mattress company, and the school (or athletic or band program) get a cut. Really pretty boring.
Mattresses seem like a terrible fundraiser product. Especially today, when more customizable products like Sleep Number beds exist. It’s also something you only need to buy every 5 years or so.
One thing I meant to add (which is probably far from a unique observation) is that the mattress, turkey, pizza, etc. fund-raisers could have been funny, had Batty wanted them to be. I can see some pretty good jokes coming from the idea that Dinkle took the term “mattress fund raiser” literally, and charged full speed ahead while more rational people around him tried to explain how these things actually work. But… right, that would require TB to do research, and how to create a building gag. We know better than that…
Don’t know but is it possible that the new syndicate told him enough with the comic books and that since mopey Pete is one of his author stand ins he decided to reopen the pizza restaurant and have Pete run it. Of course this means that he will ditch Boy Lisa and the olds (now there’s a band name). And with a typical half bright touch resurrected the pizza monster as well.
That’s not Les in there is it? That would be too horrible for words.
I’m of the opinion that he was told by GC “We bought CS, not FW.” After the interminable Valentine Lisa’s Theater Story arc, followed by Jeff howling in joy at the stench of a comic book store, some feet were put down. He’s trying, quite desperately, to ram Worstview into this. CS never was up for a Pulitzer! And even fewer Best Actress Oscars!
Also…2 days in a row of “Are you sure you want to quit comics?” I’m not going to guess what’s going to happen at the end of 2024, or even 2023. But something’s going on that we can only guess at.
Also, Prof Fate–PUSH THE BUTTON, MAX! (“Okay, Perfesser”)
It seems ineffectual for the syndicate to tell Batiuk “no more Funky Winkerbean” and then let him do this nonsense.
I think Crankshaft has already been cancelled, and they just don’t care what he does with it anymore.
I’d be inclined to agree but for the fact that he’s dragged Pete and Mindy into this despite setting up several other characters much much better suited to taking over Montoni’s (Wally and Rachel, Cory and Rocky, heck that Chef Boyardee guy who worked there in Act II would make more sense).
Maybe he wasn’t directed to make sure a long-time Crankshaft character was involved in buying Montoni’s (he sure seems to be undirected in every other conceivable way), but there was some sort of inexplicable internal logic to him that a Crankshaft character must be involved if he is to resurrect Montoni’s.
Batiuk seems to have some rule that FW characters have to be “introduced” into CS through an existing CS character. And he couldn’t find a way (or didn’t want to) work a better candidate into the story.
There’s also the question of why Montoni’s needs to come back at all. Its closure was treated so indifferently, and now it’s coming back? Why? And in CS, which is canonically set in another town.
I think the abrupt end of Montoni’s, and the fact that it’s now being shoehorned into Crankshaft, is more proof that Funky Winkerbean was cancelled.
I don’t know why this is something I forget all the time (although I’m not ruling out stupidity), but this strip was written a year ago. Is it just him whining over losing FW? Waving his fists in existentialist angst. Saying, as Sartre or Camus or whatever Frenchie that was, “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going out the back and eat worms.”
If so, what jollity awaits us in January, after The Burnings?
CS 11/3, with the hilarious theme of Anxiety Attack:
I think I’m going to say this week is Tom’s reaction a year ago to finding out FW is dead.
I would pay to see TB eat worms.
“PUSH THE WHOPPER BUTTON!”
You just know that Mindy is supposed to be a dumb girl because this scares the hell out of her. Batomic Comic Obsessive has done everything he can to make this an unappealing slash horrifying prospect but she’s the idiot but she sees nothing but bad things.
They’ve been engaged for about 3 minutes and she’s already established a habit of lying to please and placate her moronic husband. It’s the Westview way!
Meanwhile, has the P(B)M vanished back into the ether whence he sprang?
The good old speech-thought bubble contradiction! Batty doesn’t use thought bubbles very often, but when he does it’s usually for this kind of thing.
And I’d say he has women do it about twice as often as men.
Isn’t it interesting that Pete only proposed at the exact moment that he realized he would need free labor at his new venture? And possibly an additional bankroll to fund the purchase?
Does Batty realize this is how it comes across?
It’s a pretty safe bet that when the question is “Does Batiuk realize this is how it comes across”, the answer is always “No”.
Today’s strip is a good example of the lack of tone and clarity in the Funkyverse.
1. Wally’s PTSD was treated so seriously, but Mindy having an anxiety attack is a joke? She has some damn good reasons to be anxious.
2. Is Mindy actually having a medical emergency? I know this could be a metaphor, like “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” She needed to word this differently, e.g. “I feel like”, to make the intent clearer.
3. Where did the Pizza Box Monster go?
4. Why did he stay all this time? He needed to leave between the Montoni’s proposal and the wedding proposal.
5. Why is the Montoni’s storefront still in place a year after it closed? Why does it look so brand new? The awning, curtains, and sign are still in place.
6. We were told that sign was auctioned off, and Les wanted to buy it because it reminded him of Lisa. But there it is, with no expanation.
7. How can they become the owner of a long-closed business? They could buy the rights to the name from Funky, but that’s it.
Why is this going to be glossed over when it’s exactly the kind of
banal transaction the strip loves depicting in detail?
Speaking of doomed marriages:
TB recently posted this on Facebook. It’s from the intro to The Complete FW Vol 9.
Add “nonlinear” to the list of words TB never bothered to look up before he started flinging them around.
A story isn’t nonlinear because it doesn’t show every moment in the characters’ existence. If the story unfolds in coherent chronological order, it’s linear, even if other related plotlines are also followed in chronological order.
The irony is that he has used nonlinear techniques — flashbacks, flash-forwards of about a century, dream/hallucination sequences, etc. But it’s the following of multiple linear plotlines that he defines as nonlinear.
To quote a character from an infinitely superior strip: *Sigh!*
Indeed. “Citizen Kane” (told almost entirely in flashback) is non-linear. “GATTACA” (starting in the middle, flashing back to provide backstory, then continuing in real time) is non-linear. The novel I wrote (and which at least a few of y’all have read) is non-linear, running two converging stories in real time and flashback (perhaps awkwardly, but it was a first novel). And so forth. Walking away from a storyline and then coming back to it later is NOT non-linear storytelling; it’s just telling a linear-time story with multiple threads going on.
Did TB have a writing professor? If so, is that guy tearing his hair out?
Guy sitting at table in park, with a sign that reads: “Pulp Fiction is non-linear. Memento IS linear. PROVE ME WRONG”
Tom would love that meme. The guy couldn’t look smugger unless he lived in Westview.
Pete’s last name is nonlinear.
Les and Lisa’s wedding with all of its promises, fears, hopes and dreams
Which were what, Tom? They did nothing but get married and act smug. Just like we’ve seen with Pete and Mindy this week. The relationship was so underexplored we know absolutely nothing about either one of them. So we can’t assign any meaning to anything that happens, or how they react to it (not that anything except cheap drama happens anyway).
Mindy never reacted to the crappy engagement tiger; to the four years of waiting in the meantime; to implicitly being forced out of the comic book industry (which we don’t even know her feelings about); being coerced into this ludicrous Montoni’s plan (which itself is underexplored); to being secondarily proposed to; and in front of the stupid Pizza Box Man.
The story just goes where Tom Batiuk wants it to go, which is Montoni’s re-opening. In a strip set in a different town.
Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of going through with this idiocy, Mindy wises up, dumps Dopey Pete at the altar and skips to L.A. where she is hired by DC to write and color a new version of “Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld?”
It won’t happen, of course, as it would require Batty to realized his female characters should exist to do more than bring his male characters chocolate milk and cookies while they’re reading comic books in the attic.
And for it to truly be great, it would require Mindy to come up with a good version of “Amethyst,” a task no one has been able to accomplish since the original maxi-series ended in 1984.
Erdmann:
I don’t think Mindy Murdoch is up to producing a good version of “Amethyst” any more than Mindy Newell was when she joined with Keith Giffen (de mortuis nil nisi bonum, I know, but it’s hard to remember sometimes) and Robert Loren Fleming on the series.
I read *Amethyst* in the wrong order, starting with the late 1980s miniseries, which I didn’t like at all, and then reading what came prior to it. The maxi-series is the best, but I thought that the ongoing series was good until Mishkin and Cohn left, leaving us a lot of unexplored and under-explored subplots, with my greatest regret being Tom Brooks’s learning that Amy was Amethyst, and then never appearing again. (He got a mention in the ongoing series’s final issue, but that was all. When Child fills in some blanks, he’s not mentioned, nor is Rita Beckman, whom I like to think became a strict Freudian analyst, whose berserk button would be the seduction theory. The youngest Princess Emerald would be Susan Pevensie.) After that, Giffen & Co. seemed to think that they could do what Alan Moore did with *Swamp Thing,* and they were wrong.
A few years later, when DC did another ill-conceived revamp with *L.E.G.I.O.N.,* the editorial line was that they deserved credit for trying something different, even if the readers didn’t like it. They never did that with *Amethyst* for some reason.
Maybe they thought they’d be laughed at.
Incidentally, “Toni Erdmann” is at the Museum of the Moving Image this weekend. Children are the future, when they’re not left behind…
Dangit… wrote three replies to other comments. Finally getting to the one I intended to write:
I’m going out on a (very small) limb and predicting that we are headed in the Dinkle direction. That is, MoPete and Mindull will re-open Montoni’s, it will be failing, and Dinkle will come to the rescue by selling a load of pies as part of a band fund raiser.
You heard it here first!
Dinkle: (talking to Mindy and Pete) MOVE ASIDE YOU INBRED PIECES OF SHIT! MOVE IT!!
(dinkle gets beaten to death by Mopey McMopesyer)
Dinkle would be a lot more fun if he was a total foulmouth. Ditto for Ed Crankshaft.
You bring up a good point: We’re heading into the holidays and we’re overdue for some Dinkle. He’s gonna be shoved into our faces in one contrived way or another, whether or not it involves Montoni’s.
And we end the week with a reminder of Batiuk’s long-term plan to merge the two strips. Next week could well have Les Moore getting exasperated and bullied by normal people behaving like normal people as he flogs The Tome Of Dead Saint Lisa And How It Was Really About How HE Suffered Most.
WE HAVE FUNKY! I REPEAT, WE HAVE FUNKY! THIS IS NOT A DRILL, PEOPLE!