That’s a lot funnier than anything Batiuk would crap out.
It’s not even that funny. It’s bargain basement tortured wordplay of the kind Crankshaft used to have a lot of.
But what was originally there was pathetic. It was to a joke what a thimbleful of sugar is to an entire wedding cake.
The man thinks that young adults like himself find the scariest thing ever funny. He doesn’t even rate the packet sugar comes in.
I see this strip with a fourth panel in which Skippy thinks “now give them a few seconds to chuckle at my clever wordplay” followed by an infinite number of panels in which he’s standing there and nothing happens.
It took me a few to realize that Skip was making–trying to make–a funny here; it would take me until the end of the universe and all of sweet Eternity to find it funny. Tomorrow’s strip had better feature one or both of these actions: 1) the audience riding Skip out of town on a rail for his callousness, 2) the audience responding with “Oh no!”; “Does Clyde need his meds delivered?”; “I got frozen casseroles I can take him” and other responses normal, decent human beings would make upon hearing news like this. I actually would not mind if 1) and 2) started a multiday arc of tending to Clyde, even with smirks all around.
And ‘Clyde Peterson’? Fine name, absolutely wonderful name but could Batiuk not make up some dreadful punny appellation for a fish wrap thrower as is his wont? “Abel Pitcher”, there in two seconds I made a punny funny worthy of Crankshaft.
“2)” would be nice, but Clyde Peterson is not a member of the comic strip’s inner circle, therefore he doesn’t matter to Batiuk. To him, Clyde Peterson is a plot point, not a person.
Batiuk often fails to portray a common sense of decency in his work. I wonder how often he ventures outside his 3,000 square foot “Comics Castle”.
Why is Skip smiling? WHY IS HE SMILING??!!
Skip thinks that misfortune that’s not happening to him is funny
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
― Mel Brooks
“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.” — Mark Twain
Oh, fuck you, Skip.
You should be living in constant fear of the lawsuit hammer that’s bound to fall on you any day now, for the corporate espionage and the rest of the shit you pulled. Assuming the police don’t just show up and arrest you for it. But the first item on your agenda is “delivery issues”. Okay then.
Really, Skip, this is your failure point? I thought the whole point of stealing the newspaper from the hedge fund (which you totally did, by the way) was to restore it to its role as a small-town public trust. And you’re failing at this simple a task? Hey brainiac, if your delivery driver and his car both break down, you hire a new one, Mr. I-Run-The-Newspaper-Better-Than-The-Hedge-Fund-Does. You don’t wait for the board meeting to make a mean-spirited joke about it, Shecky. And you sure as hell don’t make him keep delivering, which this joke implies.
God, I hate this smug asshole so much. Can we go back to Pete and Mindy re-opening Montoni’s? Or Funky being afraid of the Pizza Monster? Or Crankshaft leaving children at the bus stop? Or bring in Les for a Lisa arc? I honestly would prefer any of these to this asshole.
(Les sees Crankshaft running The Little Johnson Girl’s Daughter over and Funky being chased by the PBM, Wally, Mopey McMopester, Holly, Cory and Jim Kablichnick)
Les: JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK IS GOING ON?
(Les sees Crankshaft running The Little Johnson Girl’s Daughter over and Funky being chased by the PBM, Wally, Mopey McMopester, Holly, Cory and Jim Kablichnick)
LES: I remember when Crankshaft tried to run over Lisa…
I think that Skip dwarfed Les as most punchable Funkyverse character (which is no small feat)
I am now 100% in agreement with the Duck of Death. I don’t think there is any character in the Batiukverse that irritates me as much as Skip. And it looks like we get a week of the world’s worst standup comic making non-jokes about a small town newspaper that he’s running into the ground.
Ugh.
Batty loves those pinned up sleeves, it shows he is better than others because he cares. It gives him fodder for his puff piece interviews as he can say he is not ashamed to feature handicapped people in his strips.
And, as with any of Batty’s stuff, we can look at Burke Breathed to see that handled one million times better.
Oh yeah! Cutter John was a great character, because he was real, Breathed wasn’t chasing misery Pokémon points, he instead wrote a real story.
I think Batiuk has difficulty making a name that isn’t related to puns
Geez, Skip, you don’t have to look so amused by it.
(I only wish I had the Photoshop skills to replace the silhouettes in panel 3; it’s just asking for Crow and Tom Servo to be added in.)
Green Luthor,
I LOL’d at “Crow and Tom Servo”!
These strips with Skip is why TB is so hard to predict. Who could guess that this would be a week’s arc? (weak arc?) Neither Monday or Tuesday had a punchline. I did not even understand Monday.
This reminds me of “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles.” When you tell a story, Tom, have a point! I would enjoy seeing a thought balloon of Davis getting this script. It probably couldn’t be printed in family friendly SOSF. I will use a word that Be Ware of Eve Hill uses. It would require too many grawlixes. 🤬🤬🤬
I will use a word that Be Ware of Eve Hill uses. It would require too many grawlixes.
Not one word, but a series of profanities. Think of “The Old Man Parker” working on the coal furnace in A Christmas Story.
Followed by threatening fist-shaking, à la Basil Fawlty.
Now, that is a word picture! I see black smoke billowing! Love to you!
What’s up with the downvote? It’s following you around like the bowl in those old Cream of Wheat commercials.
The risk of death in the first year after hip fracture in a male is about 30%.
I’ve known a lot of old folks and I’ve never seen anyone really recover from a hip fracture. Every time I’ve seen it, it was the beginning of a downhill slide that eventually ended in dementia and death.
You’d think Tom Batiuk, now in his late 70s and focusing on telling stories of old folks, would be aware of the fact that the words “hip fracture” strike fear into the heart of any senior citizen, or anyone who cares about one.
I can’t even joke about this strip, though Lord knows CBH has made a yeoman effort to mine some humor from the premise.
It’s not funny. It’s callous and sick.
I had elective hip replacement surgery @18 years ago. The surgeon told me in elective surgery the bone is cut smoothly to make it easy to bond the two pieces together. More importantly the ligaments are cut smoothly across and can be easily tied together afterwards. In a break, the ends of the bone are jagged, and really can’t be fit together without a lot of trimming and smoothing. And tying the ligaments together is a mess. So, the rehab is slow, and likely won’t completely alleviate the pain. So—pain, probably opioids to fight the pain, limited mobility, lack of exercise.
The hilarious storylines might outdo misdiagnosis of cancer!
Ed’s in the front row because he wants to know if these “paper delivery issues” will impact his three-squares-a-day habit.
For someone who wrings his hands a lot over “Climate Damage,” it sure is striking how much TomBa loves dead-tree media.
I know many people his age or older who don’t take newspaper delivery any more, but instead subscribe to the NY Times digitally and read it on an iPad. It’s much easier on old eyes. You can enlarge it or increase the contrast or brightness. You can forward articles of interest to your friends.
You don’t have to wait for delivery and then get dressed and go outside to get it. Your paper is never wet or covered in slush. And you don’t have to deal with a pile of recycling at the end of the week.
Most of all, the news is much fresher, since articles can be published the moment they’re finished.
This is what galls me about this whole plot line. We saw that after the Mordor Financial takeover, Skip was essentially the entire staff of the Sentinel. Instead of committing fraud, why didn’t Skip start his own “paper,” digitally? He was a one-person operation; he could have gotten it off the ground without spending a dime. If the Sentinel was so beloved, surely the good folks of Centerville would have been willing to pay for a digital subscription.
As usual, though, TB sets up a situation and then “solves” it by wáñking over his usual fetishes (in this case, old-fashioned newspapers).
Every situation in the latter-day Funkshaftiverse, in fact, eventually boils down to an excuse for sélf-pleásuring nostalgia pọ𝕣n.
It wouldn’t be so bad if he would just focus on how “things were better in the old days” — a common enough sentiment that many of us can get behind. It’s when that nostalgia fetish is forcibly jammed into attempts at “ripped from the headlines” stories that things get so… incompetent and insane. So… Batiukian.
Or, Skip could have just turned the newspaper into whatever he wanted it to be, while the indifferent hedge fund continued to own it. He was the only employee, and they didn’t care what he did with it. So what was ever the problem here?
Only one delivery guy, driving a 43-year-old hoopty. Only one editor/reporter/copyeditor, who presumably brings his flagrant political biases and 1930s-vintage Stalinist viewpoint* to the “news” he gathers. Do they have anyone who deals with rent, subscription fees, printers’ bills, taxes, etc, or is that just ol’ Skipperdee too?
The parakeets in Centerville are dropping off their perches, dead from intestinal blockages, because the Sentinel’s not even good for pòoping on.
*The New Deal? Why, he’s agin it! Just another way for that blue-blood plutocrat Rooz’velt to prop up the corrupt capitalist system and suppress the proletarian uprisings! For more info, read Tuesday’s timely editorial!
One reporter, who has one arm. And has been depicted typing his stories at computers. Yeah, that doesn’t work. I’ve been without the use of my left arm at times, and you simply cannot produce a day’s worth of material without voice recognition or other accessibility help.
Never mind that assembling a daily newspaper is a daunting task even if you have two arms, and even if someone else is writing all the material.
It’s nostalgia, like you said, but it’s pining for a time that never existed. Small-town newspapers were never a one-person operation. My high school newspaper had about 20 kids chipping in.
Clearly TB has had no intention of thinking through any of the details of how any of this would work in reality. He’s hellbent on making Skip this folk hero who went up against the big boys to produce a newspaper “the right way”, even though it’s basically impossible to do this in a small town and not go deep in the red.
My town where I live (not really a town as much as a small city) has a few independent newspapers, some of which only have an online presence, and some that distribute paper copies via drop boxes on the street or next to the cash register at local businesses. They don’t have home delivery. They make all their income via digital subscriptions and advertising. They are a great service to the community, as they publish calendars of events and also cover local politics, art, music, and other useful stuff. It takes an enormous amount of work to do this, certainly more than one 80-year old one-armed man could handle.
I think he’s nostalgic for old Westerns, particularly the newspapers in those old films. It typically was just one person doing the reporting, the typesetting, the printing and the selling. Of course those were essentially fantasies (and saved money on actors).
“And now the annual shareholder’s report for the Centerville Sentinel.” That’s how the first panel’s speech bubble on Monday, November 6 could have better read. And don’t get me started on the lack of bricks in the first panel.
You’d have to dig into the comments to see it, but on the 11/8 CS, someone makes a joke about the only way the Sentinel still exists is how much they charge for obituaries. This immediately becomes a discussion between people who actually know what they cost. They’ve comparison shopped!
Newspaper Comics. Truly a dying breed.
I have a question about the border in panel #3 of today’s Crankshaft. Are those supposed to be puffy clouds, indicating a dream or thought panel? If so, why are the puffy clouds only in the corners? I thought photo corner thingamabobs in the Batiukverse were reserved for memories. Has Ed delivered ‘The Sentinel’ via school bus in the past? If he has, why isn’t the panel sepia-toned? Some consistency would be nice.
I am also curious about who is dreaming of the panel #3 scenario. Is it Skip? Or Crankshaft? Or is it up to the reader to decide?
It seems like poor Dan Davis is struggling with what to draw. As a self-proclaimed “storyteller,” why can’t Batiuk provide better guidance?
Too busy reading comic books and writing self-aggrandizing blogs?
I noticed the same. I think this has happened before where the strip cuts over to some other activity that is actually happening, only that it’s at some non-past point of time and not concurrent with the other panels of the strip. I suppose we won’t have confirmation one way or another until we see if future strips would recall this and have Crankshaft deliver more papers or not.
Son of Stuck Funky 
That’s a lot funnier than anything Batiuk would crap out.
It’s not even that funny. It’s bargain basement tortured wordplay of the kind Crankshaft used to have a lot of.
But what was originally there was pathetic. It was to a joke what a thimbleful of sugar is to an entire wedding cake.
The man thinks that young adults like himself find the scariest thing ever funny. He doesn’t even rate the packet sugar comes in.
I see this strip with a fourth panel in which Skippy thinks “now give them a few seconds to chuckle at my clever wordplay” followed by an infinite number of panels in which he’s standing there and nothing happens.
It took me a few to realize that Skip was making–trying to make–a funny here; it would take me until the end of the universe and all of sweet Eternity to find it funny. Tomorrow’s strip had better feature one or both of these actions: 1) the audience riding Skip out of town on a rail for his callousness, 2) the audience responding with “Oh no!”; “Does Clyde need his meds delivered?”; “I got frozen casseroles I can take him” and other responses normal, decent human beings would make upon hearing news like this. I actually would not mind if 1) and 2) started a multiday arc of tending to Clyde, even with smirks all around.
And ‘Clyde Peterson’? Fine name, absolutely wonderful name but could Batiuk not make up some dreadful punny appellation for a fish wrap thrower as is his wont? “Abel Pitcher”, there in two seconds I made a punny funny worthy of Crankshaft.
“2)” would be nice, but Clyde Peterson is not a member of the comic strip’s inner circle, therefore he doesn’t matter to Batiuk. To him, Clyde Peterson is a plot point, not a person.
Batiuk often fails to portray a common sense of decency in his work. I wonder how often he ventures outside his 3,000 square foot “Comics Castle”.
Why is Skip smiling? WHY IS HE SMILING??!!
Skip thinks that misfortune that’s not happening to him is funny
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
― Mel Brooks
“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.” — Mark Twain
Oh, fuck you, Skip.
You should be living in constant fear of the lawsuit hammer that’s bound to fall on you any day now, for the corporate espionage and the rest of the shit you pulled. Assuming the police don’t just show up and arrest you for it. But the first item on your agenda is “delivery issues”. Okay then.
Really, Skip, this is your failure point? I thought the whole point of stealing the newspaper from the hedge fund (which you totally did, by the way) was to restore it to its role as a small-town public trust. And you’re failing at this simple a task? Hey brainiac, if your delivery driver and his car both break down, you hire a new one, Mr. I-Run-The-Newspaper-Better-Than-The-Hedge-Fund-Does. You don’t wait for the board meeting to make a mean-spirited joke about it, Shecky. And you sure as hell don’t make him keep delivering, which this joke implies.
God, I hate this smug asshole so much. Can we go back to Pete and Mindy re-opening Montoni’s? Or Funky being afraid of the Pizza Monster? Or Crankshaft leaving children at the bus stop? Or bring in Les for a Lisa arc? I honestly would prefer any of these to this asshole.
(Les sees Crankshaft running The Little Johnson Girl’s Daughter over and Funky being chased by the PBM, Wally, Mopey McMopester, Holly, Cory and Jim Kablichnick)
Les: JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK IS GOING ON?
(Les sees Crankshaft running The Little Johnson Girl’s Daughter over and Funky being chased by the PBM, Wally, Mopey McMopester, Holly, Cory and Jim Kablichnick)
LES: I remember when Crankshaft tried to run over Lisa…
I think that Skip dwarfed Les as most punchable Funkyverse character (which is no small feat)
I am now 100% in agreement with the Duck of Death. I don’t think there is any character in the Batiukverse that irritates me as much as Skip. And it looks like we get a week of the world’s worst standup comic making non-jokes about a small town newspaper that he’s running into the ground.
Ugh.
Batty loves those pinned up sleeves, it shows he is better than others because he cares. It gives him fodder for his puff piece interviews as he can say he is not ashamed to feature handicapped people in his strips.
And, as with any of Batty’s stuff, we can look at Burke Breathed to see that handled one million times better.
Oh yeah! Cutter John was a great character, because he was real, Breathed wasn’t chasing misery Pokémon points, he instead wrote a real story.
I think Batiuk has difficulty making a name that isn’t related to puns
Geez, Skip, you don’t have to look so amused by it.
(I only wish I had the Photoshop skills to replace the silhouettes in panel 3; it’s just asking for Crow and Tom Servo to be added in.)
Green Luthor,
I LOL’d at “Crow and Tom Servo”!
These strips with Skip is why TB is so hard to predict. Who could guess that this would be a week’s arc? (weak arc?) Neither Monday or Tuesday had a punchline. I did not even understand Monday.
This reminds me of “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles.” When you tell a story, Tom, have a point! I would enjoy seeing a thought balloon of Davis getting this script. It probably couldn’t be printed in family friendly SOSF. I will use a word that Be Ware of Eve Hill uses. It would require too many grawlixes. 🤬🤬🤬
Not one word, but a series of profanities. Think of “The Old Man Parker” working on the coal furnace in A Christmas Story.
Followed by threatening fist-shaking, à la Basil Fawlty.
Now, that is a word picture! I see black smoke billowing! Love to you!
What’s up with the downvote? It’s following you around like the bowl in those old Cream of Wheat commercials.
The risk of death in the first year after hip fracture in a male is about 30%.
I’ve known a lot of old folks and I’ve never seen anyone really recover from a hip fracture. Every time I’ve seen it, it was the beginning of a downhill slide that eventually ended in dementia and death.
You’d think Tom Batiuk, now in his late 70s and focusing on telling stories of old folks, would be aware of the fact that the words “hip fracture” strike fear into the heart of any senior citizen, or anyone who cares about one.
I can’t even joke about this strip, though Lord knows CBH has made a yeoman effort to mine some humor from the premise.
It’s not funny. It’s callous and sick.
I had elective hip replacement surgery @18 years ago. The surgeon told me in elective surgery the bone is cut smoothly to make it easy to bond the two pieces together. More importantly the ligaments are cut smoothly across and can be easily tied together afterwards. In a break, the ends of the bone are jagged, and really can’t be fit together without a lot of trimming and smoothing. And tying the ligaments together is a mess. So, the rehab is slow, and likely won’t completely alleviate the pain. So—pain, probably opioids to fight the pain, limited mobility, lack of exercise.
The hilarious storylines might outdo misdiagnosis of cancer!
Ed’s in the front row because he wants to know if these “paper delivery issues” will impact his three-squares-a-day habit.
For someone who wrings his hands a lot over “Climate Damage,” it sure is striking how much TomBa loves dead-tree media.
I know many people his age or older who don’t take newspaper delivery any more, but instead subscribe to the NY Times digitally and read it on an iPad. It’s much easier on old eyes. You can enlarge it or increase the contrast or brightness. You can forward articles of interest to your friends.
You don’t have to wait for delivery and then get dressed and go outside to get it. Your paper is never wet or covered in slush. And you don’t have to deal with a pile of recycling at the end of the week.
Most of all, the news is much fresher, since articles can be published the moment they’re finished.
This is what galls me about this whole plot line. We saw that after the Mordor Financial takeover, Skip was essentially the entire staff of the Sentinel. Instead of committing fraud, why didn’t Skip start his own “paper,” digitally? He was a one-person operation; he could have gotten it off the ground without spending a dime. If the Sentinel was so beloved, surely the good folks of Centerville would have been willing to pay for a digital subscription.
As usual, though, TB sets up a situation and then “solves” it by wáñking over his usual fetishes (in this case, old-fashioned newspapers).
Every situation in the latter-day Funkshaftiverse, in fact, eventually boils down to an excuse for sélf-pleásuring nostalgia pọ𝕣n.
It wouldn’t be so bad if he would just focus on how “things were better in the old days” — a common enough sentiment that many of us can get behind. It’s when that nostalgia fetish is forcibly jammed into attempts at “ripped from the headlines” stories that things get so… incompetent and insane. So… Batiukian.
Or, Skip could have just turned the newspaper into whatever he wanted it to be, while the indifferent hedge fund continued to own it. He was the only employee, and they didn’t care what he did with it. So what was ever the problem here?
Only one delivery guy, driving a 43-year-old hoopty. Only one editor/reporter/copyeditor, who presumably brings his flagrant political biases and 1930s-vintage Stalinist viewpoint* to the “news” he gathers. Do they have anyone who deals with rent, subscription fees, printers’ bills, taxes, etc, or is that just ol’ Skipperdee too?
The parakeets in Centerville are dropping off their perches, dead from intestinal blockages, because the Sentinel’s not even good for pòoping on.
*The New Deal? Why, he’s agin it! Just another way for that blue-blood plutocrat Rooz’velt to prop up the corrupt capitalist system and suppress the proletarian uprisings! For more info, read Tuesday’s timely editorial!
One reporter, who has one arm. And has been depicted typing his stories at computers. Yeah, that doesn’t work. I’ve been without the use of my left arm at times, and you simply cannot produce a day’s worth of material without voice recognition or other accessibility help.
Never mind that assembling a daily newspaper is a daunting task even if you have two arms, and even if someone else is writing all the material.
It’s nostalgia, like you said, but it’s pining for a time that never existed. Small-town newspapers were never a one-person operation. My high school newspaper had about 20 kids chipping in.
Clearly TB has had no intention of thinking through any of the details of how any of this would work in reality. He’s hellbent on making Skip this folk hero who went up against the big boys to produce a newspaper “the right way”, even though it’s basically impossible to do this in a small town and not go deep in the red.
My town where I live (not really a town as much as a small city) has a few independent newspapers, some of which only have an online presence, and some that distribute paper copies via drop boxes on the street or next to the cash register at local businesses. They don’t have home delivery. They make all their income via digital subscriptions and advertising. They are a great service to the community, as they publish calendars of events and also cover local politics, art, music, and other useful stuff. It takes an enormous amount of work to do this, certainly more than one 80-year old one-armed man could handle.
I think he’s nostalgic for old Westerns, particularly the newspapers in those old films. It typically was just one person doing the reporting, the typesetting, the printing and the selling. Of course those were essentially fantasies (and saved money on actors).
“And now the annual shareholder’s report for the Centerville Sentinel.” That’s how the first panel’s speech bubble on Monday, November 6 could have better read. And don’t get me started on the lack of bricks in the first panel.
You’d have to dig into the comments to see it, but on the 11/8 CS, someone makes a joke about the only way the Sentinel still exists is how much they charge for obituaries. This immediately becomes a discussion between people who actually know what they cost. They’ve comparison shopped!
Newspaper Comics. Truly a dying breed.
I have a question about the border in panel #3 of today’s Crankshaft. Are those supposed to be puffy clouds, indicating a dream or thought panel? If so, why are the puffy clouds only in the corners? I thought photo corner thingamabobs in the Batiukverse were reserved for memories. Has Ed delivered ‘The Sentinel’ via school bus in the past? If he has, why isn’t the panel sepia-toned? Some consistency would be nice.
I am also curious about who is dreaming of the panel #3 scenario. Is it Skip? Or Crankshaft? Or is it up to the reader to decide?
It seems like poor Dan Davis is struggling with what to draw. As a self-proclaimed “storyteller,” why can’t Batiuk provide better guidance?
Too busy reading comic books and writing self-aggrandizing blogs?
I noticed the same. I think this has happened before where the strip cuts over to some other activity that is actually happening, only that it’s at some non-past point of time and not concurrent with the other panels of the strip. I suppose we won’t have confirmation one way or another until we see if future strips would recall this and have Crankshaft deliver more papers or not.
.