49 thoughts on “Frozen in Madness”

  1. Obviously it was the promised post on David Pace Wigransky, but Crankshaft isn’t done being batshit insane.

  2. Well CBH, that’s a left hand he is holding, so it can’t be Skip.

    CBH, the heck with your wallet. What’s in your freezer?

    1. Well CBH, that’s a left hand he is holding, so it can’t be Skip.

      Maybe that’s how he lost it…

  3. I’ve long maintained that eventually we’d see a ghastly Funkenstein’s Monster cobbled together from Skip and Lefty’s arms, Lisa’s brėasts, Bull’s head, etc.

    CBH, you’ve shown us who is behind the missing-appendages epidemic in Westview. Now who will turn out to be the mad scientist? I vote Dinkle, in his quest to create a perfect, indefatigable creature who can rehearse all night and march all day, backwards, while playing in 5/8 time, in a driving Nor’easter.

      1. @DawnQuinn1 was all fired up today. She posted three replies under your comment, but none directly to you.

        She said of you. “

        He is like a woman. If he didn’t bitc%, he’d explode…”

        This comment seems weird coming from somebody with a woman’s name. What a strange person.

        1. I think everything DonkeyKong1 says is pure projection. She can’t keep from scream-complaining about people making jokes about a C-level unfunny comic, and is just now realizing that she hasn’t been invited to ANY Thanksgivings by her 3 ex-husbands, 3 families of No-Contact children, and none of her friends have talked to her in years.
          “He is like a woman. If he didn’t bitc%, he’d explode…” I’m pretty sure she was told that, maybe all her childhood.
          I find her an interesting case study. Just one of those people who copes by living in an imagined world where everyone who disagrees with her is her mortal enemy. Why this implacably hostile world is one she has chosen to live in is not a thing I can fathom.

      2. Yes, of course — the monster can have Decades-Old Dinkle Turkey drumsticks for legs.

      3. (csroberto2854 then crams 40 slices of Montoni’s Pizza and 80 band turkeys into the mouth of he Funkenstein’s Monster, causing it to explode)

    2. I have my own dark theory about where Dinkle gets his band members. It’s basically this:

  4. MONSTER BUMMER!!!! BUMMED TO THE MAX! We’re losing Real Life Adventures, another one of my long-time favorite titles.

    @#$%&! I should have known the end was coming soon when I read this comic panel in September. “32 years” was awfully specific.

    I’ll notice! 😭 Hopefully GoComics will keep it around in reruns.

  5. I was going to chuckle about the absurd “Flu Shot” poster in today’s ‘Shaft… but then I remembered that this summer’s Flash movie and its 9 figure budget had a poster on the wall in one scene that said “skateboard extreme!”

  6. Just a thought: let’s say that one day, completely out of nowhere, Batty replaced every existing Cranky Funkerbean character with brand new ones. How long would it take everyone to say “hey, wait a minute here?”. Because for at least a few days, and maybe even weeks, you’d read it thinking it’d all make sense eventually, like it was just an introduction to a new character who’d soon be interacting with the regular ones. So you’d just keep reading it for a while, waiting. It’d make for an interesting experiment.

    2. Different answers for each. FW, it could go for a very long time, depending on how he would want to write it.

      Crankshaft? As long as Ed is around, that could go forever. But if Ed isn’t around, it wouldn’t take very long for that reading base to notice and become irritated. The two week stints where Ed doesn’t show up now is enough for people to simply ask for Ed to come back, and those people simply do not care about whatever the not-Ed people are doing.

      Similarly, anyone who is not-Ed is not interesting to them so it can be constantly new people in a merry go round rotation and they wouldn’t care. That two weeks that had Rictus Jff poke around didn’t seem to faze anyone at gocomics – everyone there either knew what that character was or just did not care. Is it real? Imaginary? Seen only by Jff? Shrug, whatever. Not Ed, don’t care.

      1. True! The non-snarkers began complaining during the most Funkcentric arcs (Mayonnaise Jarre & Lisa’s Lisa’s Lisa’s, and Jeff’s “HEY KIDS COMICS and horror demons”).
        But some just clearly delete it from their memories, as normal people should, so possibly we’re not normal here. Someone in the comments asked somebody who I’m SUUUURE isn’t one of our posters, was “What is your obsession with Lisa’s Story?” The Valentine arc had mentions of L’sS 17 times in 2 weeks. Poster had already forgotten about it.
        But his name was like “OldGeezerDDay HangingFromAGutter” so he might not remember much. OldGeezer! Smoke some cigarettes, that cures dementia!

        As to SoSFers using pseudo-pseudonyms to replace their IDs here–Wish I’d thought of that! Somebody/ies is/are coming here to downvote randomly. I have no idea who (why did her parents not name her KarenQuinn1?) But you, me, all of us, we have kinda distinctive writing styles. You can fool them, but not us. 😉

        1. Edit:
          “You can fool them, but not us” was meant to be “you GUYS,” implying that they could be any one of us, not one poster. I have my theories of Who’s Who, but I like my tea unspilled.

          1. Yeah, I’ve shifted my name a few times here and it’s different there, but I’ve made no attempt to conceal anything else about it directly. As you say, I think it’s pretty easy to identify who is who if you look long enough – which is pretty much the modus operandi of anyone who posts here, as we are the loons who actually give TB the level of attention which he says he deserves. Shame on me for that, I guess. Not really, though, as this is still a tiny corner of the Internet that has remained unsullied, and may it remain so. Know that I do appreciate it still being here, and I just refrain from saying as such as often as I visit here. I get too long winded already.

        2. Thanks to the vagaries of the internet, I now have three different names for posting comments on komix. There’s this one here, then there’s a different one at GoComics (the name of the account I created years and years ago, and there seems to be no way to change a GC username), and yet a third on Arcamax/Disqus. This last is weird, because for a long time I had two Disqus accounts, one of which I used for commenting on motorcycle stuff and the other (“Hannibal’s Lectern”) I used at CK and Arcamax. But they started getting confused after a while–for some reason, one motorcycle site kept using my CK Disqus name, and then things went through a long period of “which pictures contain a stoplight” hell, before finally settling into a situation where the “HL” name seems to have disappeared from Disqus. Go figure.

    1. Crankshaft’s stare in panel two is way too intense for this banal conversation with a customer service employee. He looks like he has a secret crush on this teller, and is about to ask her to the homecoming dance. He doesn’t have this much worry on his face when he’s hanging from a burning roof.

      This applies to both the original and Ian’s great remix, BTW.

    2. Oh, to have seen the look on Davis’s face when Batiuk sent him a “Bazooka Joe” wrapper comic where Joe tells Mort his dad’s a bank teller and Mort then asks if Joe’s pop likes the job, with TB writing under it “Gimme this!”

  8. THE BATTY BLOGS ARE BACK UP!

    I was hoping the blogs were blank because he was replacing the font. No such luck. I don’t know what that font is. I just don’t like it. It is somewhat hard on my eyes.

    Today’s entry is about the Akron ComicCon. You remember those Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean banners he was bragging about a while back? Oopsie!

    1. Based on his photos of himself he was either showing off or selling original ink prints or whatever from his strips’ run. Man, that actually seems like a nice novelty of collectibles. Imagine any of us getting our hands of some of our favorites of the 50 years. The “cut-to-black” car crash, Zanzibar pointing the gun, John Darling fanboy showing off the gun that killed My Father John Darling, that robot that jogged with Funky for a week… the potential is endless!

      1. Good eye. I didn’t really notice what was on his display table. It might be nice to obtain one of those ink prints/reprints to replace the magic eye print we’ve had on our living room wall since the mid-1990s.

        Those Complete Funky Winkerbean volumes are thicker than I thought.

        Ever notice TB never sells any of his comics at these events?
        TB: (Gollum-like rasp) Never sells my precious!

      2. Good a call! He’s selling 3 different daily strips, at least one of which is a Crankshaft, and one Sunday strip, which appears to be a FW. Perhaps one of our eagle-eyed historians can discern what those strips are.

        I like to believe that the FW is the Lisa Masky McDeath Scene, and that Akronians traditionally put it on their wall next to their other Crucified Savior.

      3. I’ll bet a tshirt of the “WHERE’S FATHER?!” Zanzibar panel would sell!
        You could wear it anywhere and feel safe! Those guys in wifebeaters with the Punisher logo and fresh tattoos of Taylor Swift or whatever, when they looked at a talking monkey with a gun pointing at them would think “He’s armed and NUTS!” and run away!

        No, you test my theory.

    2. Thanks for finding that gem.

      “but comic books are my Trinity site where I first received my immortal wound.” God, he loves that line, doesn’t he? Trinity Site is where the first nuclear bomb was tested, which makes the metaphor even more nonsensical.

      “The only downside to the con was when someone fell into my Crankshaft banner. Fortunately, the person was ok, but the banner was killed.” What exactly happened here? We can see the picture of the banner. It looks like it could take some fall damage. Did the person tear through the cloth? Did he break the mechanism that you pull the actual banner down from? Was the person 500 pounds? How would you even break this thing? Of course, Batiuk doesn’t tell you.

      “I was really proud of my new banners, and I know that pride is supposed to go before a fall. but it’s not like the universe to be quite so literal and on point. It will be there for the Con next year and I’m already looking forward to that… sans any pride.” He’s so prideful about not having any pride.

      1. What is wrong with this man? Much like his present comic strip, he can’t tell a complete story to save his life.

        Tom Batiuk, the Lord of Gibberish.

      1. “That’s the one, yer honor!,” she said from the witness stand.

        “Comic Neue”? Is that the idiot bastard son of Comics Sans?

      2. I mean, of course Tom Batiuk just can’t help but use a font with the word “comic” in its name.

      3. What is meant by an “immortal wound”? A wound that won’t heal?

        Didn’t Batiuk’s mommy, tell him his boo-boos won’t heal if he keeps picking at the scabs?

        1. I think he uses “immortal wound” the way most English-speaking hu-mans would say “it left a lasting impression on me” or something like that. But, of course, Tom still hasn’t mastered talking like the hu-mans.

    4. The Winter Reading entry has Tom copping to his OCD tendencies. I don’t know if he’s been formally diagnosed with OCD, but it would certainly explain a number of things, wouldn’t it?

  9. Welp, today’s nonsensical Crankshaft has Crank confused by the GPS. When it says “bear right,” does it mean that you should move to the right lane, or does it mean that there is a bear on the right side of the road?

    Today’s joke brought to you verbatim by the children’s book “Good Driving, Amelia Bedelia.”

    My son loved the Amelia Bedelia books when he was about 3. For those who don’t know, Amelia Bedelia is a zany maid who is constantly confused by homophones and idiomatic expressions.

    My kid thought jokes like the “bear right” mixup were hilarious when he was just learning to read. The “Amelia Bedelia” jokes are perfectly aimed at very little kids.

    They are just plain sad when blatantly stolen and used in a comic with Medicare-aged readers and protagonists.

    1. Wow, that’s a great observation. Batiuk’s joke-writing is going to be a future TBTropes installment.

    2. I often rely on GPS units due to a poor sense of direction. During my lifetime, I have used numerous GPS devices. Not one of them has ever used the phrase “bear right.” Has anyone else ever heard “bear right” or “bear left?”

      “Keep right” and “Keep left, I have heard.

      Getting used to my first GPS unit was a bit of a struggle. It would say, “Exit right,” so I would take the exit I was approaching. While on the exit ramp, the unit would say, “…in one mile”.
      🙄🤬

      1. See, bwoeh, that observation is not only funny, it rings absolutely true. I’ve been through it many times myself. THAT would have been a good joke for Crankshaft.

        To answer your question: I’ve never heard a GPS say “bear right,” no. I’ve heard it from actual humans giving directions many times, though.

        Of course, the Amelia Bedelia book was written before GPS, and the scene features a human navigator in the passenger seat giving her directions.

        The next lines have the navigator asking why AB turned right — “I told you, bear left!”

        AB replies, “Oh, if I’d known the bear left, I wouldn’t have turned right!”

        Other hilarity includes a fork in the road (spoiler: it is not actual cutlery), discussion of how “left” could be right, etc. I guess we can look forward to more mangling of these jokes, which are charming in context, to suit the senile characters and audience of this strip.

        1. Poor writing on my part.

          I meant:

          Has anyone else ever heard “bear right” or “bear left” (from their navigational devices)?

          Similarly:

          “Keep right” and “Keep left, I have heard (from my GPS units).

          Sorry about that.

          ———————-

          Supplemental:
          When driving on the road, you most likely have come across road signs with the phrases “keep right” or “keep left.” The purpose of these signs is to help drivers stay in the correct lane that leads them to their desired destination without any confusion. For example, a sign might read “NEW YORK CITY KEEP LEFT,” which means that drivers should stay in the left lane and avoid any last-minute lane changes that could lead to accidents.

          And we’ve seen these…

          Also…

          If you are needlessly in the passing lane in Kentucky, the Highway Patrol will sneak up behind you and yell over their PA, “MOVE OVER!”.

          I don’t believe I’ve ever seen “bear right” or “bear left” on a traffic sign.

          ———————

          I have actually witnessed a live bear on the right side of a road. It was a traveling circus and the bear was waving at traffic. It was so sweet.

          Do road signs with Yogi Bear count as “bear right”?

          Golly. Look what I found.

      2. I have personally made this joke so many times that my partner slaps me when I say it. Don’t think I’ve heard it from my GPS though.

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