Not long after I posted about last week’s arc about a real-world eclipse, regular poster J.J. O’Malley compared it to a Peanuts arc from June 15-20, 1963, which also coincided with a real-world eclipse. Several other posters also chimed in about the comparison:
Oh, if only I had faith that TB was funny enough to just rip this off completely…
billytheskink, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2024/04/03/total-eclipse-of-the-old-fart/#comment-169174
Well, he did rip it off completely. The rest of it, not so much.
The complete Peanuts arc is linked above; the Crankshaft arc starts here. They both end with the eclipse being rained out. But Peanuts spent its week showing us that Linus was excited about the eclipse, and trying to get his friends interested. Crankshaft spent the entire week scheming ways to make money off the eclipse watchers. No other plot point was raised.
When Linus’ eclipse gets rained out, it’s a genuinely funny ending. In Crankshaft, it’s just another abrupt, end-of-week arc stoppage that resolves nothing and makes no sense. Batiuk’s premise and punchline don’t go together. “Why did the chicken cross the road? He was outstanding in his field.” Batiuk liked the punchline, and didn’t care that it doesn’t fit the setup he wrote for it.
Because there’s no reason for Ed Crankshaft to care that it rained. If anything, he should embrace it!
Ed never expressed any actual interest in the eclipse. He saw it only as a way to make money, renting out space and selling accessories to the rubes. Six strips, four of them starring Ed, and that was the point of all six of them. Ed’s response to the rain should have been this:
That’s consistent with what Ed’s been doing all week, and with his overall character. The people are already sitting in the chairs, with their marked-up eclipse glasses on, and presumably paid the $25 for parking. Ed’s already got their money. He has no reason to care any more.
And not caring is absolutely central to who Ed Crankshaft is. Nothing would make him happier than having a bunch of strangers show up to give him unexpected income, and then mother nature helps him screw them all over. He lives to blow off schoolchildren and cause traffic jams for sport. He should LOVE that it’s raining. He should be laughing at these poor schmucks as they trudge back to their vehicles with their out-of-town county names on the license plate.
(This is one reason the smirk-and-eyeroll ending in the Funkyverse is so irritating. Characters never do it when they actually should.)
On top of the entire joke failing, Batiuk also gets the timing wrong.
The merit of the premise aside, Schulz’s execution of the punchline is much better. When it’s time for the punchline to happen, it comes straight out. It’s not hinted at beforehand. The unexpectedness of the rain maximizes the shock value of the punchline.
Then, Schulz uses three beat panels, to give the reader a moment to piece it together before Lucy rubs it in Linus’ face. The timing is almost like stand-up comedy, where the comedian uses gestures and words independently, for maximum effect. And this is a common tactic: tell the joke in the subtle way fimore clever audience members will get, then spell it out for the rest.
Batiuk loves to belabor his punchlines. He tells you when they’re coming, and talks about them after they’ve passed. Harriet did a breakdown of how often Pam starts Crankshaft strips by saying “what are you doing, dad?” But I suspect this as just as common:
There’s Jeff in his Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt again. Batiuk couldn’t be bothered to make the joke make any sense, but he took the time to get that right.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
My high school saw the solar eclipse, and they wore special glasses that allowed them to see the solar eclipse and also to prevent their eyes from being damaged (I went to see it for a brief moment, and also wore the special glasses)
Crankshaft: DAMNIT! I SHOULDA DRIVEN TO ILLINOIS INSTEAD OF DOING THIS SHIT HERE IN OHIO!
Me: Also, Mr. Crankshaft, I need to get my mind off these ads on Twitter made by the Liver King
Crank: Who the fuck is the Liver King?
(Does anybody else here know who he is?
If you dont, the Liver King (real name Brian Johnson) is a person on Youtube and Twitter/X that says that eating raw meat, unprocessed organs and raw bull testicles (that’s not only disgusting, it’s also very dangerous for your health to eat that shit uncooked) and following his “nine ancestral tenets” makes you as muscular as he is, However, His physique is only achievable with a diet like that by taking steroids, and he is doing so (which was confirmed in 2022) and made an quarter-assed apology about it after the truth of his steroid usage was proven)
I have heard of Liver King, but only because I watch the Deception Detective on Youtube, though I have not yet watched DD’s analysis of Liver King, because the whole concept sounds gross.
Gotta take my crow, I guess I should have more faith in TB. I’ll give him credit for ripping off the punchline even without the setup, since we’ve all seen plenty of his story arcs just kind of end.
I think Jeff’s incessant wearing of that Blue Bombers sweatshirt is quite appropriate, given that both of those words describe what most of TB’s gags do.
And the problem is that he ends it not just with a severely OOC Ed Crankshaft but with an unusually stupid one. He should not only be Lucy rubbing it in when the suckers cry, he should be jeering “Better luck next eclipse!!”
@Banana Jr. 6000
What you and @pj202718nbca wrote is so much better than what Batiuk decided to go with.
We both agree that Batiuk used to be able to write comedic strips frequently. It’s perplexing to see a decline in his work. Is it possible that there’s a ‘Steve Blass Disease’ for cartoonists? Although TB has mostly lost his touch, occasionally he can still “throw strikes” and come up with a decent comic strip.
Crankshaft sitting all by himself in the rain, moping? When has Ed ever displayed self-pity? If it wasn’t for @J.J. O’Malley pointing it out, I would never have realized it was a Schulz rip-off. At least, TB knows a good joke when he steals one.
it’s not Steve Blass disease as much as it is Jamie Moyer disease. (Aka Juan Franco disease.) No matter how perfectly you take care of your body, age will one day catch up with you.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Ed: Jeff, where’s Pam?
Jeff: She’s crying in her room because it rained out here in Centerville. I’ve never seen her cry since the day Mario died.
Ed: When was that?
Jeff: March 31st, 2021.
(Meanwhile, Mitch ended up getting a screwdriver lodged into his brain)
If that’s Chris Davis, he got paid waaaaaaaaaaay more than $5 million to hit less than .185. For two years, and part of a third.
Meanwhile, we’re launching into another session of wailing about how Small Town America is dying of death because Big Box Stores…..are more convenient and have more in stock.
Oh, it is so fucking tiresome.
Hey Ed! I’ve never seen you go to or mention this hardware store before, much less shop there. I didn’t see you organize a community effort to save it, like your stupid newspaper got. But I’ve seen you go to Sprawl-Mart. I’ve seen you buy so much crap from online vendors it piles up on the porch unopened. I just saw you get air mattresses and folding chairs delivered. Which you not only didn’t buy from this hardware store, you also got 20 crates of eclipse glasses to compete with them.
With all his dumb house-modifying schemes, Ed Crankshaft should single-handedly keep a small-town hardware in business. Its failure is an indictment of Crankshaft’s own consumer choices. But it’ll never occur to him, or to Tom Batiuk. Just like it never occured to Les Moore or Tom Batiuk that Lisa’s pointless death was an indictment of Les’ indecisiveness.
It’s like how the Big Tragic Romance in Crankshaft is actually a tribute to the complete idiocy of white people who live in a suburb. None of it would have happened had anyone had an IQ above room temperature in Centigrade.
We should find out in a few more days that the hardware store is going out of business because their very best customer, the one who almost single-handedly supported the place through his purchases of seeds, fertilizer and gardening tools, started buying all that stuff online.
No, wait… that would mean Ed’s dickishness finally blew back on him. That’s never gonna happen.
Batiuk’s “X moments earlier” narrative framing of strips is something of a mediocre way to alternatively sell punchlines, seeming to mostly go for dramatic irony shots at showing Cranky confident in himself before disaster. It has something of a value in dramatic storylines too (CS in the death of Jeff’s mom, and back in FW for Bull’s death at least), but does lend itself to confusion and running afoul of Tom’s preference for flashback intercutting that can have mixed results.
Today’s Funkyshaft though, I honestly don’t get the choice to use that method here. This joke could easily work with a normal chronological presentation, probably even better for the usual layout of “assumption/shocking truth” juxtaposition. The “moments earlier” reversal barely adds anything in this case, and feels even less worthy of the gag since “my local store is closing!” is a far cry from the “swerves” of other uses of it, namely Crankshaft’s slapstick of hanging from gutters or butchering an ice sculpture. This is just Memento-izing for the sake of Memento-izing.
This strip wouldn’t make any sense even if it wasn’t “Mementoized.” Why are the two parts of the storefront a different color and texture? Why does it only say “sale” and not something more relevant, like “going out of business sale?” It’s such a simple joke, and Batiuk thinks he has to put so much scaffolding on it.
I think it’s supposed to be two different stores–the hardware store in P1 and a home furnishing store in P2.
That makes it even more confusing. How are we supposed to know that the store in panel 1 is a different store? Why is it being shown when it’s not relevant to the proceedings?
If I have to guess, and I do, Batiuk thought the “30 seconds before” bit made it more dramatic and impactful. The normal way to tell the (cough) joke would be brick store first, then the “devastating” punch in the gut of blue store. But he has to be different, because he’s a pioneer and a visionary.
What he should have done is label the brick store–other than the word “Shoppe” The home decor would be “Home O’Sectional” or some damn thing.
But you have to remember that Batiuk believes all his readers are exactly like him. They KNOW that the brick store is home decor, because he does. Why would he need to explain that to himself?
Readers be damned, basically.
There’s actually nothing that could be done to make this joke better. The “point” of the joke is the endless hand wringing that TB has been doing over things not being what they used to be. He’s done it with the newspaper, with the movie theater, with bookstores, ad nauseum.
When we bought our house in a suburban town on Long Island in 1992, there was a hardware store just like this on Main St in town. It closed within 6 months after we moved in, because the owner retired and probably sold the space for a pretty penny. There was another hardware store in town that became a Tru-Value franchise, which happened to pretty much all privately owned hardware stores (either Tru-Value or Ace). That was over 30 years ago.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
(groan) Why is batiuk complaining yet again about big box stores
Tom Batiuk used to be somebody! He used to steal punchlines from Warren Zevon!
Zevon is a damn good choice, though. His style of “hilariously grimdark” would have fit perfectly into the modern day. Zevon and Andy Kaufman were both 50 years ahead of their time.