Guess what?
After an internal discussion, Son of Stuck Funky has decided that we will do regular updates again.
Because Crankshaft has officially become Act IV of Funky Winkerbean. We’ve been tracking it that way for awhile, and this week seemed like the right time to make it official. For me, this week was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And I was the first to advance the idea of doing regular updates again, so maybe I’m the most sensitive of our team members. But they’re all on board with it!
They won’t be daily updates, like this blog had in the days of Funky Winkerbean. Instead, there will be weekly updates, posted on Saturday night, as needed. And these updates are “needed” whenever a week’s Crankshaft arc contains themes, story points, or characters that are more appropriate for Funky Winkerbean Act III than they are for what Crankshaft was before January 1, 2023.
Which means some Saturdays won’t have a weekly update. Arcs like “Crankshaft tries to make money off eclipse viewers” do not warrant comment from this blog. This was a perfectly appropriate Crankshaft arc. Not that it was flawless, or that we all love Crankshaft. We just think it’s in bounds for that comic strip, and therefore out of this blog’s scope. Crankshaft is not exempt from commentary, especially if it invokes Act III themes. But for the most part, we’ll leave Crankshaft alone, as we always have.
But Funky Winkerbean has infected Crankshaft to the point where we can’t leave Crankshaft alone without also ignoring the sins of Funky Winkerbean. And that will not stand. The hard-to-describe quality that made us all hate-readers of Funky Winkerbean is now prevalent enough in Crankshaft to make that strip worth this blog’s full-time attention. So here we go!
To me, the forced presence of Montoni’s was the clearest signal that Tom Batiuk always intended to turn Crankshaft into Funky Winkerbean Act IV. (Because it was totally Batiuk’s decision to end Funky Winkerbean. 🙄)
Historically, Westview and Centerville were implied to be separated by some distance. Close enough to commute or make a special trip, but not close enough to be interchangeable. I thought of them as distant exurbs of Greater Cleveland, like Painesville and Brunswick. These are both suburbs of Cleveland by the strictest definition, but still an hour’s drive apart.
Batiuk has said Montoni’s was a place for his now-adult characters to interact, after high school graduation removed the reasons they could do so naturally. Which is a perfectly good justification, and shows that Tom Batiuk once cared about his stories making sense. But keeping Montoni’s in Westview now that the action is in Centerville throws away most of what made Montoni’s work.
Think about Crazy Harry. He could be in Montoni’s without explanation, since he had a Westview postal route that presumably went nearby. But Montoni’s is a special trip for any Crankshaft character. (Other than Dinkle, who was implied to be commuting.) And this week’s arc is a perfect example of why this is a problem.
Ed Crankshaft goes to Montoni’s looking for sponsorship for his softball team. He had to make a long trip to make this sales pitch in person. Which raises questions. How did he get a car? Do Pam and Jeff let him drive it that far? Did everybody closer turn him down? Why can’t Ed just pay for the sponsorship himself, considering Crankshaft arcs run on Ed having unlimited financial resources? Why can’t Ed just hire Dinkle to harass people door-to-door for sponsorship money, since Dinkle is good at that and nothing else? And, like Dinkle’s choir robes, it’s just not enough of an expense to drive a story.
As Harriet already said, this week is a reprise of past “Montoni’s sponsors Little League teams” stories from Act I. But the premise doesn’t work anymore, for the reasons I mentioned above, and for reasons I gave in this post about modern Dinkle arcs.
Changing the premise from a Little League team to a senior citizen softball team removes what made it funny. 11-year-olds acting like major leaguers, wanting to negotiate their contracts and whatnot, can be funny, and can be a good way to satirize professional sports. Senior citizens wanting to negotiate their contracts just sound like a bunch of delusional jackasses. Never mind all the other reasons you’d throw Ed Crankshaft into a wheat thresher before you’d give him a dollar.
So this week has been a feeble excuse to rehash Act I tropes, and further shows why the Act IV decision to bring back Montoni’s was a bad one. It also shows why Mindy’s decision to marry Pete was even worse! Because Mindy solved this problem on Monday. If Montoni’s is in any way viable, getting their name on some softball uniforms is a trivial expense that Mindy was right to say yes to. Especially when the softball team gets undue attention from the local media.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Welcome back, officially!
Like Funky Winkerbean, it’s like you’ve never been gone.
*Unlike* Funky Winkerbean, it’s great to still have you around!
Not Holly, but close.
June 6, 2021.
Never knew pizza and coffee was a thing.
Your clip art detective skills continue to astound me. No idea how you do it.
I made a snide remark on GComics about Mopey Pete’s appearance on Tuesday.
I never figured it was clip art Funky (or Holly).
Dan Davis, mail it in, why don’tcha?
I’m of the opinion that a lot of the stories are ultimately shaped by the clip art Davis can find in the Crankshaft Reusable Art Portfolio. I figure that’s why we don’t actually see a lot of things but rather just hear characters talk about them. No clips of Ed and the other old folks trying to play baseball? Then we get people on the sidelines talking about it, because the C.R.A.P. contains plenty of clips of people standing around talking.
I’m with you there, TFH. Crankshaft is FW’s ne-er-do-well cousin, who’s currently doing time for breaking into vending machines (or “vendos”, as someone would say). It’s just terrible, even more so than ever. BUT…if BatYarn is going to use old FW characters this liberally, then by God, I suppose we ought to be covering that. Because who else will?
I suggested on the Comics Curmudgeon site a few weeks back that Centerville and Westview were now next to each other thanks to the machinations of Timemop, mirroring how DC’s Central City and Keystones City went from being on different parallel Earths to just being separated by a river following the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
I’ve actually been kind of curious with how Josh seems to be specifically avoiding Crankshaft now with Comics Curmudgeon blog entries. In his own posts he hasn’t called it out since February of last year, and guest writer Uncle Lumpy’s been the only one to showcase strips from it since. I can imagine other strips are still more interesting to snark about in the grand scheme, but the absence does stick out to me in particular.
I noticed this too. Back in the day he always featured FW on his blog, I guess he is just too bored with Crankshaft.
Crank is no longer on CK. All the strips he covers now are. Once, Josh ran a Thursday post on a Weds. I assume CK has some paid feature where you can see 2 days ahead. When he was on the East Coast, he’d post around 11AM EDT. When he went to LA, it started popping up at 730AM EDT. I doubt he’s writing them at 4AM PDT. He sees the strips a day early. His Monday post is probably already in his chute.
My understanding is that he can actually see strips up to a week in advance. I believe the SoSF crew used to be able to do this with Funky WInkerbean.
That’s a great observation that i totally missed–unfortunately given the sad state of affairs at Comics Kingdom it does not bode well for the Curmudgeon. Barney Google? Rex Morgan? It’s all pretty sad after a while.
And, for the record, even benign Crankshaft material may still spur one of us to post if it draws an interesting parallel to Funky Winkerbean. Or if I can photoshop something stupid out of it. Which ever is funnier/more interesting.
It also reminds us of a limitation based on his growing up thinking that excluding girls is normal and right: you can’t have dumb gorls gorling things up with dumb gorl ideas when the woman is making more sense than the mopey idiot male!
I’m not gonna lie, the thought of throwing Ed Crankshaft into a wheat thresher, sounds kinda cool. To me he is basically an older version of Les Moore. Selfish, doesn’t really care about anyone else, as long as he benefits. I know, Bathack, tries to make him a loveable curmudgeon, but it simply falls flat. He’s just a jerk, that has dentures.
Except Les hasn’t commited indirect murder (that I dont know of) or keeps destroying mailboxes for fun, and Les is generally a lot smarter than Crankshaft
A sentence I never thought I’d read. “Les is generally a lot smarter than…”.
ACT III Les Moore killed a comic strip. 🤣
Works for me, but the eternal pessimist in me believes you won’t get many “weekends off.” Even if Ed is featured in the story arc, it’s even money somebody like Dinkle, Mopey Pete, or Mason Jarre will appear with him. Judging by the comments in the GoComics Crankshaft discussion, there is still a fan base for Funky Winkerbean. Shocking, I know. I can imagine some clueless dumbass at the OMEA conference last year suggesting that Batiuk feature Dinkle more often.
For what it’s worth, I always thought Batiuk based Westview on where he grew up, Grafton, Ohio. The local schools are Midview. A little too close on the nose to “Westview,” don’t you think? Interesting point about one of the fictional places set east of Cleveland. That never occurred to me.
It crossed my mind to contact Batiuk to ask him where Westview and Centerville were supposed to be located. I figured he’d give that little smile of his and say something hokey like, “Wherever you imagine them to be.” 🙄
Centerville is a real place in Ohio, that’s located southwest of Westerville
I like to imagine that Westview is in the middle of Centerville and Westerville
Ooooo! This is fun! So, you think Westview is somewhere between Dayton and Columbus? Sad to say, I lived in Ohio for over 20 years and never even knew there was a real-life Centerville, Ohio.
I’ve always wanted to have this discussion, “Where in the @#$% is Westview?”
Another commenter a while back suggested another candidate for Westview could be Medina. There’s a townsquare with a gazebo and the artwork for Montoni’s resembled many of the buildings surrounding the square. Unfortunately, Batiuk scotched that theory back in April when he based Centerville Hardware on the Medina Hardware store.
Batiuk!!! (angrily shaking ̷f̷i̷s̷h̷ fist)
It amuses me when commenters here think there’s any kind of deliberate planning or consistency to the 21st century Funkyverse. Decades into his decline, it’s very clear that Batiuk makes it up as he goes along, and literally doesn’t care about a consistent, coherent narrative. Timemop solves everything, and whatever stray thought pops into Batiuk’s addled brain goes directly into the script.
Which means for Batiuk, if Crankshaft suddenly lives in Westview … so what? Westview and Centerville are both Medina. Or NOT Medina, if it’s more convenient for today’s strip.
If Crankshaft is 104 today, and 64 tomorrow … who cares? What works best for today’s installment?
Aside from a few basic things that will never vary (Ed Crankshaft drives a bus, Dinkle is the World’s Greatest Band Leader, etc.), everything’s subject to change in Batuik’s world.
Some people can make this work. George Herriman and Berkeley Breathed, for instance. They created goofy universes that were subject to sudden change, sometimes from panel to panel — though there was always an internal logic (and sense of fun!) to their storytelling.
Batiuk is not remotely on that level.
They could be the same town. I live in Connecticut, a very small state with a weirdly long name. I was born in Wapping. When I was 10, I suddenly lived in S. Windsor, as it ate up the little township.
In my 20s, I moved to Vernon, which a few years later magically became Vernon-Rockville. Which was controversial! WE DON’T LIVE IN STINKY ROCKVILLE! but there ya go, now we did.
The township east of Rockville is named, no joke, Quarryville. Yes, our local identity was based on digging up rocks. And No, at the end of the day a man looking at his sundial wristwatch did not yank a bird’s tail, and I did not slide down a dinosaur’s tail yelling “GABBA GABBA, WE ACCEPT YOU, ONE OF US!”
(shrugs) Not that I didn’t want to.
“If Crankshaft is 104 today, and 64 tomorrow … who cares? What works best for today’s installment?”
Funny you would say that, Y., as in the Monday 6/3 ‘Shaft we see Ed holding a candle-laden birthday cake for a Senior Softball teammate who is turning 94 and looks at least two decades older than our titular “hero.” How long before Batiuk retcons it so that Cranky is a 74-year-old school bus driver who fought in the Vietnam War at the same time his college-age daughter was covering the Kent State protests? If the strip makes it into next year, can we look forward to him becoming a Desert Storm veteran who is now canonically younger than Funky, Les, Holly, and rest of the Westview High Class of 1972?
Is there a particular R.E.M. song that’s locally popular?
Ouch! 😂
I can imagine some clueless dumbass at the OMEA conference last year suggesting that Batiuk feature Dinkle more often.
I imagine anyone who gives Batiuk genuine positive feedback has an outsized influence on the strip. His own “Secret Sauce” blog posts sometimes admit this.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
This is the third sunday with Fitness Girl and Crankshit
Meanwhile in Mary Worth
Wilbur: cries in the most disgusting, inelegantly-blubbering way possible, with snot spraying everywhere in his apartment
(I punch Wilbur in the face as hard as I can, and then jump out of the window just so I dont have to hear Wilburp cry like a gen alpha kid when their phone gets taken away from them)
(Pisssst, CSRob? You made Medic and Scout jokes in the past. Did you sign FixTF2 yet? My friends and I love that game so hard.)
I was disappointed to see Wilbur’s disheveled state—it wasn’t any different than his usual state. And here they did such a nice job showing Arthur’s living conditions. Boo Moy and Brigman, boo!
I liked the part where Wilbur threatened to start drinking, but didn’t actually do it. (After he’s had days to start getting a buzz on.)
I’ll forgive this arc if it ends with Mary putting a foot in Wilbur’s ass. He’s got nothing to be so mopey about, his failures are mostly his own fault, and he’s an awful person besides. He needs to told to grow a spine, not be indulged with low-fat, high-platitude muffins again.
I hope Mary at least points out the real problem. The only reason Wilbur cares about “Stellan” is because it was the living embodiment of Wilbur’s past falled relationship with Stella.
Wilbur wants an eternal pity party for something that died a long time ago, which he was too incompetent to keep alive. Reminds me of another comic strip character I could name.
Wilbur is so played out as a character. I was so hoping this arc would be about Dawn.
He should have never survived that fall from the cruise ship.
Yeah, Wilbur should have Aldo Kelrasted himself off that cruise ship. I think <i>Mary Worth</i> could gone to that well twice. Unlike Aldo, Wilbur is a regular character, and his death would instigate follow-up stories about other regular characters coping. This was actually starting to happen, until the little prick showed up alive. Worst plot twist ever.
Mary should be so done with Wilbur’s shit. He’s well past “don’t talk badly about yourself.” Hell, we just saw him fantasize himself as a superhero for doing nothing. I don’t think Wilbur’s problem is a lack of self-esteem.
Mary needs to say “Wilbur, I can’t help you anymore. It’s beyond my ability. You need professional counseling. If you ever want to improve yourself, come talk to me. If you want to sit around and feel sorry for yourself, then you can just do that. I’m not joining your goldfish funeral. Which is really just whining that you lost the woman I tried to serve to you on a platter.”
The usual muffins-and-meddling act is weaksauce at this point. She needs to pull out the big guns, cut Wilbur out of her life, or the strip needed to let him die. Rusty is right: Wilbur is played out.
If they had actually killed off Wilbur in the cruise ship fall — a bold-but-potentially-fascinating move — and dealt with the aftermath, I would still read Mary Worth.
The minute he was revealed to be alive, I stopped reading and have not been back since.
Wilbur surviving the fall off the cruise ship was bad enough, but when he intentionally didn’t let anyone know he was still alive for an entire week just so he could “surprise” them… yeah, total “last straw” territory there.
(Wilbur is truly the character that one wishes to see that Simpsons joke come true about: the “very rare Mary Worth in which she advises a friend to commit suicide” should totally be how Wilbur goes out.)
I hold out hope that Mary’s going to put her foot down later thids week. Because Wilbur’s turning into the new Les Moore. Maybe even more so, since the rest of the cast used to call Wilbur out on his bad behavior.
As usual, Batiuk continues to baffle with his storytelling “decision making”, for lack of a better term. So Pete owns Montoni’s now, which makes absolutely no sense at all, and creates more unanswered questions than it could possibly hope to ever resolve. I guess it would have made sense if he just bought Montoni’s, as some sort of deranged “investment”, and it went from there, but he went all-in with it, and now Pete is slinging pies like some mopey, cut-rate Wally. OK, then.
My strict anti-Crankshaft bias has been somewhat mellowed by the obvious, uh, “popular demand”, let’s say, and I give this new era my official blessing. I’m still not going to read Crankshaft, though, that’s just never gonna happen. I’ve already paid my comic strip dues, and then some.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Guess I’m going have to eat my words from friday/saturday, because it’s week two of this crap
RE: Tuesday 6/4’s ‘Shaft:
After an endless parade of homeless FW refugees making their way to the Promised Land of Centerville, Batiuk has at last heard his readers’ pleas and introduced a fresh, new character: a cantankerous, elderly man who can make with sarcastic comments and snappy comebacks. Just what the strip needed!
It reminds me of one of the Marx Brothers’ final films, 1941’s “The Big Store,” where during a climactic chase scene they brought in a “funny” janitor to serve as comic relief…in a Marx Brothers movie.
All I remember from that movie was the weird song:
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Day Eight Of This Crap, And I Want To See Some Action Right Now
Nope. It’s going to be five more days of Not Crankshaft smirking at the news camera about how old he is.