For the first time in awhile, this week in Crankshaft wasn’t straight-up Funky Winkerbean Act III. It starred Ed Crankshaft and his family, in a staple Crankshaft story: Ed’s barbecues causing a major disaster. But it was a great example of many things that are wrong with Tom Batiuk’s storytelling in general, and invites commentary for that reason. It’s going to be a cavalcade of TBTropes, some old and some new.
The week started with Mindy informing Pete that he’s “not really dressed for a grill-out” at her house. The suggested gear is, of course, protective gear against fire and explosions. Yuk yuk.
How does Pete not already know of Ed’s grilling misadventures? He’s been dating Mindy since 2017, and the “engagement tiger” incident was in 2019. They’ve been on multiple trips together.
On top of that, Ed’s grill-outs have resulted in criminal charges of destroying the earth! You’d think Pete would be aware of that incident. If the earth was destroyed, where would Pete get his comic books?
Last week and this have been as if Pete is meeting Mindy’s family for the first time. Because Tom Batiuk adores “young kids just starting out” stories. In fact, let’s promote that to a TBTrope:
Young Kids Just Starting Out Story: Exactly what it says on the tin. Any story about a young adult experiencing adult life for the first time, even if that character is old or experienced enough that these things shouldn’t be new to them.
You know who didn’t get a Young Kids Just Starting Out Story? Lisa. Well, not the one she should have gotten. Act I Lisa was a mousy pregnant teen, later retconned to sexual assault victim. She was so terrified of standardized tests that she ran out of the classroom. In the four-year time skip to Act II, she somehow became a high-stakes professional lawyer.
Lisa made one hell of a turnaround! Lawyering requires not only intellect, but poise, oration, mental toughness, and the ability to work under pressure – the complete opposite of what she was in Act I. Her transformation into an entirely different person is the greatest untold story in the Funkyverse. Hell, I want to know how she even paid for law school. (No, it wasn’t “working at Montoni’s.” Even in the 1990s, that wasn’t feasible.)
The recent appearances of Pete and Mindy are a particular sub-type of YKJSOS I call:
Getting To Know You After All These Years: Any story about a long-running couple making very basic discoveries about each other.
It turns out there’s a legit answer to this conundrum, though. As far as I know, Pete has only met Ed in Funky Winkerbean, where he exists in a decrepit state.
Act III Funky Winkerbean was supposedly ten years later than Crankshaft, because of the time skip at the end of Act II. Pete has only met Ed in the post-time skip Act III timeline of Funky Winkerbean. From Pete’s perspective, Ed has never been…. well, I hesitate to use the word “functional” to describe any character in the Funkyverse. What I mean is: Pete has never met Ed in his younger, Crankshaft form, when he was still capable of normal activity.
But thanks to the sloppy time lines, and the vague powers of Timemop, there are two plausible arguments that Pete really is going to one Ed’s cookouts for the first time. Yes, it requires Pete and Mindy to have traveled backwards in time, while still having their relationship. This could also explain Pete’s non-awareness of Ed’s Armageddon incident: it could still be in the future, relative to this week’s Crankshaft events. I call this:
Inelegant Solution: When Tom Batiuk’s writing errors are inadvertently resolved by Tom Batiuk’s other writing errors.
Next, I want to talk about the July 3 Crankshaft, and the July 4 Crankshaft. What happened between these two strips? We went straight from the setup to the aftermath. Three days of talking about what Ed’s going to blow up, and three days of what happened after Ed blew something up. We never get to see the blowing up, or even the lead-up to it.
Crankshaft does this All. The. Time. Look at the linked strip, and then the next day’s. They skip straight from exposition to denouement, skipping over rising action, conflict, climax, and sometimes even resolution. The story may not even tell you how the problem got solved! It just implies that it did. I call this:
Batiuk Cut: When an edit suddenly moves the story from well before the climax to well after it, eliminating any action, tension, conflict, resolution, or anything else that might have been interesting to see.
The first TBTrope (first link) was called Story Asserting, which was a description of Batiuk’s approach to writing. He doesn’t use art, language, narrative techniques, and other tools to convey the elements of a story. He just asserts the story at you, even if it’s different than what he’s showing. The Batiuk Cut is one of his tools for doing that.
The Act II time skip was a gigantic Batiuk Cut. It skipped the ten years after Lisa’s death for the stated reason of not wanting to spend time on Les mourning. Then Les spent the 17 years after that mourning anyway. The story Batiuk talked about on his blog wasn’t the story Batiuk gave you.
You’ve probably heard the writing dictum “Show Don’t Tell.” I think Tom Batiuk is a step worse than that, which is:
Tell, Don’t Talk About: Tom Batiuk should just have his characters tell the story, instead of skipping over the key moments entirely.
The name is a whimsical suggestion that “telling”, which is normally advised against, would actually be better than the exposition-and-aftermath dump the Funkyverse usually gives you. Sometimes in life, you have to get things from “atrocious” to “merely bad” before you can start making them good. That’s my modest ambition here.
In its better, not-yet-tainted-by-Funky-Winkerbean days, Crankshaft loved to tell things it should have been showing. So many strips were just Ed sitting in his bus, describing zany off-panel events:
(NOTE: The example strip was changed.)
Finally, Batiuk’s tendency to skip over most of the story enables many of the TBTropes I introduced previously. Writing around this week’s actual explosion also writes around anything that needs justification – and there’s a lot. Why does anyone have to, or would, attend Ed’s cookouts? Why is Ed Crankshaft allowed to use anything more dangerous than a toothpick after everything he’s done? I previously called these By The Power Of Batiuk (Type 2), where characters decline to exercise power they have over a situation, and Tonelessness, when a work fails to convey any information about the author’s intent.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Related to the Batiukverse: some old FW storyline from 1998 i found using the Toledo Blade and the Robesoian newspaper (featuring Ally and Chien)
Here he comes huffing and puffing and ready to blow the entire school down
“They might learn something”? They wont learn jack shit
The Daily Bleak
Two High School Sophomore Girls Sent To Hospital With Serious Injuries
I’m no yearbook expert, but I’m not sure Chien and Ally are allowed to use photos that rip on the school
Panel 1 and 2: Les is laughing his scrawny ass off
Panel 3: Les’s pants might as well be yellow because he’s absolutely terrified
Chien: What did he do to you when you were a student here?
Les: He beat the shit out of me.
Thank you for posting those strips. What a bafflingly awful week. That’s just not how humans from planet Earth speak and conduct themselves in making a yearbook. Is Les supposed to not be perceived as an insufferably nitwitted jackass here? What’s this “hunter gatherer” and “shallow end of the gene pool” talk about?
I was on a yearbook staff. It involved a lot of drawing lines on graph paper and manipulation of tangible photographs because it was 1994 and I was in eighth grade of grammar school. This kind of discussion wouldn’t happen, ever, anywhere. It’s the school’s football team. It will be in the book.
If you don’t like sports in general, OK, fine, that’s your preference, but this is just an especially terrible way to express that opinion. Christ. But…. it still goes to show that the primary way to really understand what makes Tom’s writing so bad is to see it among a greater context beyond a single day’s strip.
Thank you for posting those strips. What a bafflingly awful week.
I thought the week containing those strips above were very confusing as well
I also worked on a high school yearbook, and I had the same reaction you did. The yearbook is meant to include everything and everyone associated with the school. The idea that a school newspaper should be tailored to the preferences of the staff is bad enough. For a school yearbook, it’s appalling.
As a staff journalism/yearbook advisor, Les should know what “newsworthy” means. And it should have been the second thing he taught any of his students. (The first is libel, and how not to get sued for it.) But he just can’t stop thinking about himself, for a nanosecond. It doesn’t even occur to him, does it?
Indeed. Does Les think that if Ally and Chien wanted to leave students they didn’t like, or teachers they didn’t like, out of the yearbook, he should just go along with whatever they say? It’s one thing to allow the yearbook staff some latitude for creativity, but it’s another thing altogether to let them exclude activities they aren’t interested in.
Does Les think that if Ally and Chien wanted to leave students they didn’t like, or teachers they didn’t like, out of the yearbook, he should just go along with whatever they say?
Yes. At least, if he agrees with their choices. Worse, it seems that Tom Batiuk thinks this too, because the story presents Les as being the reasonable one. Les is being a complete selfish jackass, as usual.
Every time Les has power over a group function, he makes it about Lisa and himself. Except when the gang went back in time and met their younger selves. Which he SHOULD have made about Lisa, because knowledge of her future cancer would have saved her life! Or at least prolonged and improved it. Les couldn’t be bothered. And Tom Batiuk couldn’t be bothered to fix, or justify, this gaping story problem.
A similar situation happens in DOAWK: Hard Luck, when Greg joines the yearbook club, he decides to shrink the heads of some of the students in the pictures (Even Rowley)
Are we led to believe the Westview yearbook staff consisted of a mere two students? How many students were on your yearbook staff?
Out of curiosity, I looked it up in my senior class yearbook. The yearbook staff had SIXTEEN students. The faculty advisor was the art teacher, not an english teacher. An art teacher with a strong grasp of graphic design. Just sayin’.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen Chien. I had no idea she was a Día de Muertos skeleton in a wig and a dress.
I can see what Batty was trying to accomplish with these strips — the conflict between the unimaginative old-school coach and the hip, artistically-minded student has comedy potential. Any cartoonist this side of Bob Montana (“Sorry, Coach Kleats, but Veronica says the team’s new uniforms aren’t groovy enough to be included in the yearbook.”) could have mined a few chuckles from it.
In fact, when the strips were originally published, Tom might have generated a few faint smiles with the material. Unfortunately, hindsight and awareness of his “quarter-inch from reality” nonsense makes it difficult for me to read the strips without thinking about how unrealistic the story arc is.
Just imagine when the yearbooks came out with no photos of the football team. Students would’ve been outraged. Bull would’ve been outraged, and only the timely intervention of the entire assistant coaching staff would’ve prevented him from reducing Less to a mangled, Beetle Baileyesque mound of goo.
Worst of all, parents would’ve been outraged. Why, they would’ve demanded, did we pay good money for this waste of rain forests, when it doesn’t include even a single photo of our kids’ homecoming victory over the Milford Mudlarks? Within two days, with calls for refunds increasing, the school board (nine members, including three football parents) would’ve taken up the matter. Les would’ve been informed that he had been relieved of his student publication sponsorship duties and it would’ve been quietly but strongly suggested that he consider employment options at other school districts for the next term.
See? Far more realistic. And, considering it ends with Les being run out of town on a rail, more amusing.
Bull would’ve been outraged, and only the timely intervention of the entire assistant coaching staff would’ve prevented him from reducing Less to a mangled, Beetle Baileyesque mound of goo.
I dont think that would’ve stopped him from beating Les into a bloody smear (similar to non-supe characters in the The Boys TV Show after being killed by a Supe)
Like CSRoberto, I find Chien an interesting character. Because she really doesn’t fit into Westview at all – and isn’t bothered by that. She reminded me of “military brats”, or other children who moved around a lot. They were easygoing, adapted easily to new schools, didn’t join cliques, and were blase because they’d already seen everything high school life has to throw at you. Come to think of it, I got along well with those kids, even though I lived in the same town from age 4 to 18.
Chien was like “oh, I can blow off the jocks because the teacher hates them too? Cool.”
Wasn’t around for this era of FW. What well-nigh-unreadable crap! How in the world did this terribly-written feature ever survive?
Interesting to see, however, that even at this stage Tom Batiuk — via his avatar Les — clearly thinks that a publisher is someone who has no other function than to unquestioningly put out WHATEVER content that someone ‘creative’ feels like providing. That totally checks out.
I think FW survived because of people actually liking it for how bad it is
Other than this website, I don’t think there’s much evidence of that. I think the Funkyverse got a small amount of pushback in Act II and early Act III, for its direction. But not 5% of what For Better Of For Worse got during its Anthony era.
I’ve found a new good thinkpieces from that time. Such as an open letter to Tom Batiuk, asking him to lay off the gloom already. But TB doesn’t acknowledge input of any kind, much less listen to it. So these calls went unheeded. By 2010, most readers had simply abandoned FW. Except those of us who find Batiuk fascinating as an anti-auteur.
I joined this site shortly before the Kilimanjaro arc. And over the years there have been a number of comments posted that said, “Hey, I like Funky Winkerbean. You guys shouldn’t be so hard on it.”
Every time, commentors here would be nice and respectful and ask, “Why do you like Funky Winkerbean? Not trying to be mean, genuinely curious.”
Every single time, the answer would be, “I remember it from when it was funny.”
In other words, FW survived because of pure nostalgia, having nothing to do with the present day strip.
I agree with beckoningchasm.
Between the early gag-a-day strips and discovering Comics Kingdom commenters snarking on Funky Winkerbean in 2015, I primarily read the strip because it was on my newspaper’s comic page. FW was no longer a favorite. I read it simply out of habit, “because it was there.”
While snarking on the Comics Kingdom, I remember asking a finger-wagger why they liked Funky Winkerbean. They answered, “good ol’ wholesome family values.” I didn’t reply, partially out of respect that they actually answered, but mostly because I was laughing so hard. Good ol’ wholesome family values like what? Cancer, CTE, PTSD, melancholia, and alcoholism? Dude, what comic strip were you reading?
————
I’ll never forget the day I discovered Funky Winkerbean snark. I read a strip and thought to myself, “This is terrible. I should check out the comments to see if anybody feels the same.”
Mind blown. 🤯
Yeah… there may have been a few others feeling the same way. /s
beckoningcahsm wrote: ”In other words, FW survived because of pure nostalgia, having nothing to do with the present day strip.”
This sounds very plausible. Lots of music acts, TV shows, and entertainers hang on WAY past their prime, inexplicably continuing to churn out new product. Not because their new albums/episodes/shows are good, but because there’s that nostalgia factor …. “Hey, maybe this will be the one where they recapture that old magic! <SEVERAL MINUTES LATER> Nope. <SEVERAL MONTHS LATER> Hey, maybe this will be the one where they recapture that old magic! “
Nostalgia is seldom about the item in question, but more about the time in which the er, nostagiator encountered the item. “I remember when the Parafins did that song, ‘You Nogoodnik You!’ That was the summer me and the guys rode our bikes to the top of Mount Garbage and yelled Shakespeare sonnets at the top of our lungs! What a great summer!”
This person doesn’t really miss the Parafins or their songs. He just wants to feel the way he did that summer, and the Parafins are a kind of touchstone.
That’s why Funky’s fans are nostalgic for the old strip, and honestly couldn’t be bothered with the new strip. It doesn’t remind them of laughs, it reminds them of a time in their lives.
Great digging, CSR! I especially like how TB bookended the story, with Les STILL not over his high school relationship with Bull. These strips take place 5 years after Les punched Bull in the face at a high school reunion for absolutely no reason and Bull was all “Yeah, I owed you that for high school… so, tennis on Wednesday?” about it. It is understandable that Les would have a harder time moving on than Bull, but at this point the ball is completely in Les’ court and he’s stuffing it into his pocket.
It really is a wonderful example of TB’s ever obtuse view of the characters he picked to be his strip’s heroes. Les is the protagonist, going to bat for the students in his care… in a conflict that arose entirely because Bull is going to bat for his kids! He’s doing the same thing Les is doing, and for a cause more inclusive to be semantic about it. And, he’s the bad guy. Remarkable stuff!
Like so much of Act II, it was at least well-paced insufferable pap. TB was on to some other pet issue the following Monday, no doubt.
And of course, Les isn’t really going to bat for his students. He’s throwing them under the bus. He tells Bull the decision was made by the students, not him. If he had any guts as their advisor, he could have told Bull “I stand by their decision”, even though it most certainly would have resulted in the events in erdmann’s post.
Any decent advisor would have asked the girls “Have you considered the ramifications of excluding your classmates from yearbook? Classmates who have worked just as hard as you? Don’t their accomplishments also deserve be remembered?” Les is a journalism teacher. Has he never covered ethics or bias? And if they continued to insist on leaving out the football team, he most certainly could have used his advisor position to overrule the decision. He could have actually taught the girls something about journalist integrity and understanding who your audience is. And it might have even been funny…
Not the first time I’ve thought this, and not the first time I’ve posted this, but I think Batiuk doesn’t have a problem with bullying. He just has a problem that he might be the guy getting bullied. If he gets to bully people he doesn’t like, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s cool, even.
“Mr. Moore, would you care to explain why the yearbook didn’t include anything about the football team?”
“I guess SOME STUDENTS WERE LEFT BEHIND.”
Thank you for posting this, csroberto2854. Nothing warms my heart like reading multiple SoSF commenters ripping Les Moore to shreds.
Your post about “inelegant solutions” made me think of the Gay Prom storyline, and for a moment I forgot this is supposed to be about Crankshaft and thought that one of your links might mention it.
Never mind the standard terribleness of that story and all its shortcomings. One of the most unmentioned massive screwups when we recall the thing is that Becky’s dad yells at Becky’s mom, who was causing ALL the trouble, and… that was it. The next day it was all over and Linda and Becky were busy talking about it. There was no discussion and subsequent rejection of what Roberta had been advocating (probably because Batiuk was too much of a coward to make that explicit). There was no defense of why what Nate was proposing was superior to Roberta’s, because, really, “let’s follow the rulebook when it doesn’t give us an answer by assuming it means that this is allowed” really isn’t defensible, admirable, or groundbreaking. It was just left at that. “Shut up, lady” was the solution. And then we get a prom where everyone praises Nate, who Batiuk had already claimed was acting as his stand-in, and no one mentions gay people without first making sure to hide behind the scenery.
BatYam has always been very adept at deftly sidestepping and ducking the REAL LIFE ISSUES he’s supposedly “addressing” via his groundbreaking strip, but he really outdid himself with the Gay Prom Mega Arc. He introduced the same-sex prom couple, then immediately shifted the focus on to Summer, at which point Becky’s meddlesome old bag of a mother became the lead, only to be dressed down by her perpetually henpecked husband. Then came Nate’s unbelievably half-assed resolution, which would have been a gigantic cop-out all on its own. But then he copped out on the cop-out by having a student who was undecided about being gay hide behind some scenery, and thank Nate for making it safe for them to attend prom, if they did in fact eventually decide if they were gay. Wishy, meet Washy.
I am also obliged to point out that he never finished the arc where Becky’s annoying old bat of a mother was stuck on the band scissor lift. Boy, Roberta was just a terrible, terrible character. And that bit with her husband always filming everything was way less funny than Batty thought it was.
And for all that, which would certainly show Batiuk as deserving of the snark, he then doubles down by talking about how edgy and ground-breaking and risk-taking he is by doing these stories in the first place. It’s truly fascinating how utterly disconnected he must be.
that bit with her husband always filming everything was way less funny than Batty thought it was.
It could have aged well, though. Like The Riddler’s rant at the end of Batman Forever about how his device collected “credit card numbers, bank codes, sexual fantasies, and little white lies” from its users. That was damn prescient for 1995.
But it didn’t age well, because there was never any substance to it. Nobody ever reacted to this man’s obsessive filming of everything, and the story never explored why he did it. It was just a side gag. He’s filming everything, because he’s the guy who films everything. The end. And Tom Batiuk needs objects to fill up the boxes full of talking heads.
If Batiuk had ever written a strip where someone was put off by this constant video recording, or even commented on it, it would ring very true today. Video recording is pervasive and normalizes in society now. We’re just used to it. It’d be refreshing to see a negative response to it. Rebellious, even.
But Batiuk would still find a way to undermine himself, like he did with the school monitor machine gun thing. There were two valid responses to that: “yes, that joke isn’t very funny anymore” and “that joke was from a different era, that also had talking computers, pizzas you could play on a record player, and a majorette who routinely set herself on fire.” Of course, he chose neither. “The machine gun just played the school fight song!” Which, somehow, made the whole situation even worse.
Or, he could have had Roberta’s husband film her saying something in private that undermined her public “Moms Against Gay Proms” stance, which might have forced her to recant, and admit she was fine with same-sex prom couples, and was just posturing for attention, and perhaps it would have made the characters appear, you know, human-ish instead of the dumb caricatures they actually were. But that would have involved a degree of WRITING that our pal Tom just wasn’t willing to commit to at that time. So he went with the Principal Nate thing instead. It saved time he needed for those vital Funky/Fitness Girl arcs he had ready to run that year.
It’s like Batiuk can’t fathom any of his own characters experiencing failure or criticism – not even the villians. Even when they’re clearly in the wrong, and the entire story is about how wrong they are. Only cartoon villains like Frankie and faceless “Hollywood people” ever get called out.
Roberta Blackburn is just Dollar General Sheila Brofloski. Roberta has no dignity that needed to be preserved. But TB just quietly retired her from the strip, rather than having her deal with any repercussions from the damage she caused to other people’s lives. The GOOD characters’ lives. The proper comic-book-enjoyers’ lives.
The Funkyverse runs on constant aggrievement over ancient, petty slights. Then when a real enemy shows up and does real harm to people, they can’t even be bothered to care. Or take any satisfaction in defeating it. What kind of cynical bastard would create a world like this?
The problem with your scenario, and with Batiuk’s resolution, is that Roberta wasn’t the only person protesting the SSC going to the prom. She had an entire crowd out picketing the thing. Nate called the assembly where he talked about what wasn’t in the Student Handbook because he heard that the students were going to counter protest and presumably feared an incident between the protest groups.
Then Roberta’s husband told her to shut up, she shut up and literally no one else in her entire picket line had anything to say in response to that. They cared enough to come out and picket a school over this, to make signs that could brand them as bigots. All this and the only thing it took was one old man telling his wife to shut up to make them all run away and give up the cause.
Because I was an idiot back in 2012, I thought the following day’s strip would be Roberta’s husband explaining in some detail why Roberta should just give up the cause, even if it was pretty generic or vague. (ie. “Just leave those kids alone!” “Let them do what they want.” “None of the kids actually going to the prom has a problem with this.” “Why is this so important to you?” etc.) But I overestimated Batiuk substantially. Or I underestimated his cowardice. Or both.
So it was all “shut up and sit down!” and then this gripping conflict that had taken up weeks was completely resolved. The thing was almost dadaist or a shaggy dog joke. If I didn’t know better, I’d find it unbelievable that Batiuk just intended that to be it. There had to be a second meaning. But then, with the next several strips talking about how great his stand-in character was, that second meaning emerged, and it was terrible.
Young Kids Just Starting Out Story
The Boy Lisa and Jessica story was another confounding Young Kids Just Starting Out story. They were Act II mainstays, and along with Pete, were the main WHS student characters. Then, after the time skip, they seemingly vanished, only to reappear in 2010 or 2011 (can’t remember, too lazy to look) at Boy Lisa’s bio-mom’s husband’s door, just out of nowhere. They were already married, and the story was that This Economy drove Boy Lisa, by that point a hotshot MBA, from the Big City back to Westview, but the rest of that fourteen year span was a mystery. Then, predictably, they became Young Kids Just Starting Out again, working at Montoni’s, renting the apartment and knocking out a baby. It’s like the time skip never happened, which comes up pretty often in FW lore.
I always wondered re: Lisa’s miraculous blossoming too. College apparently did wonders for her. I have to believe it was all the result of Batiuk’s infamous idealization/wish-fulfillment fantasies, where he seized upon the opportunity to morph the Lisa character into his vision of the ideal woman. Don’t know what the deal was with that hairdo, though.
Still Related To The Batiukverse: What I Imagine The Heights of The Characters To Be (slightly tweaked)
I have to address this again. Sorry, dude, but your list is absurd. There are less than 500 men in the United States who are 6’10 or taller, and you have two of them listed. Your average height of a Funkyverse man is around 6’3, which is 6 inches taller than an average American man. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Just for comparison’s sake, if you were to gather your conceptions of Funky, Wally, Wedgeman, Jarod Posey and Big Mac in Montoni’s, the starting five from the Cleveland Cavaliers could walk in and they’d be less physically imposing than the men who are already there. You’ve made Big Mac bigger than Shaquille frickin’ O’Neal. Substitute a vast majority of NBA teams’ starting five and I could still make that claim. The New York Knicks would be positively tiny! Big Mac would be taller than all but about 12 of them.
If Funky were actually 6’3, his height and bulk would make it difficult for him to fit comfortably in a standard car. If Wally were 6’6, he’d either not fit his bed or have to have one specially made for him. He’d also be 5 to 8 inches taller than just about everyone in his Army unit. Darin at 6’3 would not be able to ride in Mopey’s Miata that he was shown driving in his reintroduction to Act 3 without massive cramping. And if any of the shorter yet still over 6’0 men tried shopping at a department store, they’d better hope no one else got there before them.
Again, if you’re 6’0, you’re taller than 86% of the American male population. Your conception of Westview has them constituting a race of Supermen.
I can buy a lot of those height estimates… Surely TB made his characters tall enough to look down on us readers, as they so often do.
Wedgeman would have struggled as blocker and ballcarrier as a 6’7″ fullback, though.
“Lisa Moore is seven feet tall” would be the funniest damn thing Batiuk’s ever written.
I agree with BTS. These heights are mostly reasonable, if csroberto is approaching the Funkyverse from a cinematic angle. The “average” characters you see in movies are portrayed by people who are well above average in looks and physique. See Hollywood Pudgy.
In other words, I don’t think Wally Winkerbean is 6-foot-3, but you might get a 6-foot-3 actor to play him.
My thought was that BTS was making the joke that all of the Funkyverse characters are super tall because it enables them all to look down on the rest of us.
As for your contention of Hollywood actors, yes, they’re better looking and they’re generally thinner than average, but that doesn’t address height. “Hollywood Pudgy” doesn’t apply here because we’re not talking about how Hollywood got a size 10 actress to play the massively overweight Holly. We’re simply talking about how tall they are.
Here’s the heights of some of the Avengers and their assorted contemporaries:
Robert Downey Jr – 5’8
Mark Ruffalo – 5’8
Tom Holland – 5’6
Jeremy Renner – 5’9
Benedict Cumberbatch – 6’0
Chris Evans – 6’0
Chris Hemsworth – 6’3
Brie Larson – 5’7
Scarlett Johansson – 5’4
Dave Batista (cast as a character who is supposed to be otherworldly enormous) – 6’6
Chris Pratt – 6’2
Let’s go with James Bond, paragon of masculinity and power:
Sean Connery – 6’2
George Lazenby – between 6’1 and 6’2
Roger Moore – 6’1
Pierce Brosnan – 6’1
Timothy Dalton – 6’1
Daniel Craig – 5’10
How about Batman?
Adam West – 6’2
Michael Keaton – 5’8
Christian Bale – 6’0
Robert Pattinson – 6’0
Ben Affleck – 6’2
Star Wars?
Mark Hamill – 5’9
Harrison Ford – 6’1
Carrie Fisher – 5’1
New Star Wars?
Daisy Ridley – 5’7
John Boyega – 5’9
Oscar Isaac – 5’9
Adam Driver – 6’2
Prequel Star Wars?
Ewan McGregor – 5’10
Natalie Portman – 5’3
Hayden Christensen – 6’0
Hell, since I mentioned them, Cleveland Cavaliers:
Darius Garland – 6’1
Donovan Mitchell – 6’3
Max Strus – 6’5
Evan Mobley – 6’10
Jarrett Allen – 6’9
Do we want to keep going on?
I did make an error in my previous post, however. There are only 3 players in the NBA who are taller than 7’2, and one of them famously joined the league last season. Please forgive the error.
My thought was that BTS was making the joke that all of the Funkyverse characters are super tall because it enables them all to look down on the rest of us.
I got the joke. That just wasn’t the thing I wanted to respond to.
Otherwise, yes, you’re right too. The characters are 3-6 inches too tall across the board. A 6-foot-7 high school fullback, even from a dead-end team like Westview, would be a better college/pro prospect than Bull Bushka himself was.
I’m going to disagree with your assessment of “The little Johnson girl is in kind of an ugly mood this morning!”
The joke in that strip is that we are led to believe that the bus is being chased by an angry dog, when in fact it turns out that the bus is being chased by an angry girl. I think the joke works the way it is.
I suppose that the revealer in the last panel could have been the girl chasing the bus and growling, “Grrr!”, but that would have required a lot of re-drawing and re-positioning of the bus and characters.
Going to agree with you here. Sometimes there is a good reason to tell and not show in a comic strip. There’s a certain comedy in describing something not seen.
The idea for the jokes this week would have worked just fine under Old Crankshaft. The exaggeration fitting the way Crankshaft maintained more of the zany nonsense Act I used to have. But the art was abysmal and failed to carry the jokes, which, while as solid as a pedestrian sidewalk in concept, were poorly executed.
Joshua, you and Harriet are right – that was a bad example. I changed it to a better one.
1.) Why this place is the best.
Respectful, reasoned debate is not only accepted but encouraged.
Much better example, Banana. It would have been funny for the strip to be silent, and to see a mother rip off her bathrobe to reveal a spandex running outfit, along with Crankshaft’s look of horror. Then maybe even a silent panel of Cranky flooring the accelerator.
Thank you and Joshua for the correction! Yes, the better example would have been much funnier as a wordless, visual joke. I know there are tons more examples in Crankshaft.
Well, hope we enjoyed the comic break because Sunday has finally brought back a Funky tradition to Crankshaft in its purest form: An original comic cover. No technicality of it being a novel cover either, this is for a comic, and an all new one at that that Pete was inspired by just from surviving Ed’s grilling scene.
Putting aside the obvious snarks about how Pete quit Atomix Komix months ago (does pitching whole new books honestly count as part-timing?) and how like mentioned before that he’s acting way too late considering how Ed was in the international news for his world-dooming antics last year, let’s just appreciate how this occasion of the Funky Comic Cover (TM) is of the discount outlet variety. The “We got Funky Comic Covers (TM) at home”, to use a modern meme. No commissioning a veteran artist this time, “Dangerous” Dan Davis was simply asked to draw something himself (no doubt with traced sources, though I’m too tired right now to judge on where he got that grill reference), with the Andrews McMeel colorists doing a bang up job of making it look like a joke comic you’d see in a Saturday Morning cartoon. Fantastic craftsmanship, Boy Lisa.
I’m going to say that the tortoises are stolen from the Atomic Ape comic cover that Batiuk had someone draw years ago. I remember it because I wondered at the time why Batiuk was having his comic book hero beating the shit out of tortoises while his “child sidekick” was blowing them away with a fully automatic laser SMG while grinning maniacally.
What did tortoises do to earn his ire?
You spotted them bang on, Charles, they’re from the Atomic Ape #1/”993″ cover, with cut-and-pasting within the new cover itself!
And for a bonus round, I checked. Yes, it’s ripped straight out of Google Image Search for an Amazon listing
Truly carrying the legacy of Silver Age covers.
Holy Dead St. Lisa, Andrew! Great detective work! I stand it line.
Adobe’s auto-trace tool has gotten better since the last time I used it.
I am really impressed by the overall shoddiness of today’s cover. It takes “phoning it in” to a new level. Look at the lettering in the title, looks like Davis spent about a minute on it and said, “screw it; this is a dumb Sideways Sunday cover.” I can’t blame him–if Batiuk can’t even be bothered to come up with a “clever clip” for the insert bubble (notice MoPete says nothing that’s even trying to be funny here, just that he got the idea from a cookout with Mindy’s grandfather–unlike most previous Sideways Sunday covers, when there was a generally lame attempt at a pun), why should his artist put any effort into it?
I kinda wonder… there are no doubt some papers that still only carry Crankshaft on Sunday. I wonder what their readers are thinking when they see this… something along the lines of, “well, he had to crack up eventually…”
“MoPete says nothing that’s even trying to be funny”
It’s like the Ancient Baseballers arc. They didn’t end in punchlines, just statements of fact. Bats has truly elevated that inescapable “joke” from TV sitcoms: “Well, THAT happened.” Yes. It did. I noticed. Everyone did! It’s so stupid that–
Let us count down the minutes until Bats has someone say “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?”
I got up to pee late last night, decided to check CS, and just said “This is the stupidest, unfunniest fucking thing this gibbering lackapate has ever rubbed out.” That is not my punchline. It is a statement of fact.
I’M BACK! THE SPAWN WERE SNUGGLED AND THE FIREWORKS WERE EXPLOD.
Thanks for BJ6K for holding down the fort and giving it a good bombardment while he was at it!
Why would I want to bombard the fort I’m holding down? Maybe you need a few more days away from Crankshaft. 🙂
Badum Tish!
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Remember when Funky laughed at the idea that Pete had time to work at Montoni’s and work on comic stuff? Now that shit is out of the window because here we are
I’m guessing that explaining how Lisa turned her life around isn’t as interesting as watching Dinkle be a pompous ass.
I think Batiuk wanted to focus on Dinkle than Lisa in the first year of Act II
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Since when cupholders were used to carry buckets of popcorn?
They can barely hold soda cups anymore. Movie theater concessions are ridiculous, even by already-bloated American standards. Every container is shaped like an oil drum. Everything is $7 for small, $7.25 for medium, and $7.50 for large, so you might as well get the large.
If you’re ever outside North America, and dining at an American chain, prepare to be surprised at what you get when you ask for medium fries and medium Coke. I hope you weren’t hungry or thirsty.
I realize that there really is nothing Tommy Tuberculosis is more convinced he’s right about, while being laughably wrong about, than Hollywood movies. (OK, he’s more wrong about “How people speak” and “Basic Hu-Man emotions”)
Yeah, Phantom Dumpster was a no-budget serial from 1935 in sound, but silent movies were the main format of major films in 1940. Yeah, climb that Hollywood sign, and give your Best Actress Oscar to the guy who wrote “Based on a true Story” when in reality, the actual screenwriters are barred from the set (and you can’t give Oscars away). A quarter Astronomical Unit from reality.
But…He doesn’t know how movie THEATERS work? I don’t mean that the Valen-grime serves popcorn in trash bin leftovers and has shown only 6 movies, half of which were vaguely eclipsed-themed. (Hey, Mom & Dad! Bring the little ones to APOCALYPTO! They’ll love it!) He thinks modern theaters have popcorn-tub sized cup holders.
HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HOW MOVIE THEATERS WORK
I hope his wife stopped washing dishes and giving him cookies and paused long enough to take his car keys away. “But wifey! We’ll get to the 77th showing of Lisa’s Story faster if I drive on the sidewalk!”
To be fair, Phantom Empire had Gene Autry in it, and he was a pretty big star at the time. The movie had a budget for his salary, at least.
Still Today’s Absolute Incredibly Very Boring Shell of A Shitty Comic So Much I Wish That Batiuk Would Fire Dan Davis For Not Making His Own Damn Artwork And Rehire Either Rick Burchett or Chuck Ayers (Aka. Funky Crankerbean)
The last time I was in a movie theater, it was sometime in 2018-2019 when my parents and me watched Venom, and the cupholders were way too small to hold a bucket of popcorn
Related to the batiukverse: more chienposting (via Toledo Blade)
The Daily Bleak
Seventeen Year Old High School Girl Hospitalized Because She Hit The Wrong Key on The Keyboard One Too Many Times
The smiley face in the panel with the FW title might be mocking Chien
BTW, this strip is in a weeks-long storyline where Chien gets suspended for berating WHS for not being hard enough on bullies
Ha ha it’s funny because nobody told Chien that the study worksheets were due on Jan 30th, 2005
Holy crap the art in Cranky today. Davis has gone from phoning it in to scribbling drunkenly on a scrap of toilet paper and tying the results to the broken leg of a diseased carrier pigeon.
Holy crap the writing in Cranky this week.
In his defense, Davis continues to put in exactly the amount of work the scripts deserve.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean (I Hate The Artwork in Crankshit Ever Since “Artist” Dan Davis Took Over Than The Writing Itself, Which Is Beyond Sucktacular)
What is this, the Cold War of theatre seats?
These two need to decide on what kind of theater they want to run. Do they want an old fashioned cinema showing classic films? Is so, then focus on maintaining the retro look of the theater and booking old films that people would pay to see on the big screen. If they want to build a state of the art venue with fancy seats, that’s fine (I hope Mason has deep pockets) but it seems they would be appealing to a completely different segment of the population if they went that route.
I’d love to know how many days a theater with seats that have recliner buttons, heating buttons and phone rechargers have where none of them are broken. Also, better hope with heated seats, nobody ever spills a large soda on them!
You know with little kids, those recliner buttons would last about three days, with them absolutely annoying the shit out of everyone in the meantime.
Also, Wifi in the seats? Does every seat have a router? Great use of a theater’s dwindling revenue there!
Guess I’m saying Batiuk doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he doesn’t have enough of an imagination to effectively fake it.
Wifi in the seats and phone rechargers. They’re practically begging for people to ruin the movie-watching experience for everyone. How about giving everyone a microphone, too?
I’m sure if anyone said anything above a whisper when Tom was watching “The Phantom Empire,” he would have shot them such a look.