I’m thankful my mom bribed me with 200 dollars cash to bleach wash my older brother’s warcrime of a bathroom ahead of my sister and her ever expanding army of giggling, tripping-hazards from arriving.
I’m thankful for the stubborn resiliency of 80’s era plastics that allow my fat ass to crouch sit with my nephew on the vintage Little Tikes picnic table we hoarded in an old hog shed for thirty years for just this occasion.
I’m thankful for the current grocery store price war going on in my town that made it so I could transform ten cans of green beans and this pile of processed dairy:
Into this glorious tapestry of saturated fat:
All without mortgaging my action figure collection.
I’m thankful for this wonderful blog. And all the readers and commenters who have supported the SOSF crew in the last two years as we transitioned into a new form. I’m thankful for your patience. Your enthusiasm. Your passion to deep dive, discuss, and dissect, and snark.
I’m thankful that Batiuk has let slip that the abysmal horror of modern Crankshaft will be continuing for at least another year, so I have another year to spend here with you.
And I’m so thankful that Batiuk has promised that soon the full Funky and Cranky archives will be on GoComics so I can stop emailing myself photos of physical comic book pages.
And yet, I’m also thankful for those bulky, overpriced monuments to one man’s hubris. And also so thankful for that silly old coot himself, whatever his ignoble fall from the dizzying heights of average.
Yup, out here in hicksville, we’re juuuuuuuuust about done. We’ve got one field of corn that we’re running through the chopper to bag as cattle feed, but that endeavor has turned into Zeno’s earledge. Like a shriveled baby carrot left in the back of the crisper drawer for a year, the corn is way too dry and old. Meaning we’re not chopping and crushing yummy moist corncobs, but grinding kernels into flour. The wind has to be out of the right direction, at the right speed, or both the chopper and the tractor get lost in a huge white cloud of potentially explosive cornmeal.
Fall is winding to a close, we’re less than one week away from the Nationwide Food Coma that heralds the beginning of the holiday season.
Tom Batiuk loves fall. Of course. More than any other season. He’s had some winter wonderland strips, some spring has sprung strips, some summer heat strips. But the sheer number of fall strips outweigh all others. Year after year, he revels again and again in the liminal nature of it’s natural beauty.
Batiuk loves the season where everything is tragically dying. Shocker.
In 1975 we got the first of ‘Existential Leaves’ week. The first of MANY.
“And you, Livinia, will soon be discarded like decaying trash.”“Talk to your landscaping about the warning signs of Liver Disease today.”“Just ask Frank Olson!”“Where the Centipede shall lie down with the Pill Bug.”“How dare everyone else copy my fear of death!? I was scared first!”You’re in Funky Winkerbean, it’s always Bad Joke Time. Kind of what it feels like reading Crankshaft these days….
(I seriously have no idea what happened or how to fix because I’m a technological luddite driving a borrowed blogging vehicle I barely understand.)
WHY ARE EMILY AND AMELIA SUDDENLY HIGH SCHOOLERS?
(I know that this Time Mop splash first spilled out in The Burnings arc, but I wanted to reiterate it. They were grade/middle schoolers in May, and then BAM.)
WHY IS EMILY’S LAST NAME NOW REYNOLDS?
(Emily and Amelia’s last name had been stated at least once as Mathews. Though it had hardly ever come up.)
And, as BWOEH said, WHY DOESN’T WESTVIEW HAVE A NEWSPAPER?
But. Most importantly.
WHY BLOG LOOK LIKE THIS?
And now…for your viewing pleasure. More entries in the “CBH DUSK HARVEST” collection.
In my last post, I said comic book week could have been a charming little throw back to Act I, and that Tom Batiuk should do this kind of thing more often.
I take it back.
Last week’s “bus driver shortage” arc in Crankshaft was a perfect example of why Tom Batiuk shouldn’t try doing Act I-style stories anymore. They miss everything that made Act I arcs good.
What did those stories have that last week didn’t have?
There were actual stakes. Les was facing criticism, and possible termination of employment, for what his magazine published. Westview faced threats remove to popular video games. The Eliminator was tampering with Crazy’s grade, War Games-style.
A bus driver shortage should have serious effects on a high-school centric world, even if it’s just “hey, none of us have to worry about getting fired for awhile.” That should push Ed and the crew into even more extreme behavior, which is a staple of the strip. Here, of course, there are no stakes, no implications, and nothing that even escalates existing stories. Speaking of which:
There was an actual story. In all three examples, any gags were part of a larger story which the strip took time to unravel. For example:
The two strips are jokes, but they’re good ones, and they flow naturally from the story. The strip had spent a good week talking how the literary magazine had offended the community, which drove the easily-upset Les to having nightmares, and the feckless Fred Fairgood into making an actual decision. Then the story moves forward.
Bloom County was good at this:
This is silly as hell, but it was actually a small part of a long, complex story about Oliver Wendell Jones’ hacking misadventures. Which itself was also a longrunning theme in Bloom County. The story supported the joke, and the joke supported the story. Berke Breathed had a talent for writing insane stories, but also making them make sense in context. Which is exactly what’s not happening here:
The bus driver shortage isn’t a story, but just a premise to be restated at you over and over and over. It’s another form of “What are you doing, Dad?” Which as it turns out, Pam doesn’t actually say that much. It’s the Funkyverse’s answer to “beam me up, Scotty” or “play it again, Sam”. But you know what I mean: it’s the stand-in phrase for an overused trope. Even if Pam doesn’t say those exact words, she might as well be.
Those stories weren’t contrary to the reality of the world. The literary magazine arc in particular was very consistent with Les’ established personality, Roberta Blackburn’s personality, and the general spinelessness of school leadership in the face of obnoxious citizen critics.
Here, we were treated to a joke about how the school board was so desperate it was forced to hire a Hell’s Angel as an elementary school bus driver. A Hell’s Angel would probably be a way better bus driver than Ed Crankshaft is! They do Toys for Tots, so they must have some degree of altruism, and ability to interact with children. Ed Crankshaft and the other drivers certainly don’t, considering how they routinely blow off children at bus stops, and cause traffic jams to amuse themselves.
The jokes were aimed at the right targets. Les’s worry, Fred’s spinelessness, Roberta’s Karen-ness, and the public’s excessive squeamishness about the tiniest hint of sexual content were all on the receiving end of the barbs.
Here the victim is – to the extent there even is one – this Hell’s Angel who did nothing more than show up and apply for a job. Ed gets no guff for being an awful bus driver. Lena gets no guff for making bad hiring decisions. The school system gets no guff for managing its resources so poorly that it gets into this state. The “Tucker Twins”, who’ve never been mentioned before and probably never will be again, get no guff for bullying a grown man out of a job. (Can they please be assigned to Crankshaft’s bus?)
This is more evidence that the “good” characters can never, ever, ever be in the wrong, not even in the tiniest way. Even unseen “main “good” characters.
There isn’t much to say about this week’s “If Amazon drove your kids to school” arc, even though it progresses naturally from a “bus driver shortage” arc. Yeah, the jokes are lame, but a week of formulaic jokes isn’t worth talking about. It’s well above the level of awful that makes the Funkyverse fascinating.
What is worth talking about? The Burnings! And I haven’t forgotten that I owe you all the next installment of the reimagined Burnings story, so that is coming soon!
I had one last post I wanted out on this year’s Pizza Box Monster arc. One last thing to explore before we leave the joys of spooky season (and the horrors of non-stop political ads as hamfisted and braindead as a Snuggie infomercial trying to convince you that your duvet worships Satan,) and enter into the two month long season of frantic shopping and guilty gluttony we annually use to distract ourselves from noticing the world slowly, day by day, growing darker, colder, and more full awful pop music.
So take a break from your doom scrolling! And join me on an exploration of a more innocent time!
Son of Stuck Funky 