After the Burnings piddled out, Tom Batiuk spent two full weeks on comic book covers. Pointless, derivative, unimaginative, actionless, talky, over-expositioned, self-indulgent, still-auditioning-for-Marvel-and-DC-at-age-76 comic book covers. It was so bad I struggled to write anything about it. Then on Sunday, I asked myself a question I never thought I would: why’d he stop?
The November 3 Crankshaft strip is perfectly suited to be a comic book cover. It’s already turned sideways. It’s already framed like a comic book cover; there’s empty space at the top where the Atomik Komix livery and price tag would go. There’s more action in this drawing than anything we saw during Pizza Box Monster week. So why isn’t it one?
It could have been a nice little self-callback. It’s hard to remember now, but comic book covers and comic book art in Funky Winkerbean used to be a way of framing the actual story arc. Not-Yet-Dead Lisa would imagine herself as a cancer-fighting superhero. The obstacles in a character’s world would manifest themselves as comic book-style villains, and so on. It had its charms.
Or at least, it had a point. It complemented the narrative instead of replacing the narrative with something that wasn’t narrative. Sometimes it was just in service of a “collecting comic books” story, but that was still in-bounds. It wasn’t just to flesh out Batiuk’s imaginary comic book continuity he never does anything with. Or indulge his fantasy of what he wishes he’d been doing for the last 50 years.
This Crankshaft strip is perfect for that treatment. It’s about urging people to vote, a common theme when an election is imminent. But it could have been so much better, if Batiuk had just leaned into what he’s been forcing onto us for the last two weeks. Put Ed in a America-themed costume. Call him Super-Citizen or something. With the power to change mighty governments in a single vote! Instead of Meckler lamely saying “we’re trying to encourage younger voters”, Ed could have compelled them to join his superhero team! This would have made a garden-variety voting story a little bit fun.
Which is what’s missing from all this. For all the time Tom Batiuk spends in Comic Book Cover Land, it’s just. Not. Fun. Not even to him! The comic book covers aren’t funny. Or interesting. Or skillfully drawn. or passionate. Or frame the story a different way. Or set up anything that gets explored later. Or serve as a entertaining spectacle in themselves. They feel obligatory.
This is like the song “She Keeps Me Up”. It’s an overproduced disco rock song from the humorless band Nickelback, played with complete earnestness. This should be hilarious, but it’s not. And it’s not because the song is bad. It’s fine for what it is. But watch the 70s-style music videos for “Are You Gonna Go My Way” or “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” or “Ooh La La” by Goldfrapp, and you’ll see the problem. Those people are enjoying themselves! They clearly love this type of music, and know how to create it. They have a sense of a humor. They put some thought into merging the disco sound into their usual songwriting.
As much as Tom Batiuk professes to love comic book covers, he draws them like it’s a contractual obligation.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Batty’s stupid fake comic book covers were/are every bit as low-energy as his tedious little stories were/are. Starbuck Jones, for example. SJ became a regular FW presence in 2011 or thereabouts, and popped up in the strip all the time, but he never really went anywhere with it other than using in in preachy and/or goofy story arcs about “Hollywood” and ponderous 1940s-50s nostalgia trips. We never actually learned anything about SJ at all, and dare I say, it might have almost been fun if he’d have maybe dug into it a little and fleshed out the mythology a little bit. Then again, asking the guy to flesh out a sub-universe when he can’t even find anything for his main characters to do might be expecting too much.
Or Rip Tide-Scuba Cop. Boy, he sure dropped the ball with that idea, which IMO was easily the most imaginative thing he did in the entirety of Act III. It’s a can’t-miss concept, and deserved way more than he put into it. He really ought to consider farming that concept out to someone capable of bringing it to life, as he very well could be sitting on mountains of money right now, and studiously writing brand new Crankshaft arcs about how awesome and rewarding Hollywood is. Just imagine Boy Lisa hoisting his Rip Tide Oscar skyward, and dedicating it to his dead birth mother Lisa. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?
RT – SC was nothing more than a rip-off of Super Scuba from the ’60s Saturday morning animated series “The Super 6”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_6
Or Stinky Diver from Action League Now! That show was stupid, but it was the fun kind of stupid.
Rip Tide is a way cooler name, though. Even a broken comic strip writer is right once a decade.
Rip Tide had great potential. I’ve told this story before, about how my mom’s small Florida town has Jet-Ski cops, and that I’ve often wondered what their day-to-day job is like. It’s begging to be a reality show.
Solving aquatic crimes, and bringing undersea villains to justice. Like Ace Tylene, a villain who cuts into undersea pipelines and steals whatever lies within. Or Amber Griss, illegal whale poacher. Or Sandy Beech, and his beach erosion machine. The possibilities are nearly limitless.
Or he could be more of a scuba beat cop. Busting drunken boaters, pulling over speeding jet skis, lecturing people on the importance of life vests, that sort of thing. I suppose he could be both, but that might be way too taxing for ol’ TomBan.
“Ahoy! Heave to! Don’t you know this is a no-wake zone?”
It just writes itself!
Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Why did they not put something that appeals to Gen Z like BTS or even 5SOS or even One Direction?
Right? The idea of “toss in dumb pop culture thing for the kiddies” is fine enough — I got one of those cool Michigan Werewolf-tearing-off-his-shirt ‘I Voted’ stickers — but Pac-Man? That’s a hip, timely contemporary thing for kids my age, the ones who ate Pac-Man Cereal (“You can open wide!”) and who are now 52 years old. Yeah, that’s a kid by Crankshaft standard but otherwise it’s a bobbled ground ball of a joke.
I’m not 100% sure that’s supposed to be Pac-Man. I think it’s just an emoji. Still, there’s nothing here that makes the punchline work.
Yeah, it’s probably Boss Smiley. The kids are really into 70’s comics that never found an audience.
BC:
Boss Smiley wants you to pay him welfare!
Prez had a woman as Vice-President of the United States before the actual country did!
Simon without Kirby didn’t seem to do as well as Kirby without Simon.
No, Chester, Brother Power wouldn’t have made a great President…
And now we’ve had two conspicuous smiley faces in three days: Crankshaft is wearing a The Comedian-style button today for some reason.
He doesn’t understand that comic books are meant to be absurd. Superdickery had fun making fun of the attention-getting bullshit cover art and how little it usually has to do with the actual absurd story. James Lileks celebrates the weirdness of the medium. Batiuk is the dopey kid pissing himself in fear because brightly colored brain rot hasn’t been mailed to him yet.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
FINALLY WE HAVE SOMETHING RESEMBLING A PLOT FROM ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO
The “solution” to the bus driver shortage doesn’t even make any sense as a punchline…??
I’m going to have a lot to say about this week. I see what he’s aiming at, but I also see why it doesn’t work.
A winning gag in today’s strip could have been Ed being told that he would actually have to pick up the kids along his route due to the driver shortage.
Enter (if you dare!) into the mind of Edward Roger Dale Crankshaft, Sr. as he considers Billytheskink’s suggestion:
No, not that, anything but that…
Stop laughing at me, Little Johnson Girl…
Izzat you, Pop Clutch? Or is it Fidel and Dr. Ernesto?
Strike Four….!
That’s the gag. There’s a problem, and the ‘solution’ the authorities have come up with is arbitrary, nonsensically dumb, and doesn’t solve the actual issue. It’s not a great joke, and it’s not perfectly executed, but at least it’s an attempt at an “ain’t-bureaucracy-stupid” punchline. C+.
Anyway, we were already told there’s only one kid who takes the bus anymore. No, that didn’t make sense either, but Batiuk used it.
As much as Tom Batiuk professes to love comic book covers, he draws them like it’s a contractual obligation.
I disagree. I think it’s more a combination of “first thought-best thought” and “no theory of mind.” I’m sure in his mind, Batiuk envisioned a reader opening up the comics page and just drooling from ear to ear at the PBM and the Bulk reading comics. “This is the best day ever!”
Like today’s. “Ha ha, Crankshaft is a crossing guard! I’ve never laughed so hard!”
It’s the kind of idea that, properly executed, in the proper comic book, could have been endearing. Imagine Batman and Superman in Bruce Wayne’s opulent library, sitting on the floor, engrossed in reading old-time comic books while Alfred serves them milk and cookies.
But it didn’t work here because it’s not meta — these aren’t characters who have established personalities that we have come to know. Batman entertaining himself with a childish pursuit could be amusing because we know that he takes himself and his job very seriously, and is generally a grim person. Here, the characters are nothing and nobody and we don’t care what they do. They can’t act against character because there is no character there in the first place.
It also doesn’t work because we were just promised ghost stories. And these are not stories, and they have nothing to do with ghosts. And you can’t draw and color a comic book cover in the dark, on a cocktail napkin, with no drawing tools apparently anywhere near.
It’s those things too. “Contractual obligation” is my way of saying how little creativity, interest, substance, or passion exists is in these comic book covers the man inundates us with. They’re faux covers, but Batiuk couldn’t be bothered to even write a faux story for them! The “Pulp” comic book cover was about a creature made of comic books, reading comic books.
Hi. I’ve not been here since the Fungyverse came to an end. Just dropping by.
I do have a strange desire though to drive to suburban Cleveland for a pizza that inspired the Fungyverse.
Good to see you round these parts again, Count! Hope you stick around for a bit.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Ha ha it’s funny because Crankshaft is furious over not being able to be an asshole to kids by making them miss the buss
RE: Wed. Nov. 6’s C’Shaft:
And the reason that Batiuk used a online retailer like Amazon which only delivers its own orders, as opposed to an actual delivery service like FedEx, UPS, or the U.S. Post Office, for today’s knee-slapper of a joke is…?
Also, are we to assume that, instead of running the school buses (which can hold 30 or 40 kids and are driven by salaried employees) they’ve already leased or own, the school board hired an independent service where they would have to pay for each student separately, with vehicles without seats that look like they could hold 10 kids, tops? Makes perfect sense.
Lastly, why does Lena feel the need to begin every meeting of the school bus drivers by telling them there’s a shortage of school bus drivers, especially since it seems like there’s more new faces in the crowd each day?
instead of running the school buses (which can hold 30 or 40 kids and are driven by salaried employees) they’ve already leased or own, the school board hired an independent service where they would have to pay for each student separately, with vehicles without seats that look like they could hold 10 kids, tops? Makes perfect sense.
Real school boards will do stupid shit like that. Supposedly my local one uses taxicabs/Uber to convey the children to alternative school.
I was actually amused by Wednesday’s joke. Despite JJ’s objections noted above, it almost–almost–got a genuine laugh from me.
To the point where I almost thought Batiuk might have handed the writing reins to someone slightly competent. But you know, a blind squirrel, a stopped clock, etc.
Yup, the set-up is quick, and necessary to understand the punchline. The absurd visual punchline is funny and works. A solid A- from me. If Batiuk could operate at this level everyday, this site wouldn’t need to exist.
I was just about to post the same. It wasn’t preachy, it wasn’t about comics, and it wasn’t sideways. It also made me chuckle.
Mary Worth on the other hand, needs to move beyond the current story and Wilbur. Enough already. Stell and Wilbur actually deserve each other, and I also agree with Wilbur in that I do not want to live in an animal circus. My sister is a vet and so I have some insight into this. She has a dog and a cat and isn’t searching for new pets. She has them so her children can grow up having pets, but once they are out of the house I can see her being pet free. It’s a stressful job, but she doesn’t miss important family events unless she is on call for emergencies.
Forgive me, I feel so fucking nauseous today 🤢
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Day Three of Dumbass The Bus Driver Storyline
WHY ARE THERE AMAZON PRIME CARS DRIVING KIDS TO SCHOOL
ComicBookHarriet,
I have it from a reliable source that you and I came within 73,000,000 votes of becoming the next president and vice president of the USA. You were at the top of the ticket. We lost so perhaps I dragged the ticket down to defeat.
It was not even my vote. I voted for my daughter and my best friend. Please add presidential candidate vote-getter to your resume. “Oh, what might have been!”
All I know is that I received this cryptic message in today’s mail:
*Carry on Wayward Son!*
(Signed)
eB eraW fo evE lliH
[you’d have to be a cryptionologist to figure out this riddle wrapped in Func and Waggonel’s mayonnaise jar left since Thursday.]🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Post Spooky Post is en route, but HARVEST. Expect Thursday sometime.
LOVE YOU ALLLLL
Harriet (and Banana Jr 6000)…
Never any need to apologize for your posting schedule. We know you’ve got work and real-world responsibilities. Post what you can, when you can — we’re always happy to read ’em!
Apparently Wednesday exhausted Batiuk’s joke supply. We’re back to dull statements told in a boring fashion, with extra ennui.
Agreed. But give it this — it’s not sideways!
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Day Four of the Dumbass Bus District Meeting Week/The Complete Jackass Olympics
Ed: They don’t wanna choke on your brownies or shitty coffee.
{Lena marches up to Crankshaft and beats him until his head is nothing more than shards of bone and brain matter}
Now this, the school bus driver shortage, is the kind of “serious issue” that TB ought to tackle the way he thought he tackled book bans. It really is a problem, and one that has gotten quite a bit worse since COVID. Qualified school bus drivers are hard to find for a variety of reasons, but often especially because they posses commercial drivers licenses and folks with CDLs are in demand for a lot of jobs that require a CDL and often pay considerably better and offer considerably more hours than driving a school bus.
He doesn’t have to bend the strip one bit to fit this kind of “serious” story arc into Crankshaft, the characters he needs and the job he’d be covering are already very well-established in the strip. He’s not treading well-worn ground, this is a fairly underreported issue and he could actually call a little bit of genuine attention to it rather than trail the coattails of the many publicized concerns about cancer/censorship/climage damate/etc. Heck, what community there is around school bus driving probably knows and likes his work pretty well and would be happy to amplify whatever press he’d try to drum up for the story arc. And he can still break out the jokes he’s woven into Crankshaft… Lena’s brownies could scare off a potential new hire, Shaft’s cruelty could shock another… or his bad habits could rub off on a new driver and compound the problems Centerville kids already have getting to school.
OK, we all know he wouldn’t do it justice at this point in his career because… well, that’s what he’s doing this week. But this is the kind of school-oriented kitchen table issue he used to have a pretty decent eye for mocking while also calling attention to.
If you want to know the reason Batiuk does, or does not, cover an issue the most important question to ask is this: what are the awards he might win?
You’re right that covering a shortage of bus drivers would be an interesting topic to cover. But it’s not going to get him the praise he requires.
The problem with this week isn’t the concept, it’s the execution. Yes, an alleged bus driver shortage is a very Act I-style story. But…. there’s no story. “We’re short of bus drivers” is just the setup for a lot of very bad jokes (though Wednesday’s strip wasn’t bad).
Look at some of Harriet’s recent posts about Act I stories. They have an actual plot, a reality that doesn’t rewrite itself from day to day, and there are actual stakes. This is Tom Batiuk doing a bad parody of his younger self.