I didn’t say it before, but Cindy’s Miraculous Pregnancy won in its category by the highest margin of any of the awards this year. But it wasn’t the only landslide victory. For Example.
Most Repulsive Character Combination.
1.)Jeff, Batton, DSH, Crazy Harry, and The Flash.
2.) Mopy Pete, Jeff, Flash, Jffy, and Phil Holt.
3.) Les, Lillian, and Dinkle.
4.) Batton, Skip, and DSH John.
5.) Lillian and Skip.
6.) Lillian, Les, Emily, Amelia, Mopey Pete, and Mindy.
And the winner for Most Repulsive Character Combination?
Les, Lillian, and Dinkle.
You all spoke loud and clear.
For the record. I voted for Batton, Skip and DSH John.
While I have a rational understanding of the visceral disdain most of you feel for Lil and Dink. They just don’t elicit that same response from me. In my tierlist of Crankshaft Characters, they barely have me reaching for Pepto on most days they appear.
My personal most repulsive combination has to include Batton. He’s like the rotten dog turd of a Parvo infected puppy. Doesn’t matter who he’s smeared together with. It’s gonna send me running gagging to the toilet.
CBH’s Personal Tierlist Which She Will not Apologize For Suck It Ed Haters.
Son of Stuck Funky 
It says a lot that Batiuk thinks those three repulsive people are sympathetic.
Again, anything with Dinkle and Les automatically gets my vote. Those two have no business being in this strip. Lilian is already the female version of Les as it is.
The winner of Most Repulsive Character Combination had to be ‘Les, Lillian, and Dinkle.’ Don’t they say, “Bad things come in threes”?
Throw in Batton Thomas, and you’d have the Mount Rushmore of the most reviled characters in the Batiukverse.
I’m rather surprised ‘Lillian and Skip’ garnered not a single vote. Zero, zip, zilch, nada, bupkis, not a ting mon? I guess people realize there’s a spark of romance there. Kind of like Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in ‘Body Heat’.🤢🤮
So many deserving combinations in this category, but it really is hard to top a strip with 3 clear cut “Mount Rushmore” of hate-ability cases like Lillian, Dinkle, and Les.
I always pause a bit on Batton being the fourth face, wondering if that is more attributable to recency bias than Batton being historically awful in a strip full of other excellent candidates (Linda, for example, is an underrated candidate for spot #4). But I always come back around to Batton being worthy of the spot despite his recent introduction into the strip because he is basically an amalgamation of the worst and least-interesting traits of the rest of the characters in the Batiukverse. He’s boring, depressing, long-winded, preachy, performative, smug, self-centered, insincere, etc. etc. and nothing else. NOTHING, Batton is nothing personified.
You make a strong argument for recency bias. Thinking back into the days of Funky Winkerbean, a candidate who immediately pops into mind is Lisa Moore. I’m guilty of repressing my memories of that character. The Dead St. Lisa was often rage inducing and cringe, but rarely boring.
To be fair, in contemporary Crankshaft, it is a tossup who is more unlikable between Batton and Skip Rawlings. The sudden appearance of either one, or both, is a harbinger of dread for the bore fest to come.
I hope TB isn’t as dreadfully boring in real life as Batton Thomas.
TB (in a grocery store to a cashier): Hi! I’m the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Tom Batiuk. Would you like to hear the story of how I got my start in newspaper comic strips?
TB (in a doctor’s office to a nurse): Hi! I’m the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Tom Batiuk. Would you like to hear the story of how I got my start in newspaper comic strips?
TB (to a bank teller): Hi! I’m the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Tom Batiuk. Would you like to hear the story of how I got my start in newspaper comic strips?
TB (to a bartender): Hi! I’m the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Tom Batiuk. Would you like to hear the story of how I got my start in newspaper comic strips?
TB (to a telemarketer on the phone): Hi! I’m the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Tom Batiuk. Would you like to hear the story of how I got my start in newspaper comic strips?
“Hi! I’m the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Tom Batiuk. Would you like to hear the story of how I got my start in newspaper comic strips? Well, I really wanted to write comic books, so I went to New York in 1974 and–“(talks about this for 45 minutes, never once mentions being a cartoonist).
Be Ware of Eve Hill,
1. *Body Heat* the most film noirs of film noir!
Matty Walker was so good(?) she NEVER needed a sequel. An absolute triumph of a film. William Hurt’s Ned Racine plays the perfect character to let his little guy do all of his own big guy thinking.
Seriously, it is a hot movie!🔥 There was a month or so in 1981, where I saw more naked from Kathleen Turner than I did from Mrs. SP. 🙄🫣😳
2. Regarding Skip and Batton: Hold up a blank sheet of paper, and there is more content on that paper than either one of them combined.
It’s my boy SP!!!
1.) Who doesn’t like a good femme fatale in a neo-noir thriller? Body Heat rocks.
2.) Skip and Batton, the rare team where you can declare a comic strip boring after just one panel.
CBH,
About your tier list, for the most part, I have no issues with it, especially the placement of Ed. Have you ever noticed how the “likes” on GoComics Crankshaft goes up when Ed’s in the strip? That’s not a coincidence.
OTOH, I have to disagree, placing the Nympho and Boy Lisa one level above Mindy. I find these child abandoning nitwits utterly repulsive. Speaking of which, where’s Skyler? Oh, no! Don’t tell me the poor lad has been forgotten/abandoned again!🤦♀️
I voted for the “Les, Dinkle and Lillian” option, it had the three of the most insufferable Batiukverse characters
Today’s Crankshaft
This week so far has been dull and stupid
While I understand the loathing of Les and Dinkle, Batton is the very, very worst for me.
As annoying as they are today, Les and Dinkle, at least at one time in the past, were funny characters. There was a reason for them to exist in the world of the comic.
Batton Thomas has no reason to exist in the comic at all. He’s never funny, or interesting — or welcome. Put him in with two other characters who drone on — or even worse, let Batton drone on? Well, that’s why Batton, Skip and DSH John got my vote.
Batton Thomas has no reason to exist in the comic at all.
Hey, c’mon! Pastis puts himself in Pearls all the time! As a flabby slob who’s the butt of the joke! Usually, his own characters want to kill him because of some awful not-pun he just made! Just like the dashing, debonair man about town Batton Thomas! (town is Medina, Ohio) Pastis uses himself to poke fun at himself, usually after after making a horrible pun! Just like Tom does in Crankshaft when he uses heroic, manly, 12-pack abs from the treadmill Batt…on…Thom …Hang on.
He’s never funny, or interesting
Sorry. Carry on then.
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strips: A 2-Week Storyline where Holly has a chat with Funky (this storyline made me feel somewhat bad for Holly, like the ones in Act I that involve her asshole mother Melinda)
Lisa: I don’t want anyone here to contract second hand smoke.
I kinda wish that Tom actually showed the other characters responses to Lisa’s passing (Les was only shown grieving), such as Holly, Darin and Lisa’s parents, but I have a feeling that it would’ve been as drawn out as Les/Dick Facey 28 year long grief
Holly’s first husband sounds like a real piece of shit
Like, he left her because he found someone on the internet (or because she had breast cancer), leaving Holly to raise Cory alone and dealing with breast cancer
Holly’s Subconscious: What the fuck is wrong with me?
Holly: I-I really should go now.
Funky: Yes you should.
(Holly starts to cry)
“I wish Lisa had been around when I was going through my chemo and divorce!” Trust me, lady, you don’t even want her around now.
Holly’s one of those “bad things come in threes” people, so she was just trying to get #3 out of the way as quickly as possible.
“So… how did things finally work out with you and Cindy?”
“Wait… aren’t YOU Cindy?”
“I… I don’t even know any more…”
Mark Twain wrote of a “Mysterious Stranger.”
He turned out to be Satan.
(You knew that, didn’t you, Les?
(Cayla, I’m the Lord of Language!)
When I think of Elvis Presley’s “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise,” I will probably see Holly Budd Winkerbean..
Happily, when I think of majorettes, I will always see Lee Remick in “A Face in the Crowd” or Christine Lavin twirling a baton at the now-defunct Bottom Line.
Montoni’s has rooms?
Yet the scenes there are usually at the counter or in booths!
We must not see them as often due to climate damage.
csroberto2854,
You are doing a great job in posting these arcs. They show Tom Batiuk when he cared about his strip. They have sharp humor. There is plot. The characters are interesting. Good posts.
Hmm, Funky kept a note from another woman in his wallet for years? No wonder his first marriage didn’t work out, he obviously wasn’t committed to Cindy.
Funky didn’t even know that said note was from Holly until she confessed to him about it
True, but he knew it was from another woman and kept it. (Or assumed it was from a woman, I guess that wasn’t guaranteed.)
And secret admirers in high school? That was junior high school for me.
Calling yourself a “secret admirer” is basically an admission of your own failure to act on your interest in another person. Which is fine when you’re 12, because it’s all new and overwhelming to you. But by the time you’re in high school, you need to be more socially skilled than that. Between two adults, this scene is just pathetic.
If you want to tell someone you were attracted to them in high school, fine – you can just do that. Once you get past age 15 or so, this “oh, I’m too shy” thing ceases to be charming, and starts being awkward or creepy. Especially when you’re not known to be an overly shy person. And somehow, the most pathetic thing of all is Funky keeping this note in his wallet. Perhaps without even knowing who it’s from. There are ways you could make this story work; but as usual, Batiuk just pukes up the cheap glurge.
ComicBookHarriet, I’m going to sound like a idiot for this, but I have a question regarding the tier list: Is it public? (because I want to make one)
I used the tiermaker.com, but picked the ‘single use’ tierlist maker because I didn’t want to create a login. If my brain had been firing on all cylinders I would have foreseen this, sorry.
The website is super easy to use. Really the most time wasted on the tierlist was picking and cropping the pictures.
This was the entry where every single one provoked a “this is the winner” initial response from me. They just kept getting worse and worse.
And I too thought that Batton has to be in it. He’s become such a gross conceit that he’s repulsive in ways that Les or any other stand-in can’t be. So I did vote for Les, Dinkle and Lillian, because it’s Les, Dinkle and Lillian, for Christ’s sake, but all the while I thought “this really should include Batton.” Unfortunately, none of his compilations added up to quite the same repulsion.
That it excluded Mopey, the Dopesy Twins, Skip(!), Jfff(!!), Jfff’s Innr Chld(!!!), and Gross John is extraordinary.
I also seem to be more appalled than you with Batiuk’s “Look how clever I am” characters, so for me, Pizza Box Monster and Crazy go much farther on my personal repulsion meter.
I voted for the Unholy Trinity of Les, Lillian, and Dinkle, although both Batton and that… ghost Jffy thing were both tempting.
As much as it’s obvious that characters like Les and Lillian becoming award-winning authors is Batiuk wish fulfillment, Batton Thomas Creator Of The Comic Strip Three O’Clock High is on a whole other level; I mean, there’s author avatars, and then there’s just blatantly putting yourself into the strip as a character. And having all the other characters being just so pleased to know you… ugh.
With any luck, we won’t have any new Les strips this year, so Batton can take home the award next year. (Although he just might give it away to Les anyway, as one does with major awards.)
Taking a Midweek intermission in the awards show. Next up, the Slappys Subsection of Awards!
Well done, Harriet — and well-deserved rest and reset! When you can please explain “Slappy”. I have a years-long fixation with that guy in the Westerns who always ran the chuckwagon, got drunk and danced like an electrocuted scarecrow by the campfire. Wasn’t he usually called Slappy?
Then, years later I had a work association with a company named Slappy’s Telephone Service. Luckily I did not have to speak to the customer directly.
Today’s Crankshaft
Doctor: That does it, I’m transferring you to Dr. Herbert Ludwig.
Ed: NO, ANYTHING BUT THAT!!
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strip: A 1994 Funky Winkerbean Week-Long storyline where Mickey Lopez-Bushka gets a new pair of shoes and Sadie shuns her for it
ha ha it’s funny because popularity is decided by shoe quality
bro literally said “Nah, I’mma do my own thing”
Seriously, I appreciate that Mickey doesn’t give a shit on how Sadie and her friends think about her shoe choice now
It hits closer to home for me as i wore that exact style of shoe for at least ten years prior to those strips, and maybe twenty after. At some point even i realized they weren’t actually that comfortable, but they are classic styling.
Yeah, I remember when those dorky 1950s Chuck Taylor sneakers made a comeback in the 1980s. I had a pair.
They’re not “black canvas high-tops,” they’re CONVERSES! CHUCK TAYLORS!
For once, I agree with Tom’s fear of brand names. I’ve worn those all my life. People in the 80s/early 90s would say “OMG, I remember those! They were so comfortable!” Then they became “in” again. My niece, a better artist than Batton Thomas by far, even had a little side gig in high school where she’d do customized paint jobs on them for $5. But there is literally nothing that could kill their cool like having them known by “As Seen in Funky Winkerbean.” Chuck Taylor would’ve risen from the grave to sue Tom for slander.
(For those ban-curious, the GC commenting ban lasts 3 months. They don’t tell you you’re banned, they don’t tell you you’re not. So hang in there, gleeb! Soon you can post about trains on Dick Tracy again!)
Wow, I don’t think any of us predicted THAT twist!
Crank: *sigh* “Am I pregnant with a blue-eyed blond girl with hair that stops growing at her shoulders”?
“Ach ja, zo they is! Like all the other Mädchen in the Centerville area are!”
Ed, summoning every last bit of strength in his crumbling but battle-hardened body: “Like all the other clones, eh? I’ve been waiting for this since 1945–DOCTOR MENGELE!”
(last panel censored for bloody gory horrible, if VERY justified vengeance)
Ed, holding up a severed spine: “Hey, Doc! GOT YOUR BACK!”