The 2024 Crankshaft Awards! Day 4! The Slappies!

Seriously. Brief Digression. But why isn’t Crankshaft an easily pissy old coot any more? Doddering, Confused Cranky is LAME.

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ANGRY EYEBROWS!

Like an icy wind blowing through the drafty wards of an illness infested sanitarium, across the palid faces of the listless diseased limply lying abed, waiting for death to come claim them; in 2024 Les Moore returned.

You nominees for the…

Backpfeifengesicht Award for Most Punchable Les Moore

1.) Women, Amirite?

2.) Measuring Up

3.) I, too, am on the right side of history…

4.) Smirks’a’plenty

5.) With Clarity

6.) My Wife!

7.) Loop’d’loophole

8.) My Work Here is Done

And the winner is…

With Clarity

When Les Returned, I knew I had to split the ‘Slap Based’ section of the awards show into multiple awards. It is unfair to make the other characters compete with a person with such inherent and obvious advantages in the cut throat competition of eliciting visceral disgust. Les Moore is the unassailable GOAT, the Michael Jordan, of slapablility.

Now, to decide on the Caitlyn Clark of the WNBA.

Les Moore Award for Most Punchable Character Who is Not Les Moore

1.) Batton Thomas

2.) Skip Rawlings

3.) Jeff Murdoch

4.) Harry Dinkle

5.) Lillian McKenzie

6.) Pete Reynolds Roberts

And the winner is….

Harry Dinkle

No big surprise. Dinkle’s going to have to build a new trophy case for all the awards he’s raking in this year! The smug slappable bastard.

And, because I promised,

SnowBelle

21 thoughts on “The 2024 Crankshaft Awards! Day 4! The Slappies!”

  1. I voted for “With Clarity” for both of those, even though it wasn’t a nominee for the second. It’s bad enough how Les treats his boss, but Nate is Cayla’s boss too. And she just joins right in with Les’ smug, pointless insubordination. That is the face of “yeah, buddy, we run this town and you know it.” And Nate’s impotent rage fits perfectly into this scenario.

    1. The Les-Nate interactions are especially hard to take because Nate has been dealing with the messes Les has made for decades, since Les was a student even. Decades of disrespect, none of which Nate is depicted as remotely deserving even as he’s been assigned the thankless role of the establishment/”by the book”/stuffed shirt.

      And perhaps it should not matter, but Nate’s status as a Vietnam veteran has always made this dynamic particularly unbecoming to me. He was crawling through booby-trapped tunnels while Les was copying Funky’s math homework and harassing Mary Sue Sweetwater.

      1. That’s true too, isn’t it? I wonder if he’d be the same sorehead Lynn Johnston was when she realized that people hated Anthony.

        1. After Johnston’s marriage broke apart, she started ramming Foobworld into her 1950s fantasy world, much like Batiuk did. Women with careers, like Therese, became the straw villains. Anthony became the hero, despite the fact that he’s an awful husband to that exact kind of wife. When readers reacted negatively to Anthony, Johnston took it personally. And i kind of get why.

          This will never happen to Batiuk, bevause he simply doesn’t care about anything but his comic books and his own ego. Climate damage, cancer awareness, literacy, school levies, CTE, and all his other pet causes are all performative. So he’s never going to react angrily to our mocking of these things.

          He’d probably get mad if somebody dared suggest anything negative about Les. But Batiuk will never agree to any interview where that question might be asked.

          1. It gets worse: Lynn based Anthony on herself and Therese on her first husband. When we snarker troll fungus people call him a despicable loser who bailed out of marriage because it wasn’t going as expected, it’s easy to understand her reaction.

          2. Also, Batiuk lacks the ability to see how alarming he can be so I don’t see him doing a sitdown interview either.

          3. You don’t have to be a troll fungus snarker person to see why Anthony was a complete piece of shit. He bullied Therese into having a child she never wanted, didn’t fulfill his promise to take care of that child, and was pining for another woman the whole time. Liz had better options, and a more rewarding life teaching First Nations children. And by “better options”, I mean “a man who doesn’t see a sexual assault attempt as the perfect time to make his move.” On top of all that, Therese had an actual career, while Anthony had a crappy nepotism job. Therese should have just dropped him off at home, and kept on driving. And Liz should have driven right past him, and her obnoxious Karen mother, on her way back to Mtigwaki.

          4. You’re preaching to the choir. Pornstache could only exist in a world of cretins who never actually left middle school.

          5. After Johnston’s marriage broke apart, she started ramming Foobworld into her 1950s fantasy world,

            That started loooooooong before Johnston’s marriage fell apart. She was pulling that crap back in the 90s, and her whole “mom’s always right which means you’re always wrong” was pretty much the standard for that strip’s entire history.

  3. ComicBookHarriet,
    Snowbelle and your phone came within proximity!
    In today’s context, I could slap myself silly, but that distance would only require a tap.
    Thank you, CBH!

  4. I voted for Dinkle

    I hate him infinitely more than I hate Dick Facey (because Dinkle has a lot of shit that would’ve landed his ass in jail at best, and in Hell at worst)

    If I were facing Dinkle in a slap fight, I would punch him at full force instead of simply slapping him

    1. I also voted for Dinkle because, and I have said it all week, why is he in Crankshaft!

  5. “With Clarity” was my vote. It’s not enough for Les to suggest the board members write with clarity; no, he has to suggest they specifically take HIS course to learn how. Smug bastard. Enjoy your slap.

    (Of course, any nominee would have deserved to win, because there hasn’t been a non-slappable panel of Les printed in the last… I’ll be generous and say 30 years…)

    (But “Women, Amirite?” gets points for accidentally revealing the true motivation behind the whole story: Les was told he couldn’t do something, so he just HAD to do it anyway. Cayla’s not talking TO you, Les, she’s talking ABOUT you. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole thing was Nate’s plan to circumvent the board’s prohibition on Fahrenheit 451: just tell Les he’s not allowed to teach it, and let him do the dirty work. It’s not like Les faced any consequences for it.)

    As tempting as that Dinkle face in particular was for a slap, I think I voted for Lillian, just for the whole “lecturing an angry mob who are so angry they’ll politely listen to you as you lecture them” conceit. You can mail-order flamethrowers in this town, couldn’t one of the protesters have come packing for a REAL firefight?

    (But another case where any winner would be deserving, since any of them warrant a slap whenever they show up. Especially that Rictus Homunculus thing. Do Batiuk and Davis truly not see how creepy that smile is?)

    And SnowBelle is the winner for “Least Punchable Face In This Blog Post”. Adorable!

  6. I voted for Dinkleberry for 2nd most punchable face, but I think too many voters don’t appreciate how Mopey Pete should have garnered more votes. Skip really doesn’t bother me too much and Lillian, even with her air of superiority, is hard to punch, because she’s like somebody’s grandma. But, Pete? Man just seeing his face, and his moronic ‘puns’ makes my hand automatically curl into a fist, much like it does Les Moore himself. Actually I think of him as a young Les More. And honestly, Batton and Jeff aren’t too far behind him.

    1. I don’t have a tier list of Funkyverse characters, for the same reason I don’t have a tier list of Taco Bell menu items: they’re all made from the same 12 things. If you start with taco shells, ground beef, bean, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, rice, and salsa, you simply can’t build anything that’s that good or that bad. The raw ingredients dictate the range of outcomes.

      And so it is with the Funkyverse. Les, Pete, Dinkle, Lillian, Batton, Skip, and others are all made from the same ingredients. The belief that they’re an elite writer; unearned success; smugness; passivity as a virtue; self-satisfaction; obsessions with comic books; severe arrested development; smirking; condescenscion; laziness; and being a Mary Sue. Some characters have more or less or some qualities than others, but there’s really not much difference overall. Even Ed Crankshaft and Dead Lisa don’t vary much from that list.

  7. “I, too, am on the right side of history…” bothered me more as a panel, I think, because we’re supposed to believe these characters are so brave for doing something that Barnes & Noble was doing years ago. But “With clarity” got my vote, because that face is definitely the most punchable Les face.

    Lillian and Skip were probably worse actors during this past year in ‘Shaft. Lillian’s lecture was as predictable as it was intolerable and Skip once again displayed a level of journalistic integrity that would embarrass the National Enquirer. The historical resentment built in to any Dinkle appearance, though, is always going to be hard to top.

    Batton Thomas is the most interesting case here because I don’t think his face particularly punchable. It would be like punching an automaton… Batton’s face cycles through only a small number of expressions and when speaking he only cycles through a small number of (obnoxious) topics. I imagine Batton’s reaction to getting punched in the face wouldn’t be the satisfying petulance we conceive of seeing from Les or Dinkle, but rather a few seconds of a soft clicking noise followed by a gentle hum and then the same tired anecdote about The Flash #123 rearranging his molecules.

    1. Batton is detestable, but you get the feeling that punching him would be like shoving your hand into a sort of gelatinous ooze. It would briefly envelop your hand, then dissolve into a pile of sludge on the floor, simply to flow over a few feet and reform itself into Batton Thomas again. It would then start talking about comics as if nothing had happened.

      (And from Batton’s perspective, nothing did.)

      1. Your account of what punching Batton Thomas would be like made me think of the ragman in “Tatter Up,” the last story in the last issue of Tales from Crypt.*

        “I knew she could never love a ragman…”

        The villain in that was Tony Barrett, whose initials are the same as Tom Batiuk.

        Lillian is older than Tony’s wife Fanny (nee Ogden), and, outwardly, not as ugly. (Inwardly is another story, Lucy and Eugene.)

        *

        #46, which would have been the first issue of a new title called The Crypt of Terror, but the coming of the Code put the kibosh on that.

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