Sports stories are some of the easiest stories to tell. The scrappy underdog rookies always pull off the last-second victory against the team of Jerk Jocks. With this week’s bus rodeo story in Crankshaft, Tom Batiuk seems to be making the sports story into some kind of performance art.
I realize that a bus rodeo isn’t exactly a sport. But it’s close enough for the comparison I want to do, which is to sports movies. Here is a list of all the ways Batiuk dropped the ball on one of the most straightforward narrative formulas out there. And screwed up some of the most basic narrative techniques that exist. Sports stories should:
Be a personal story first. The great sports movies, like Slapshot or Bull Durham or Hoosiers or Rocky, aren’t so much about sports as they are about the main characters’ personal struggles. Yes, they still usually end with the million-to-one upset win we all saw coming. But the best moments aren’t about the game, even when they take place on the playing field.
This week’s Crankshaft starts with a solid premise. On the eve of the bus rodeo, Rocky has left to join an opposing team! The face-heel turn is another common sports story trope, especially in pro wrestling, which invented the term. It’s always satisfying to see a once-beloved character lose to the team he abandoned in the pursuit of shallow victory. To put it mildly, this does not happen here. And it brings me to my next point:
Know your subject matter. Sports fans, especially baseball fans, can be merciless to a story that doesn’t portray their sport with sufficient realism. There is some room for artistic license here, depending on how serious the story is supposed to be, for example Little Big League. But we all know the Funkyverse is… say it with me now… “a quarter inch from reality.”
Apparently “transfer portal” is Tom Batiuk’s new favorite funny thing to say. He uses it on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and he’s used it in the past. Even though he doesn’t seem to know what it means.
You know I find genuinely funny about “transfer portal,” though? It sounds like a Batiukism, even though it’s a real term. It sounds like “climate damage” or “solo car date” or another clunky name Batiuk would make up for a concept that already has a better name. If the player movement mechanism in college sports were called the college free agent pool, in the Funkyverse it would still be the “transfer portal.”
(Speaking of Monday’s strip: do the characters look a little off-model to you? Those are all strange reactions to the very mild news they’re hearing. They look like the Scooby Doo gang running from the haunted house.)
Give the protagonist a motivation. Protagonists in sports stories usually have an underlying reason for wanting to win the big game. They want to prove they belong, prove they’re not washed up, prove themselves to someone they love, restore pride to a community, or win the prize money to solve some greater problem. Why on earth does winning a bus rodeo matter to these people? Especially when the rest of their lives is a contest to drive a bus as badly as possible? And the whole thing reeks of the workplace forced-fun events that Dilbert used to mock the hell out of?
Introduce the sport. On top of needing to know why the bus rodeo matters to these people, we also needed to know what a bus rodeo even is. For stories based on an imaginary sport, you need to tell the audience enough to understand the action. Rollerball, BASEketball, and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story all needed a little extra explanation.
I know the bus rodeo has turned up in Crankshaft before. But not explaining it here exhibits two of Tom Batiuk’s most annoying traits as a writer: assuming all readers remember minor Funkyverse arcs from long ago, and assuming all readers had the same life experiences as him. Everybody knows what a bus rodeo is, right? Duh. Sheesh, where did you grow up, somewhere other than Akron sometime other than the 1950s? I bet you didn’t even read comic books.
Have a dramatic climax. Sports, by their nature, are all about exciting finishes. Some athletes and teams are famous for succeeding at the most critical moments; others, not so much. It need hardly be said that a good sports story should take advantage of this, and craft a satisfying ending to the game and to the hero’s quest.
This week’s story starts to do this. On Thursday, Rocky’s reviled substitute Lena succeeds in parking a bus right in the middle of a puddle. From the next day’s strip, we must infer this was the bus rodeo equivalent of Francisco Cabrera singling home Sid Bream, The World’s Slowest Baserunner. An unlikely hero is plucked from the end the bench at the last possible second, and shockingly delivers a championship-winning moment. Great, but there’s one little thing Tom Batiuk forgot to do:
Make sense. Remember what I said about introducing the sport to the reader? Because the story didn’t do that, it’s hard to understand why parking a bus in the middle of a puddle is a good thing. We must infer from later strips that this was a winning play, because the action here is confusing at best.
I know that inconveniencing the bus riders is the main characters’ usual game. But this bus rodeo event is presumably sponsored by some governing body, which presumably wants the bus drivers to do their jobs well. So why are Lena and the referee marveling at how precisely she placed a bus in a puddle? Is this whole story an unlabeled fantasy sequence? Batiuk’s pulled that lame stunt before.
And the character reactions don’t clear anything up. Ed is doubting Lena in the first panel, which is fine. But the only reaction we got is an off-panel “!”. We don’t even know who it’s from, because the word balloon is coming from a different direction than where Ed and Andy Clark were standing two seconds ago. A word zeppelin would actually have been useful here!
Also: are they trying to win, or trying to lose? This story would have been a lot more fun if they needed to lose the bus rodeo for some reason. You know, the old Springtime For Hitler bit. For example, participation is mandatory, and the prize is a transfer to a “prestigious” route none of them actually want. Imagine if this team of intentionally bad bus drivers was placed in a situation where they were forced to be bad bus drivers, and suddenly felt pressure to perform. “Jeez, Ed, you did a terrible job of backing over that cardboard mailbox. I’ll tell Keesterman you’re getting soft.”
Remember what happened in the first act. Because this story sure doesn’t. Remember when Rocky “entered the transfer portal” (yuk yuk) to join a competitor? In Saturday’s strip, he’s back celebrating his old team’s victory, as if he hadn’t walked out on them right before kickoff. Yes, traitors in sports stories are forgiven sometimes. But this petty, vindictive bunch of jerks? In this petty, vindictive universe? And for no reason? Come on.
We want to see the traitors get humiliated. Have you ever seen the end of UHF? It spends two solid minutes dunking on Kevin McCarthy and his henchmen, calling out every jerk move they pulled the entire movie. And it is awesome.
And if you thought last week in Crankshaft was crap, wait until you see Mary Worth next week.
Son of Stuck Funky 
This arc also displays Batiuk’s other uncanny ability: to write a sequence of strips that are each individually aggressively mediocre-to-poor … but when read as a connected ‘story’, are actually much, much worse.
It’s clear he’s incapable of understanding how bad he is at this now. Or why he’s considered bad. Or even what would be considered good. I mean, forget about story structure — he can barely seem to understand simple cause and effect.
He’s almost like someone doing a parody based on third hand information.
“Failure to understand cause and effect” is a much more succinct way of putting it than what I said. People in the story just do things, and then other characters don’t react to any of it. It’s as if the creator has some ossified, out of touch idea of what a comic strip formula is, and then deploys it without any thought. The same thing happens in other drama strips, like Gil Thorp and Rex Morgan and the aforementioned Mary Worth. They’re long, rambling story-like proceedings that don’t make any narrative sense. They look like something AI would write.
It’s like listening to a story a small child is telling: things happen and the child is confused and angered by the scariest word he knows: why.
I think his creative license should be revoked.
On the upside, apparently this Sunday Dinkle is sobbing uncontrollably in a tiny church bathroom stall after having some post traumatic flashback meltdown.
Is that what’s going on? I didn’t understand it at all. Dinkle doesn’t get PTSD, he gives it. Is he finally becoming ashamed of how he’s treated people his whole life, or is this a random character-breaking moment that will be instantly forgotten? My money’s on the latter.
Even worse, you two’s joke post about a Jff prostate cancer prestige arc will actually come to be, but instead of Jff and prostate cancer it’ll be Dinkle and dementia…
Today’s Horseshit Crankshaft
Dinkle is back (excessive booing)
-After this story arc, I still don’t know what exactly a bus rodeo is or why a school corporation would approve the use of buses outside of their intended purpose. Maybe since there’s a driver shortage, this is a way to make sure the buses stay in working order. Or something like that…
-I know the transfer portal is a real thing, but yeah, it does sound like a sci-fi term doesn’t it? Or maybe I’ve watched too much Star Trek.
-I love UHF! Diehard Weird Al fan here, so you’ll get little disagreement with me on that cult classic. As silly as the movie was, Kevin McCarthy and all the bad guys played their villany to the hilt which made the “band of misfits defeating the evil big shots” storyline so fun to watch.
-Mary Worth is going to get even worse next week???? Oh boy… As if Wilbur’s psycho gal pal trying to murder Dawn isn’t enough. What is it with this recent run of “How many reprehensible characters in a row can we introduce into the strip?”
In today’s MW strip, Belle spiked the tea with poison and tried to give it to Dawn
the only reason Dawn didn’t drink the tainted tea is because Wilbur stumbled and knocked the tea over
Wilbur has clearly seen the photo of Dawn that Belle defaced. Why he hasn’t thrown Belle out of the house is a mystery that will have the lamest solution ever. (My theory is that Belle is Dirk’s mother out for revenge.)
The problem with Mary Worth is that Wilbur 100% knows Belle is trying to kill Dawn, and appears to be helping. He badgered Dawn into drinking the tainted tea, and took her away from the kitchen so Belle could mix it without being observed.
Yesterday’s strip looked like Wilbur had a last-second change of heart about being in on Belle’s murder scheme. But the muted text in today’s narration box, and the characters’ even more muted reactions, defy that. Wilbur’s also not calling the police, not telling Dawn she’s in danger, not attacking Belle, and not even kicking Belle out of their house. It’s like when Becky didn’t give a shit that Wally chopped her arm off.
Also, Belle has no motive to kill Dawn. If she’s a serial killer, she could have just stayed home and preyed on random lost foreign tourists. (The city of Orlando is practically designed for a Henry Holmes scenario.)
Also, check out the April 27, 2025 strip. It doesn’t spoil anything, except how badly-written this story is.
And today, Wilbur cleaned the tea cup without noticing the spilled tea had the color and aroma of drain clog remover.
Mela: <i>UHF</i> is great, despite objectively being a mediocre movie. Compared to modern times, it stands out for how good-natured it is. The bad guys play their roles to the hilt, but so do the good guys. You can see how strongly this random collection of characters, from Michael Richards to Victoria Jackson to Gedde Watanbe to Billy Barty, all believe in this dumb TV channel and want it to succeed. The movie is actually kind of sweet, despite being very mean-spirited at times. (“Is this it? Nope. Is this it? Nope. Is this it?…”)
Exaggerating mean-spirited gags to the point that they come around to being harmlessly funny is one of Weird Al’s biggest comedic gifts. The “Is this it?” and “Wheel of Fish” bits being great examples in UHF.
David Bowe’s straightman Bob is the lynchpin of UHF for me. Bob because he makes me believe the rest of the oddballs at U62 would believe in George too. A more ambitious (and worse) movie would have tried to make Bob “interesting”, turning him into a wet blanket or having him do a heel turn in an attempt to ground his exasperating existence as George’s put-upon friend and roommate. But even when disapproving or despondent, Bob is always up for the madness. And since Bob, a consummate mensch in a Cubs cap despite being dragged through George’s many many messes, keeps on believing in the guy, I absolutely buy that Stanley and Philo and Pam and Noodles and Teri and even Uncle Harvey and Aunt Esther can/should believe in him too.
Likeability goes a long way. George Newman, and Al Yankovic himself, are just so friendly and guileless. Yes, they can be annoying, but they’re also hard to hate. (SEE ALSO: Spongebob Squarepants.) Songs like “Perform This Way” and “Achy Breaky Song” and “Smells Like Nirvana” are actually hilariously vicious, but Al gets away with it because he puts so much effort into having good relationships with artists, respecting their wishes, and knowing not to go too far.
I hate to see you left hanging. I would have thought somebody would have answered your inquiry.
A School Bus Rodeo is to promote safety. The primary purpose is an actual behind-the-wheel program to test the driver’s ability as to the handling of the bus in various situations, the judging of clearance and distance, the rules and regulations pertaining to school bus operation and the Motor Vehicle Code, and in general, proper school bus procedure. Here’s a video covering the Northeast Ohio School Rodeo from a few years ago.
That clearly isn’t the Bizarro World event Batiuk featured in Crankshaft, where competitions are skewed directly towards cruelty to children. We see drivers literally being awarded points by a governing body for their ability to make children miserable. For some peculiar sadistic reason, TB finds this funny.
BWOEH-Thank you for this! I had no idea that this was a real thing, so no wonder I was confused. And I’m glad bus safety programs ARE a thing! My original thought process went something like “Crankshaft, Rodeo, smash up derby, destroying buses! Why?” So I’ve learned something, which is pretty awesome, and one of the many reasons why I keep hanging out with y’all!
And I realize this is a little late, but in regards to the Sunday strip-shouldn’t the title really have been Murder at the Bookstore STEP burning?
You’re welcome. Not knowing if you had notifications turned on, I took a shot you’d see it. I’m so happy you did. At least this time, Batiuk’s portrayal of the school bus rodeo wasn’t as offensive as it was the last time. Cruelty to children is not funny to me.
Agreed. ‘The Burnings’, Batiuk’s latest foray into a prestige arc, fizzled out faster than the fire on the bookstore steps. Batiuk’s puff piece interview turned out to be much a’do about an unsatisfying and unresolved story.
Sunday, I almost made a nitpick in the GoComics Crankshaft discussion that the bookstore sign was incorrect and should have read ‘The Village Booksmith’. Then I realized the bookstore featured on the cover is in Lillian’s ersatz mystery novel and can be named anything she wants it to be.
Cheers.
Today’s Dull As Shit Crankshaft
And we’re back to Dale Evans with Cranky, Ralph and Keesterman
RE: Mon. 4/14’s C’Shaft, or “How Do You Screw Up a Sports Illustrated Story?”:
Easy. You’re sitting at your writing desk in the Spring of 2024 and you see reports that SI may cease its print edition. “Say, I can work that into a Crankshaft strip!” You then write the script, send it out to be illustrated, and let it fester for about a year.
Since then, the magazine changed publishing hands and is now doing better, making today’s breakfast table topic outdated and irrelevant.
Also, I cannot speak for all doctors’ offices, but most of the ones I’ve been to recently no longer have magazines–even old ones–lying around the waiting rooms. I assume this is a remnant of the COVID Era when they wanted things as sterile as possible, or maybe it’s simple economics. Has anyone else noticed this?
Indeed. Oh, what was in the New York Times exactly one year ago to the day?
Sports Illustrated’s Employees Are Told Print Edition Will Close in May
I’m actually kind of impressed at how precise TB’s clockwork is.
Fictional sports stories are not easy to tell well, I don’t think. Inventing plausible and interesting scenarios and translating the narrative inherent to any real sports competition into a good fictional story is a challenge. While a number of folks can do it, the wealth of terribly poor sports stories out there (*cough*cough* GilThorp *cough*) would seem to bare out how challenging it is.
What is easy to do is deploy the tropes that many/most sports stories use. And TB was once perfectly capable of doing this. We mock TB for having Mickey Lopez and Owen scoring go-ahead touchdowns while wearing a ball gown and a mascot costume respectively, but his deployment of The Unlikely Hero sealing the win for The Underdog with The Clock Winding Down was plenty competent and easy to follow.
The remarkable thing about bus rodeo week is that none of the tropes it peddles are deployed in a way that is easy to follow at all. Sports stories are especially weak when the author tells rather than shows, alas the defining trait of present day TB’s storytelling arsenal. Bus rodeo week was almost entirely characters saying “Well, that happened…” in various ways. Rough stuff.
From Batiuk’s blog. Can you imagine writing this sentence? NB: this is the only appearance of the word phantoms in the entire entry.
“Working with one of my “phantoms” started to bring a certain materiality to things, and it brought me tantalizingly closer to the answer I was seeking. “
No other human writes like Batty does. They’re real words, and the sentences are grammatically correct and all, yet somehow none of it ever makes sense. The simplest sentences, and simplest thoughts, become incomprehensibly baffling. It’s almost like he’s an alien life force who’s landed on Earth, and is trying to fit in by being a “writer”, but doesn’t really fundamentally grasp what that means. If you fed that blog of his into some sort of AI generator machine, it’d break it.
“Trying to fit in as a writer” is exactly what Tom Batiuk is doing. He can never write a basic sentence to convey meaning. Everything has to be a flowery, pretentious, over-written treatise, full of every writer-y thing he can cram into it. Imagine how he would write the note “please pick up a gallon of milk.” He doesn’t realize that artists of any type do straightforward work 90% of the time.
And I think being rejected by Marvel and DC has a lot to do with this. His formula of “be good writer = money + praise + fame + awards + comic books + mom was wrong” didn’t work. So he became a tryhard about it. I hate the word “tryhard”, because trying hard is a good thing, but it applies to Tom Batiuk’s writing. Everything he writes conveys his overweening desire to be accepted into the super-elite writers’ club. Or it’s so banal there was no need to write it at all, like his comic book cover descriptions.
“Our dairy needs must be fulfilled anew.”
The Milk must flow.
“I’ve been drinking milk for my entire life. Few things are as satisfying as pouring out that last, full, glass of milk, while dreading the inevitable trip to the grocery store to purchase more. The frigid, unforgiving dairy case, the vexing expiration dates stamped on the carton (or plastic jug, allowing for creeping modernity). The thick glass bottles, delivered to my door by the friendly milk man, have been replaced by self-service, and soulless plastic, a form of “progress” that inspired many Montoni’s and school lunch stories through the years. But regardless of how, the acquisition of that milk (as well as the prerequisite cookies, of course) ensures another evening of comic book pleasures, and retreating into the same fantasy world the old milk man once helpfully enabled.”
He was easier to take before desperation set in.
Somewhere in the Star Trek multiverse is a timeline where Kirk overloads the android captors in “I, Mudd” by reading to them from TB’s blog.
“It’s full of–of–of things that are only correct because they’re grammatical, but they’re tough on the ear. You see, this is a very wearying one, it’s unpleasant to read. Unrewarding.”
“Our comfortable yet angrily-antiquated means of conveying greetings requires that we refresh our supply of decorative emblems.”
Today’s Crankshaft
(yawns and falls asleep)
Crankshaft so far has been incredibly dull
COME ON AND GIVE US THE WEDDING AND WINNIPEG FOOTBALL STORYLINES ALREADY
Another problem with Friday’s strip (4/11): Ed is standing not far from Lena’s bus, which is parked next to a puddle. The judges are measuring with a stopwatch and ruler. Ed says, “Getting a winning run from Lena is like getting stones from a turnip!”
Ed would have known that the objective of this event, for some reason, is to park right next to a puddle so that the bus door will be in the center of the puddle. Even if he couldn’t tell that Lena had made it exactly, he should certainly have been able to see that she was close to achieving the objective. He shouldn’t have implied that Lena was running their team into a loss.
I didn’t even notice the stopwatch. So the object is to park the bus in a puddle as quickly as possible? Or is Lena being timed on how fast she can deliver a smirky remark? Is this Ohio’s version of The Upper-Class Twit Of The Year Contest? “The twits are done insulting the nurse and designing the comic book cover, and now they’re on to the final event: dying of cancer!”
What’s been bugging me since that strip is that we learn here that the abuse of students and parents–parking so the bus door’s over a puddle, speeding away before the kid can get on the bus, stacking up long lines of traffic behind the bus, knocking over mailboxes, etc.–happens not because Ed’s a mean old man, but because this is official school district policy. Drivers compete on techniques of dickishness and are rewarded for being particularly obnoxious.
If Skippy Rawdog were covering the “bus rodeo” story, it would be the biggest exposé in the Sentinel’s history. Probably even win a Pulitzer Prize. Alas, he’s spending the day at Montoni’s, dutifully recording Part 267 in the never-ending Batton Thomas saga.
What’s been bugging me since that strip is that we learn here that…
Gawd. I just used the word “that” (possibly the most over-used word in the English language) three times in one sentence. I fear Batty’s “writing” style is rubbing off on me. Aieeeee!
Today’s Past Batiukverse Storyline: Cindy Has A Bad Hair Day And Stays Home For The Day And Gets Detention for It
I don’t think anyone could use a bad hair day to be excused from school for a day
and then Fred proceeded to put Cindy’s ass into detention (I’m hoping that it was for at least 2 weeks)
Cindy: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bodean: Is it true that you beat Wicked Wanda to a pulp all because your right-hand woman, Carrie, was in love with her?
Cindy: HOW THE HELL DID YOU KNOW THAT!?
Bodean: You’re a total fucking bitch, y’know that?
I like this Bodean character. Don’t remember him at all.
he appeared in a 1987 storyline where Barry Balderman had to go to summer school because he never took any courses in school
Agreed.
More Bodean.
Less Crankshaft not even having the decency to try and do justice to the ancient “what does a Grecian urn?” joke.
Bodean looks like a character from Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
Or maybe he’s Owen’s father.
Bodean to me looks like George Cooper Jr. from Young Sheldon
Speaking of old FW strips, today’s (4/16) really spoke to me. Back in my high school days (about ten years or so before Batty started publishing FW), I consistently scored in the top 1% on standardized tests, while pulling a middle-B grade point average. It was rather funny when I was one of seven National Merit Finalists (in a class of 700), and the only one whose GPA was under 4.0.
I just happened to have a natural talent for bubble sheets. Seriously. I had standardized test taking down to a science: blast through all the obvious ones. Then go through the ones where I could eliminate two or three of the choices and guess which of the remaining ones might be right. Finally, put the booklet down, look at the bubble sheet, and decide where to fill in the remaining blank lines.
Mind you, I went on to score some 4.0 quarters in college and graduate with honors from a tough engineering school, but my high school experience taught me that all a standardized test actually measures is standardized-test-taking talent.
Batty nailed this one. An observation that holds up decades later (when schools seem to spend as much time on test-taking technique as they do on the subject matter being tested), and the strip was tightly written, economical, and well constructed (right down to the fourth-wall-breakage accompanying the punch line).
I’ll second this. Supposedly I got some crazy-high test score, when I was in the second grade at a dubious Christian school. It changed everything for me, and got me put in advanced classes and even skipping a grade (from which I later dropped back). I wasn’t overwhelmed in the advanced classes, but I knew I didn’t have it in me to be a great student. For one thing, I didn’t give a shit. School was an annoyance to be completed with as little effort as possible, so I could go do something fun and challenging instead. Other students had passion, or maybe just overbearing parents, that I lacked.
There are many different ways to be intelligent. School testing only identifies one of them, and treats the others as worthless. Some of the kids I remember being in lesser classes turned out to be highly driven, creative, perceptive, intuitive, emotionally intelligent, or had something else going for them that made them much better candidates for success than they ever got credit for.
I did find Batty’s 4/10 blog interesting for this little bit of information:
”Chuck Ayers was penciling Funky at the time, and he was not a fan of science fiction or comic books. He would have done a very good serviceable job, but he wasn’t that familiar with comic books or common comic book tropes.”
I often wondered about Ayers’ relationship with Batty. It always seemed to me that Ayers just viewed his work on FW as simply a steady 9 to 5 gig, nothing more.
The irony is that Batty writes like someone who’s also not familiar with comic books or comic book tropes. All his “superheroes” seem to be missing:
Clearly delineated powers.
A known vulnerability.
An internal conflict.
A distinct personality.
A nemesis.
And of course, the ultimate comic book trope is action, fighting, dynamic layouts and movement.
All lacking.
I bet Ayers understands comics better from flipping through a 1977 “Brave and the Bold” than Batty understands them after a lifetime of reading, but never absorbing. (Maybe he should take lessons from Absorbing, Jr.)
It’s amazing how little Tom Batiuk actually knows about comic books. Especially when it comes to writing and storytelling.
All he knows is that they make his Inner Child feel good.
And they rearranged his molecules.
Were they sent through the transfer portal?
A great example of terrible writing.
” very good serviceable job” Well? Which one is it? Those are not the same thing.
”he was not a fan of science fiction or comic books”
“he wasn’t that familiar with comic books or common comic book tropes.”
Why not say the same thing a third time, Tom? Or maybe even a fourth!
Chuck Ayers seems very, very overqualified for the Funkyverse. One of his cartoons about the Kent State shootings got a Pulitzer nomination, making him just as accomplished as Tom Batiuk in this regard. Maybe more so, since he was the artist at the time of The Dead Lisa Story and therefore deserved some of the credit for that.
Yeah, Chuck’s political cartoons were featured in many local newspapers in NE Ohio.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 3 of the Dale Evans Week
This week is drearily boring
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 4 of the Dale Evans Week
Ed: Keesterman, both me and Ralph are 100+ years old.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 5 of the Dale Evans Week
This week is disappointingly boring even for Batiukverse standards