Remix

I mixed the last two Crankshaft strips into a much better joke.

Points for discussion:

  • Yes, I know Les is short for “Leslie.” But if Tom Batiuk can throw out decades of character history to make a joke work, so can I. It just makes the parody more realistic.
  • Is Lisa evil? Is she actually worse than Les? Les’ Muse Abuse sets the bar pretty high. But Lisa’s victim complex, need to be the center of attention, micromanagement of Les from beyond the grave, and complete disinterest in her child make this race closer than you’d think.
  • Have you noticed nobody in Westview actually watches or reads Lisa’s Story? As outlandish as the parody strip seems, it is 100% consistent with what we’re supposed to believe, that the movie was of Oscar quality. Pam and her dad having a nice movie night watching Lisa die again is a lot more plausible than them watching old Looney Tunes.
  • Murder In The Burnings will be resuming soon. There’s still a long way to go in the story, but I’ve been visited by Le Chat Bleu lately.
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Author: Banana Jr. 6000

Yuck. The fritos are antiquated.

54 thoughts on “Remix”

  1. A brilliant-yet-troubled, sensibly-coiffed young woman eagerly embraces death, then returns to this mortal coil in apparition form, specifically to torment her husband, and destroy his relationships with other women. After one of his suitors considers suicide, it’s up to the heroine to sexually assault the husband, thereby breaking the spell. There’s a daughter involved too, but she gets phased out and only returns briefly at the end. I mean, it is kind of what happened, right? So yeah, Lisa was absolutely evil.

      1. Cayla tried everything to woo (gak) Les. She even changed hairstyles like three times. But in the end, she had no choice but to pin him down and MAKE him get over Lisa. And it kinda worked, briefly, I guess. The Lisa stuff did change after Les finally married Cayla. She was still around, but only in journal and VHS form, unlike before, when she was pretty much a strip regular. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

        I suppose the most overtly evil FW character was Frankie, who was an unrepentant scumbag through and through. I kind of liked his panache, though. It was kind of nice to have a character around who experienced emotions beyond wry, weary, gentle sarcasm, even if the emotions were, uh, negative ones. Lots of wasted potential there, too. Plenty of Act III arcs could have used a good does of Frankie, if you ask me.

    1. I want to see Lisa’s Saul Goodman-style TV commercial.

      “Have you been injured? Are you amicably separating from your husband? Are you facing the death penalty? Have you attempted to sell manga comic books? You need the law firm of Lisa! Whatever your problem, Lisa can help! Criminal defense, divorce mediation, free speech cases, everything except medical malpractice! Come see Lisa’s Law Firm today! Conveniently located at Montoni’s Pizza. Because I still work there part-time, and live in the apartment upstairs.”

      1. “Hi, I’m with the law firm of Lisa, Lisa and Lisa. Are you facing incredible challenges? Let me show you the best way to give up and let fate take its course. Slots are filling up quickly so call today!”

        1. “Or don’t! Calling might be like taking some sort of action! So … take the first step towards giving up completely by NOT calling! That number not to call: 1-800-I-NEVER-BOTHERED-TO-GET-A-PHONE-NUMBER. Don’t delay! I’ll be dead soon! And by giving up completely — maybe you could be too!”

  3. SHOO, Chat Bleu, SHOO! Get outta here and leave BJr6K alone! Back to where you came from! Go on, now, GIT!

    I swear it’s the heat of midsummer that does it. Oppressive.

    Anyway, I’ve noticed throughout my life that couples tend to be generally evenly matched in most respects — looks-wise, ambition-wise, and morals-wise. So I’d agree: Lisa is at least as horrid as Les. They were a matching set of creeps.

    Of all the aspects of Tragic Lisa’s Tragic Death that didn’t sit well with me — in other words, nearly every bit of the story — the part that chafed me the worst was that she showed essentially no interest in her own daughter. Any woman dying while her child is a toddler is going to be absolutely stricken that she’ll never see her child grow up, and that her child will never remember her. A normal woman would think of the future, and how motherless girls have a wound that never really heals. She’d focus as much as possible on loving and comforting her child. Lisa? Could NOT have given less of a damn about that whole thing. All eyes on Les — for whom Summer seemed an afterthought as well.

    Sociopaths, the both of them.

    1. To be fair, those dang videotapes initially came about because Lisa was worried about Summer growing up without her (not enough to keep fighting the cancer, but whatever).

      Of course, they turned into a monstrous totem under Les’ watch… and then TB’s 2022 retconning of the tapes as something Lisa decided to set up to help Les feel better (!!!) appallingly took the focus away from both Summer and Lisa and put it on to the person who deserved it the least.

      I was incensed at the time and I remain so.

      1. Another infuriated reminiscence of mine from that 2022 story arc:

        Originally, her lament was at least partially focused on Summer and how her daughter might not have a mother’s support at critical moments in adolescence. In this flashback, though, the lament is all about the experiences SHE will miss. She doesn’t even mention Summer by name.

        1. To avoid dealing with the immediate aftermath of Lisa’s death, BatYam skipped ahead ten years, then proceeded to completely wallow in Les dealing with the aftermath of Lisa’s death. And in hindsight, the Summer character was all about the contrast (good athlete vs. dorky nebbish) between Les and Summer, which wasn’t anywhere near as humorous as Batty apparently believed it was. The whole thing was a huge mess, and he didn’t even win that Pulitzer. So why even kill off Lisa at all?

          1. Batiuk skipped ahead ten years because writing the emotional baggage of Lisa’s death was beyond his ability. Simple as that. Ditto for Becky’s arm, Funky’s alcoholism, Wally’s PTSD, and every other tragedy he set up that could have fueled months of stories, but didn’t. The formula is always the same: write a pointless tragedy disaster everyone just goes along with, set up the lurid money shot, cut away from the aftermath, beg for awards.

      2. Les insisted on preserving the sanctity of Lisa’s Story. Ironically, Tom Batiuk has done the exact opposite. Batiuk’s need to keep Lisa in the public eye has led him to rehash the story into incoherent nothingness.

        Les told Lisa to make tapes for her daughter? No, Harry told her to make tapes for Les. Lisa’s pregnancy was an ordinary teenaged bad decision? No, it was the result of sexual assault. Les and Lisa were a couple of high school dorks who hooked up? No, they were pawns of a time-traveling janitor’s multi-generational process to create the book that would “define humanity as our nation.” In all three cases, a believable story was replaced with a ludicrous one.

        1. “Pawns of a time-traveling janitor’s multi-generational process to create the book that would “define humanity as our nation.”

          Now, I’d never endorse violence of any kind, but hypothetically, if a FW reader was to smack BatYam over that particular story arc, no jury in the land would vote to convict.

  4. Please take care of yourself, Banana Jr. 6000. Your health is more important than this blog, if something else will bring you greater peace at this time. 🙏🙏🙏

    1. In retrospect, I probably should have said “Lord of the Late” instead of “Chat Bleu.” Because it’s a writers-block thing, not a self-loathing thing. Mentally, I feel pretty good. I just haven’t been feeling creative lately, and I haven’t been with satisfied with what I’ve been producing in The Burnings story. I try to keep the quality of my writing high.

      There are things in my life I probably need to take a break from, but SoSF isn’t one of them. If anything, this *is* the thing that brings me the greater peace. I feel like I’m in community of true kindred spirits. Hating Funky Winkerbean was a weird place to find a home, but here we are. I thank you for your concern, and I assure you my mental health is good.

    1. This TV commercial is so 1982-looking. When was the last time you saw a TV commercial where a man in a suit spoke to the camera to pitch you a common product like aspirin? Must be Timemop nudging again. Maybe Ed is in a reality where not all of the cyanide has been discovered yet.

      1. And today is another 1982 commercial. Who advertises saltine crackers on TV, much less that they’re “hermetically sealed”? Batiuk must really be cleaning out his old joke drawer this week.

  6. Today’s Past Batiukverse Storyline: Cindy gets stuck working New Years Eve and then goes to a bar to drown her sorrows (I think)

    Cindy (looking in a mirror, dejected): Where the fuck did it all go wrong?

    I think Carrie left Westview after getting married to her fiancee (I headcanon it to be Wicked Wanda)

    Funky: FUCK THAT BITCH! She drove me to drink every day!

    Jim: Y’know what? Forget it. I would never date some narcissistic asshole who thought she was the shit during high school and is incapable of taking responsibility for her actions.

    Cindy: YOU’RE THE FUCKIN’ NARCISSIST!

    I admit to feeling a bit bad for Cindy in this strip, in spite of her being my least favorite character tied with Dinkle

    1. Good Lord, this makes no sense.

      So Cindy was reporting on Times Square on New Year’s Eve but her shift ended before the ball dropped? What was she, Dick Clark’s warmup act?

      Cindy “got stuck working New Year’s Eve?” If she graduated high school in 1991, she would have been 32 by 2005. And in a profession where working non-standard hours is commonplace. Another one of those “Tom never mentally left high school” moments.

      “Congratulations on the latest rating book!” Individual newscasters don’t get ratings, entire TV programs do. Unless they’re talking about something like “Q-rating”, which would be pretty obscure. And if she was popular enough to have one of those, she would have had a more prominent role..

      “Hi, my name’s Jim.” “Hi, my name’s national TV star, asshole.”

      1. “Hi Jim! Sorry you remind me of a complete douche back in my hometown. Bye Les–i mean, Jim”

  7. I’d like to think that Les’ imagination was the real reaction that his friends and family had to the Lisa’s Story picture.

    The cherry on top is picturing Kablichnick, a co-worker who is definitely more acquaintance than friend to Les, absolutely rolling in the aisles scene after scene.

    1. Dangit wordpress… Here’s the strip I looked like I was expecting you all to have in your minds.

      1. That strip is UGLY.

        Is this really what Les thinks of Cayla, Summer, and Funky? These people spend their lives walking on eggshells to indulge Les’ every Lisa-related feeling. They indulge his every whine, take the brunt of his awful behavior, and never give him a word of complaint or pushback. Nor do they tell him he needs to grow up and get the fuck over it after 28 years.

        The strip is drawn like this is captures some kind of cute little human insecurity. But it reveals what a trash human being Les is. It reveals how little value his friends and family have to him. He can’t even see how much they do to keep him happy. They are to be used for his own needs, and not trusted otherwise.

        1. The strip went to great lengths to forgive and redeem Bull, but Les never did. The strip went to great lengths to portray Les as a hapless dweeb, but when Funky had a laugh about it, Les nearly disowned him, and forced Funky to grovel for forgiveness. He is truly the embodiment of everything I hate about everything.

  8. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day 5 of Random Joke Week

    after a week o’nothing like this, I’m ready for the MinMope Wedding or the Winnipeg Blue Bombers storylines

    1. Maybe they’ll be the same. Mindy and Pete get married at the 55-yard line.

      1. The torso chute has been clog-free for a while, but there are still glitches in the space/time continuum. We need somebody to mop up, or give things a nudge.

    2. Maybe they’ll be the same. Mindy and Pete get married at the 55-yard line.

    3. Maybe they’ll be the same. Mindy and Pete get married at the 55-yard line.

    4. Maybe they’ll be the same. Mindy and Pete get married at the 55-yard line.

      1. Ah, the Wonder of WordPress! If they liked a comment once, they’ll love it a fourth time! I suppose it must be prohibitively expensive for them to install a “delete comment” button. Remember when it’d tell you if the comment was a duplicate before you posted it?

        The above “Everybody laffs at Les” panel–in the early comics Crazy Harry’s hat was pulled down so far you couldn’t see his eyes, like he was microcephalic or something. When he takes it off now, he looks like he should be wearing a long robe and carrying a book titled “To Serve Man.”

        Woman, screaming: “‘To Serve Man’–IT’S A DINKLE COLLECTION!”

  9. 7/12:

    ED: “I just thought I’d replace these–” (drops light; it shatters on the floor; Pam shrieks as the shards pierce her flesh) ED: “I guess now…It’s a FLOORescent light!”

    ED passes 2 lights to the Shining Twins. EMILY: “Now I am the master!” GOTHILY: “Only a master of evil!” They swing them like lightsabers.  They shriek as the shards pierce their flesh. ED: “You shoulda used The FLOURESCE!”

    ED: (brushes his teeth with them, shards pierce his gums) “My precious bodily fluids!” (Nuclear war toe to toe with the Russkies begins)

    (ME: Chronic insomnia is as fun as chewing on light bulbs)

    1. Somebody’s asking for big trouble with the Coca-Cola Company, if you ask me.

      The survival kit would make for a pretty good weekend either in Vegas or in Dallas, Major Kong.

    1. Oh man, my cousin got me a couple Mary Worth books for my birthday. She and I love ripping on MW. Anyways, one of the books features the original “Olive” story. Can’t believe Moy/Brigman are reviving this story, but it sure beats another Wilbur arc.

  12. Today’s Crankshaft

    If I had a nickel every time that Batiuk made a joke related to Stonehenge, I’d have two nickels

    which isn’t much, but I’m surprised that it happened twice

    1. Sundays are usually padded three-panel strips, but a padded one-panel strip?

      1. I like how “Whoever This Hallucination Is” is screaming “LORD, TAKE ME NOW! Have I not suffered enough?!”

        Seriously–I know there’s some kid of variable age named Max, but why does Tom expect us to remember?

          1. csroberto, Thanks! I figured that Ed could only have great-grandchildren by now. He’s 105, Pam’s 75, Max must be 45, so Mitch is fiftee–Five. Sure, he’s 5. Old enough to have kids of his own.

            What’s with that time change again? Okay, Ed was in WWII, why just not acknowledge that it’s a strip, and not a quarter-inch? How old is Uncle Walt in Gasoline Alley, 130? What is he, a struldbrugg? (People in Gulliver’s Travels that are immortal, yet keep aging, until they’re shambling wrinkled blobs of senility and incontinence. No one envies their immortality)

            Huh. I was just about to say, if TB wants his quarter-inch, have Ed die already. Falling from a gutter he’s hanging onto. But how many characters have died in his strips? Bull Bushka, obvs, and…I forget her name, begins with an L, maybe Tom will remind us once or twice…Wait, I got it! Her name was Lucy! Oh, and John Darling!

            Houston, we have segue! New (very old) Darling strip on the blog! Why did this strip get cancelled? It’s entirely about celebrities that the writer hates but certainly not out of jealousy! And the art…Crimeny. Basil Wolverton would’ve cringed at these Bobbleheads of Your Nightmares. Even the blonde who’s supposed to be hot. I wonder what her name is…?

            JESUS CHRIST, TOM.

          2. Right, Max and Mitch. IT’S A PUN, GET IT? LAUGH, DAMN YOU!

            Max’s twin sister is Mindy. Max and Mindy. IT’S A PUN, GET IT? KEEP LAUGHING, THIS IS HILARIOUS.

  13. RE: Mon. 7/14’s ‘Shaft:

    OH, MERCIFUL LORD IN HEAVEN, NOT THESE TWO AGAIN! IT BURNS! NO, MARION, DON’T LOOK! DON’T OPEN YOUR EYES!

    In other news, Happy Bastille Day.

    1. The funny thing is, I haven’t read today’s Crankshaft yet, but this comment fits basically any new story arc Batiuk could give us.

  14. 7/14:

    He’s there to interview Batsin Belfrey again. And the most interesting thing in the room is a rock.

    “The writing faded quick! I asked them how they painted it, and the boys said ‘The same way we write our names in the snow!'”
    “Batsin…this rock is a coprolite.”
    “WOW! Copper Light? Isn’t that what they make Oscars from?!”
    “…Yeah. Yep, they sure do.”

    This interview has been going on for a YEAR. How long does it take to publish his one-sheet “newspaper”? “I’m hoping to get the next issue out when Halley’s Comet returns! The headline writes itself! COMET RETURNS, Man Has Rock.”

    1. Remember when Batiuk handed Les that fucking Oscar? And we all thought “this is it, this is the definitive ego wank of the entire Funkyverse”? Batiuk has topped this TWICE now. First, he had Summer inadvertently ‘redefine humanity as our nation.’ And now his self-insertion character is being interviewed as if he were a more important and complex figure than Jesus Christ. Alex Haley didn’t need this much interview material to write The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. How big is this going to get?

  15. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day Whatever Of The Most Boring Interview, Ever

    The Daily Bleak

    The Head of The Centerville Sentinel Interviews The Most Boring Man Alive, This Is What Happened To His Brain

  16. “Oh, make the Random Joke Week stop,” they begged. “Anything’s got to be better than this,” they pleaded.

    “As you wish,” Tom said…

  17. What does the message on the rock mean? “On this rock, today’s work will be done tomorrow!” Batton wasn’t going to do any work “on this rock”. Nor could he use it as a writing surface.

    If they had given him a drawing table with the words “On this table, today’s work will be done tomorrow,” that would sound like a satirical comment about Batton procrastinating and putting his work off till tomorrow, but I don’t know how the rock fits into that.

    1. It was the Random Quote Of The Day on some kid’s desk calendar that morning

    2. My first thought was that it was sarcasm. “Don’t do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”

      I’ve known people that you can insult to their face, but they’re so vain that they think it’s a compliment. I had a coworker who thought he was the main character of Saturday Night Fever and was wearing the jewelry 15+ years after the movie. People said “He won’t shut up about his car! He works ‘my IROC-Z’ into every conversation!”
      Me: “Know what we said in high school in the 70s IROC stood for? Italian Retard Out Cruising.”
      They would ask as he walked in to work, “Hey, how’s the IROC doing today?” And he’d answer with a proud smirk “Great, great!”, and as soon as he was out of earshot everyone would laugh. The IROC in this case was not his car…

      (If that sounds mean, he was an asshole. He was 36 and hit on 16 year old coworkers. His vanity plate: “SILK 69.” He was fired, not just for sexual harassment, but because he embezzled company funds to buy a $45 Fisher Price basketball hoop, so he and his boys could play with a toddler’s toy on the clock. 1990s Sam Goody, guys!)

      So it’s possible Tom never caught on to their joke. Maybe that’s why they did such a cheap paint job. Don’t forget–this is the guy who brags about writing 11 months out and never editing. If you’re not going to edit boffo comedy like “fluoride light” and “A pigeon of a chance,” why not just send it out? Power play over the artist? Worked out great when he quit on you and no one wanted to replace him.

      My second thought was “Where is this quote from? It can’t be–Oh. Grandpa Google’s first page is all about Jesus founding the church.” Is he that vain? Like, so vain that he thinks his piddling wet fart will lead to a Utopia with Humanity As Our oh shit, maybe so.

      Also, “3 O’Clock High” is a stupid name. If that’s what he named FW back then, we’d not be talking here today, because the strip would have lasted 6 months and run in 10 papers.

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