Sunday saw a repeat of one of Batiuk’s oldest jokes. The ‘One Leg At A Time’ coach speech. He’s been pulling out that old groaner for more than FIFTY YEARS.
One Leg At A Time…
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Sunday saw a repeat of one of Batiuk’s oldest jokes. The ‘One Leg At A Time’ coach speech. He’s been pulling out that old groaner for more than FIFTY YEARS.
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Son of Stuck Funky 
Oh. It’s the “People who are our betters in every way aren’t” speech.
As someone who played one season for the worst high school football team the region had seen for many a year, and a foulmouthed coach who could play “sports cliche bingo” with the best of them, these strips are oddly comforting.
I know Batiuk was just channeling Charlie Brown’s baseball team that never won (I played for one of those in Little League, too!), but for me it’s still one of the most personally relatable things about the Funkyverse…
Well, THAT was certainly agonizing. Hats off to you!
I think the “One Leg at A Time” punchline is Coach Stropp saying that Big Walnut Tech is incredibly fucking stupid
“True…you haven’t had to put yours on yet this season.”
HUH???? The football team hasn’t worn pants all season? Am I missing something?
Sorry, some clarification. That was part of the arc where Westview ended up being the undefeated conference champs because every team they were scheduled to play had to forfeit. Except for Walnut Tech, who beat Westview but used an ineligible player and Westview won by default.
Another proud Batiuk tradition that dates back over fifty years: telling a three-panel joke in just seven panels!
– For the first strip, lose panels 1-4, and replace the word “they” in panel 5 with “Big Walnut Tech.”
– For the next Sunday strip, lose panels 1-4, and drop the word “But” from panel 5.
– For the next Sunday strip, lose panels 1, 2, 3 and 5.
– The last Sunday strip is pretty unsalvageable, but panels 4, 5, and 6 is where the joke is.
I don’t get the “Levis for Men” strip. What’s the joke supposed to be there? That the other team’s uniforms are made of denim?
It’s not as though the Westview football team should be intimidated by the fact that the other team wears men’s clothing. The Westview football players aren’t women or little boys.
I believe the joke is supposed to be that the small, puny Westview High team would have to wear boys’ sizes, and they are being sent out to be pummeled by opposition teams who are all much bigger and stronger and are already wearing men’s sizes.
Becky walks by just as the football coach is delivering his “one leg at a time” spiel. A silent panel, featuring a sad-faced Becky, with a tear rolling down her cheek. Cue the Very Special Prestige arc about the physically disabled, featuring a brand new character, Ashamitra, who lost a leg to a landmine in war-torn Iraq, and now runs the saxophone reed shop down the street from Montoni’s. They all gather for Thanksgiving, and everyone smirks.
Lots of folks are capable of beating the proverbial dead horse, but it takes real talent to beat that horse, bury it, dig it back up, and beat it again and again and again, until it’s just hide, bone fragments, and mush. TomBan genuinely seems to enjoy it, too. He’s way sicker than most people realize.
Soundtrack for today’s post: Sam Spade – Roundup
When I did a cursory search on the phrase, the first thing that came up was something regarding Ohio State in the 2000s. I knew it had to be earlier than that but I was already too annoyed to look further, since Google itself decided that I obviously care about Ohio State as much as Batiuk does. Ugh.
Thank you.
Sam Spence, I meant to say.
Awww, but now I’ve got this image stuck in my head of Bogart shilling for herbicides.
“Listen, dollface, I hope they won’t hang you by that pretty neck of yours, but when I got cheap thugs to kill, I use a gat. When I got crabgrass, I use Roundup.”
Huh! I guess it’s just me, but I sit on the edge of my bed and pull my pants up both legs at once, which means…
…I know how pants work?
And then, I open the garage door, turn the ignition key, THEN back the car out of the garage! SUCK ON THAT, EINSTEIN!
Did you know Einstein died in a tragic garage door collision?
(and No, he was not wearing pants)
Today’s strip leaves us wondering just why Ed feels doing something somebody has to do is some sort of punishment.
I’m just baffled why anyone would try and make Ed go to work. Sheesh, let him retire if he wants to. He’s certainly earned the right. He spends so much money on Bean’s End crap that he must have adequate financial means.
Not going to work would be good for the community too. Pam doesn’t see this either.
And yet I expect that this plot will end with Ed, for some reason, going back to driving the school bus, despite the fact that he is over 100 years old and does the job very poorly.
Of course. After all, it’s not as if Keesterman’s mail box is going to back into itself.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 2 of Ed Not Wanting To Work Week
(sigh) This is gonna go on for the whole week, isn’t it
Sadly, yes.
The “one leg at a time” bit is a good running gag… for Coach Stropp. He’s a feckless idiot who is so lacking in intelligence that he is unable to fathom how doing something, anything differently might help his team and so lacking initiative that he probably wouldn’t try to do anything different if it ever did occur to him. The running “one leg at a time” gag reminds us of this quickly and effectively. Act I FW is probably at its most effective when it shows us of the lunacy that occurs when youthful inexperience is being brought up by indifference and stupidity. I suppose then it is no wonder all the Act I kids grew up to be such shmucks.
Toss the “one leg” gag into Sunday’s Stropp-less ‘Shaft strip, of course, and you get predictably bad results.
This is another reason why Big Walnut eats Westview’s lunch: if something isn’t working, they stop doing it.
It would be a much better gag if the kids would ever recognize it for the empty platitude it is. As Hitorque said, kids are capable of figuring that their adult leaders don’t know much more than they do, and don’t have any *real* help to offer. But look at the kids in every single strip. They’re all paying rapt attention, as if they were hearing it for the first time. Only in the Buck and Bull strip, when they’re in their 70s, do they recognize the uselessness of it. (Despite being in an advanced state of mental decay.)
I realize that you have to be an idealist before you become a cynic. And this isn’t the hyper-cynical world of South Park. But there is zero recognition on any of these kids’ faces. They aren’t at different stages of discovery. They aren’t recognizing it as repeated or trite. The joke expects us to take it at face value. It’s suddenly the 1950s again, where children are highly compliant, and don’t have the wherewithal to recognize hypocrisy and uselessness in their adult leaders. Which kind of goes against the Act I tone, when the kids were actually pretty sharp.
The earlier strips CBH posted appear to me to show recognition in the kids’ faces, particularly the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strips that re-trace or re-use the same artwork for the group of players in the final panel. Derek, in particular, is shooting the reader an irritated “can you believe this” look, but it appears to me that pretty much every player in those final panels has narrowed their eyes in recognition of the stupidity of Stropp’s useless “one leg at a time” platitude.
TB being TB, of course, gradually pulled all of the teeth out of the gag over the years as he stopped having the students react to it.
I see frowning, despairing faces in the older ones. I see kids realising that Coach has nothing to offer but a deepity he’s too stupid to question.
Sounds like you want something to be the matter with kids these days, unlike Mr. and Mrs. MacAfee in *Bye Bye Birdie.*
*Bye Bye Birdie* opened on Broadway in 1960.
It closed after 607 performances.
The sequel *Bring Back Birdie* came to Broadway in 1981.
It closed after four performances and thirty-one previews.
*Bye Bye Birdie,* for what it’s worth, largely takes place in the fictional town of Sweet Apple, Ohio..
I don’t WANT the kids to be unhappy. But their world is so fucked up that their apparent acceptance of it all is distrubing. I wish somebody would get angry. I wish somebody – child or adult – would say “hey, have you noticed that wacky bus driver is actually a real asshole?”
I guess I don’t see the recognition in the kid’s faces that BTS and PJ do. They just look like blank faces to me. Maybe I’ve been looking at this shit so long that I’ve become blind and/or cynical to the nuances. And that’s not healthy.
this reminded me of this comic: https://clayyount.com/hamlets-danish-comic/2016/11/29/just-like-you/
and it took me *forever* to find it. Hmm what was that guy’s name. He did the sluggy freelance weekend comic for a while, I think his brother was involved with the MST3k reboot, maybe something about hamlet. Modern search engines no help at all of course
Wednesday is here and we’re already at the Pam forgot Uber Eats exists part.
And Big Walnut’s marching band puts their uniform jackets on one arm at a time. Oops, sorry Becky.
Stupid tablet. That was supposed to be an UPvote.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 3 of Ed Not Wanting To Work Week
(ed grabs the bag from the Grubhub delivery)
Ed: GODDAMMIT! I ORDERED A HOTDOG, NOT A SALAD!
Maybe this would lead Uber Tuber to consider a career change.
“ICE 2” is up on the Batiuk blog, and… he offers no commentary whatsoever, just the strips. For a story that makes no sense whatsoever right from the outset. ICE ordered the pizza to get Adeela there, except… Adeela wasn’t supposed to deliver the pizza at all. Cory was all set to deliver it, but Adeela offers to make the delivery instead since she just got her driver’s license. So… what exactly was the plan here? Keep ordering from Montoni’s until Adeela happens to make the delivery? Even though she wasn’t even doing deliveries at that time, on account of her having just gotten her license? Crankshaft’s football play was a better plan than ICE had here.
(Also, Adeela reaches the address, but there’s no lights on and no sign of anyone around. Pretty sure that’s the point where a pizza delivery would write off the order, because even if you call the customer to confirm and they say to come in anyway – as happens here – you’re not delivering pizza, you’re about to be murdered. Your last known photo is going to be on the news the next day. You’ll be lucky if they find your body. And they’ll probably steal those new snow tires you just put on the Montonimobile.)
He didn’t think the POW story through at all well either. The logic of that is no logic at all too
And this is why I say his talents are fading. Back in the day, he could bang out a pedestrian Jack Webb-lite shock horror thing about an acid trip gone wrong no problem. If he tried railing against Stimucrank today, people would think he’s on it.
“ICE 2” is up on the Batiuk blog, and… he offers no commentary whatsoever, just the strips.
Well, just look at the commentary he writes for “why I like this comic book cover.” He has nothing to say, and no ability to say it, despite having a background in art education. Plus, he’s so arrogant he thinks the brilliant social commentary of “Muslim architect who works at a pizza place in Bumfuck, Ohio gets arrested for being the wrong person but is freed when the owner calls in a favor to Bill Clinton during the Trump administration” is self-evident.
Batiuk’s biggest problem isn’t that he can’t write; it’s that he can’t think.
He also can’t understand why other people do what they do.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 4 of Ed Not Wanting To Work Week
How does Ed (who’s canonically 105 years old) know how to use Zoom?
And better yet, what’s he doing about poopoo…..
Hmmm, why isn’t the coach the same one Crankshaft gave the playcall to? Is it because he objected to being depicted in this shitshow without his permission or even knowledge?
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 5 of Ed Not Wanting To Get Out Of Bed Week
Pam: Dad, why are you even doing this?
Ed: Lena offered me $2.50 if I stayed the entire week in here, so I immediately accepted.
That sounds just about right.
I’d give him $3.
Another Flash Fridays, and Tom REALLY manages to out-Batiuk himself this time.
No, really. He’s mocking Cary Bates for randomly changing a character’s name, as if he forgot what their name was supposed to be.
Never change, Tom.
He never will
Today’s Past Batiukverse Storyline: Holly Budd’s First Week
Holly: Can I please leave the band so I can finally stop getting third degree burns everywhere on my body?
Dinkle: WHAT!?
Holly: I’m serious, Mr. Dinkle. I can’t do this anymore.
(Holly gets up off the chair and leaves)
I think that if Holly was a Pokémon, she would be a fire-type one (Mooch Myers also would be a fire type)
bonus: a few Act I strips
I guess this means that Crazy Harry is a werewolf
I’ve combed over the Act I strips on GC before it became Comics Kingdom 2.0, and I think this is Ginny Wolfe’s first appearance in the strip
This becomes harsher in hindsight when you remember the stage mother behind the manic.
Fred Fairgood seems to be channeling B.D.’s response to receiving Michael Doonesbury as a roommate, wherein he reflected that there were still a few bugs in the system.
Must close before I start thinking of the success of B.D. and the failure of Bull Bushka.
Did anyone ever say “don’t ever change, Linda” as they did to Boopsie?
The Werewolf Harry strip is completely ruined by Tom’s trash art style at the time. You can’t have a minimalist feature style as well as cover a face with a hundred lines to convey facial hair. I needed to look at that last panel for a solid minute before I could figure out what the hell it was trying to convey.
And here we are with him out from under the bed and it’ll never factor into his daily life ever again. It’s like a failed attempt at a Family Guy cutaway. Hell, we might as well have cut to Mister Conway Twitty.
And so ends, even by the admittedly low standards of “Crankshaft,” one of the most pointless weeks in the strip’s history. The running “gag” was a one-note repitition, Ed behaved totally out of character, and it simply concluded without any sort of resolution.
One assumes there will be no suspension or any penalty for Ed’s skipping out on the first week of school (Is there still a driver shortage?), and his underbed hermitage won’t be referenced again.
Isn’t it time for Skip Bittman to continue his interview of Batton Thomas, Creator of the Formerly Syndicated Comic Strip “Three O’Clock High”?
A classic Batiuk Cut: “When an edit suddenly moves the story from well before the climax to well after it, eliminating any action, tension, conflict, resolution, or anything else that might have been interesting to see.”
Based, I think, on Batiuk having little to no idea what other people find interesting.
At the very least, Crankshaft should have been facing away from the viewer in the first panel, so the sunglasses are revealed in the second. Gonna pin this one on Davis (‘s overdependence on clip art) here.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 6 (final day) of Ed Not Wanting To Get Out Of Bed Week
Out of the many week-long storylines in the Batiukverse, this was one of the most uninteresting ones
8/31: If only Batiuk’s issues hadn’t forced him to kill off all the coaches. It could be Bull being stupid.
Today’s Crankshaft
“YAWN”
It would have been actually securing entertaining if Garfield and Heathcliff took turns waling on him with a tire iron.