How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?

I am not even going to dignify the last week of Crankshaft with any kind of detailed response. Y’all have lambasted it well and truly in the comments here and elsewhere, and there is nothing I want to add.

Except to point out that the exact same Batton face was used twice today, just flipped horizontally. I would call it lazy, if Davis hadn’t gone above and beyond with his stock image searches to bring Batton’s sepia toned flashbacks to stilted nonsensical life.

Let us go back to an earlier time. When the art was fresh, but the writing was just as insufferable.

To re-orient ourselves into Chien’s Story,

In 1998, Chien was introduced as a wannabe avant garde, misanthropic snarker with a goth sense of fashion.

I posited that we should be asking four questions when going over Chien’s history.

1.) Is Chien truly unique in personality?

2.) Where does Chien come from?

3.) Is Chien morally/intellectually/philosophically justified in the author’s eyes?

4.) What can Chien’s portrayal tell us about how Batiuk views and writes the internal lives of women?

From 1998 to 2000 we saw Chien and her best friend Ally working for the school yearbook and newspaper. We saw them butt heads with Bull Bushka over including pictures of the football team in the yearbook, and in the next year they published a hit-piece in the school paper about the hypocrisy of the new dress code.

In my analysis I pointed out the many many times Chien was demeaning and dismissive toward ‘The Cool Kids’. I posited that while this was believable for her character, Batiuk does a ham handed job of framing it, never realizing that by making Chien an intellectual elitist that gets off on being an outsider, he turns her into just another kind of bully.

And now we reach September 11, 2000. And a disaster of an arc begins.

First things first. This strip. I will give THIS ONE strip credit.

This nearly wordless strip establishes that Chien dresses the way she does because she personally thinks it’s cool and likes it. She is literally doing it for an audience of one, herself. This helps to make her sympathetic.

NOW THE HORROR.

Your friends call you ‘dog’? Kay. And what is up with this second person narration? Is this some kind of Chick Tract.

(Kind of)

No, of course you’re not like them Chien. You’ve never mocked or belittled, pointed at and humiliated others because you thought you were better than them.

Oh wait…

But no. You’re not like them. They’re preps and dress preppy.

I will stop referencing ‘My Immortal’ by Tara Gillesbie when it stops being relevant.

Oooooookay. Don’t even really know where to begin to pick this one apart. Like, it’s 2000, right? Wouldn’t adults expect classrooms to be wired for telephones?

Batiuk is obviously trying to put his Boomer audience in the shoes of a Gen X student. But barring the technology upgrade how does Batiuk even show that school is different.

And then there’s the nonsensical Columbine namedrop over the top of blatant and egregious bullying? What does that even mean? What has changed?

The going popular narrative being bandied about at the time was that Columbine was the result of preps bullying outsiders, and there was much hand wringing and pushing of anti-bullying initiatives. Why are we seeing bullying?

Batiuk is, once again, incorporating a real life tragedy into in little universe in the most stupid way. Some of you may argue he does this to grandstand and get accolades. But I also think there’s a weird coping element to it. He takes a problem that troubles him, shoves it awkwardly into his playhouse, and solves it to his own satisfaction. Like a kid whose parents are fighting soothing themselves by making the dollies kiss.

But wait. It gets worse.

I have no words. I can only respond using a visual aid.

For fucks sake. It’s like Batiuk is writing a self-aggrandizing Tinder profile for Les.

So, all this boils down to, “You are Chien, you think about Les Moore.”

BARF.

Buckle in folks. This one’s a doozy.

52 thoughts on “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?”

  1. CBH, I can’t wait for your opinion on the Chien Gets Suspended storyline

    my covering of this storyline (which was in November of 2024)

  2. Now I understand why Mopey Pete is often referred to as The Thinking Person’s Mort Sahl!

  3. Given his upbringing, it’s axiomatic that a tub of manure like him can’t imagine a woman not thinking about a man. There’s an affirmative reason the chunk of stupid compares anything gravitating towards equality with a United Girls Against Jughead: moral outrage at the idea that his comfort isn’t the be all and end all of his mother’s existence. Just don’t bully the doofus by calling him a brainless troglodyte.

  6. So, what we have here is a cartoonist in his fifties writing about his avatar, in his thirties, who is the object of a crush that the most attractive young woman around — at least judging by the dumpy, frumpy way all the other kids are drawn — has on him? And that young woman is a cool (if emotionally screwed-up), slim, academically clever goth-girl who is supposed to be about fifteen?

    Skip endlessly fawning interviews of Batton now seem only mildly off-putting by comparison.

    1. We should force Batiuk to listen to Don’t Stand So Close To Me and explain than Sting wrote it as a horror song.

      1. Seriously?? I knew McEldowney was a deviated prevert back when I was still at the Curmudgeon site, but his own daughter?! WTF?

  7. Today’s Crankshit

    Day Six of The Interview from HFIL (what Hell is referred as in the Ocean dub of Dragon Ball Z)

    Crankshaft as of this week was shit

    I hope the Interview with the Bummer Batton doesn’t continue on monday

    1. Hm, Westview does seem to be the Home For Infinite Losers, though, so I’d say it fits.

      I’m guessing (hoping?) we’ll be on something else next week; I’m pretty sure he only does these one week at a time, to further draw out the agony.

      1. Agony is right: you just know this boring stretch of pointlessness is going to be made into a graphic pamphlet.

  8. “It lets you know you’re not like them.” Another of Batiuk’s favorite platitudes, whether you’re a goth high school kid or a black baseball player in the era of segregation. Really, it’s all the same.

    It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: the “Chien” nickname is Batiuk trying to be way too clever. There’s absolutely no way these chuckleheads would go to the effort of giving her a French nickname. “Dog Girl”, “Rover”, “B*tch”, “Fido”… anything like that I could believe. But “Chien”? Sorry, Tom, but no. The students you’re trying to present as idiotic cretins aren’t as clever as you think you are.

    (Also, if the coloring is to be considered official, then we can probably assume Chien wasn’t supposed to be Asian, if she has green eyes. Then again, if it was a syndicate colorist and not from Batiuk, it could just be the wrong color, which happened on daily strips a lot. So who even knows.)

    1. Exactly right, Green Luthor (I’m one who’s said it before, but I’m sure not the only one).

      1 – “Chien” is incomprehensible to people who don’t know French, which I assume is most people at Worstview. It’s also hard to pronounce for an English speaker.

      2 – It should be the feminine, “Chienne.” “Chien” is masculine.

      3 – “Chienne” is a fairly harsh insult in French, along the lines of its English analogue, “bitch.”

      And it’s not in the top 25 words an American high school student would use to convey the idea of a “dog.”

      …But what really, *really* grinds my gears is how TB mangles the words of an actual writer, thus inadvertently demonstrating the importance of subtle wording differences.

      Mark Twain actually wrote:

      “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

      Tom pluralizes “bug” and wrecks the whole thing.

      Mark Twain, 1; Tom Batiuk, 0.

      2. This is a chump who can’t write a story about a woman repulsed by male advances without going full incel. He’s going to crash and burn.

        It’s constructive to compare him to one writer on MASH holding a megaphone to our ears and yelling that of all the hardships the nurses have to face, the worst is a handsy adult child with rage issues in a maroon bathrobe. The IRS and Pentagon refer to him as Alfonso J D’Abruzzo. SAG calls him something else.

      3. Though you gotta love Batiuk’s propensity for trying to make his own characters seem like intellectuals by… quoting someone else, as if they were imparting their own wisdom. Les and Twain here, Lillian reading Bradbury in The Burnings, Mopey reciting Flash’s quoting of Stan Lee… it’s like he doesn’t realize that being able to quote someone else’s words doesn’t convey any actual intelligence.

        (I feel like an appropriate quote for all this would be from A Fish Called Wanda: “Apes don’t read philosophy.” “Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it.”)

      4. It is so pitch-perfect Batiuk to screw up a classic, ideally-constructed quote about the importance of using the exact right word — by “improving” it with just a few tweaks to a couple of words.

        If only Twain had been able to use Batiuk’s editing services while he was alive! Maybe he’d have become a celebrated author of some deathless literature, instead of a … [shudders] … non-comics writer who was never even nominated for a Pulitzer!

    2. Regarding Chien being Asian: I think we can be pretty sure that if she were Asian and faced bullying, we would have gotten some Very Special Pulitzer-Bait Arcs about anti-Asian sentiment in which Tom could prove once again that he’s One of the Good Ones, not like you foaming-at-the-mouth racists out there. Listen and learn!

      Besides, in TB’s world, there isn’t room for more than one distinguishing trait for most characters. Chien’s is “Goth.”

      “Goth” + “Asian” is a trait too far for a writer who can’t even remember his own character’s last names or ages.

      1. Another trip down the rabbit hole informs me that Elegant Gothic Lolita, which was a style at the time, had indeed started around this time in Japan: i am finding start dates of 1999 – 2001.

        I literally can’t imagine TB either visiting Tokyo or being online or stopping by Kinokuniya during his legendary trips to NYC, so chances of it being actually influential on him approximate zero.

        (Only seeing the Chien material years later did indeed make me think she was/is Asian. Still, anyone having seen the K-Pop stars recently will note that green eyes are quite achievable, and even popular, via colored contacts.)

      2. Especially when he’s too stupid, out of touch and pretentious to assign her a normal mocking nickname like Lassie.

  9. Here’s something a little off topic: the Bombers just lost this year’s Banjo Bowl. That’s what happens when you let Ed Crankshaft into your soul.

      1. He only knows that the Bombers exist. The other eight teams are a mystery to him so, yeah, he’s not going to know.

  11. Today’s Crankshaft

    (Crankshaft grabs a parent by the throat and slams them onto the ground, and then whispers in their ear)

    Crankshaft: I am so lonely. All of the other bus drivers except for Mary, Rocky and Andy are scared of me. They don’t talk to me, they don’t want to be my friend. They think i’m insane. They send me from school district to school district committing atrocities in their name, and as I get better at it they fear me more and more. I am a victim of my own success. Crankshaft. They never call me by my first name, only my surname. I am capable of so much more and no one sees it. Some days I feel so alone I could cry, but I don’t. I never do. Because what would be the point. Not a single person in the entire universe would care. Take it to your grave.

    1. At first i thought today’s comic was just overselling the punch line (ice cream vendor = GIANT ICE CREAM CONE) but then i realized overselling would require commitment to selling, and this smacks of effort.

      So i turned to Grandpa Google who assured me that indeed there are Giant Cone ice cream stands in Ohio–probably the best intro was this Facebook page.

      It is this sort of individualized local color that Batiuk used to do, and frankly i would recommend he lean into it.

      1. Since he doesn’t travel when he travels, he’s got no idea what Tastee-Freez stands would look like in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Upstate New York or Michigan.

  13. Also, Pmmmmmm seems not to be especially aware of what a humiliation bowling is when working around a vindictive and incompetent idiot woman.

  14. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day 7 of Crankfuck Not Wanting To Get Out Of Bed Storyline

    What’s next? Ed playing Call of Duty, Fortnite, or Team Fortress 2 with Ralph and George?

  15. But I also think there’s a weird coping element to it. He takes a problem that troubles him, shoves it awkwardly into his playhouse, and solves it to his own satisfaction.

    This is a tremendously keen insight and I am in complete agreement that TB does this pretty much every time he tries to tackle “substantial ideas”.

    This is also something I have long done, certainly since I was a child, and even do to this day. I do find that using one’s imagination to work through issues that trouble you, issues that you are unable to solve as an individual, is a soothing practice. Sometimes I imagine myself in these situations, sometimes I have my imagination tell myself a story involving fictional people involved in the issue… so I kind of get how these things might spring forth from TB’s mind. Personally, I do find that this practice helps me to better respond when the troublesome issue does come up directly in my life, whether they are actually affecting me directly or simply being brought up in conversation. Also, I don’t know how to turn it off…

    I don’t think the likely fact that TB does this is a problem in itself. In fact, I think it can be (and likely is, for some writers) an avenue for producing interesting topical fiction.

    However, I try to approach this practice with humility. My internal monologue’s solutions to the world’s problems might or might not stand up to scrutiny, but I try to keep in mind that they usually have never (and likely will never) actually have to face reality. They should serve to make me curious about the problems I ponder, interested in learning more about them and/or in challenging my beliefs about them to see if they should be maintained.

    This, I think, is where TB goes wrong when bringing his internal coping to the page. He stops when his imagination solves the problem and dives no deeper into the subject… committing to his imagination’s solution with obtuse and ill-informed determination. And of course, we then so regularly see how half-baked and wrong-headed this comes out in FW’s issue du jour arcs.

    1. The problem is also that he’s fairly defensive and assumes that he’s being attacked when that’s not the case.

      1. Indeed he is. He clearly has a high opinion of his own ideas and it is certainly easier to label his critics as unreasonable and aggressive instead of considering why they might hold the opinions that they do… or even just ignoring them and plowing ahead.

        Hey, I’ve been guilty of that from time-to-time too, but every time? It’s not a becoming pattern with TB, is it? And the stories suffer greatly for it.

        1. I think this Ed Under The Bed crap is his defending the being out of touch that drives his failings. After all, he thinks deliberately misunderstanding a warning makes him smarter.

    2. TB’s approach to solving difficult real world problems in his fiction world reminds me of the lazier written Star Trek episodes where’d you’d have characters at a philosophical impasse, but rather than forcing a character to concede a deeply held view or take a difficult position to its final conclusion some dumb deus ex machina would present an unlikely ‘third option’ to avoid it.

    3. This was a keen insight, and you have added to it. Batiuk seems to have no ability to look at a problem from a distance. The social challenges of high school are a perfect example. With the Chien examples, you can see he’s *trying*. But as Harriet points out, all he knows how to do insert his aging Boomer dad self into the shoes of a female Millennial. He’s hamstrung by his inability to relate to his characters.

      Batiuk never mentally left high school, but somehow he didn’t remain in high school either. “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” is exactly how he comes off when he tries stuff like this. Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes were great because Schulz and Watterson could write believable child characters. Even lesser strips like Zits and pre-Anthony For Better Or For Worse did this reasonably well. The authors knew how children think, and could write their characters from that perspective. Batiuk can’t, despite his man-child tendencies.

      Even though “looking back at high school and laughing” is one of the first things you discover as an adult. Especially if you had to start supporting yourself at 18, or just had to live on your own. You quickly realize how silly high school priorities were. But you also remember why you valued them as you did. The high school social environment can be all-consuming, and you really have to make a place for yourself within it. And a lot of kids struggle with that. To this day, I’m not sure how I managed.

      Chien’s dialog might as well be from Freaky Friday, where the mom is trying to navigate the daughter’s high school life. “Oh, they didn’t have mass shootings or learning resource centers or wired classrooms when I was a kid!”

      1. This is what Time Mop means by humanity’s nation: everyone agreeing to be a dumb white guy from the sticks.

  16. 9/9: It’s still not about the sudden realization that everyone hates him and the world is a terrifying place. It’s about a mommy being angry for no reason.

  18. Today’s Crankshaft

    Day 8 of Crankfuck Not Wanting To Get Out Of Bed Storyline

    Don’t know why Pam and Jeff are surprised that Ed goes on Bean’s End with the internet

  19. 9/10: Aside from the obvious fire hazard, how exactly is this a hardship? Pam has no friends, no visible career, no known outside interests and nothing to do that isn’t to ask Ed what obvious thing he’s doing.

    1. It’s cold on the bedroom floor of an Ohio family’s house in early September? Really? Pmm is aware the place has central heat, and that there are sheets and blankets over Ed that he could just reach up and pull down to where he is, isn’t she? And Ed is aware that he could wind up starting yet another fire in the house, isn’t he?

      1. Point out these glaring defects and the superannuated third grader running a dumb idea into the ground is going to whimper that he’s being bullied.

    1. Good call! On the plus side, he’s actively trying to come up with new annual (seasonal?) running gags. On the down side, this.

      1. I hold between thumb and forefinger a nose that’s anticipating worse ordure than this to come.

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