It seems ol’ Batiuk has finally taken to heart all the complaints about not enough Crankshaft in Crankshaft. And he has decided to rectify this by shoving ol’ Crank into the St. Spires Choir, even though the ol’ coot has never before shown any musical inclination in his life beyond badly butchering popular lyrics to the chagrin of his family.
I always imagined Cranky would have a singing voice somewhat like My Old Man, who sings ‘Happy Birthday’ like a funeral dirge and ‘Joy To The World’ like Clint Eastwood scaring punks off his lawn.
What us Classic Crankshaft fans really wanted was a return to the good old days of property damage, bullying children, and bowling. We didn’t want Crankshaft shoved awkwardly in with Dinkle and his choir, like some recipe out a Chopped kitchen nightmare.
It’s so easy to hate on Batiuk’s writing these days. And that is just fine.
It’s fun and all the cool kids are doing it.
But allow me to be super uncool and contrarian just for a moment, and state an alternate opinion on a few comments of the last month.
First of all, I actually quite liked the ‘Cranky hides under his bed.’ arc.
Banana Jr. may have spent his last post lambasting it with much skill and pizzaz but I am going to defend it and say, with much respect and affection, that I believe my dear co-host is looking at the strip with too much of a real-world lens.
After all this is a comic strip where not only did Crankshaft launch a grill into space, canonically that grill’s launch diverted an asteroid that will eventually result in the extinction of all life on earth.
Crankshaft hiding under his bed for a week is, in my opinion, a classic sitcom style exaggeration. Everyone wishes they could bedrot just a little longer than they should. Well, what if decides he’s just gonna rot under his bed for two whole weeks?
I know one of the arguments against the arc was that since Batiuk has tackled serious subjects with a serious face, that switching gears to trauma for laughs doesn’t work. But if it’s a sin of Crankshaft universe then it is also a sin of nearly every single sitcom, comic strip, and children’s cartoon. Where the breakdown you should laugh at and the breakdown you should take seriously are only differentiated by if there’s a laugh track or maudlin pianos.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this, perhaps, but that’s the joy of snarking here.
The other bit of contrarian grandstanding I have to do is in response to Green Luthor and The Drake of Life’s comments on the nickname ‘Chien’.
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.
-Green Luthor
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.”
-The Drake of Life
I think that ‘Chien‘ is exactly the kind of stupid nickname an artsy 14-year-old who isn’t half as clever or knowledgeable as she thinks she is would give herself. And we know she gave herself that name because she corrected Les Moore on it back in ’98. The first day of her freshman year.
She doesn’t understand the French language, culture, or history. She probably just looked up the word in a dictionary. French is fancy, posh, and mysterious. ‘Heather’ is a boring prep name already on its way out of fashion after the movie “The Heathers” released in 1989.
Once you understand Chien as just another poseur of a different kind, as another counter-culture Roland spouting nonsense she doesn’t really understand because she’s still finding herself, the name ‘Chien’ makes all the sense in the world.
Did Batiuk frame it this way? No. But the list of Batiuk’s writing fails rivals the list of French Military defeats.
For Example. Week 2 of the Chien Gets Suspended, storyline.
Guys.
I sprained my ankle this week.
Really. We were moving the spring calving cows and their calves home from pasture, and as I was closing the gate behind the last load, I stepped in a hole, rolled my ankle good, and was left cussing and shouting lying in the red-tan dust of a minimum maintenance road. This was half as painful as attempting to break down this single week of Funky Winkerbean.
I sat in the ER for four hours with an ice pack on one ankle, waiting on the results from the doctor’s thirty second glance and five minutes of x-rays. I listened to a poor little old lady, maybe delirious, maybe addled, saying the word ‘Hello?’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Hello?’ every fifteen seconds for the entire time I was there. And it was only half as tedious and infuriating as attempting to break down this single week of Funky Winkerbean.
But here it goes.
Bullying as a cause for Columbine has mostly been disproven, but in 2000 was all in vogue. It’s part of what gave the shooting the damnable mystique feeding 25 years of mentally ill outcasts obsessively replicating the narrative. Batiuk is feeding into that same mystique here and it is pissing me off.
Because of the prevailing narrative, there was a huge anti-bullying crackdown in a lot of schools at the time. (Ask me how I know.) So Chien’s last line is a bunch of bullshit.
But we do see a bunch of bullying with the name calling, and tot-throwing, happening at Westview, so maybe this school hasn’t caught up. If Chien wants to vent about the bullying problem in her essay, that is her right.
But did she have ANY say in this being published? She doesn’t vocalize it, but she doesn’t look too happy. Once again Les Moore is the real villain, smugly shoving Chien into a spotlight she neither wants nor can handle.
Because, let us NEVER forget, Chien is also a bully. She tried to exclude the football team from her yearbook, and regularly teases struggling students for their lack of intelligence. She negs everyone around her. Even Les in her own mind is Timid and Dorky, and she mocks Darin and Mopey Pete for their nerdy ways.
Properly framed, this would be fine and believable.
Is this properly framed?
Son of Stuck Funky 
He’d have done better to stick to his strengths if he wanted to show us Poser Dipshit Barbie. Extended narratives don’t work but gag a day things that highlight how full of shit she is would tell her story more effectively.
The comics medium has the advantage of not having actors who complain about shifting gears. Ed can go from thinking the band director is nuts to not having met him without it ‘mattering’.
ComicBookHarriet,
I sit before my computer at 5am 🕔, (Never ask an old man why he is awake at 5 am! Even if Be Ware of Eve Hill says I am adorable.) I am musing over my daughter’s trip to Paris. The last time, she was accidentally in the middle of a French protest and riot. Both rioters and police were very kind to her. So here I sit, and what do I read: ComicBookHarriet is injured, mortally??? with a sprained ankle! Do the Fates live just to mock us!!! I say thee, Nay!
I assign CsRoberto2854 and pj292718nbca to CBH as caregivers extraordinaire fulfilling all CBH wishes and subsequent farm duties. (I hear CBH’s Mom is a good cook!)
I do have to disagree with CBH. Chien shouldn’t be surprised her article was published. She wrote it in Les’s ScapeGoatzette office. She wrote in on a Newspaper computer. She turned it in to the editor. What was her expectation? (It is so rewarding to write “ScapeGoatzette”. Yet not so rewarding to type it twice! bwoeh caught me. I copied it the second time.)
I can’t say Chien is bullied. She catches and throws the digs pretty well. If TB was better at personalities, he had a storyline where Chien and Matt would start dating. It’s called writing.
It is now 6:23am. I believe it is time for me to get in an early nap, as CBH hobbles out to milk her some cattle. Moo!!!
I don’t think I’m looking at the strip too realistically; I’m looking at it as realistically as the author wants it to be looked at. Tom Batiuk is constantly posturing for attention and awards for writing about “difficult issues,” when it’s obvious how vacuous it all is. Like that idiotic ICE/Adeela arc, which Batiuk is currently showing off on his blog as if were the Greatest Hits of Deathtongue. I wouldn’t take Batiuk so seriously if Batiuk didn’t.
But if it’s a sin of Crankshaft universe then (switching gears to trauma for laughs) is also a sin of nearly every single sitcom, comic strip, and children’s cartoon.
No, it isn’t. Because sitcoms, and other comic strips (1) can convey tone; (2) respect their own characters and their histories; (3) don’t veer into Dude, Not Funny like a drunk driver crashing into a telephone pole, and (4) can write something other than cut-and-pasted joke templates that don’t make any sense in context.
And you gave a perfect example in your parody strip. In the real strip, Ed was convinced to join Dinkle’s choir because they provide free donuts. Ed has never been motivated by donuts. Also, his singing is canonically awful, he and Lillian despise each other, his job (which he was recently forced to continue) doesn’t allow for post-midnight choir practices, and any sane human being would avoid Dinkle like the plague. Your version, that joining a group of women would appeal to Ed, makes a lot more sense. Especially when Batiuk made that the joke two days later!
It’s as if Batiuk noticed the Heroism Incentive trope and wanted to use it, but couldn’t come up with a motivation that fit Ed’s character. That’s the kind of writing obstacle our hero struggles to get over. I’m sure you’re already thinking of plenty: Beans End catalogs, a new bowling ball, obscure gardening tools, lighter fluid, a display case for his damned CFL game ball, almost anything Ed’s ever shown interest in would have worked better than donuts.
I agree Batiuk is at his absolute worst when he’s doing his dumb little morality plays. Maybe that’s why I’m more forgiving of his ridiculous plotlines for jokes. I’m saying, “Naw, more of this please.” That’s the tone I want. The cruel humor of classic Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean.
I found it really funny that, as if it had seen your criticism, the strip gave Crankshaft a therapist a few days after your post. Yeah, that was played for laughs too, but at least Pam put in the effort.
I love your passion for the material, BJ2K. Even when I disagree I am never bored or baffled when reading your takes on the subject. Which is more than I can say for Batty.
The problem is that his dumb morality plays mix with his absurdist humor, to the point where they defeat each other. Because Batiuk never makes it clear what anything is supposed to be. I’m not sure he even knows where one ends and the other begins anymore. He just throws everything at the page and hopes he wins a Pulitzer.
Ed hiding under his own bed out of nowhere could be a joke, or it could be the beginning of his end-of-life arc. And there’s no way to tell which it is.
When Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes got into serious business, you could tell that. And characters reacted to it like it was serious business. Lucy brought Linus in from the pumpkin patch. Calvin’s parents treated the raccoon’s death with seriousness, because they knew it was emotionally important to their child. Because Schulz and Watterson could convey tone. Schulz and Watterson could write both gags and drama well. Batiuk can’t do any of these things.
I enjoy your passion for the material too, even when we have different takes on something.
I’ll give you another example of absurdism that didn’t work because it conflicted with “quarter inch from realilty”: the time machine class reunion arc where the Act II characters went back in time and met their Act I selves. Lisa’s death hung over the proceedings like a stale fart. Batiuk created a situation where Lisa’s life could have been saved, and completely ignored it.
The other characters didn’t tell Lisa her fate. They didn’t not tell Lisa her fate. They didn’t lie about it, they didn’t sugarcoat it. They didn’t have some “you must not alter the past” discussion, like every other time travel story from City On The Edge Of Forever to Back To The Future to Hot Tub Time Machine. They just ignored her, which seemed cruel, considering how often high school Lisa got this treatment.
And of course, Batiuk’s agent of inaction was Les Moore, the living embodiment of “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
Was Crankshaft actually forced to continue his job? We haven’t seen him driving a bus (or related tasks) in any daily strips for a few weeks. (I’m not counting the Sunday strip where he took the kids to an ice cream stand as that seemed to be taking place either before or after he did his stint of hiding under the bed.)
Well, Pam spent the whole time with her arms folded saying things like “you have to go back to work, Dad!” Then, in the last strip of the first week, when Ed’s wearing sunglasses, he mentions that he did. So it’s clearly implied that he was pressured into resuming work, even he is 35 years past retirement age. Of course, this strip never actually says this, because the strip never actually says anything.
I’d look up the example, but right after I bought a Gocomics subscription, it started giving me 502 errors. Guess I should have seen that coming.
For the last month of the strip, I recommend checking Arcamax.com as an alternative to GoComics.
In the last strip (August 30) of the first week that Ed hid under the bed, he’s in the kitchen with Pam and Jeff.
Jeff: “So you’re out from under the bed?”
Ed (wearing sunglasses): “Yep.”
Jeff: “And the sunglasses?”
Ed: “Doc said I have to wear them until my eyes are fully adjusted to the light again.”
And then in the September 8 strip, Ed is hiding under the bed again. So Ed may have gone to a doctor after he started hiding under the bed, and he has been shown having a conversation in the yard with Lillian and going to St. Spires for the choir practice.
So he might be working again, but then again, the possibility has been left open that he hasn’t yet gone back to work.
August 26 had Pam saying “Dad, you’ve got to come out from under the bed!” After which Ed complains about the Tucker Twins, and kids throwing up on his bus. She didn’t actually say “you have to go back to work, Dad”, so I misquoted her above.
But if the choices are “Ed was bullied into going back to work” and “Ed quietly gave up bus driving when that would be a major upheaval to the entire strip”, I’ll make a large bet on the former.
@Banana: I agree that we will likely see Ed back to being a bus driver due to what TV Tropes would call “Status Quo is God.”
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StatusQuoIsGod
The Funkyverse runs on Status Quo Is God, but it also runs on Negative Continuity. The status quo must be preserved at all times, so the status quo can be ignored again.
It’s called inept writing.
“Like that idiotic ICE/Adeela arc, which Batiuk is currently showing off on his blog as if were the Greatest Hits of Deathtongue.”
I noticed that little tribute to himself on that moronic blog of his. If we excise the padding and bloat from that arc, we’re left with what, two panels? But anyway, what actually, objectively, happens in that story? Adeela is mistakenly scooped up by La Migra. She calls Wally, who talks to Funky, who uses his “political connections” to get Adeela sprung. And that’s it. The lesson, if you could call it that, is that you can use powerful connections to cut right through whatever red tape you might find yourself in. No one learned anything, no one used the incident to fight for or affect any change, no one even seemed all that angry about it. The whole thing boiled down to “Funky served pizza to Bill Clinton one time”. That was the plot AND the gag, even though it was neither of those things.
And, apparently, he’s PROUD of this story, which, when you think about it, isn’t a story at all. And that is (at least partially) the crux of why I loathed FW so much. They’re ALL like that. You cut his stories open, and there’s no “there” there. It’s all fluff, wrapped in padding. It’s not even like cotton candy, where you can squish it all together and get one real bite. You can squish and squish a BatYam story, but it’ll instantly snap back to its original, completely empty state.
I recently had a similar thought; that Tom Batiuk doesn’t really know how to write anything (controversial opinion, I know) but that he copies things he sees in other stories. Or even his own. You can just see the thought process:
“I want to write an award-winning story about immigration enforcement. How can I do that in the Funkyverse? First, I need a victim. Rana? No, she’s an attractive, highly westernized, young woman. And her ties to the major characters would be hard to write about. Adeela? Perfect! She’s Muslim, foreign, and has no such ties! And she’s here for educational reasons, which makes this an insightful commentary on how immigration enforcement attacks the wrong people! I smell a Pulitzer!”
“Now, how will she get caught? She works at a pizza store, right? We can have her arrested while making a delivery? Oh, wait, she can’t drive. I guess I need to spend two weeks getting her a drivers license first. Now she can do deliveries!”
“But there needs to be some kind of ironic twist! We’ll have the police arrest her during her first delivery! Even though it wasn’t supposed to be her delivery! She’ll walk right into the trap!” (Batiuk fails to notice that this trap makes no sense, since it’s designed to catch a delivery driver, which Adeela wasn’t yet. Or, if the authorities are monitoring Adeela so closely that they knew about her driving lessons, they could have designed a much simpler trap. Or just walked in and arrested her, and not bothered with the theatrics.)
“Now who’s going to help Adeela? Not her friends, family, lawyer, or any kind of advocacy group, that’s for sure. My characters must solve this problem! But how? They can have a meeting at Montoni’s to work through it. She needs a lawyer, though. Amicus Brief, that’s his name! He can show up and say lawyer things, like ‘I subpoena the witness!'”
“But this doesn’t work, because my characters must always lose to the cold, indifferent, bureaucratic world. So what happens? I know! We’ll have Funky call in a favor to Bill Clinton! He ate pizza there once! That’ll solve the problem! That’ll make the point that…. well, who cares what point it makes! This is a prestige arc and I can’t wait to blog about it!”
But it gets worse, he has Adeela give up her culture and become Americanized. Remember that Sunday strip where she plays a song on the jukebox at Montoni’s?
And goes to Dinkle’s Christmas Messiah despite being Muslim.
Stop Gabby says—The Messiah is an artistic performance, not a religious ceremony. And many (most?) religious organizations allow their members to witness ceremonies of other religions (weddings, funerals, etc)
Within Islam, going to a Christian musical ceremony could be considered shirk (a specific type of haram). But as with most religions, these things are largely subject to the whims of the local authority. What sect Adeela belongs to may also be a factor, though I doubt Batiuk ever bothered determining that.
I remember his Serious Business Just Say No thing from ages ago. He lifted a PSA Hanna-Barbera made where a guy took one hit off a joint and aged fifty years on the spot clean. It would have been more effective if their cartoon stoner ended up becoming one sad dog food eating hippie.
There was a Tiny Toons episode that roasted the hell out of that. Plucky Duck, Buster Bunny, and Hamton share one beer and they all die horribly at the end. I’m sure it was some mandated “educational” content, but it felt like they were mocking the concept.
They gave with the over the top moralizing and took with “we’d have to be so stupid, we’d actually drink beer to take this mess seriously.”
OMG, Lillian, Ed and Dinkle in the same panel. Worst panel ever.
Not quite. After all, Les Moore isn’t there.
True. I withdraw my prior comment.
Today’s Crankshaft
(Crank and Dinkle walk towards each other and angrily glare at each other until Dinkle starts bragging on how “famous” he is, which leads to Crank punching Dinkle square in the jaw)
Amazingly, it never occurs to Tom Batiuk that a battle of wills between his two strongest characters would be entertaining. No, he just frog-marches Crankshaft into the damned band room — er, choir loft — for dubious reasons that conflict with the strip’s own history. Coming up next: that wacky, earth-destroying bus driver sits compliantly while Dinkle Dinkles all over the place, and they eyerollsmirk at each other!
Yes! The choir is rehearsing. They pause, a sound is coming from the sanctuary. It’s Ed singing a song beautifully, but totally botching the lyrics. Dinkle is impressed. He yells out: Good news sir! You are my new soloist! Ed sprouts a muddled aphorism.
Would actually be funny! The arc could be “Ed has the voice of an angel, but screws up lyrics just as much as he does words.” Which would work a lot better in an audio-visual format, but is passable enough for the comics page.
This is because continuity can go hang if it gets in the way. I remember the crossover that had them taking an instant hatred to one another.
Old Navy was tremendously popular in the 90s (and performs competently even today, where it is far and away the top performing chain in Gap’s portfolio), the chain was a hit immediately when Gap launched it in 1994. And you nailed the reason, the clothes were inexpensive and generally regarded as a cut above Target/JCPenney/Mervyn’s/other mid-market department stores (the amusingly-named Wiener’s was a popular local chain at the time where I lived) in terms of quality and style. That made it a great place to buy kids clothes, certainly my parents thought so.
However, Old Navy was absolutely not regarded as a status symbol in the way Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, Nike, Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, or even The Limited were. Chien’s inclusion of it in her story is baffling, because while Old Navy was not held in contempt by all but the most snobbish of people, no one bought clothes at Old Navy to tell anyone they bought clothes at Old Navy (other than, maybe, the popular super-cheap Old Navy 4th of July t-shirts). If Chien was buying her black wardrobe from chains like Hot Topic or Gadzooks, she’d be wearing clothes trendier (with a certain crowd at least) and more expensive than anything from Old Navy.
It’s realistic that a regular dumb guy from the sticks can smile stupidly as he gets it wrong. Look at all the times we’ve wanted to kick Les’s ass until his head falls off because he and Batiuk mistakenly believed he knew what he was smirking about.
“Gadzooks”
Holy cow, I’m going full Obi-Wan here.
“That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.”
I mostly remember them from the old ads with Carrie Donovan (and, in this case, Morgan Fairchild, Isabel Sanford, and Sherman Hemsley (for some reason)).
9/19: Dinkle should remember the idiot bus driver who kept making him late. Crankshaft should remember the high-strung lunatic forcing him to travel in a monsoon. Batiuk should remember having conversations about a crazy fantasy fist fight between Batman and Captain America.
Dinkle should remember that his job is to lead a musical group in live performances. Being pressured to accept an obnoxious, incompetent new member isn’t something he should be smirking about.
Remembering what his actual job is has never been his strong suit.
It’s just like Funky and Cranky meeting over the Montoni’s buyout story. The characters did have tangential history together, but it’s just getting ignored, this time because it’s not important as opposed thinking it’s worth making a big deal to snark about their silly names.
Which could be waved away by Ed being really bad at understanding how people age.
Today’s Crankshaft
Dinkle: LILLIAN, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT 105 YEAR OLD SHITHEAD DOING HERE?!
Lillian: He’s here to join the choir.
Dinkle: NO FUCKING WAY!
Dinkle: LILLIAN, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT 105 YEAR OLD SHITHEAD DOING HERE?!
Lillian: Harry, you’re going to have to be a lot more specific. “105-year-old shithead” could be you, your wife, me, most of the members of this choir, Ed, any of Ed’s friends, Eugene, Mort Winkerbean, Melinda Budd, Tony Montoni, Flash Freeman, Phil Holt, Ruby Lith… should I go on, or would you like to try again?
Excuse me, but, “the late Phil Holt”. And I think they stop counting once you’ve died.
9/20: The cursing comes from realizing that there’s a week more of this.
Today’s Crankshaft
Dinkle: GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, YOU CAP-WEARING DICKHEAD PIECE OF SHIT!
Ed: GO FUCK YOURSELF, YOU EGOTISTICAL BASTARD!
(Both Dinkle and Crankshaft engage in a fistfight)
Which is what would happen if consistency of character mattered.
Oh look, Tom was sloppy/boomer enough that he just posted the text of last week’s Flash Friday blog instead of the text for this week’s issue. Mildly amusing he’d slip that much on his favorite superhero, especially since he’s particularly passionate for this series in how he aims to analyze it, but suppose it could happen to anyone prewriting their entries.
Not to mention anyone too stupid to understand that DC remembered how much money Marvel made the first time they killed Phoenix.
Maybe the blog is also written a year ahead of time? It is funny he updated the cover image but not the text
It’s a shame no one is every going to correct him so we’ll never know what his thoughts on that issue really are
I’m a little curious to see how he maintains the column. The Flash comic he’s been covering ended at issue 350 (so another seven weeks) to make way for Barry Allen dying in Crisis on Infinite Earths, then a new comic starts with Wally West under the cowl (with some story about him winning the lottery, according to summaries on DC’s Wiki). Wonder if he’ll cover both of those or some other book (maybe something where Barry isn’t dead anymore?)
The blog series will probably just stop without any discussion of why it ended. Tom Batiuk detests multiverses like “Infinite Earths”, and will refuse to draw any attention to incorrectly-made comic books. Not even by mentioning that they exist.
I recall the post-Crisis Wally Flash as being more relatable, grounded and well-written. So my guess is he hates it with the burning passion of a thousand suns.
9/21: This is a quarter of a mile from reality, isn’t it?
Today’s Crankshaft
Dinkle: BOWLING ALLEYS ARE FOR BAND PRACTICE!
Max Axelrod, Ed Crankshaft, Gloomy Blond Waitress, Nicole, Lena, Rocky Rhodes, Andy Clark and Mary Marizpan: NO THEY FUCKIN’ ARENT!
(Dinkle proceeds to get beat up)
Man this Sunday strip is one that makes me miss Ayers-quality art. As trite as it is dragging Crankshaft into a choir (do we know if Tom’s doing that now? I don’t recall if that’s mentioned in his blog entries), the idea of the group trying to practice in the middle of a bowling alley’s seating area is earnestly funny and I’d love to have seen a proper illustration of how they’re postured behind the wall in front of the lane seats with details of other patrons and the surrounding facilities to highlight how out of place the choir is.
The gag is completely wasted by Davis’s low-tier tracing/pasting methods that not only skimps on the rest of Crank’s team but draws a liminal-tier version of Marco Lanes with an out of place wall and a black background that confused me into thinking the choir was in their usual church balcony that somehow had merged with a bowling alley. That or a big black screen like the world’s biggest Zoom call.
I thought it was the world’s biggest Zoom call. Because of the lazy black background, it wasn’t clear to me to that the choir was actually at the bowling alley. It really needed the background details to drive home the silliness of the location. Eleven months lead time, and a staff artist with a heavy reliance on clip art, and Crankshaft is still too lazy to sell its own joke?
I interpreted Sunday’s strip as a failed attempt at Act I-style surrealism. And, as an example of Tom Batiuk’s Act III approach to conflict between his “preferred” characters. Which is: give both Dinkle and Crankshaft what they want, even when this makes no sense! Dinkle would never make this kind of concession, even though we’re supposed to believe the random plot point of the week that Ed is a talented singer.
It’s like Batiuk just watched The Big Lebowski and tried to copy it without understanding what worked about it.
9/22: Starting to see why he’s under the bed.
Today’s Crankshaft
Not sure if it’s gonna be a Random Joke Week or another week of Crankfuckery Hiding Under His Bed this week
So far, it’s random idiocy week.
Funky Crankershaft: It appears Ed also drank deeply from the fountain of ugly.
Hm, DID Chien give herself that name? I honestly hadn’t considered that possibility. I mean, she does give that as her preferred name to Les, but is that because it’s the name she wants, or the name she’s accepted being called by? (She also says “your friends call you ‘Chien’ because of the collar you wear”, which makes it sound like a nickname other people gave her; would she name herself after her collar?)
Ah, who am I kidding, it’s not like Batiuk put half this much thought into the issue. Both explanations for the name could have been true at different times. And at this point, I’m fairly sure if anyone asked him about it, he’d probably say “Who’s Chien?”
Anyhoo… about the “dress code” “joke”… Batiuk lists SEVEN brands for the “accepted clothing”. That… doesn’t sound particularly “elitist”. (Especially when you’re including Old Navy and The Gap, stores I never particularly considered “high end”.) This really seems like a case where the “rule of threes” should have come up. Name THREE high-end brands, and you’ve made your point. List half the stores in the mall, and it feels like you don’t have a point at all. (But then, Chien probably got all her stuff from Hot Topic anyway, like a true poser.) (Also, “the swoosh”? You just named six other brands, and you can’t say “Nike”? Did the other companies pay for product placement, but Nike refused?)
If you’re going to do a dress code arc, you have to do something The Delicate Genius doesn’t and can’t: commit to a position. We don’t actually know who’s supposed to be right because he won’t tell us.
9/23: Behold! I will teach you the Stuporman! He is this forced punchline! He is this sophomoric social commentary.
Crankshaft stumbled into a good joke today. Calling something “scarcer than hen’s eggs” is a playful way to say that it’s much less scarce than expected. Which makes perfect sense here. Most TV remotes, especially universal ones, run on common Duracell-style batteries you can buy almost anywhere. Which Pam and Ed may not have known. So Ed could look it up online, learn that he just needs a couple of AAs, and make this remark.
The joke Batiuk actually wrote was “ha ha, that wacky old bus driver mixed up his words again!”
Because he isn’t thinking about what phrases mean or what size battery something takes. If he did, we’d get a week of framed panels in sepia lamenting renaming the five-and-dime The Dollar Shrub.
Batiuk has a good ear for the sounds of words, but completely whiffs on their meaning. “Scarcer than hen’s eggs” isn’t just a mis-spoken cliche: the changed meaning fits the situation almost perfectly. And he just doesn’t notice.
It’s why people allegedly bully him by saying that what he calls muddled aphorisms sound a lot like warning signs of senility.
Today’s Crankshaft
The joke is that batteries are incredibly scarce at the moment in the Batiukverse
Either that, or the avian flu just hit the Batiukverse, making hen’s eggs scarce.