WHAT ABOUT THE BIRD, TOM?
We’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see if Ed Crankshaft presses fat lips to cold beak and puffs Pam’s Christmas Cardinal back to life, and Batiuk just shifts gears to Pam and Minty redecorating a Christmas tree that should have been well and truly decked as of Thursday afternoon when Pam strung lights under the watchful eye of her blood red companion.
And all so Batiuk can, once again, flash us that hysterical landmark, 425 West Avenue, Elyria, Ohio. The starter apartment of Pam and Jeff, Ann and Fred, and Batton and his nameless Cathy Clone.
While the bird’s fate is unknown, a surprising, long memory holed, friend has emerged from the reference sheets. Appearing for the first time in the Davis era, on Wednesday we saw a feline resembling Pickles the Tomcat. Last seen on December 23, 2016, during Ayers tenure.
Wherever Pickles has been the last nine years, I’m guessing it included a short stay in the Pet Sematary. Since the mangy old feline debuted in Crankshaft’s first couple years, while Max and Mindy were still young.
Back in the glory days when Crankshaft still had the personality of a lime-encrusted sea urchin.
Save the Cat and Pet the Dog are tropes as old as time. A quick shorthand to show the true empathy innate in a character. If you want to show your character is a slimy fake, you have a seemingly ‘nice’ person kick a dog.
If you want to show that the grumbles, grousing, and belly aching of a cantankerous old coot are just the timid farts of an emotionally constipated man, you have him get a cat.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Or you get him a new cat when the old one dies. Ed’s had a cat so long, I can imagine an endless succession of gray tabbies.
Also, thanks for the reminder that Ed wanted to be unhappy all the time.
The entire Funkyverse is a 50-year exercise in misaimed Pet The Dog moments.
Westview is a cultish, insular small town full of snippy, unhappy people… but everyone’s obsessed with pizza, comic books and a public domain 1930s serial!
Crankshaft is an asshole baseball player… but he’s very pre-integration at a time when most white people weren’t! And he never got any pushback for it!
Crankshaft was later an asshole bus driver… but he spent his own money to help the Rough Riders go to college! Then he abandoned them when he couldn’t afford more than one semester!
The Westview covered up Bull Bushka’s suicide, completely undermining his reason for doing it… because they needed to protect his reputation!
Cindy Summers routinely bullied everyone in high school… then, at the final reunion, defined herself as a fellow victim!
Funky Winkerbean ran multiple pizzerias into the ground… but he bought a fleet of new cars so all his employees could go to Dinkle’s Christmas Messiah in a blinding snowstorm! Including Adeela, who was a Muslim! And he still had enough money to live in a huge house and retire to Florida!
When Montoni’s re-opened, the town brought back all the decor they bought the auction, even though they paid their own money, and some of it was valuable… but we haven’t seen any employees re-hired, or even Pete and Mindy doing any actual work!
Wally Winkerbean somehow survived years of captivity in the Middle East… and when he finally returned to Westview, he was treated as an annoyance!
Becky remained loyal to her husband John Howard after the love of her life Wally returned from the dead, and cited her as the thing that kept him sane… when they have no mutual affection, nothing in common, no children or business they have to stay together for, and don’t even seem to like each other very much.
Les Moore is by far one of the worst people on earth… but he’s ludicrously devoted to his long-dead wife! When he was too busy writing books to spend any time with her, or try to keep her alive!
And we’re supposed to admire all this, and forgive everything else these characters do. Ed Crankshaft having a pet cat is a light warmup exercise for Tom Batiuk.
But yet this old Crankshaft arc was nice. No preaching, no weird references. Just a cranky old man softening a bit, it won’t win any awards but it’s nice in its own way.
He used to be able to write mildly cynical stuff like this before he went nuts.
I meant to say “pro-integration.”
TV Tropes uses the phrase Oxymoronic Being to refer to people like this. As by way of example, Cindy is too stupid to understand what she was doing to drive people away.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Now we’ve shifted from Pam And Her Cardinal to Jeff talking about the time he walked 12 blocks to get a music CD during a thunderstorm
She doesn’t know why he tells the bullshit story, does she?
Always appreciate these archival deep dives, taking us back to a time when you could see why people actually glanced at Batiuk’s stuff from time to time. This is mostly competent and sometimes mildly amusing! If you looked at everything on the comics page at the time and graded each strip, Crankshaft was probably in around the median or — on a very good day — maybe even slightly above it!
Even given an overall decline in comics quality, that would be unthinkable today.