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.
Also, it was Becky and John that have “no mutual affection” etc. Becky and Wally most certainly did. Which makes her decision to remain with John even more nonsensical. The O’Learys in Father Ted were a more loving couple than Becky and John.
Great assessment!
The reunion arc was awful. Everyone sitting around frowning about how they didn’t fit in, instead of celebrating how far they’ve come since then. It’s one thing to recognize how awkward high school was, but to wallow in it 50 years later when most of the characters managed to have relatively decent lives and family was just too much for me. Even characters who had their struggles (Funky, Wally) achieved personal victories by overcoming them-struggles that were far more challenging than surviving high school awkwardness.
As far as Becky and John, I agree with others who have said that it was purely for shock value. Upon reading that plot point for the first time, I remember thinking “Now how in the hell did THAT happen?” Which is exactly what I think TB was going for. And I still don’t know the answer since it was never explored beyond Becky saying “I moved on.”
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?
This is, of course, totally not just another in the endless examples of Batty taking a banal story from his own life and placing it into the mouths of characters who are totally not just shallow self-inserts. Tom Batiuk definitely did not walk through a somewhat higher than average snowfall to buy a tire company’s Christmas album for his wife.
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.
It really does show that Batiuk once did quality work. And the comparison to today’s work shows that he has zero interest in ever doing so again.
Baituk is 100% committed to the fantasy world he prefers to live in. The one where his work is too sophisticated for jokes; where he’s a Bill Watterson/James Thurber/Joe Shuster-level literary figure in Ohio; where people line up for blocks to shake his hand and buy his books; where DC and Marvel’s refusal to hire him was a crippling error; where Lisa’s Story was a “Who shot J.R.?”-level cultural phenomenon; where Les Moore is an everyman Byronic hero; where that elusive Pulitzer is coming any year now.
I wonder what life is like for people like this. I couldn’t deal with that level of cognitive dissonance.
The trick is to be well and truly 100% committed to it — then it’s not cognitive dissonance at all. Any dissonant thoughts, ideas, voices, or informational inputs of any kind are filtered out long before they can clash with the “reality” you’ve built.
It’s not uncommon. You can probably think of people in the news to whom this model would apply.
True, but some things can’t be filtered so easily. If you regularly rent space at to sell books and autographs, and very few people are interested, eventually your annual income will not be as high as you were expecting.
I question whether these trips even pay for themselves. Especially if the business model is “he buys the book from Kent State Press and re-sells it,” which I suspect it is.
I would bet a substantial sum of money that these trips don’t pay for themselves … if I could find someone foolish enough to take the bet.
Tom tells himself that the trips are worth it, of course. “You should have seen the last one … lots of people there! I think it was the last one. These sure are fun, though. I’m in with all the comics people! This one’s a little slow right now, but the people passing by the booth are getting the Funky Winkerbean brand impressed on them … they’ll be on Amazon later buying some books for sure! This is great. I love talking to all my fans. Sure glad it’s slow right now, though … don’t want to strain my voice too much! But this is why real comics creators attend comic-cons — to interact with the people! Like I interacted with Gurf Thripnavel over there, the assistant colorist on Flash issue #421. And getting his autograph for $10 was a real deal! He seemed real interested in hearing about Lisa’s Story … too bad the line behind me to see him was so long, and that the booth attendant had to ask me to step aside. But he’s probably coming by later to pick up a few copies! But if he doesn’t, it’s only because his booth was so busy! He’ll probably be another one of those Amazon buyers! Boy, look at how clean and pristine my booth is. You don’t want to pay all those exhibitor’s booth fees and then watch the booth get all messy with people’s handprints, or them picking up books and putting them back improperly! People passing by my booth are obviously impressed with how untouched everything is! It was such a good idea to come here…”
How do we know the cat was the same one? Perhaps it was actually a cerain French-speaking, some times sexy woman, depression tulpa having been passed on to Ed and/or the Murdochs after Les’s appearance during The Burnings.
Related: how do we know the cardinal is the same one? It’s romantic of Pam to imagine that she’s being visited by her “Christmas cardinal,” but cardinals are rather common. No reason it couldn’t have been several different ones.
Because this is an extremely weak thing to build an emotional connection on, if Batiuk really is trying to remake Calvin’s dead raccoon. We saw Calvin try to nurse that raccoon back to health, and how invested he was in the little animal. Pam gives it a name: cut straight to the overwrought drama.
Also, wouldn’t this artsy-farsty color scheme have worked better if it didn’t start until the bird got injured? As if the color change represented imminent death, or something.
I also wonder what Petco would do if you brought it an injured cardinal for treatment. I suspect they would laugh at you.
I’m amused that out of the handful of comics I regularly follow, two of them currently feature oddball bird stories. At least the Mary Worth one is so ridiculous it’s entertaining.