One Sore Keester

I’m hard at work narrowing down the best, worst, and slappable of 2025, don’t you worry my nitters. But in the meantime a comment by my co-captain sent me down a little rabbit hole.

Indeed BJ6K, this George Keesterman

Is the same George Keesterman who appeared on the cover of the very first Crankshaft collection published in 1992.

And while the mailbox gag hasn’t appeared in the last couple years, it’s only been in mothballs since 2022.

How did we get here? Who the hell is George Keesterman and why is he willing to put up with Ed’s hobby of destroying his personal property?

To clarify this deep dive, I don’t have access to all of Crankshaft. GoComics only goes back to 2003 and for many of those years Sunday strips are not included. There are Crankshaft paperbacks covering the first four or six years. Then there is the book on baseball and the book on Alzheimer’s, these pull relevant arcs and, infuriatingly, erase the dates on them. But from what I have, this is what I’ve learned.

For the first few years, Keesterman doesn’t seem to be any kind of friend of Crankshaft’s. Running over Keesterman’s mailbox is, from the beginning, inserted as a fully developed running gag.

In the first visual appearance I have for him, he’s smoking the pipe he’ll be seen with through at least 2008.

Even at the very start of the strip, it’s established that Crankshaft has been doing this for decades.

And on at least one occasion, physical violence ensued.

In a bit of early installment weirdness, Keesterman’s first name is given as ‘Milo’. The moment it’s reestablished as ‘George’ is in the time void I cannot see.

Cranky refers to the driveway at ‘The Keesterman’s’, and George does seem to have a wife, at least he did in 2003.

And if this woman standing next to him at Lucy’s funeral is her, then she was still alive as of 2009.

Her name might be Sally, if George married his childhood sweetheart.

Indeed, it seems Batiuk eventually decided that Ralph, Ed, Georgie, and the McKenzie sisters all grew up together.

In fact, George Keesterman was partially responsible for burning down the Summit Beach Wisteria Ballroom on the night of Pam’s birth.

Sorry BTS, seems Keesterman has at least two kids, grandkids, and even a great-grandkid. But these are all the mentions of them I could find.

With a starting point in 2003, at first the relationship between Cranky and Keester seems to be the same purely antagonistic one.

And for a couple years interactions revolved entirely around mailboxes and their destruction.

In 2006 and 2007 we get some strips of both guys talking politics at Mort’s barbershop. I don’t know if there’s earlier instances of these sort of interactions.

Then, on 7/12/2007 we get this strip. (And forgive the hideous coloring monkeys from GoComics)

As near as I can tell, this is the proto ‘Dale Evans strip’. We’ve got Ralph, George, Cranky, and some bald guy, eating at Pancake Barn. This was a single strip in a week of random gags.

The next month two strips with the same crew.

There’s nothing like this again until March 2010, when ‘The Cardiac Kids’ are formally established, sans Ringo.

Eating at their favorite restaurant!

Wait, no Dale Evans it is!

And thus the strange juxaposition between Ed and George at the Diner and Crankshaft and Keesterman at the mailbox. Where one month we would get George and Ralph visiting Ed in the hospital.

And literally two weeks later…

These two seemingly incompatible relationships would become the status quo.

And yet, these two worlds would occasionally intersect.

In 2015 Keesterman showed up quite a bit as he and Crankshaft worked together on Ralph Meckler’s campaign for mayor.

And yet, a year later, as commenter Joshua K recalled, Keesterman would consider suing Ed.

Judging by the expressive grimaces, scowls and frowns, Chuck Ayers seemed to love drawing Keesterman. Appropriately a Keesterman mailbox week was Ayers final week on Crankshaft.

Mailbox arcs continued into the Davis era, but with the gradual de-assholification of Cranky, we eventually get a kinder, softer, mailbox flattening.

Why are Ed and George friends? The out of universe explanation I came up with is that Batiuk realized around the late Aughts that a crew of old guys eating out, as they do, would make an easy tableau for endless jokes. But it just being Ralph and Ed was missing a certain acid and bite. There’s no other named male characters of the same age except George.

I guess he could have added Andy Clark, but Andy Clark was originally supposed to be a decade or so younger than Cranky. He’d already decided that Ralph and George and Ed had all grown up in Centerview in the same age bracket. So, for an in universe explanation, as other men age and die around them, they have gravitated toward each other despite everything else.

Is it realistic that the gravity of that familiarity overcomes decades and decades of property destruction? That’s for the individual reader to decide.

But as for me, I don’t hate the mailbox gag.