We are pleased to bring you, at last, finally, and without further ado, Crankshaft Awards Week!!!
Sponsored by Yondr!
When reviewing the year 2025, one thing unexpectedly struck me.
Bricks!
We here in the Funkyverse Monitoring Community have long kept notice of panel after panel of lovingly rendered or slavishly copied establishing exterior shot, but the carefully plotted rows of masonry were especially chatty this year, leading me to inaugurate a new award.
Outstanding Performance by a Talking Building
Your Nominees…
Unenthusiastic Bedside Manor
Acquiescing Village Booksmith
Investigative Montoni’s
Reminiscing Dale Evans
Public Address Princess Auto Stadium
Depressed Bus Barn
Revelatory Apartment
Home Shopping Home
Sympathetic St. Spires
And the winner….
THE BUS BARN!
I’m pleased as plaster to affix this award to this storied old building, which has seen, sheltered, and said so much since the very first year of Crankshaft.
And while hours of searching has failed to turn up whatever building you were originally based on, while your graffiti has been painted over, some garage door windows lost, and you’ve been lying about your age for at least 25 years…
You remain iconic. Whether your cornerstone was laid in 1921, 1925, 1927, or 1929. Whether you’re tan or red or covered in snow, you have nothing to be depressed about. Take a bow!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed then slips on the ice and explodes)
It was Depressed Bus Barn all the way for me. In the Funkyverse, even the buildings can be one-dimensional sadsack whiners — sadsack whiners whose prime function is to passively allow all forms of misery to spread throughout Central Ohio until they metastasize.
This building totally gets it.
It’s typical that he’s all over the place with a landmark.
Can I borrow that as a book title? All Over The Place With A Landmark: The Story Of Funky Winkerbean.
Feel free to. He deserves it for Summer’s march past places that mean nothing to her.
RE: Monday 2/16’s C’Shaft:
Whoa, whoa, whoa…stop the clock! December’s black-and-white “injured cardinal” saga brought back Cranky’s cat Pickles, who hadn’t appeared in the strip in nine years. Now all of a sudden we’re supposed to recall that Ed also owns a dog named Homer? Has anyone seen Homer in the past decade? Is Ed just doing a “reno” on the house as a memorial to his AWOL pooch? How on Earth would PBS hear about some geezer in Ohio refurbishing a doghouse, and why would they think it merits filming?
Also, Pmm’s obligatory expositional question here is one the late Al Jaffee would have had a field day with in Mad Magazine.
Oh, this week is going to be full of Act IV staples!
Probably coming later this week:
I’m going to push back on two of these.
– “Reno”, pronounced to rhyme with “Jay Leno”, is not a Batiukism. At least where I’m from, it’s an extremely common abbreviation for renovation, both in print and as a spoken word. Arguably, it’s an abbreviation that’s spoken even more commonly than the full word ever is.
– The punchline is two-fold. That Kevin O’Connor is there is part of it, but that his show is now “This Old Doghouse” is also part of it. So yeah, Batiuk does end the joke with the last word being a punchline. (Want to argue that the real joke is Kevin O’Connor’s presence, and that the “Doghouse” line distracts from that? I’d disagree. Batiuk’s going for the kind of embedded double punchline that Doonesbury or Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County did all the time. He’s not as good at it, but this is a reasonable effort. Not an amazing effort, and slightly clunkily executed … but I’d say a solid B.)
fair enough. I’ve never heard the word “reno” in my life, despite having my home reno’ed last year. If it’s an Ohioism, fine. And your point about the punchline is valid.
“Reno”, with the sense of meaning renovate, is in the OED — the first citation dates from 1981. It’s also a valid Scrabble word. It may be more a commonly used word in some locales than in others, of course!
Are “vendo” or “solo car date” or “in the main” in there?
The OED editors have not yet seen fit to include these words or phrases in their publication. But perhaps the editors of the other OED, the compendium of Ohio Eccentric Dialogue, will step up.
The strips Pogo and L’il Abner were really good at introducing the readership to regional accents. Television was far less pervasive for most of their existence, so this was a genuine insight into a way of living people might not know. If Batiuk was making an effort to capture Ohio personalities and Ohio ways of speaking in his work, I’d be 100% in favor of it. But like everything else he does, it’s lazy, half-assed, arbitrary, and inconsistent.
There’s something else in play: whining about people who care about what they read.
I voted for Public Address Princess Auto Stadium, because it was such a blatant crutch for not having to show the football play that was the centerpiece of the story.
Ditto. That and the Dale Evans word zeppelin were the most egregious of the nominated panels, I thought.
“Most egregious” drove most of my votes this year.
My votes went to Depressed Bus Barn
Today’s Crankshaft
Pam: Dad, Homer’s has been dead for a long time.
Ed: You think that that time-travelin’ janitor gave a shit about that? His fucking up of the timeline somehow brought Pickles back to life.