Panel of the Year
Blind Charge
Memory Lane
Batman Burns Batton
Lifelong Work Ethic
Driving Gear
I’m Your Huckleberry
Pillow Talk
Soap On A Dope
And you winner!
Soap on a Dope!
Welcome to the gallery, Lil.
Crankshaft Awards 2025, Day 4: Let the Art Speak for Itself.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Crankfuckery
(ZZZZ)
2/21: We have another candidate for next year owing to a mocking disclaimer.
Christ, Batiuk, stop making jokes that attract attention to your own worst qualities as a writer! Where do I even begin with this?
How about his contempt for people who give a rat’s ass about what they’re reading?
Here is a partial list of Funkyverse events that did not come with a disclaimer that no one was actually hurt.
Lisa’s date rape and pregnancy; Summer’s premature birth; John Darling’s murder; Bull Bushka’s long slow deterioration from CTE and eventual suicide; Susan Smith’s suicide attempt; Marianne Winters’ suicide attempt; Becky’s dismemberment; Skip Rawlings’ dismemberment; a wildfire that consumed most of southern California; Jeff Murdoch somehow not being killed in that fire; Wally and Rana’s PTSD; Funky’s alcoholism and car crash (in different stories); Barry Balderman’s nervous breakdown, Holly’s broken ankle in her late 60s; Adeela’s arrest by ICE(!); a stray cat disappearing into the void via time helmet; the deaths of several characters not mentioned above, like Coach Stropp and Mary Sue Sweetwater; or all the psychological trauma Ed Crankshaft, Harry Dinkle, Cindy Summers, Lillian McKenzie and Les Moore inflicted over their entire lives.
What are we to infer from today’s strip?
That he’s an idiot with skewed priorities?
I voted for Blind Charge, because I enjoy any panel where Funkyverse main characters might have violence meted upon them.
Snoopy didn’t need “This Old Doghouse” when his home was burned.
Then again, Homer was probably never a World War I Flying Ace or Joe Cool.
The “doghouse reno” week seems like a redux of the “Crazy’s Locker Is Large, It Contains Multitudes” conceit of Act I. But I thought that idea was genuinely droll and pretty original for a comic strip — at least, I’d never seen it.
It worked partly because Puff Batty left it in the background as an established, but never explained, never lampshaded, fact of the Westview universe. He didn’t try to drive home the jokes with a sledgehammer.
It never fails to sadden me when he attempts something he used to be pretty good at, and reveals that he’s somehow forgotten everything he used to know.
…which itself was a ripoff of Charlie Schulz. The spacious and well-appointed interior of Snoopy’s doghouse was an ongoing joke in Peanuts.
Thank you for hosting these! My vote on this particular choice was Memory Lane, as it affixed a concrete and identifiable date on something, from which everything else can be inferred – and that includes how poorly Tom writes his content.
You know, we’ve often talked about how the Crankshaft/McKenzie generation, based on canon, couldn’t have been born later than the early 20s. But it continually amazes me that TB still proudly affirms that, even though that makes Crankshaft and Lillian over 100. Has he known any centenarians? Some do manage to keep their brains — Mel Brooks, Charlie Munger, Henry Kissinger, Dick Van Dyke come to mind (okay, 99 for Brooks and Munger) — but none of them are hanging from eaves or, I hope, driving a bus full of helpless kids. And those guys are outliers. Most centenarians are barely able to walk around the block without a struggle, let alone climb trees with chainsaws.
He would’ve done better if he’d either handwaved the canon away after it became ridiculous, or simply ignored it to put his characters in the eternal present.
Oh, we will talk about this at length tomorrow.