We interrupt the Crankshaft awards to bring you a breaking story in Major League Baseball!
Bill Mazeroski died this weekend. Mazeroski is a Baseball Hall of Fame member, who hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history. It was the first ever World Series-winning home run. This has only been done one other time, by Joe Carter in 1993.
Why are we talking about baseball necrology? Because former Major League Baseball player Johnny Lucadello was born on February 22, 1919. Lucadello was also the youngest player on the 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, the real-life baseball team which Ed Crankshaft canonically also played for. (Ed also has a real-life retired jersey number.)
For that reason, I view today as Ed’s birthday, because it’s the latest possible day he could have been born. And I think Lillian McKenzie was in his high school class – because this is the Funkyverse – which makes her well over 100 as well.
Ed’s baseball career, with its early integration experiences, and winter ball in pre-revolution Cuba, fits this time frame. So does Lillian, Lucy, and Eugene being young adults whose lives were interrupted by World War II. So does Pam’s life, centered around the 1970 Kent State shootings. Ed would have been about 30 at her birth.
I want to stress that 107 is the youngest Ed Crankshaft could reasonably be in 2026. The average player in the 1940 American Association, and on the Mud Hens themselves, wasn’t 21 years old: he was 27. If Ed was 27 in 1940, he’d be 113 today. Which would almost make him the world’s oldest man. (Unless Walt Wallet from Gasoline Alley also counts.)
We can’t move Ed’s birthday much later than 1919, because then he’d be too young to be drafted into the military. What if we gave him Joe Nuxhall’s backstory (pitched briefly in the majors at age 15, making Ed’s birth year 1925)? Ed would be way too young to join the military legally, much less be drafted.
Which would have made Crankshaft extremely likely to reach the major leagues, no matter how illiterate he was. MLB teams in 1942-1945 were eager to employ players who weren’t subject to being drafted. And since some were already missing, the standards were lower. A player too young to be drafted, who was also good enough to pitch in AA (the top minor league level at the time), would have been given plenty of chances. Especially on a mediocre team, which the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians (both implied to be the Mud Hens’ parent club at some point) and St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles, who was Toledo’s real-life parent club in 1940) were.
The optimal birth year seems to be 1922. That would make Ed 20 in 1942, which is the youngest that would have been drafted that year. So maybe he’s only 104 now. Which would also make him extremely young for AA baseball, and by definition a phenom. But let’s solve one problem at a time here.
So how many inches from reality is Ed Crankshaft’s life?
Out of 35 players on the real-life 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, only two lived to see 2003! They were Jake Wade (1912-2006) and Harry Bailey (1918-2014). Six others made it to the 21st century: Armond Payton (1917-2000), Daniel Scudder (1916-2000), Tommy Criscola (1915-2001), Lucadello (died in 2001), Hal Spindel (1913-2002), and Robert Jones (1916-2002). A ninth player, Harry Kimberlin, died on December 31, 1999 at age 90. Kimberlin was the last former Major League Baseball player to die in the 20th century.
Bill Mazeroski’s famous home run was in 1960. He was born in 1936. He was 89 when he died this year. Ed Crankshaft is 15-20 years older than all of those standards. Look at the photos of Harry Kimberlin and João Marinho Neto in the above links. That is what a very old man looks like.
On top of that, Ed is absurdly active. He still works as a bus driver, bowls regularly, goes out to eat with friends, portrays Santa Claus, sings in a choir, gets into arguments with cartoonists, goes to the fair, has traveled to New York, Winnipeg and Columbus, performs frequent physical feats, and builds an AI-powered smart garden. Very few people on earth have the expertise to build an AI-powered smart garden. And few centenarians on earth have the ability to do any of the other things.
So, Ed, since you like gardening so much, why don’t you dig a 6′ x 3′ x 3′ rectangular hole in the ground? I’m sure we’ll find something useful to do with it. Oops, I mean “you’ll” find something useful to do with it. Happy birthday and many more!
We now return you to the Crankshaft awards!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Of course, TB can explain it in one word:
TIMEMOP!
True, but I’m a much better writer than he is.
Thankfully TimeMop isn’t real and after their awkward conversation, Summer stood on top of that diving board, looked out over Westview for a minute and went “The hell was that about?”
Summer’s book was simply an observation of the bizarre nature of her hometown and the denizens that inhabit it. There’s the local pizza joint which is treated as some sort of temple; a place of ceremonies where all young women must work in a strange form of conscription. A place where her father seems to hold some sort of divine influence as anyone who steps within its borders eventually comes to praise him. The type of town where a band director acts as generalisimo and enslaver. Where her very special friend had two siblings who one day disappeared, whose father lived in a locker and whose mother seemed to be of fluctuating age. Where the school janitor truly believes he’s a time travelling future man and everyone entertains his delusions.
Summer realizes that Westview is a unique place and odd place and thus her work does, in fact, cause the world to realize humanity as its nation. Because they read Summer’s book and come the conclusion that at least they’re not like those freaks out in Westview and Centerville and that’s something that everyone can come together and appreciate.
That may be the biggest flaw in the story; that Westview would be anything other than a cautionary tale about how NOT to be humanity’s nation.
But Batiuk is incapable of seeing how they’re all terrible people.
More nonsense from the Batty Blog:
I learned pretty early on to just trust my own instincts when it came to writing. As I mentioned back in Volume 1 of this series, I had purchased a book on writing gag cartoons, which I immediately abandoned and put aside as ineffectual for me. Part of that I’m sure was due to a contrarian streak, a trait I attribute to both nature and nurture. Rules tend to inordinately raise my hackles.
Hoo boy, what nonsense. Snark away snarkers!
It’s not nonsense. Quite the opposite. It’s a tacit admission of Batiuk’s own faults. He just doesn’t realize that.
“I trust my own instincts!” Well, Mr. Batiuk, your instincts suck. This blog post is one of many articles at this blog that gives a detailed example.
“I had purchased a book on writing gag cartoons, which I immediately abandoned.” Why is this relevant? I’ve read lots of instructional books in my life. Some were helpful; others not so much. But this is part of the overall learning process. That Batiuk needs to speak out against a single book reveals that he’s not really interested in learning. He just wants easy answers to everything, and this book didn’t give him any. Which I think is why he relates to Les Moore so much. This may be Les’ defining trait.
“Part of that I’m sure was due to a contrarian streak.” This might be interesting in the context of resisting advive being the right move, or accepting advice against his contrarian tendencies. I think Batiuk did get some good suggestions from editors over the years, at least until Jay Kennedy died. But he never acknowledges it as such. Only Tom Batiuk is allowed to make correct decisions about what should happen in the Funkyverse. Does that sound like any character we know?
“I attribute (this trait) to both nature and nurture.” This sentence is begging to be fleshed out. Batiuk has written so much about how comic books (and his mother’s reaction to them) affected his life. It would be interesting to hear how he separates that from his nature, or if he includes comic books as part of his nature. But to be able to do this, Batiuk would have to be, you know, a writer.
“Rules tend to inordinately raise my hackles.” Do they, Tom? Do they really? Because from where I’m sitting, you love rules. As long as you’re the one who set the rule, or if you personally agree with it. Like “stories can’t be longer than three weeks.” Batiuk loves this rule and often cites it, even though he loves to rules-lawyer his way around it. He completely misses the point of the suggestion, which was “if your story is longer than three weeks, it probably would benefit from some editing.” He memorized it as a simple test: longer than 3 weeks=bad, less than 3 weeks=good. He can’t fathom that there are good long stories and bad short stories.
After all that, he provides an example of a rule he did choose to follow, about jokes ending in a punchline. And doesn’t address any of the above back-and-forth yammering.
With a little editing, Match to Flame 233 becomes:
I learned pretty early on to trust my own instincts when it came to writing. Rules tend to inordinately raise my hackles. But oddly enough, there was one rule regarding cartoon gag writing that I bought into early on. A cartoonist named Orlando Busino said in an article that a punch line should always be the last word in a sentence. For some reason that made quite an impression on me, and I followed it rather religiously for a long time.
I’ve now come to realize that you have numerous other options. For example, you can bury a gag in the middle of a line by simply having a character tell the elephant joke as something the character saw on television, and then follow it with a conversational word or three. It’s a much more naturalistic way for that to occur since, in life, nobody talks in punch lines.
It’s much better, don’t you think? I removed a lot of word cruft, which also got rid of most of the zig-zagging tone. “I trust my own instincts! I hate rules! I’m a contrarian! I’m always like this, except when I’m contradicting myself! Because sometimes I follow rules! Yes I do! No, I don’t! Yes, I do!”
Sheesh, how hard is it for Tom Batiuk to write the words “I usually hate rules, because of my contrarian nature. But one time I was taught a rule that really helped me. But I eventually learned to modify the rule, and I still use the modified version to this day. That rule was…”
“It’s a much more naturalistic way for that to occur since, in life, nobody talks in punch lines.”
Here’s a handy tip for anyone thinking of becoming a writer: you are not being paid to create material that is naturalistic.
Instead, you are being paid to create material that seems naturalistic, but is in fact funnier and/or more dramatic, better and more involving than that which occurs naturally. It will take you a fair bit of talent and effort to do this.
If you’re an exceptionally strong writer, you will be able to create material that people will praise as being naturalistic, even though it isn’t … it’s been carefully crafted to go beyond that, into a heightened realm that represents naturalism but is not, strictly speaking, naturalistic. It can be hard to spot the craft that accomplishes this, of course, because an important part of the craft is to conceal the craft. But pretty much every great writer is capable of doing this.
On the other hand, if you’re a particularly weak writer, you will respond to criticism of your writing not being funny or dramatic or interesting by bringing up the idea that you write naturalistically.
That’s a great point. Batiuk is so in thrall to his “realism” god that he completely misses the point of it.
Does anyone know a game called Desert Bus? It was part of a very troll-y collection of Penn and Teller-designed games. You had to drive a bus through the desert. There was absolutely no scenery. The bus pulled to the left so you had to manually keep steering it. The bus moved at a realistic speed. If you drove all the way from Reno to Vegas without going insane, you got one point. The point was: realism isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Remember how “realistic” Les insisted Lisa’s Story had to be? Biopics, even sober ones about well-known figures (Walk The Line, Man On The Moon, Untergang), take plenty of historical liberties in the name of storytelling. Les wouldn’t have any of that, no no no!
But there’s an even bigger problem: Les/Batiuk is insisting on realism in something that was already fictional. There can be no realism in Lisa’s Story, because there is no reality. Lisa is a fictional character in a fictional story. A fictional story that wasn’t told with any realism in the first place, and frankly bears no resemblance to real-world cancer stories. If Lisa really had Stage 4 cancer, she would have been dead within weeks. Not traipsing off to Washington to hijack someone else’s meeting with Congress. Which is one of many, many problems.
If Batiuk wanted the in-universe movie about Lisa’s life to be cinematic, he should have written it cinematically in the first place! Because comic strips are in an environment where creators also need to be cinematic! Or at least think in terms of presenting an entertaining story to readers.
Exceedingly hard. The dimwit can’t talk like a normal person because he thinks he’s not allowed to.
That’s really it. The man is holding a gun to his own head, pressuring himself to seem writer-y at all times. He’s so committed to this act that he completely forgot how to make sense. He buries everything behind inferences and implications. And then those aren’t clear enough, or aren’t given enough background information because he buried that behind inferences and implications too. Even in the informal environment of his own blog, he acts like he’s padding for length.
Batiuk must act like a writer at all times. Because he’s terrified someone will notice he isn’t one.
The Batton Death March Interview shows us the warped logic behind the bad writing.
Oh, I love that name, and intend to use it at every opportunity.
For me, the Batton Death March arcs are an existential crisis. Do… do I even need to say anything? He thinks he’s being self-deprecating, but he’s really just showcasing what an untalented, boring, egotistical jackass he is. Nobody makes Tom Batiuk look worse than Batton Thomas does. Not even Tim Negoda. Batiuk’s owning himself so hard it’s making third-party criticism obsolete.
It just popped out.
Like Cleavon Little’s sheriff in “Blazing Saddles”!
“He’s just crazy enough to do it!”
I thought of a different comedy movie: “It just… popped in there.” “WHAT just popped in there, Ray?”
Batiuk LOVES rules, so that he can flaunt them. He makes rules up that aren’t true and that nobody follows, pretends like they’re universal, and then purports himself as ‘special’ for transgressing those boundaries.
He’s such a banal anarchist.
A banarchist. Ugh, I’ve been reading Crankshaft for too long…
The Banana delivers! I’m glad that you mentioned Walt Wallet there, as that strip has had a similar looming existential crisis – but even then, Alley has had times where it at least acknowledged the improbability of the aging within the strip itself. Tom can’t even bear to do that much.
However, there is an act of omission that Tom commits which I think shows he’s at least somewhat aware of the chronology problem. If you go back 15+ years in CS specifically, you will see many more callbacks to Ed’s WW2 service, either as one-day jokes (such as Ed being in WW2 uniform on election day because it’s “a battleground state”, hyuk hyuk hyuk) or week long Armistice Day memorials. He hasn’t done anything like that in a while now.
All this because Tom won’t let go, and nobody has the need or desire to make him go. From the publisher’s perspective, I don’t understand how that makes economic sense in 2026, but here we are.
That’s a good point. He doesn’t talk about his baseball career anymore either. Batiuk is being smart by avoiding drawing attention to the problem. But when he turns right around and builds a story around a long-dead dog….
Lovely chronology-based takedown, BJr6K. You have truly earned the exalted title Beady-Eyed Nitpicker for noticing glaringly obvious facts that turn Puff Batty’s whole timeline into mishmosh while he gloats in pride.
Can you imagine if the current Blondie team pulled a similar stunt? Frequently reinforcing the OG canon, that Blondie was a working-class flapper girl in her youth, who literally danced the Charleston while drinking bathtub gin and intermittently blurting “23 Skidoo”? And Dagwood was literally the heir to a huge fortune whose parents were horrified with his slumming? And the current strip reinforced this every so often, by having Blondie reminsce about their romantic years in speakeasies, and Dagwood sigh nostalgically about how he worked on FDR’s first campaign or something?
Yeah, that’d be pretty crazy. Pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty crazy.
Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it. This post is why I didn’t want to discuss chronology on the other thread yesterday 🙂
Given what a mess the jump in Act III made things, then how the timeline kept moving back until within the span of about 4 months it jumped forward (Crazy’s time travel story being in 1980) and then backwards (50th reunion) and all the problems the earlier dates created it’s best if Batty stays away from anything regarding time and chronology.
Today’s Crankfuckery
ED IS SUPPOSED TO BE BANNED FOR LIFE FROM THE ICE SCULPTURE CONTEST FOR DESTROYING A STATUE WHY IS HE THERE
Because Batiuk is a terrible writer.
Just a reminder that Tom Batiuk has his very own YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TomBatiuk2024
2 new videos were added in the last month, plugging volumes 14 and 15 of the Complete FW. No, they don’t top the dramatic reading of “Les Takes Summer Dress Shopping” in the Volume 13 video. But SoSF readers will still find plenty to discuss in these videos! (You can skip about the first minute of each video, which each consist of nearly identical background info.)
And if you haven’t already seen Tom’s reading of “Les Takes Summer Dress Shopping” …. go to the 1:53 mark on the Volume 13 video. It’s everything you imagine it could be, and more. (And Les.)
Oh my God, he attracted attention to this? One of the most disgusting strips he’s done in his life?
Well, tried to attract attention to. It’s gotten a total of 150 views in the year that it’s been up.
But yes, it’s clearly an installment of FW he’s especially proud of.
Being proud of an a****** for making his daughter cry because he’s stupid also shows us how stupid Tommy Boy is.
Not just stupid, but abusive. The blog post I wrote about that strip listed 5 different textbook ways Les was being abusive, and a sixth came up in the comments. And it just never occurs to Batiuk.
Of course it doesn’t. He’d have to understand how he’s perceived by other people. Bakugo from My Hero Academia has more self awareness and he insists on calling himself Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight.
Batiuk has tried to retcon this by having Crankshaft reminisce about his childhood heroes Vic Power and Rocky Colavito, who played for the Cleveland Indians in the late 1950s. This would place Crankshaft’s birth maybe around the late 1940s — he’d be approaching 80 or so by that reckoning.
Of course, all the stuff about being a minor league pitcher in the 1930s, serving in WWII, etc., are completely wiped out by that retcon.
Clearly, Skip should ditch this go-nowhere Batton interview (18 months and counting!) and instead interrogate Ed Crankshaft to get the skinny on what’s really going on in his life. It’s a big story either way … Ed’s either the spriest 107-year-old who ever lived, or is some sort of reality-warping inter-dimensional traveler making his way from one alternate universe to the next.
This was meant to be its own thread, incidentally, as a reply to BJr6K’s original “Happy 107th, Crankshaft!” post. It somehow got attached to this thread on Batiuk’s videos.
I learned something interesting about the 1940 Cleveland Indians. If that’s where Crankshaft would have gone if he’d been invited to the major leagues, he would have fit right in. Why? Because that team had a reputation for being a bunch of whiners.
(Manager) Vitt was known for being critical of his players, who had grown increasingly upset with his style since he had become manager in 1938. (Several older players) met after the game and decided to approach owner Alva Bradley with the request that Vitt be removed. Criticisms included Vitt’s insults to his players, showboating style, anger and willingness to air dirty laundry with the media. Bradley said he would investigate but did not want the affair to become public. Somebody leaked it though, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer had details a day later.
Mr. Boo Hoo I Didn’t Get To Play In The Major Leagues Because I Can’t Read And That Bully Changed The Lineup Card would have fit right in.
Kind of hard to defend Vitt, though, when he publicly crapped on Bob Feller, who at 21, led the league in wins (27), complete games, innings pitched, and ERA. (And in a modern statistic, WAR.) He also led the AL in shutouts, including a no-hitter. As well, he found time to rack up four saves.
It was just an incredibly dumb move to insult the engine of the franchise in full view of everyone, and not even apologize. Vitt was WAY below Feller in terms of importance to the team — without Feller, Cleveland wouldn’t have been anywhere near playoff contention, and I’m sure the entire team knew it. You might argue that some of the other players on the team may have deserved some dressing down … but how seriously are they going to take Vitt’s criticisms if even Feller, the guy standing the league on its head, isn’t good enough for him? Vitt’s the guy who created the culture of whining, by being a self-pitying whiner himself. (“He’s supposed to be my ace. I’m supposed to win a pennant with that kind of pitching”, he said of Feller after a rare bad game. Again, he’s speaking of the guy who led the league in wins, complete games, shutouts, innings pitched, WAR, and ERA.)
Vitt was fired at the end of the season, never to manage in the majors again. Feller spent his entire baseball career with Cleveland, retiring after the 1956 season.
I wondered that too. The complaints about Vitt seemed valid, but it was a different era, and men were supposed to just suck up whatever abuse was handed down to them by their superiors. But history doesn’t seem to have vindicated the team. Even though Feller was unquestionably a top-tier Hall of Famer, and later managers like Billy Martin were a lot worse in this regard. None of the players involved have bad reputations AFAIK.
I just think it’s funny that the team Crankshaft pines about not getting to play for was the Crybaby Indians. (Not my name; that’s what they were called at the time.)
Making Ed 25 or more years younger also means that Ed would not have been involved with the early days of integrated baseball (every team would have been integrated before he left school). His daughter wouldn’t have been at Kent State during the shootings, nor would she have been a fan of Chad and Jeremy as she wouldn’t have been born until after their heyday. Ed’s contemporary Ralph couldn’t have a son who was killed in the Vietnam War; it would have been Ralph himself who was of draft age during the Vietnam era.
Granted, just accepting a floating timeline would make this more or less acceptable — most comic strip characters don’t age anyway — but it would mean that Batiuk would have to drop all the references to the distant past he likes to make, as they would be anachronistic with a floating timeline.
The other problem with an 80-ish Ed is that it makes Ed not much older than Batiuk himself (Batiuk was born in 1947). And I don’t think Batiuk would want to do that. I’m pretty sure his concept of Ed Crankshaft is that he is supposed to be like an older relative from Batiuk’s parents’ generation — not a contemporary of himself.
2/23: Someone once said that smugness is stupidity’s tell. Batton is proof of concept because the interview from Hell reminds us that the hamster died and the wheel is broken.
“Batton Death March”: Simply perfect, pj202718nbca.
Today’s Crankshaft is just awful.
No illustration of anything that’s discussed — no sepia-toned Batton pulling a “How do you do, fellow kids” with the baffled high schoolers. Just a wall o’ text.
It reminds me darkly of the scenes in “Crumb” where we see the progression of Charles Crumb’s comics as his mental illness descends on him. They go from cartoons with text to walls of text filling up 95% of the panel, with only a tiny drawing in the corner.
“This is the interview that never ends.
Yes, it goes on and on, my friends.
Some people started reading it not knowing what it was
And they’ll continue reading it forever just because
This is the interview that never ends…”
As I said, it finally occurred to me that watching the smug rat be stupid constitutes a war crime.
“Batton Death March” really is an instant classic. Well done! I expect it to become the standard way to refer to the endless Skip/Batton interview, as it continues on through the forthcoming years…
So is Batton pronounced like Bataan? It sounded more like BATT-n in my head. Or batten (down the hatches) or baton.
Bat-unn, of course. The names are similarly structured.
RE: Mon. 2/23’s C’Shaft:
Why am I suddenly picturing Batton wandering the halls of Westview with granny glasses, a puka shell necklace, and a “Keep On Truckin'” t-shirt, saying “How do you do, fellow kids?” By the way, was it ever established prior to this that Batton was hanging around Westview getting ideas for his strip? This took place in the ’70s, so were there ever any strips of him interacting with the original FW gang? I seem to recall a strip where Les had him talk to his English class, but I don’t remember anyone saying the wacky shenanigans depicted in “Three O’Clock High” were inspired by the very school they were in.
On another topic, we apparently have finished up an entire week of watching the “This Old House” crew film a “reno” of a doghouse for Homer, Ed’s pet who hasn’t appeared in the strip in over a decade. And when the arc was finished, we saw no visible changes to the exterior, a revamped interior was hinted at but never shown, and Homer himself was still nowhere to be seen. This is a textbook definition of “tell, don’t show” from a man working in a visual medium.
A rehash of Home Improvement jokes, centered on a long-dead dog, and a doghouse we never saw the improvements to.