Ending The Crankshaft Awards 2025, and giving out the award for the worst strip during a Batton and Skip arc feels appropriate, doesn’t it?
After expressing my personal affection for Ed Crankshaft as a character yesterday, today the more objective part of my brain has to admit that Crankshaft as a strip this year was pretty meh. Davis is phoning in the photoshops like never before. The GoComics colorists are similarly lazy. Cranky was more befuddled than properly cranky, and almost all the best jokes were recycled.
The only thing Batiuk shows any passion for is pandering to whoever will give him a nod and breaking his back shoving his nose into his navel for another abysmal Batton interview arc.
Where is Batiuk taking us this year? I have no idea. But we’ll be here to point and laugh, and reminisce about old times good and bad. And who knows, maybe next year it’ll be harder to pare down the list of shitty strips to just eight.
The Worst Crankshaft Strip of 2025
Nostalgia Blinders
Dinkle’s Wet Dream
A Fitting Memorial
Check Please!
No Politics
That’s Not Humor
Linus’ Blankie
Trigger Happy
And your winner is…
Dinkle’s Wet Dream
The nitters have spoken. In a year with a month and a half of Batton strips and given four, FOUR, Batton strips nominated, you all decided, albeit not in a landslide, that a sweaty somnolent Dinkle having Old Testament flavored dreams of his own greatness was worse.
Now, you all want a Homer deep dive? Because that’s what I’m working on next!
Son of Stuck Funky 
As I’ve said before, the worst of it is that he forgot what made Dinkle funny: being a deluded, power-crazed obstruction.
2/26: While he finally mentioned his wife, it’s just only to talk about not really growing up.
The extremely competitive voting – every nominee got between about 7% and 20% – shows how strong this field was. I voted for Nostalgia Blinders, because it was just so juvenile and sophomoric. It sounds like something an edgy 14-year-old would say. The others are all spectacularly awful too, in their own way. There was really no wrong choice.
“That’s Not Humor” probably angered me the most, but indeed a very strong field with a pie chart to match.
The pie chart, incidentally, looks how I imagine a Montoni’s pie sliced by Pete would look.
The small blue slice is for Lisa.
A Mopetoni’s pizza would just be a serving tray with nothing on it because he probably couldn’t nuke a Hungry Man in the microwave if you put a gun to his head. No, like with everything else Mindy will probably make the pizza and somehow be hyper-competent at it too. Carlo will be pulled from the bag of forgotten characters to exclaim that her pizza-making skills surpass even him and then she’ll wonder why she’s with this loser again while silently cursing whatever cruel god forced this existence on her.
The Funkyverse loves to lean into everything it isn’t. It’d be a lot more tolerable if it would acknowledge its own reality: that it’s a world of small-minded townies, many of whom are deeply flawed or outright broken. You can do that while still treating the characters with dignity (Pogo, Lil Abner, Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, arguably Peanuts). But Batiuk seems to be massively overcompensating in the other direction. World’s Greatest this. Book signings that. Record contracts. Awards. Humanity is our nation. It. Just. Never. Stops.
The strip makes me feel like I’m being proselytized to, by a religious zealot or a pyramid schemer. The characters steer every single conversation straight back to the what they’re trying to sell you, even when you haven’t shown a shred of interest. They cite comic books as if they were scripture. And they have no clue how pushy and unwanted they actually are.
I think this is the biggest problem overall. There’s nothing much left to hate really because Batty’s phoning it in via a tin can attached to string. None of it is good but it’s bad in a way that’s just utterly banal and lifeless. I can’t speak for Crankshaft but with Funky I can pinpoint the exact year everything really fell off for me when I was reading through it: 2021.
Yeah everything post 2013 or so in Funky lacks the insanity of the strip’s “prime” but there’s still a lot of really stupid stuff and stupid in a way that leaves you scratching your head. There’s all the stuff with Les and Hollywood, Bio-Dad: The Finale, Zanzibar the Talking Murder Chimp and so on. But 2021 is a big fat nothing. What were the big stories? Phil Holt’s undeadening and Dinkle joining St. Spires. 2022 had the benefit of Batty going all out in idiocy to send it off but it seems as if that 2021 vibe transferred over to Cranky. It’s bad but not in a way where it feels like anyone has any interest in anything; just a lot of going through the motions. Batty really should have taken the opportunity to put down the Funky felt tip after 2022 but he’s too stubborn to do it so we’re left with a strip where even calling it a zombie would imply that it has more life to it than it does.
The Interview with a Lamepire strips are just the crystallization of all of that. Trite, lifeless and not even interesting enough to make fun of because you can get them from reading Batty’s blog without the Davis cut and paste “art” to accompany it.
I don’t want to say this out loud, but… Batton Thomas is my kryptonite. How can I mock Tom Batiuk, when Batton Thomas does this much better than I ever could?
Batton is a clueless egomaniac who can’t write, can’t draw, and is allergic to saying anything interesting. He makes ludicrous demands of others, is obsessed with tacky childhood things, and reveals new awful traits every time he opens his mouth. Today it’s “I made my young wife help me draw my comic strips.” Doesn’t mention her getting paid. Doesn’t express any thanks. What does he do? Thank comic books. How on earth do I top that?
This is like a movie where they’re showing what a terrible human being the main character is, before the story forces him to change. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Or Scrooged. Or Stripes. Or Ghostbusters II.
Look at today’ strip: “I should have bronzed the bed I was sitting in when I invented Dinkle.” I… have nothing to add to that. He’s Tim Negoda-ing himself. And he doesn’t have any clue he’s doing it. $5 says Batiuk doesn’t even know who Tim Negoda is, because he’s built such thick walls around his mind that he doesn’t see the connection. Or possibly because he’s so thin-skinned that no one in his life dares tells him it exists.
I get the feeling Batiuk would watch that and think “Man, I’d hate to be whoever inspired that bit! I wonder who he had in mind. Trudeau? Johnston? Breathed? Mort Walker? Hal Foster? Oh, well, time to see what wacky adventures Dinkle can get up to…”
I think it’s the opposite. Batiuk is the kind of person who would assume that literally all human communication is about him in some way, and gets offended very easily about things that have nothing to do with him. I also don’t think he spends a nanosecond thinking about any cartoonists other than himself, unless they’re relevant to his own career in some way, like Roger Bollen.
Vote splitting may be at work here. Batton strips got almost half the vote, but were divided up amongst the four nominees. With only one Harry strip in the mix, its 20.7% of the vote is impressive — but Batton more than doubled that.
Yeah, I am surprised that the “Check Please” strip didn’t win because these interviews with Skip are just so loathsome and tedious. But as you point out, the awfulness of Batton Thomas was spread out among four different scenarios, so that’s understandable. I also think the Winnipeg strip is terrible. Jeez, Jeff, grow up.
Bombers merch isn’t the One Ring so, yeah, he needs a big old cup of STFU with a side order of grow up.
Well, you do have to undertake a long journey to get it, kind of. If someone in Cleveland owns any CFL gear, they almost certainly bought it online or from a catalog. Especially if they’ve never been anywhere that would stock such gear, e.g. the stadium shop in Winnipeg.
So if this was really a problem (which it absolutely wasn’t), the shirt could be easily replaced. But not in the Funkyverse! Mommy destroyed the child’s special object, so Mommy must be punished! Mommy must replace the child’s $30 shirt with a $2,500 trip!
Instead of say, ordering a new one online or buying more than one shirt or like a million saner ideas.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 3 of Interview from HFIL Week
(Rachel walks towards Batton and Skip’s table)
Rachel Winkerbean: (very wearily, talking to Skip) Will you just PLEASE do your interview with Batton Thomas somewhere else?!
Skip Rawlings: I tried, and they all kicked the both of us out due to how boring Batton is.
Day 4: He’s willing himself to forget the real band director he paid the left-handed compliment to. He can put the bronzed bed next to his big brass balls.
They should have bronzed his bed. With him in it, Han Solo-style.
Buckminster Fuller once made a bad joke about bronzing baby’s turds. For some reason, I remembered that.
Also, he didn’t really invent any of them. They’re all stock characters
I’ll give him credit for Dinkle, because that character captures the megalomania of band directors. And of a certain type of high school teacher, who thinks their own subject is the only one that matters. My band direcrtors weren’t that bad, but I ran into a few Dinkles in more academic courses.
He used to be aware that Dinkle was in the wrong. Somewhere along the way, he became what he used to mock.
The whole cast became what Funky Winkerbean used to mock. Especially Les, who became exactly the same ineffectual, incompetent, disinterested high school teacher Act I used to roast on an open fire.
I don’t think he understood the irony.
“Mr. Finkle”? Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse…
Was Mr. Finkle also a placekicker for Stetson University?
Day 5: He destroyed other people’s property because he’s stupid.
He’s not stupid. He’s selfish, lazy, and ignorant of basic social norms. You don’t take other people’s stuff out of a shared storage area! Who needs to be told that? Especially when it’s just goddam cardboard you can get anywhere. Ask any local business that routinely receives things in cardboard boxes, you lazy twerp. Like… a comic book store. They’ll probably thank you for hauling some of it off.
And when other people try to enforce social norms that get in his way of being the most selfish prick ever, they’re bullying the assclown.
The implication here is that Batton cut up some cardboard boxes which someone else actually wanted to keep. In most comic strips, if something like this happened, tomorrow’s strip would involve him finding out what those boxes were for and who wanted to keep them.
However, this is a Batton Thomas story. Just because something dramatic is implied doesn’t mean that it will happen. He might go on to talk about something else tomorrow … because it turns out that the boxes really were trash and the woman in today’s panel 3 really did not need them.
Think of when he was honked at by another driver on the way to Roger Bollen’s house, then arrived at Roger’s house and saw the other car in the driveway. Nothing came of that. I had to e-mail Batiuk to find out who the other driver had been (it was Roger’s wife, who had said nothing about the honking incident when Batton arrived at their house).
Yeah, I’m guessing tomorrow will be some completely different stupid anecdote that has nothing to do with drawing cartoons, or anything else anybody would want to hear. Batiuk just loves doing this hatchet job on himself. As long as people are talking about him, I guess.
The idea of connecting his being a spoiled brat with how he’s treated doesn’t occur to him, does it?
BatTick stories are like that gif where it cuts off just before the truck crashes into a pole.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Interview From HFIL Week
Batton: In 1986, Dinkle sued me for making fun of him via the character of “Mr. Finkle” in Three-O-Clock High. He ended up losing the lawsuit.
Day 5 of Interview From HFIL Week
Batton: Why are you bothering to interview someone as boring as me, anyways?
Day 6: It tracks that someone as uncaring of social norms as Batton really does think his banal comment is a grand insight lesser people aren’t capable of.
I’m a little late getting around to this year’s **Cranky Awards**, but I finally caught up and wanted to say how much I enjoy them every year. The effort you put into the whole series really shows, and it’s always one of the highlights of the blog.
The categories, the commentary, the wonderfully cranky observations — it’s all great fun to read. Even arriving fashionably late, it was absolutely worth it. Thanks for keeping the tradition alive and giving us something to look forward to every year!
The Crankshaft comic strip really has gotten meh. What the strip needs is more inadvertent destruction from Ed, especially on Lillian.
Luv ya. 🤟