Mr. Finkle….LORD HAVE MERCY.
So Batton Thomas’ wife is just Cathy? No cute rearranging of syllables? No inversion of letters. Just Cathy. Fine.
I hate it.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate Batton since I began to blog. There are 547 published blog posts on this site I have posted under my name. If the word hate replaced each letter of each word of those 547 blog posts, it would not equal ONE ONE-BILLIONTH of the hate I feel for Batton as I type this. For Batton. HATE. HATE.
I do not hate Tom Batiuk, no. Tom Batiuk is a real life human, with real thoughts and real feelings and a real family. He has enjoyed hot, fresh pizza. He has seen the beauty of fall leaves. He has felt pain. He has made others smile. I can lay no irredeemable crime against humanity at his feet. I cannot hate him. Pity him, yes, but not hate.
But Batton is a fictional device. Batton is a narcissistic conceit. Batton is made of thoughtless, heartless computer goo and transmitted through wires and radio waves. He’s not a real life person. And I HATE him. Like I would hate the melanoma growing from an ugly tattoo on the back of a stranger.
This week is miserable. Almost makes me nostalgic for last week, when we got to watch uncanny traced photo people converse about the unnecessary renovations they were doing to an abandoned doghouse.
Abandoned? Indeed. For Homer the dog was last seen August 6, 2010. Wherein E fed him chocolate cake. And I guess we can surmise that the elderly dog died. Because we never see him again.
Yes, Cranky, as opposed to those things you ignorant git. Unless vermin contain caffeine or theobromine, or cat poop is laced with the methylxanthines that block adenosine receptors.
In truth, this last appearance of Homer is shocking, and not because of the dog murder. It’s because Homer had already disappeared for two whole years before this. He hadn’t been seen since taking stock of Grandma Rose’s chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, in July 2008.
I don’t know how often the old dog showed up in the 90’s. But in the 2000’s he was very much on the back burner. Heck, he wasn’t even on the stove. He was in a coffee can of grease kept in a cupboard above the stove.
He was allowed in the house on Christmas Day 2007.
He slept through fireworks on July 4, 2006.
Cranky took him on a walk to piss on Lillian’s saplings in March of 2006.
He briefly escaped being chained up to a flimsy doorless doghouse in the dead of winter in January 2006. Wonder if Tom got some hatemail for this one.
On September 27, 2005, he goes comatose with boredom.
In June of 2005 Homer gets his last proper full week arc, where we learn that his ‘boy’ doesn’t care for him and can’t even remember his name.
21 years ago Crankshaft enslaved his elderly dog and forced him to shovel snow. The GoComics coloring monkeys decided the sight was so horrific it turned Pam’s hair white.
October 2, 2004, we got a lovely little wordless strip. No notes here.
August 12, 2004, the Murdoch/Crankshaft household was kind enough to make sure Homer wasn’t Toto’ed in a twister.
July 25, 2004, Homer is let in the house to get his treat ration, and Mindy proves she’s Pam’s daughter by asking the classic Pam question.
May 30, 2004. Ayers draws an adorable pupper cowering behind his flimsy doghouse.
This strip displays something I wish Ayers and Batiuk had consciously cultivated, especially in their later years: put kids and pets in the damn background of strips! I’ve talked at length how the consistency of the physical locations in the Funkyverse give it real tangibility. I wish we had that same consistency with the people living in those locations.
We wouldn’t be asking ‘Where’s Wally Jr.?” or ‘Wait, who the f**k is Pickles?’ or ‘Does Mitch even live with the Murdochs anymore?’ if they had been placed in the background or foreground where appropriate. I will say Ayers was better at this with Pickles up through the early aughts, where the cat is often drawn just standing around in the yard while Ed yammers about his brand new combine harvester. But there’s a million million yard strips where he could have doodled ol Homer to remind us that the dog still exists.
May 4, 2004 is the earliest GoComics strip I could find with Homer.
Homer isn’t in the first four Crankshaft books, so they must have got him after, maybe sometime in the early to mid 90’s if Mindy’s age in this strip from Strike Four! is anything to go by.
In Roses in December, Homer has his Lassie moment, sort of.
And this brings up that Homer is actually Homer II. Named, (presumably) for Ed’s childhood dog. Long Dead Homer was mentioned long before Homer II was introduced.
Poor Homer II, named for a long dead and better loved dog. Neglected, forgotten, dismissed. He wasn’t even Ed Crankshaft’s favorite pet.
Son of Stuck Funky 
This Batton story is getting a little dramatic.
You just know he forgot all about that.
Now THAT’s funny.
I would bet real money that Panel 1 wins the Backfeiffengesicht award for 2026. Rarely does one panel contain two faces that are begging that hard for a slap.
Tom Batiuk: “Challenge accepted.”
At least we finally have the answer to a 30-year-old mystery: the post office blew ITSELF up rather than have to accept another one of Batton’s comics. Makes perfect sense, really.
USA! USA!
So his artwork is so bad, it explodes?
“Okay, Skip, lemme have this last slice of pizza and I’ll give your readers a real inside scoop! When the time came to send my finished art to the syndicate, I would sandwich them between cardboard, secure it with tape, write the mailing address on the front, and then take it to the local post office! There I would buy stamps and affix them to the package! The clerk would postmark it and put it in a large bin with other parcels so it would get sorted for eventual delivery. Then I would walk home and start the process all over again. First I’d take a pencil and paper, then I’d…Skip? Why are you passed out on the tabletop, Skip?”
Many thanks for the enlightening Homer I/II retrospective, CBH. Who but Batiuk would come up with a storyline concerning a character not seen in print in nearly 16 years, and then not even depict them?
He’s gone soft, really. If this was prime or even sub-prime Batty then Homer would’ve either casually been mentioned as having died or returned on panel with some kind of debilitation.
Isn’t that right, Mary Sue Sweetwater?
There’s no reason this current dog can’t be Homer III. Crankshaft killed Homer II with chocolate; 16 years later, he now has a different old dog, awaiting death by power tools or some sort of merry mishap involving a schoolbus trying to avoid Keesterman’s mailbox and crashing into the doghouse instead.
Fortunately, all the kids in that school bus will have their phones tucked away in Yondr pouches, so there won’t be any video record of any of this ever happening. Ed Crankshaft will remain free to kill another day, for our collective comic reading delight. That’s where all this is headed, right?
Having a dog is obligatory. Knowing crap-all about dogs is optional.
Thank you for the dive! The July 4 2006 strip stuck out in memory, as I came across it some months ago when looking things up. The coloring and contrast serves the actual artistry well. That’s the kind of strip that helps me recall my own youth and times when our family would do the same thing to spectate fireworks. That’s the kind of strip that one could cite for a reason why it was still kept around at the time. Twenty years later, nobody cares enough to make even that kind of effort now. But Tom will still speak pridefully about his work to the present day.
Next, Battom relates about that time he visited the post office and bought some stamps, then went home with them.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of Interview From HFIL Week
THIS BATTON WEEK IS FINALLY OVER (hopefully)
3/1: Someone finally learned what a word means.
Just to proudly proclaim that the character has been miserable for fifty years, it seems. What an accomplishment.
Also fearful.
RE: Sun. 3/1’s Shaft:
So, Batiuk is still going with Jff (and, by association, Pmm) attending Kent State circa 1970, which means they’re currently in their mid-to-late 70s. Which, again by association, means that Ed is at the very least in his late 90s, regardless of mention of his military service or minor league baseball career. Good to know.
Even with all that, today’s dull reminiscence is such a palate cleanser after a week of Batton Thomas.
This is what I meant by Batiuk not being able to make Ed younger and accept a floating timeline. As long as he keeps making references to the characters’ distant pasts, the characters have to be old enough to have lived in those distant pasts.
Of course, Batiuk very simply does not want to be bothered about this. Ed is 75, except when he’s 85 or 95 or 105. And even then, he’s 75. (Unless it suits the specific strip that day for him not to be.)
A good writer can get away with this, because the storytelling is just so damned entertaining that fiddly little inconsistent details don’t distract from it (and maybe are even part of its charm.) Unfortunately, Batiuk isn’t a good writer…
Tom Batiuk will turn 79 a couple of weeks from now. I would be surprised if he thought of Ed as being 75. which would make Ed younger than himself.
Maybe this is one of those situations where people aren’t sure how a person of a given age is supposed to act. I’m thinking about when Jack Benny was originally cast in the movie The Sunshine Boys (in the role eventually played by George Burns). At a rehearsal, someone told Benny, “Move slower, Mr. Benny. Remember, you’re playing a 70-year-old comedian.” Benny replied, “But I’m an 80-year-old comedian.”
This is only true if Tom Batiuk considers himself to be 79. Like a lot of people as they age, I suspect he thinks of himself as about 45, and holding…
I don’t think Tom Batiuk knows how any person of any age is supposed to act.
Today’s Crankshaft
Ed: Pam, I dont know if you heard, but Dinkle told me that he is wanted by the Westview Police Department for all the crimes he commited while he was a band director for Westview High School.
3/2 ‘Shaft: Hey, look, gang! It’s Max, Hannah, and their son of shifting and indeterminate age, Mitch (who looks like he’s about 8 or 9 and too big for his car seat here). And they have some big news that Pmm might overreact to! Are they moving back into the house (did they ever leave?)? Did the Valentine movie house shut down again? Is Hannah preggers? We may go the whole week without Batty revealing it, and I’m hard-pressed to say I care. But it’s not Skip Bittman interviewing Batton Thomas, so for that reason alone I give today’s installment a thumbs up.
We’re about to be reminded of how little Batiuk cared to understand his mother because of what Pam will overreact to. Betcha it’s something she should object to.
Batiuk Blonde Centerville is pregnant once more but not with her child. She’s a surrogate, you see, but whose child is she carrying? The mutant spawn of Cindy and Mason? Lil’ Lisa Jr. for Summer and Maddy? Or perhaps a reincarnated Lucy for Morton and Lillian.
Dammit, Tom, you can’t have another pregnancy until you finish the last one!
Oh look, it’s another 45-year-old who needs their mother’s permission for something.
When you remember all the crap he talked about Jeff’s mother, this is no surprise.
Pam is not Jeff’s mother. If anything, Pam is completely the opposite: she’s too lenient of Jeff and Ed’s self-destructive stupidity. And she thinks an international vacation is an adequate replacement for a damaged shirt.
This is another example of Schrodinger’s Continuity (characters having whatever traits the story needs them to have.) But I never though Batiuk would weaken a story built around his mommy issues. Max, your grandmother threw out your comic books, not your mother. Learn the difference. Or do you not have object permanence yet? I knew these people had severe maturity problems, but jeez.
You’ll notice that it’s his wife seeing the alleged problem.
Are we gonna have another pregnancy, and then perhaps a third (Pete & Mindy?), so we can end Crankshaft with a trifecta of births? Hey, I correctly called the end of the Funky Winkerbean strip. It’s not so implausible.
Today’s Crankshaft
Hannah: I don’t think your mother’s gonna be happy when we tell her that we’re both $300,000,000,000 in debt because of that Dinkle bastard.
It seems to me that whatever this is, it’s something that Pam should be the one organizing.
At this point with the cutesey BS it’s going to be something dumb because nothing actually happens in the Funkyverse and hasn’t for a good 5 or 6 years now as everything is always a lot of build up to nothing. Given how The Snorings just turned out to be some stairs getting charred, there’s no reason to expect anything beyond some trite Al Capone’s vault style reveal.
At least For Better Or For Worse had stakes:
“Will Mike embed himself in his sister’s room like a tick and bullshit his way into displacing his parents?”
“Will Liz marry her stalker?”
“Will April continue her one-sided rivalry with a girl who doesn’t realize she’s trying to crush people with her star power?”
“Will John screw around with model trains?”
“Will Elly continue to pretend to be downtrodden and disenfranchised because she hasn’t clued into people being afraid to anger her?”
Also, I think Hannah is the driver of the conflict.
3/3: Given Puff Tommy’s festering hatred of the mother who had more on the go than indulging a lazy and stupid child with a stupid child’s need to ignore social norms, whatever Pam isn’t supposed to object to is something that she has every right to be agitated by.
No, it isn’t. Pam is about 75 years old, which means her son and his spouse are well over 40. There is nothing – and I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING – they need her approval for. They’re already married and have a child, one that was famously conceived in their own movie theater. This almost has to be something stupid. I think the favorite is that Max stammers his way to “c-c-c-c-c-can-can-can I collect comic books?”
This was a huge problem with that Kent State shootings story, which most people thought was good. The story insisted on Pam concealing her true “involvement” in the shooting, which was (1) dictated by her job as a campus journalist; (2) on the right side of history; (3) a PTSD-inspiring near-death event she should not feel pressured to lie about; (4) completely undermined the lesson they were trying to teach their descendants about the high stakes of college life; and (5) concealed Timmy Meckler’s heroism from his father Ralph, when that would probably help him cope with Timmy’s death. Instead, Ralph got… another video tape of a dead person!
All because she doesn’t dare offend Daddy’s feelings. Even when Daddy’s an even more toxic knockoff of Archie Bunker who couldn’t be more wrong on this issue if he tried.
It’s a knock on effect of Batiuk and his mindless worship of his dad. For pity’s sake, he can’t even go to a decent hotel because he doesn’t want to disrespect his dad. No way is he pointing out how full of shit Ed was about Vietnam.
Minor point, but I don’t believe Max and Hannah ever actually got married.
(I came SO close to typing “Max and Mindy” there. Who also aren’t married, as far as we know, but… I don’t think even Batiuk would do THAT story.)
The Batiuk Blondes are sort of alternate versions of Jan Darling as Westview/Centerville is some kind of quantum anamoly due to TimeMop’s mucking about in the timestream. Jan, being the original or “real” one, is why she’s the only one who ages as she’s the only one native to this universe.
My odds for this week’s story:
+10000 An identifiable regular character makes a major life announcement where it’s reasonable to be trepidatious about informing elderly parents
+500 Mason Jarre has given Max and Hannah some kind of promotion in his movie theater
+300 They’re going back to their jobs at Channel 1 airing John Darling reruns
+200 Hannah is pregnant again, even though she’s already been knocked up once in their movie theater, and they never needed need mom’s permision for that
+150 This is somehow about Cindy Summers’ never-resolved pregnancy
-10000 This is something about Lisa
-50000 They won some kind of award
-1000000 Max wants to buy comic books
Taking all bets.
And the answer was “something even more stupid than any of those.”