Yes, yes, I haven’t posted in forever, many thanks to Banana Jr 6000 and Narshe etc etc…
More importantly what the hell is going on this strip?
That is NOT the Starlight Ballroom in Chippewa Lake Park. THAT is an amalgamation of two different comic panels drawn decades apart, one of which included a different fictional band leader and band.
And the other, is a panel from Lillian’s imagined afterlife for Lucy. So don’t ask me how Eugene was able to pull a photograph from purgatory itself.
What unites the two, other than the copy pasting work of some poor computer intern posing as Dan Davis? They’re both supposed to be in the Wisteria Ball Room at Summit Beach Park!
This:
Is not Eugene and Lucy dancing at Chippewa Lake. Because it’s them at Summit Beach.
A location established as so important to Lucy that in the throes of dementia she somehow found her way there!
A location established for decades and decades. 30 years at minimum!
Now it’s pretty obvious, with only the barest bit of research, that Summit Beach Park was always based on the real life Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio, just south of Medina, which closed in 1978 after a hundred years of operation.
The grounds sat abandoned, the play place for vandals and urban explorers, slowly being consumed by nature and burned by arsonists for more than 40 years, providing reference photos for Batiuk to pass on to Ayers.
The ride track in the foreground was the Tumble Bug. Only one ride of its kind remains in operation at Kennywood.
I will say that the Wisteria Ballroom and the Starlight Ballroom don’t share much resemblance on the outside. Artistic license perhaps? After all ‘arcade’ literally means a whole bunch of arches. Wisteria looks more early 20th century amusement and looks less like a two story Village Inn.
Inside The Starlight Ballroom looked like this:
Until it looked like this:
And then in 2002 it looked like this:
(The Wisteria Ballroom was confirmed burned down in strips dating back to the 90’s btw. Did the Crankshaft strips inspire an arsonist? Was the arsonist Batiuk himself? Questions!)
Still, the most important question remains, what the heck is going on here?
A few possibilities.
1.) It’s an error. Batiuk is going senile, and is mixing up his fictional locations with the real world locations they’re based on.
But in Sunday’s strip we get those stupid ticket stubs in the title panel.
Lovingly copied from an Ebay listing photo.
Seems pretty specific and high effort to have ‘Davis’ pulling up. So what is going on? Gleeb over in the GoComics comments section may have figured it out.
So I’m putting my money on gleeb’s notion that Batiuk is choosing to muck around with 30 years of continuity and water down Summit Park as a place of importance to Lucy and Eugene in order to crowbar in a current local Ohio event. Banana Jr, put me down for betting that this whole stupid arc ends with Harry Dinkle directing his choir/band of geriatrics at the opening of the new Chippewa Lake Nature Park. Eugene will shed a single wistful tear as he watches on TV from the comfort of his prison or nursing home or anchorite’s cell or desert island or wherever he’s going.
Funny that Batiuk would look back so fondly on The Starlight Ballroom. That is where, in 1937, Lawrence Welk made his first radio broadcast. And Batiuk’s relationship with Welk is…fraught.
Funnier still that Ed Crankshaft is acting like he’s never heard the name Larry Dinkle before. Because his best friend for life, Ralph Meckler, played trumpet in his band.
lol
Son of Stuck Funky 
Of course he’s going to invite himself to the proceedings. How else is he going to get his characters to make a hash of things while people look on in impotent rage?
As for Ed’s amnesia, it’s called (terrible) writing.
Indeed it is, though I do think Ed forgetting (or never caring to remember in the first place) that Ralph played in Dinkfather’s orchestra tracks with his character. This is, after all, the same Ed Crankshaft who forgot to vote for Ralph back when he was running for mayor… a vote that could have swung the election. In real life, anyone in Ralph’s shoes would have stopped talking to Ed decades ago.
Ed is scrap friend so it’s likely that he wasn’t listening.
Thank you so much, Harriet. There are a lot of pieces here that I don’t recall seeing before, and tying everything together here in this fashion truly shows just how wretched this whole thing is.
Larry Dinkle was so proud of his silver trumpet he had it bronzed.
Because I had no idea the strip Crankshaft even existed until a few years ago, I had no idea this sad attempt at a story telling arc had been limping along for over 30 excruciating years.
Puts the Batton Death March — now coming up on year 2 — into some kind of perspective.
Good Lord, why is Lillian so eager to drag her sister back to the scene of the love affair she ruined? Is Lillian torturing Lucy, or herself? Is this a Cannot Spit It Out story, where Lillian is trying to get Lucy to prompt her about what happened to Eugene, but Lucy never got the clue? Is this a twisted mixture of Saw and Flatliners, where they’re confronting their past selves in the most psychologically cruel way possible? No wonder Lucy went insane.
TBF, Lil never dragged Lucy back to Summit. First Lucy wandered there on her own in the 90’s. Then in the weird ghost dream segment from 2011, it was Lucy’s ghost demanding to be taken back to Summit Beach.
Let’s be honest: at 79 years old, Batty can barely be expected to remember what he wrote last Tuesday, let alone keep track of the absolute mountain of continuity he’s piled up over the decades. When you churn out daily comic strips for what feels like a literal century, the sheer volume of overlapping timelines and forgotten characters becomes an unmanageable mess. He’d need to maintain a staff just to keep track of it all. Besides, we all know how much Batty cares about fact-checking, especially at this point in his career; the only thing bigger than the mountain of continuity is the humongous “List of Things Batty Knows Nothing About.” When you’ve been running the show this long, consistency takes a back seat to just crossing the daily finish line. With decades’ worth of plots clogging up the archives, it’s no wonder the facts are constantly tripping over each other. We notice the contradictions and find them frustrating, but most casual Crankshaft readers probably don’t give them a second thought.
What ever happened with the Cindy Summers-Jarre pregnancy, Batty? The poor woman has a gestation period longer than an African elephant.
Batiuk forgetting Ralph played for Larry Dinkle’s band is no big deal really, I just thought it was funny. But we had that entire Memorial Day segment of Eugene taking WISTERIA to Lucy’s grave just last year. He’s been, in some ways, more obsessed with Summit Beach and Eugene in the last few years that he ever was in the 90’s. Seems strange for him to just forget the Wisteria Ballroom after all that.
Don’t worry, Harriet, I haven’t gone over to the dark side to become a Batiuk defender! Heaven forbid. I completely agree with you that forgetting the whole Wisteria/Eugene/Lucy connection, especially after he’s been so obsessed with it recently, is incredibly sloppy. To be clear, I’m certainly not calling the guy senile; I’m just hinting that the creative effort and pride he once put into his work is clearly no longer there. He just doesn’t care enough to check his own notes anymore.
Batiuk forgetting Ralph played for Larry Dinkle’s band is funny, Ed and Ralph have been friends since childhood. Ralph playing in Dinkle’s band is something Ed (and Batiuk) should have remembered even if I didn’t.
I was really just trying to make a joke about the “normie” readers out there who read Crankshaft over their morning coffee, completely oblivious to his butchered continuity. To them, “it’s just a comic strip,” but to those of us here, your incredible deep-dive into the archives proves just how checked-out his timeline management really is. Keep up the amazing work, I love what you do!
I’m just annoyed that there’s another 110-year-old man in this comic strip. Ralph was apparently a fully formed adult on October 28, 1937.
The problem isn’t the length of Cindy’s pregnancy, since we haven’t seen her in the strip since the week her pregnancy was announced, which was two years ago this month. The problem is that she would have to have become pregnant at around 70 years old based on current continuity.
The oldest verified woman to give birth was Erramatti Mangayamma from India. She got pregnant via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) using donor eggs and delivered twin girls on September 5, 2019, at the age of 74. It is not entirely improbable.
The way the subject of Cindy’s pregnancy was abandoned makes me wonder if it was a one-off joke at the expense of Max and Hannah. If it was a joke it landed with a thud. Especially with the readers.
If the pregnancy was supposed to be for real, add Cindy’s pregnancy to the long list of things Batty has forgotten about.
Perhaps some of Batty’s stories had to be put on the back burner to make room for the never-ending Batton Death March. The man has priorities.
Also, most people assume that old people forget stuff.
“What feels like a literal century”, by the by, actually is a literal century in regards to Tom Batiuk. As of today, TB has had a comic strip published for over 101 combined years (36,943 days), between the runs of FW, Shaft, and John Darling (and likely has had over 100 years worth of daily strips printed during that time). TB reached the century milestone on March 23, 2025, which marked the 13,834th day since Crankshaft began. Add that to the 18,541 days between the beginning and end of Funky Winkerbean and the 4,150 days between the beginning and end of John Darling and you get the 36,525 days that make up a century.
Funky Winkerbean
Start: 3/27/1972 Finish: 12/31/2022 – 18,541 days or 51 years and 278 days
John Darling
Start: 3/25/1979 Finish: 8/4/1990 – 4,150 days or 11 years and 132 days
Crankshaft
Start: 6/8/1987 Today: 6/15/2026 – 14,252 days or 39 years and 7 days
Total – 36,943 days or 101 years and 53 days
They should give him two Golden T-Squares. He’s earned it!
Despite not illustrating the majority of those strips, that is a quite impressive number of scripted comic strips. For some reason, the NCS is unimpressed.
Bill Holbrook is a fascinating comparison because he’s one of the very few cartoonists who can legitimately be mentioned alongside Tom Batiuk in the “multiple daily strips for decades” category.
Strip Years: On the Fastrack: 42, Safe Havens: 38, and Kevin and Kell : 31 for a total of 111 years.
So by the simple “combined strip-years” metric, Holbrook has now edged past Batiuk, with about 111 years versus 100.
Where Batiuk may still have an advantage is in the sheer number of published installments. Funky Winkerbean, John Darling, and Crankshaft were both daily-and-Sunday newspaper strips during their runs, while Safe Havens has traditionally been weekday/Saturday only, and Kevin and Kell is primarily known as a webcomic. A precise strip-count would require detailed accounting, but Batty’s Sunday output probably narrows or even eliminates Holbrook’s lead in total individual episodes.
FWIW, Bill Holbrook is ten years younger than Batty.
Batiuk forgetting minor details like Ralph being in the Larry Dinkle Orchestra are mostly fine, although his habit of dropping in bits of minutiae as if we’re expected to remember every single detail from every single strip does make it fun to play the beady-eyed nitpicker. Just look at this current story; it started with Eugene showing up at Lillian’s, but would a casual reader know who Eugene even is? Even with context clues, all you can really gather is that he was an old friend of Lillian’s and someone named “Lucy”, who was also apparently important to Lillian. We’re expected to know the relationship between Eugene and Lucy – and conveniently ignore the role Lillian played in that relationship, of course, since this story is supposed to be heartwarming, I think? – but Batiuk doesn’t give you enough information to figure out the exact nature of that relationship. Which, again, wouldn’t necessarily be terrible, except that in other instances he’ll infodump in the clunkiest manner possible. “Jessica Darling Fairgood Daughter Of John Darling Who Was Murdered”, “Batton Thomas Creator Of The Syndicated Comic Strip Three O’Clock High”… people constantly being greeted with their entire resume in a manner that doesn’t resemble actual hu-man speech patterns.
I guess the bottom line is: I can forgive Batiuk’s occasional lapses in continuity, as long as he doesn’t expect readers to remember that continuity with perfect precision, or complain when the lapses are pointed out.
would a casual reader know who Eugene even is?
Does it even matter? Eugene’s only reason for being in the story was to deliver a message, like Jar Jar Binks. Which at least made sense in Episode I, in that Jar Jar was the only character who could credibly deliver that message. Lillian could have learned about Harry Dinkle almost anywhere. Especially if he published sheet music, as we saw in one shot.
You’re right that Batiuk often expects his audience to remember very small bits of Funkyverse lore. But he also built a story where that lore is irrelevant. It’s actually better that the audience doesn’t know the lore, because they’d be saying the same things we are: “What, this story isn’t about Eugene? Are we ever going to deal with that whole hiding-the-letter business?”
Last week Mela held a mini poll predicting where this story would go next. No one could have predicted a verbose story about the Dinkle family tree.
The only thing I got right was predicting the missing letter would not be mentioned.
The only thing I got right was predicting the missing letter would not be mentioned.
It’s not Sunday yet.
You hit the nail on the head, Green Luthor. The truth is, the Batiukverse is so wildly overpopulated with characters and abandoned story arcs at this point that if he actually tried to bring casual readers up to speed, every single strip would have to be plastered with asterisk footnotes and clunky flashbacks.
But the truth is even if he wanted to include standard narration boxes or helpful callbacks to explain who Eugene or Lucy are, where on earth would he put them? His voluminous, bloated word balloons already devour 70% of the panel space, leaving barely enough room for the characters’ floating heads, let alone a helpful editor’s note. Between the ‘resume-style’ dialogue you mentioned and the sheer wall of text he insists on churning out, the page is just too full of hot air to fit actual exposition. He’s trapped himself in a prison of his own wordiness!
Not that Batty cares if the reader is up to speed. To him, that’s their problem.
Batty: If you’re not familiar with what happened between Eugene and Lucy, the book ‘Roses in December: A Story of Love and Alzheimer’s‘, is for sale. You can find details where to buy it on my website.
I couldn’t have said it any better. It’s bad enough that Batiuk makes lore-overloaded story arcs for the sole purpose of selling back volumes to people who don’t know the lore. What’s worse is how he acts like this is some kind of failing on the reader’s part. No, Tom, I don’t remember that Les tried out for the football team in 1980, and neither does anybody else!
A few years ago, I visited my brother in Ohio. Somehow, our conversation turned to his time in the school band. He mentioned that he still had two trumpets stored on an upper shelf in his bedroom closet. I asked if he could still play. Out of curiosity, he retrieved the cases.
He was distressed to discover how tarnished his silver-plated concert trumpet had become in the years since he last played it. His gold lacquered marching-band trumpet was similarly afflicted. Even the mouthpieces were tarnished.
There’s no way Dinkle Daddy’s trumpet looks that pristine after being in a storage locker for that long.
Also, why is it so hard for the GoComics color monkeys to read the comic before applying the colors? The text clearly states “silver-plated” in the same panel. I know they just follow a numbered guide, but somebody should have noticed.
That being said, it’s still better than what ArcMax released. Something seems to be missing, gang. Something like the black layer? Oopsy! 😆
ArcaMax: It… um… it was like that when we found it.
Dinkle is obviously one of The Custodians (along with TimeMop™), with access to technology that allows him to violate normal chronological laws. I mean, he kept whole turkeys in his freezer for, like, thirty years without them ever spoiling, AND he was able to defrost and cook them in only a few hours. Clearly, his freezer slows down the effects of time on items inside it, while his oven speeds them up. It thus stands to reason that his storage locker can also slow down time inside it, thus preserving the trumpet and everything else there. (Meanwhile, it might seem to those inside the locker that only a few minutes will pass, but it will probably be at least a week later once they leave. And to the readers, it’ll feel like it’s been going on for an eternity.)
The Elegant Solution™!
I always assumed Harry Dinkle was not of this earth.😄
The evidence has been piling up for decades. The man stored Thanksgiving turkeys for thirty years and served them as if they’d been frozen last Tuesday. He can retrieve a trumpet from a storage locker after an equally absurd span of time and find it in pristine condition. Normal laws of physics, biology, and food safety simply do not apply. The Dinkle garage and storage lockers are pocket dimensions. Every object Harry puts into storage enters temporal stasis until the plot requires it.
Your Custodian theory is compelling, but I think it gives Harry too much credit. Custodians merely manipulate time. Harry appears to exist entirely outside of it.
One thing is for sure, metal instrument storage, frozen turkey storage, and turkey thawing/cooking have been added to the colossal list of things Batty knows nothing about.
For some reason, I feel the Batiuk family Thanksgiving dinners were held at Luigi’s.
Thanks for the history lesson, Harriet. For years, both Summit Lake and Chippewa Beach were both very popular and were really packing them in. They’re less than 25 miles apart. Chippewa Lake is in Medina County and Summit Beach is in Akron, so I guess CL would have been closer for Eugene and Lucy. Don’t they live in Westview which is supposed to be Medina?
As a kid, I went to Chippewa Lake a few times with my family. I remember riding the wooden coaster Big Dipper and the small metal frame ride the Wild Mouse. I went there last in 1977 for an Oktoberfest.
When CL was first mentioned I looked up articles and photos to refresh my memory. One story I liked said that there was flooding after a big storm and some cabins were cut off by the water. Row boats were sent out, not to rescue the stranded people, but to make sure that they were able to get to the ballroom for the dance!
A lot of my friends that grew up in Akron saw some great rock shows and wrestling matches at the Armory (1918-1982). The circus was there. The first show was John Phillip Sousa and the concerts were the hottest stars of the day. You were hot shit if you played there!
I like that the illustration of the Akron Armory includes the doughboy statue out front and Zion Lutheran Church (1877), both of which still look great today. I can’t identify the building with the peaked roof, but I think it represents the Quaker Oats Company silo tower (1932). I think the building being eclipsed by the AA are the silos themselves. If you like repurposed buildings check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker_Square
Ayers should know what this looks like. The Beacon Journal office is only a few blocks away.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but I read all this shit and I wanted to share.
Meyers Lake Amusement Park was a historic, long-running lakeside destination in Canton, Ohio, that operated from 1880 until it permanently closed in 1974. Known for its wooden roller coaster (The Comet) and the Moonlight Ballroom,
When I was a child, Dad’s company picnic was once held there. They even had the ‘Tumble Bug’. Kids being kids, I took my snow cone aboard the Tumble Bug. The ride shook the treat out of my hand. As the icy concoction dripped on the seat towards Dad, he grabbed it and threw it out of the car. Damn, I wanted that snow cone. It was grape.
You beat me to it with the history of Summit Beach and Chippewa Lake. I remember going to Chippewa Lake in the early 70’s as the company my father worked for had picnics there in the summer. Chippewa Lake is being revitalized slowly. I heard from a friend that the foundation received a grant to install trolley tracks and catenary wire so that they could offer rides in vintage trolley’s. There is a small railroad museum nearby where they will store the cars. This is surely something Batty, and I will enjoy.
Don’t know anything about the Tumble Bug, but on a mid-’60s family trip to Palisades Amusement Park in NJ I distinctly recall going on their version of the ride, which they called the Caterpillar. And yes, I cut up pages from some of my Silver Age DC comics to get the money saving coupons Superman touted in ads. Took me years to replace those books.
But what about the all-important question: did you cut those comics with scissors, or hack away at them with a knife?
I got a ride on the Kennywood one (Pittsburgh suburbs) a couple of years ago, still running fine if a little slow by today’s standards. There was some signage describing it’s unique place in amusement park history, which was nice.
Kennywood was a pretty good deal for someone with a young child to entertain, fwiw.
This storyline (which i’ve barely looked at) does have that local color and nostalgia that i think Batiuk should have leaned into more. A shuttered Ohio amusement park and sepia memories? Great. Dragging Dinkle out for another round? Ehhh.
I apologize for beady-eyed nitpicking but a Caterpillar isn’t a Tumble Bug. They’re similar in that they’re flat rides sending a train of cars on a circular, undulating platform but you can say that about a lot of rides, like Himalayas and Bayern Kurves and (stretching a point) Tilt-A-Whirls.
The unique point of the Caterpillar was the canopy that covered the entire ride while in operation, which makes it harder to guess just when you’re going up and when you’re going down and allows for better canoodling chances. (Also, in a 1930something Dick Tracy sequence, an instance of a villain escaping while under the Caterpillar’s cover, by dropping underneath the ride while in motion, which is audacious and cool enough who cares whether it makes sense.)
With the Tumble Bug/Turtle ride the unique point is you’re in a circular car and are tossed around the center post as the ride goes. The Caterpillar has your regular seat facing forward that you don’t get tumbled around in. One wonderful time an operator at Conneaut Lake Park (the next-to-last Tumble Bug-haver) told us riders the game was to not be the last person to grab the center handle and it is hard to resist grabbing on to stabilize yourself.
Both rides (and the Bayern Kurve) are all-but-extinct and if you find one running, get a ride while you can; although kiddie versions of the rides are still going in a lot of parks.
Good call, Joseph. I looked at the Bug’s picture and thought it had the canopies. Now I’m trying to think where I went on one of those rides in my youth, because I’m sure there was one somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic region. Maybe Hersheypark? Knoebels? Not Lenape Park.
This is the kind of thing this story should be exploring. If we’re going to talk about these long-forgotten and just-now-being-preserved places, it would be fun to explore old attractions like the Tumble Bug. Too bad Batiuk doesn’t have a shred of interest in anything beyond filling space with tired stories about dead people being reminisced by people who should be dead.
And if Gleeb is right that Batiuk is promoting some local restoration project, my Funkshi bet is that Batiuk is a corporate sponsor, at whatever level gets him attention at the banquet or whatever event they have.
6/15: It will probably never occur to the man that he was allowed to be his own man. Batiuk is just too daddy obsessed.
Yeah, this is kind of the opposite of all Batiuk’s mommy-bashing stories. “In the name of the father”, indeed.
The man probably spent his childhood listening to war stories in brain dead reverence.
This is probably going to be a week of Dinkle sucking up to his father, and also Tom Batiuk transparently sucking up to his own father. Which seems like way too little, way too late. How many times have Funkyverse characters worked through some version of “my Mom took my comic books away” while their fathers have never been spoken of? It’s like Batiuk realized, at age 79, that maybe he was focused on the wrong parent.
The idea must be that if he’d been a good enough son, Daddy would have stopped her.
Good job. Considerably better than the maudlin sludge in the real strip.
I adored both my parents (who, by the way, kept me supplied with a steady supply of books, including comics), but I had no interest in following in their footsteps. I certainly couldn’t be like my dad, who was a self-trained mechanical engineer (I’m lucky I know which end of a hammer to hold).
As for my sons, they have gone off in their own directions in life, which is exactly how it ought to be.
You can love and honor your parents without trying to be them.
Put me down for betting that this whole stupid arc ends with Harry Dinkle directing his choir/band of geriatrics at the opening of the new Chippewa Lake Nature Park.
Okay, done. I am also informally accepting any predictions anyone wants to make in the comments.
I predict that whatever Batiuk does with this arc, it will suck. (There, that should net me another .0001 Batton Death March Points!)
I’ll allow it.
I predict an utter lack of self awareness from all concerned parties.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 14 and 15 of In The Name of The Father
Ed: I bet your father would’ve been disgusted if he ever found out about your extremely abusive behavior towards your students and co-workers.
(Dinkle smacks Ed in the face)
Lillian: He’s right, Harold.
6/16: This also describes him and his child. He sees this as normal. He is a fool.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down ….
6/17: Guessing he’d blow a gasket if you reminded him he did the same thing his dad did for the same reason.
Batty’s got a new blog post up today (6/17), and it’s a doozy. He talks about his love affair with Hollywood, well not quite, because he really isn’t interested in movies, he’s more interested in how movies are made. He sure is proud of Lisa’s story, and that actress who climbed the Hollywood sign.
I guess he is being honest here, because he thinks the same way about comic books, he is obsessed with the process of making them, and creating the covers, but not interested in creating an interesting story.
Marianne was honestly one of the least objectionable parts of the Hollywood stuff and later years for me. Hell of just about any character she has probably the most reasonable story arc: she’s seen as a vapid actress who gets by on her looks, has a role where she’ll have to show actual range and talent beyond looking pretty, goes through a bit of hardship that fills her with doubt but she recovers from, shows that she has actual talent and is recognized for it and then leaves with newfound confidence.
Of course it’s Batty so the actual execution is awkward and kind of dumb and in the end exists to glaze Les for no real reason and would have undoubtedly been done better by even a mildly more competent writer. But I can at least see what he was doing and see that the storry, poorly executed or not, was by his standards logical. Much more logical than everything involving Dopey and Mopey in Act III.
Come on along, come on along
It’s Larry Dinkle’s craptime band!
Come on along, come on along
They’re the worst band in the land!
The matching outfits were a great idea but what really sent them into the stratosphere was when they got identical haircuts and became known as the Crewcut Cutups!
“And it really came together when Dad sang along!”
Why are the Dinkle band guys posing like the cover of a late-60s folk rock album? I wonder what photo that was cribbed from.