Sunrise Over the Chippewajaro

Is that members of the St. Spires choir wandering into some kind of abandoned location? Banana Jr! I’ll take the payout for my bet.

And to answer this question.

Let me pull up the handy guide I use when tallying up year end appearances for Awards Season.

So from left to right we’ve got Pat, Mary Jane, Lois, Lil, Ed, Nancy Harriet, and Harry. No sign of the Bedside Manor band yet. And what a choir is going to do with sheet music intended for a big dance hall band is still a mystery.

‘In the Name of the Father’ has been a real treat for me in the way a decaying fever dream of a wannabe auteur can only be. Weirdly ambitious, disjointed, and with all the artistic merit poorly implemented cut and paste technology can provide.

As in so many things Batiuk tries, there’s a kernel of a solid idea inside the poorly processed shit. Elderly man connects with the memory of the long dead father with whom he had a complicated relationship. Making Larry Dinkle a sad drunk who never really achieved his dreams might be considered unnecessarily maudlin by many. But can you imagine this story if there WASN’T any hint of tension or conflict? If Larry was just a perfect and perfectly happy Harry clone in a different decade? This story would go from laughably bad to mind numbing.

Of course it doesn’t work, because the Crankshaft audience doesn’t care about Dinkle’s journey and has no investment in his feelings toward his dead dad. Lillian and Eugene’s feelings about dead Lucy have been done to death, and no longer carry any conflict to resolve, and using them as the launch pad to get this tour through Larry Dinkle’s history has no thematic cohesion to it.

Why doesn’t Batiuk give Cranky himself some old arcs like this again? I’d love for the old coot to DO something for once. It’s not like the old geezer doesn’t have history you could mine for some bittersweet end of life stories. Have him find his dead wife’s diary! Dead people apparently always have diaries hanging around in case you need narration over panels, ideas for your next novel, or blackmail material for wannabe reality TV producers.

But I’d still take this over Skip and Batton any day of the week.

Why did Batiuk even attempt something this borderline ambitious so late in the game? Well. I have another error that needs retracting.

Both Banana Jr, and I, had misremembered and misread this strip.

Batiuk’s mouthpiece says, “I love writing, and hate having written.”

Batiuk loves writing. He hates NOT doing it.

I still say that what Banana Jr. and I used this as evidence to argue is still true. Batiuk does love the idea of being a writer. His ego wants that identity label, and it’s more important to him than the actual stories he creates.

But it’s hard to read something like what we’ve gotten the last month and assume that Batiuk doesn’t also have some weird compulsion to weave together these nonsensical narratives. He loves writing. His brain craves the process of creation no matter how demented and lackluster the final results. It’s what makes him who he is. It’s why Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft didn’t become a Family Circus like zombie strip with no passage of time, only rotating around the same 20 safe jokes with all the regularity of a church liturgy.

Yeah he’s also only got those 20 jokes. But between them you sometimes get something like ‘In the Name of the Father.’

I poked around in the archives just a little bit. I was hunting for an arc I remembered when Harry’s daughter, Halle, visited him and he talked about how he regretted how much band directing had taken him from her. I couldn’t find the exact arc, but I did find a couple fun strips nonetheless.

80 thoughts on “Sunrise Over the Chippewajaro”

  1. 6/30: He had a heart attack and died because his band didn’t want to play to an empty ball room. How is he not like his son?

  2. I think we can all agree with Batiuk on one thing: we also hate him having written.

    1. He’s real life American Mike Patterson, perfectly capable of garbage like And then, the living buried the dead.

  3. And of course, the final insult to Larry Dinkle’s legacy came in 1982, when The Kinks, a *shudder* rock band, released “Come Dancing” and cut him completely out of the story of the decline of big bands and dance halls…

  4. Yeah, it”s probably Batiuk’s intent that this is the choir. But there’s no way that’s Pat, Mary Jane, and Lois. Unless Timemop de-aged them all, and gave them all sex changes. MJ and Lois look like high school Pete and Darin with swapped haircuts. Pat looks like Emily from Stardew Valley if she was a lot more butch.

    Sheesh, how hard was it to draw wrinkles on these three so they look as old as the others? Or use the character Ricca, the only choir member who looks like a young adult?

    1. I really can’t be angry with Dan Davis for spending as little time as possible fussing over the illustrations. Yeah, yeah, one should take pride in one’s work, sure, I get it. But c’mon … hours of extra labour isn’t going to suddenly make this turd gleam. So …
      – Do the minimum, knowing that it will still be light years better than whatever the hell the ‘art’ in Gil Thorp has devolved into.
      – Cash the cheque for $10 when it comes.
      – Work diligently on fixing whatever calamity (Gambling addiction? Blackmail-able behaviour? Sold your soul at the crossroads?) that got you into this mess in the first place.

      1. i don’t blame Davis either, but sheesh — the characters need to look like themselves.

    1. And then, a workman will bloodlessly shove his skeleton into a garbage bag.

  6. So… the band came back from intermission only to find the dance hall empty, but Lucy and Eugene came back from the intermission only to find the band had left? Am I missing something? Does this timeline make any sense without including the phrase “time-traveling janitor”?

      1. But both the night shown here and the night Lucy and Eugene were there were supposed to be the night he premiered “Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro”, no?

        (Wait, the new strip just went up. Yep, it’s the night Lucy and Eugene were there all right, unless they were somehow there while Lucy was in the mental hospital?)

      2. Good point! We can now place the youth of Lucy and Eugene well into the 50’s. Lol.

        I wonder if Larry Dinkle was originally conceived as a grandfather or uncle of Harry’s? Not sure. Larry never really came up in Funky Winkerbean proper, as far as I can remember.

        1. How would that fit in with the whole “hiding the letter” story? Are we to believe they continued dating after World War II, and the subject never came up?

          1. But Lucy had her breakdown when Eugene enlisted to fight in WWII, so she should have been institutionalized (she only wanted a Pepsi! *Ahem* Sorry about that)… anyway, she should have still been in the hospital even after Eugene got back. So they couldn’t have been dating after WWII.

            Seriously, the timeline in Heinlein’s “-All You Zombies-“ makes more sense than this thing.

          2. In our universe it’s Simpsons/comic book logic. Did Abe Simpson fight in World War II? depends on which season of the show you’re watching.

            Within the Funkyverse? Uhhh… Eugene was in Korea? Yeah. We’ll go with that.

          3. i don’t think we know exactly when Lucy had her breakdown. But she knew he was going to war, so she shouldn’t have been confused about why he wasn’t writing between 1942-1945.

          4. World War II soldiers could and did write letters home.

            That said, I can’t even make sense of Lucy’s nervous breakdown, even though we’ve talked about it in this blog many times before.

            Why would Lucy think Eugene had broken up with her and didn’t want to see her again? Yes, Eugene’s letter said that if Lucy didn’t respond, he would assume she was no longer interested and would never write again. But Lucy didn’t see that letter, because Lillian hid it. So for Lucy to find out that Eugene had joined the Army … that would hardly mean to her that he had broken up with her. Lucy knew about the war. It was in all the papers!

          5. Specifically, Eugene’s letter said, “If your answer is ‘yes’ … meet me on this coming Friday night inside the brass rail at the Wisteria Ballroom. If you don’t come … I’ll know your answer and won’t bother you about it again.”

            So when Lucy failed to show up, Eugene knew he wasn’t going to write to her again. But Lucy didn’t know that. There would have been no sudden point when Lucy knew that Eugene was going to stop contacting her. She would just have been waiting for a letter from Eugene for an indefinite period of time that never arrived.

            On the other hand, since Lucy had no reason to think that Eugene had broken up with her, she presumably would have written to him when he was in the Army. And that would presumably have reversed Eugene’s assumption that she wanted to break up with him.

          6. When Eugene up and enlisted without telling her, Lucy assumed that he must have been breaking up with her (I mean, who enlists and leaves town without even saying “goodbye” to their girlfriend, unless they have no intention of ever seeing that girlfriend again?), thus leading to her breakdown. (And she probably wouldn’t have been writing to him from the hospital, since she a) assumed he had broken up with her, and b) wasn’t in the mental state to write the letters anyway.)

          7. When Eugene up and enlisted without telling her, Lucy assumed that he must have been breaking up with her, thus leading to her breakdown.

            You know who’d be pushing that theory? Lillian. Because it absolves her of any role in her sister’s breakdown. “What letter? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Must have gotten lost in the mail. How sad.”

        2. I agree with Green Luthor that both Lucy and Eugene taking the sudden lack of communication as a breakup is plausible enough. It paints both people as stupid as sin, but in a way I could see happening IRL. Some people do just be like that.

          And Lucy’s institutionalization supposedly changed her for life. Heck…I even get weird lobotomy vibes from this strip.

    2. You didn’t officially place a bet, but I’m calling that a winner.

  7. RE: Wed. 7/1’s ‘Shaft:

    All I can say is, thank goodness Pinky Lee and ZaSu Pitts were there to save “Sunrise Over Mohenjo Daro.”

    1. Tomorrow, they’ll be the people who show up in the teaser of anything by Dick Wolf when they find his corpse.

  9. Yes, I completely overlooked the fact that Batton flipped the two words in his version of the sentence. My response to that is:

    Does it even matter?

    If you asked Tom Batiuk or Batton Thomas what either version of that sentence means, he’d just stare at you blankly. Everything Tom Batiuk does – and I mean EVERYTHING – is a bad mimicry of something someone else wrote. He has this notion in his head that “writers should talk about the process”, so his blog is full of these voluminous rants about what he thinks that process is. It’s like he’s imitating writers like Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, who are quite willing to talk about their creative processes, and have insightful things to say. So Batiuk writes these wordy, misaimed declarations about the importance of research, when his own work contains mistakes he could have avoided by typing one word into Google. He can’t do research for shit, but he knows on some level that he should, so he puts on charades like this.

    Impostor Syndrome is when genuinely skilled people have an irrational fear of being exposed as frauds. Which is a cruel condition to have when the world is full of Tom Batiuks: complete frauds who somehow build a long career out of it, and never once doubt themselves when they absolutely should. If there’s such a thing as Anti-Impostor Syndrome – irrationally believing yourself to possess talents you clearly do not have – this is a textbook case of it. I think it’s a major symptom of Stage 4 Dunning-Kruger Disease.

    1. The man who write what would become A Christmas Story called it Creeping Meatballism. The meatball thinks that if he mouths the right words, he’ll be the person he thinks he’s copying.

    2. And there’s a brand new Match To Lame: “I spread my pictures and notes across my drawing board, settle into my comfortable chair, open my trusty laptop, flex my fingers, and write the eyeballs out of it.” Well, Tom, thank you for clearing THAT up.

        1. Like I said, everything Tom Batiuk writes is to mimic other people, or to sound pretentious. He would never use a phrase like “burn the midnight oil”, which is clear and well-understood. He’d think “no, no, no, too cliched. How can I express that I’m working really hard? I can’t say ‘working really hard’, obviously. I know! Write the eyeballs out of it!”

          Also: write the eyeballs out of WHAT? Nothing in this paragraph has eyeballs. Your laptop doesn’t have eyeballs. Your fingers don’t have eyeballs. Your chair doesn’t have eyeballs. The writer has eyeballs, but you wouldn’t say “it” when you’re talking about yourself. Instead of clearly stating what he’s doing, the writer put a confusing and disturbing image in the reader’s head.

          1. Orwell talked about a British Batiuk of the forties who’d said that the fascist octopus had sung its swan song when he set out his rules for clear prose.
            .

          2. This is also why nothing he writes sounds authentic. Whether it’s his comic strips or his blog posts, nothing sounds real. I understand the artistic license to stretch the meaning of words to illustrate a subtlety, but like you said, Batty stretches it so far that there is no meaning left.
            And he invites this criticism because he brags about being a writer. Mary Worth features things written in a way nobody would speak them, but the team of Moy and Brigman never write long diatribes about “the process”.

  11. I think it would have been funny to see Larry driving his band as hard as Harry did the Marching Band, but of course, comics don’t have to be funny, but sometimes they should.

    CBH is right though, Crankshaft readers have no investment in Harry Dinkle, band director. But I have no interest to nestle in and read this crap and I’ve been to some of the places mentioned in this story. Show Ed going overboard for America’s 250th or something like that.

    1. But Larry’s band consisted of professional musicians, whereas Harry’s marching band were high school students.

      Actually, I can see it going the other way around.

      Larry’s diary: “The band was scheduled to practice for two hours today, but there was a lot of tension and arguments among the musicians. So I said, ‘Follow me,’ and led the band over to the local high school. I asked to borrow a football, and we spent a little time on the field tossing the football around for fun. By the end of it all, we had forgotten what we had been arguing about and we all felt much better.”

      Harry: “What was Dad thinking?! That’s awful! Football fields are for band practice!“

  13. I have read every strip in the current arc of Crankshaft and I couldn’t tell you a single concrete idea of what has happened. Something about Single and music and his Dad.

    So, so boring.

    1. It’s not you … it’s the consistent magic of Batiuk’s storytelling. Each individual strip is poised somewhere between blandly unmemorable and pitiably stupid. But when the whole story is looked at over the course of an arc? Incredibly, the sum of the whole still somehow manages to be even LESS than (considerably less than) its terrible constituent parts.

  14. Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery

    Days 30 and 31 of In The Name of The Father

    HARLEY DAVIDSON THE TIME-TRAVELING JANITOR, WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE TO THE BATIUKVERSE TIMELINE

    1. Is Batiuk leaning into Timemop at this point? The story makes zero chronological sense – even by this feature’s low standards – unless it’s acknowledging him.

  15. So, Daddy Dinkle’s musicians walked out on him during an intermission in their performance for one couple (see 6/30 strip), but they left their instruments and luggage behind in the band bus? Makes perfect sense.

    And this is also supposed to be the night Larry died (see 6/22 strip). Is that why he’s huffing and puffing in Panel Two? Makes perfect sense.

    Oh, and after spending the first weeks of this “tale softly told” telling his life story to Lillian and that bus driver with the ballcap (what’s his name again?), Harry has brought the St. Spires choir gals out to the charred ruins of the Starlight Ballroom to…do what? Sing non-existent lyrics to “Moonlight Over Madagascar”? Makes perfect sense.

    1. Was the band so bad that everybody left at intermission, or did the band get so high on the bus that they forgot they had to play a second set?

      I think the band is waiting on the bus for Dinkle to get over his temper tantrum. Or maybe they all drove separately and split. I’m betting that Larry gets drunk and crashes the bus. And then he dies.

      Eugene wrote his proposal letter when he went off to serve during WWII. WWII ended in 1945. Elvis first appeared on tv in January, 1956.

      2. Lots of other people have brought up these same points but I’m kind of talking to myself to try and grasp the magnitude of the stupidity.

        What happened to the audience? What happened to the band?

        Wasn’t there a more elegant way to get the sheet music to Dinkle?

        Larry Dinkle has become unstuck in time.

  18. In “Errors Were Made”, CBH mentioned that there are restoration efforts ongoing for the Wisteria Ballroom and/or Summit Lake Park.

    This whole story is a blatant commercial for the place. It’s not about Dinkle, his father, his father’s band, Eugene, Lucy, or anything else. Saturday’s strip might as well be Ed Crankshaft turning to the camera and saying “and the ballroom has reopened today! Come on down to Summit Lake Park and find YOUR memories! Enjoy our rental canoe, ballroom, and this week only, unlimited free screenings of The Phantom Empire!”

    I feel like I’m watching one of those in-content commercials that the high-end YouTubers do.

    1. AND THEN HE DIED. Again!

      Now that Batiuk has finally gotten around to clarifying what actually happened in this rambling Ovaltine commercial, we see that Dinkle has been WAAAAAY too glib the entire time. His father drove off Nobottom Road almost exactly like Bull Bushka, but Dinkle tells the whole story like he’s telling a joke. “A band director and two teenagers walk into a dance hall…”

      My father, whom my entire family loved greatly, died of a heart attack. Not immediately, but it was ultimately his cause of death. If I ever told his story this disrespectfully, my mother and brother would both disown me. And they’d be right to do so.

      On the WTF scale, this is right up there with “talking murder chimp” and “Darrin made his son a toy out of his grandfather’s murder weapon.” Eugene had this grisly trophy of a man who died later that night – the father of a local legend everybody in town knows – and he silently kept it for 80 years? It never occurred to him to share it with the grieving family, OR share it with the music community, OR cash it in? Even Letter-Hiding Lillian had the decency to do one of those things. Well, I’ll give Eugene this: he fits in perfectly with this town of memorabilia-collecting, corpse-sniffing old fools.

      Christ, Tom Batiuk, would you please acquire a basic understanding of how human beings behave when a loved one horribly dies?

      1. This is what makes the recurring image of a workman casually throwing away Eugene’s attempts to pay tribute away so false. He’s the workman.

        1. At least you can see what it’s aiming at. Yes, the flowers dutifully left by mourners in graveyards are removed by custodial staff at some point. Probably after they’ve degraded to the point that leaving them on someone’s grave is more disrespectful than respectful.

          Which is a story you can tell. Ultimately, the remembrances we leave for our departed ones are just as temporary as all our lives are. Someday the cemetery itself will degrade into nothing, as will our species and, ultimately, this entire planet in a few billion years.

          But Tom Batiuk’s inability to understand nuance writes the script. He disregards the fact that there might be valid reasons for removing flowers from a grave. So it becomes the story Batiuk wants to tell: “uncaring people will undermine your attempts to honor your lost loved ones.” Which is simply not true. At least not in a vacuum.

          On a side note: some cemeteries have rules about what you can and can’t leave on a grave. Nobody would object to flowers, but i’ve seen signs that advise against leaving things like unconsumed alcohol. That would be another valid reason to remove someone’s well-intentioned remembrance.

  20. “We were told he probably had a heart attack.” Probably? They didn’t care, to, like… investigate? Examine the body? Dude drives a bus off the road into a lake, and they just… assume what happened? Were they trying to help the Dinkle family commit insurance fraud like with Bull Bushka? Was this like John “Stumpy” Pepys’ bizarre gardening accident that authorities felt was “best left unsolved”?

    I mean, we’ve been having our fun with “AND THEN HE DIED”, but… that seems to be exactly as much effort as was put into the police report here. “Hm, looks like this Larry Dinkle guy was driving the bus. AND THEN HE DIED.” “Are you sure you don’t want to put more detail into the incident report?” “Not really, no. Gotta get home to watch Elvis on the TV.” “That won’t happen for another 15 years.” “Oh, right. Timemop.”

    1. When Flash was using Idiotic Speed to thwart Rainbow Raider, he had a more sensible motive.

  21. Also, once again, by the use of soap opera cliches and dialogue, Lynn Johnston did far better at handling the death of Elly’s mother. Do we get glurge about her having Elly’s dad’s heart for forty years? Yes. We even get Elly thinking that her mother’s spirit inhabits a bird. Still, it’s immeasurably better than And Then He Died.

  22. Shortly after the crows had finished, the remains of Eugene’s disintegrated corpse had fallen into a neat pile beneath the rope.

    Just before midnight, Crankshaft appeared. He looked around furtively, and seeing no one, he scooped up Eugene’s remains with his Bean’s End Heavy-Duty Flat-End Garden Shovel and deposited them into his Bean’s End Easy-Glide Dyna-Flow Wheelbarrow. He then pushed the wheelbarrow all the way back to his garden in Centerville/Westview/Wherever/I Can’t Keep Them Straight. Then he happily spread the remains in his flower bed to serve as mulch.

    1. No one knows what happened that day
      How his bus overturned in flames
      But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck
      He was still clutching an empty bottle of Victory Gin in his lifeless fingers.

  25. Today’s Past Batiukverse Strips: Dinkle Struggling With The Responsibilities of Being The President of the State Music Education Association

    (dinkle then throws a chair at Fred)

    Dinkle: I SAID NOT TO FUCKING INTERRUPT ME!

    Ed: Not interested. Take that fruitcake, and get off my porch!

    ha ha it’s funny because Dinkle wants a award for every damn thing he does

  27. 7/4: This is his idea of bonding: playing Sunrise Over Deus Ex Machina at the ruins of the bandstand.

  28. Pingback: Why Is Everyone Angry at _Crankshaft_? I Mean About the Harry Dinkle’s Father Story – Another Blog, Meanwhile

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