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.