After wandering through the wreckage of the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story, this week’s Crankshaft explored Harry Dinkle’s alleged self-esteem issues. We will talk about both of these stories today, how they’re connected, and how this led me to a surprising realization about my own life.
There are two important bits of background. The first is Lucy’s Story, which explains what the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story actually is.
Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy is drafted into World War II, boy snail-mails marriage proposal containing “no response means no” clause, jealous older sister hides that letter, girl has mental breakdown, boy and girl somehow go another 60+ years without ever discussing the topic again, girl dies in 2009, boy is still longing for girl in 2026, boy has to move to a new home at age 99, Crankshaft readers wonder if they’ll ever find out where boy will be living now. (There will be a follow-up post about that.)
I know that summary got strange, but this is a strange storytelling world. If you asked the author to explain, he would say “It’s called writing.”
The other is Leaving Westview, which turned out to be perfect prologue for what I’m about to say. I’ll repost the important part:
And now:
Narshe’s great Part 3 of Summer’s backstory included this strip:
While this looks creepy on the surface – and is being done by a known creep – it is perfectly appropriate. We saw in the previous post that Lisa died on October 4, 2007. This is 15 days after that. It’s an emotionally powerful comic strip, which Funky Winkerbean was capable of producing sometimes.
But nothing will ever make Les Moore stop sniffing his dead wife’s clothes. Not 20+ years. Not a marriage to another woman. Not raising a mixed family, both racially and in the step-parenting sense. Not a phone call from Lisa from beyond the grave. Not a house that seemed to generate new Lisa artifacts every couple years. Not being handed a freaking Oscar trophy for a Hollywood movie about Lisa, which Les was sabotaging at every turn. Not other chances Les had to work through his grief.
Les smelling Lisa’s clothes is accurate and quite sympathetic. The aromas left from loved ones onto clothing, triggers memories in a very powerful way.
SorialPromise, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2026/07/08/surprise-youre-on-cancer-camera/#comment-182055
This is very true. A scent or a sound or song or a noise or a place or an object can trigger long-forgotten emotions, and turn you back into the person you were when you were having those emotions.
My first experience with this was when I was 21 and in college. I’d had a particularly triumphant night out clubbing with my best friend, Todd. We were staying at his parents’ house, and when we got there, they had some cheap bathroom product. The scent reminded me of my high school girlfriend, Susan, whose bathroom had that same product. I had no active feelings about Susan at that point. But the scent of flowers and petrochemicals in a $1.50 pharmacy item turned me from a young man happy about a rare successful night meeting women into… well, Eugene.
I recently had this experience again. Something very specific reminded me of my high school The One Who Got Away story (analogous to the Eugene-Lucy story), which helped me finally understand why she got away (the Dinkle story). This is all about people and things I haven’t thought about in a very, very, very long time. Which led me to into even deeper rabbit holes in my own head. And it finally showed me the bottom of the rabbit hole.
I’ll try to keep my story from getting too cringe. But today, I’d rather be cringe than whitewash uncomfortable realities. So buckle your seatbelts. This flight will be experiencing turbulence. Trauma dump up ahead.
I went to an emotionally abusive Christian elementary school that gleefully took a flamethrower to my self-esteem. I was a shy and introverted child by nature. The people my parents trusted to educate me used me as an object of ridicule and scorn. That piled an avalanche of self-doubt, which I didn’t previously have, on top of my shyness.
Long story short, the Christian school shunned me. And I have no idea why. Apparently, at some point between 6th and 7th grade, somebody decided I wasn’t the kind of Christian they wanted their Christian school to produce. Even though I was an agreeable child who did everything he was told, read the Bible, and got mostly A’s. But I’d already seen them do the same thing to other kids who deserved no such treatment either. There seemed to be about one kid a year who randomly got on the school’s bad side. It made no sense to me. And Christian schools aren’t in the business of teaching the critical thinking skills that might result in someone questioning their judgement.
So I’ve been dealing with self-esteem problems most of my life. Mine were caused by that very specific and identifiable thing. It wasn’t a combination of factors, or a vague, whiny Freudian Excuse like Crankshaft is pushing this week.
Funky Winkerbean appealed to me in 1988 because I related to Les Moore’s high school struggles, as depicted in the above strips. It was the only thing in media that seemed to understand what was going on in my head. So when its attempt at ripping off Peanuts ended with the girl wishing Les had asked her out, I felt personally betrayed. Even 16-year-old me didn’t believe that. That was the day I became a critic. It is my villain origin story. Mwahahahahaha!
I also shared something with adult Act II (1992-2006) Les Moore: wanting to be a writer, because of my perceived skill at it. I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up. It appealed to my writing skills, my sense of justice, and my failure to foresee that newspapers would become an obsolete medium. I would ultimately get a college degree in journalism, with a broadcasting focus. I promptly switched careers to Information Technology in adulthood, which I still work in today.
I’m honestly embarrassed to tell this story, because 50-something men should not be still processing failed high school relationships. But it’s too important to the larger story to omit, gloss over, or be vague about. And it’s a universe less creepy than anything Eugene does. More importantly, I refuse to worry about embarrassing myself anymore, for reasons I will soon make clear. So let’s go.
In high school in 1988 or 1989, I had creative a writing class in 2nd period, and journalism/high school newspaper class in 5th period. In both those classes was a girl named Christine. I still remember her last name; it was similar to that of a 1980s game show host.
One day, out of nowhere, Christine approached me before 2nd hour Creative Writing class about needing to talk, with this look on her face like it was something really important. I couldn’t imagine what this could be about, but I didn’t want to deal with it right then, so I said “talk to me in 5th hour.”
The truth is: despite my general cluelessness about how these things worked, I sensed Christine was going to tell me she had a crush on me. For some reason, I didn’t want that. And there was no logical explanation. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this girl. Not even by the sadistic social standards of high school. (Cindy Summers, I’m looking at you.)
I really liked Christine as a person. We worked together on the school newspaper. She was pretty. She was nice. She got along with people. She had no off-putting qualities. We had the same sense of humor. Considering that my defining trait in high school was doing open mic nights at legitimate adult comedy clubs, that should have been huge. (It was the late 80s. Everybody, including me, was trying to be the next George Carlin. Too bad none of us ever succeeded. Well, maybe Jon Stewart a little.)
By the time 5th hour arrived, I still didn’t want to deal with it, so I avoided her. The next day, we went back to being flirty/friendly with each other. That status quo remained for the rest of high school. But she never directly approached me again after that day. After graduation, we went our separate ways.
I tossed my high school yearbook in the trash decades ago. But I recently remembered what she wrote in it. “…and remember the girl who always STARES at you! Love, Christine.” With the game show host’s surname in place of her own, because that was a running gag between us. My God, how many times did this poor girl whack me with the clue-by-four?
But I had severe self-esteem problems. So severe that I sabotaged a potential relationship that I actually wanted. The idea that a desirable girl had a genuine interest in me made no sense in my mind.
It’s hard enough to approach the opposite sex when you’re an introverted, awkward, not-terribly-attractive teen. It’s impossible when you’re mentally convinced there’s zero chance of success, and that any failure will end with you being dragged in front of another classroom for another round of humiliation. So I friend-zoned myself. I threw away the chance to make a sweet, intelligent, pretty, funny girl I genuinely liked my first girlfriend. When all I had to do was stand there and let her initiate it.
I was so convinced of my own worthlessness that I couldn’t let that happen. I blocked her like Dikembe Mutombo.
I never rejected Christine. I rejected myself. I played the parts of both Lucy and Lillian. Christine tried to send me a love letter, and I hid it from myself. It was the most honest case of “it’s not you, it’s me” in the history of relationships.
That’s what a self-esteem problem looks like. So watching Crankshaft throw a pity party for Harry goddamn Dinkle severely pisses me the fuck off.
Harry Dinkle is not a person who had childhood trauma and self-esteem problems. Harry Dinkle is a person who caused childhood trauma and self-esteem problems in thousands of people over his career. (Including the elderly choralists who are following him on this journey.) He plays the role of the Christian school in my story. Not the victim.
Dinkle’s ego must be fed at all times, and doesn’t care how many people he has to grind up for meat. He’s a pervert, and this is how he gets his rocks off. The Colonel Khadafi outfit he wore like fetish gear doesn’t disprove that theory. And, as is often the case, he’s protected by a system that refuses to do anything about it.
What the Christian school did to me in 1983 made me reject Christine in 1989, and I didn’t even realize that until 2026. She liked me, and I liked her, but I rejected her. Why?
Because the Christian school psychologically abused me.
Now, I want to be very clear about a few things. One, there was never any sexual or physical component to this abuse. It was psychological only. Two, I had/still have a great family that was very loving and supportive about the whole ordeal, who made the right move. They yanked me out of that Christian school overnight, and put me in public middle school.
I probably could have used some counseling, but I think they didn’t know how to help me, and I definitely didn’t know how to ask for help. On top of all the debris that was in my head, I could be a difficult child in my own right sometimes.
Third, the psychological abuse was mostly traceable to one teacher at that Christian school. I don’t want to say that person’s name, because I’m afraid I might summon them, like Voldemort. So let’s leave that person in damnatio memoriae. And in hell, where they no doubt are today, according to the rules of their own belief system.
This is how abuse perpetuates itself. Someone hurt me, which ultimately made me hurt someone else (even though declining interest in a relationship is not a hurtful act if done tactfully). I never realized until now that tearing myself down, which was basically my coping mechanism, was also painful for the people who cared about me to watch. No wonder some them gave up on me.
Six years ago, I wrote this about the Dinkle family Thanksgiving:
Look how many details in this strip are about (Harry) Dinkle’s toxic workaholism. The house decoration and the choice of Thanksgiving meal are based on his career. The annual band turkey sale makes Harry tired of turkey, so turkey must not be served, no matter what anybody else wants. His daughter entered the same career as him, so you can guess what the table conversation is going to be about.
Look at (Dinkle’s wife) Harriet’s face as she presents the Thanksgiving non-turkey. Her weary eyes seem to be seeking his approval. Her daughter gives her companion an aside glance, as if to say “see, I warned you it’d be like this.” He seems to respond in kind, as if acknowledging he’s seen this in his own family. Harry is genuinely happy, because everything revolves around him, exactly as it should. And everyone knows it better stay that way.
This is the Thanksgiving of a family that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. And it’s a common theme in Funky Winkerbean.
This is the guy we’re supposed to feel sorry for, because “his stepfather was rough on his father”? Well, let me say this as clearly as possible:
Get the fuck out of my fucking face with that fucking bullshit.
I called this post Destroy Everything You Touch, because that’s what Tom Batiuk does to every “prestige arc” he gets his grubby, comic book-stained fingers on. His writing is so shallow he trivializes everything he tries writing about. It insults anyone who’s really experienced it. Which is why all those Lisa’s Story collections aren’t selling.
And Batiuk has tried writing about every trauma you could think of. Dementia, layoffs, freedom of speech, domestic terrorism, transsexuality, illiteracy, amputation, “climate damage”, bullying, war, PTSD, alcoholism, racism, coming out of the closet, football-induced CTE, suicide, cancer, and cancer incest. He did childhood self-esteem this week. Most of these things he’s tried writing about at least once.
(Also, musical titles are a recurring theme at this blog. And “Destroy Everything You Touch” is a god-tier banger.)
Funky Winkerbean and now Crankshaft are misery porn. To the extent misery porn works, it’s because the storyteller spilled their guts onto the paper. Great personal memoirs don’t hold back about embarrassing and personal details that most people wouldn’t want others to know. Their brutal honesty makes them compelling to read, and helpful to people who are going through the same things.
Funky Winkerbean gives us this:
The greatest writer in the Funky Winkerbean universe is a not a man who spills his guts onto the page. It’s a man who’s too emotionally fragile to even read his own wife’s diary. So he passive-aggressives their daughter to reading an entry about her own mother being sexually assaulted. Nice guy, that Les Moore.
(Narshe, I apologize if I spoiled something you were planning to use in Part 4 of your story. But please do use it again. Because this may be the single worst thing Les Moore ever did. And there’s a lot of competition for that crown.)
I consider what happened with Christine the biggest mistake of my life. Not because I’m Eugene, still sad about a girl he lost because he couldn’t be bothered to find out what her actual answer was. But because I lost the better man I might have become a lot sooner if I had given myself a chance in that relationship.
However it might have gone – and unlike Eugene, I make no assumption that life would have been perfect after that – it would have been a net positive. Whatever happened, this girl was never, ever, ever going to humiliate me. Which I now know is what I was really afraid of.
It would have ended amicably, given me confidence and experience, and probably helped me face my inner trauma a lot sooner than I did. Christine would have been a better high school girlfriend for me than Susan was, though Susan was a pretty good one. (Other than some things that were my own fault, which is the nature of high school relationships.) And I would have saved Christine a little rejection and confusion. Lord knows life already gives you enough of that. Especially in high school.
Or maybe I’ve misread this entire situation, and Christine just wanted to tell me my fly was down.
(That was a joke. This story needed to end on a lighter note. And I refuse to second-guess myself anymore.)
One other thing I want to mention, because it ties into the “some things trigger deep memories” theme, and because it’s funny. While I was working through all this, I found a playlist of 1988 hit songs on YouTube, and set it to shuffle. This was the first thing it pulled up:
Mwahahahahaha! I am the Rickroller! You fell right into my devious trap!
I’m kidding. It was actually this:
Debbie Gibson is another woman I hadn’t thought about in 30+ years. Nor has anyone else.
I have no particular memories attached to this song. But the overwhelming 1988-ness of this music video reinforced the feelings I was working through. (This isn’t what initially brought Christine back into my head. It’s not important what that actually was.)
But imagine me, a 54-year-old man, blubbering about a blown high school date while listening to an obnoxiously peppy Debbie Gibson song. That’s a pretty funny visual. Imagine that happening to Jim Carrey in one of his better movies. Or Jack Black. Or Chris Farley, if I’m being honest about who would play me in a movie. (And if I’m being too honest: Rick Moranis, if he ate Chris Farley.) Or it could be treated seriously, in a movie like Fatso.
I hope I didn’t bait-and-switch you. You came here for newspaper comics snark, and I gave you my dead chicken moment. Which is what this feels like: discovering what my real problem was. I’d been trying to find it for 40 years.
This is why I know a lot about neurodivergence, and why I frequently mention it as a factor in the creation of these comic strips. I thought for a long time that my problem was untreated neurodivergence. But I could always recognize emotions and social cues adequately. I just couldn’t act on them, because of my crippling fear of humiliation. I’ve been throwing darts at the wall for decades, trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. But I think I just did.
I’d like to leave a few ground rules for the comments:
- I’m willing to answer any questions anyone may have, though I reserve the right to be vague or silent about certain things.
- Being an abuse victim isn’t my whole identity, and it will not become that. I have accepted that it’s a small part of who I am. But it will not destroy anything it touches, anymore. While I would never question anyone’s approach to processing their own trauma, I personally think some people lean a little too hard into the victim identity.
- I realize a lot of people went through a lot worse than me. So there will be no Trauma Olympics.
- I’m not looking for a pity party, safe space, psychoanalysis, therapy-speak, or anything like that. I just wanted someone to listen to my story. If you’re reading these words, you’ve done that, and you’ve done me a great service. Thank you. I actually feel really good about this whole thing.
- I’m not looking for closure. I consider it closed. I said what I needed to say. The people who have been living rent-free in my head have been evicted.
- I am open to reconnecting with Christine, but I’m sure she has a family that wouldn’t appreciate that. It’s not her job to help with my recovery. My only purpose was to document the key role she inadvertently played in fixing something that was very broken in me.
- I shouldn’t have to say this, but please do not try to figure out who Christine is, or who I am. There are enough clues that someone with connections to our high school class could figure it out. But I have very little contact with any of those people anyway, I now live 1,300 miles away from my hometown, and I don’t do the social media thing.
Calvin & Hobbes had a terrific story where they try to build a robot, so Calvin doesn’t have to make his bed. Here’s the ending (SPOILER ALERT):
Psychological abuse and self-doubt made me throw away an opportunity to get to know a delightful girl who could have helped me a great deal in life.
And in a way, she did.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Banana Jr. 6000,
Thank you for including me in your post. I appreciate that. You did a magnificent job of being insightful and brutally honest. You are a good writer!
Thanks man, I really appreciate that. And what you said was was an important ingredient in this stew, so I thank you for that.
It’s like he’s Doctor Doom screaming about the barely noticeable scar under that stupid mask. He’s never really suffered anything that wasn’t his being stupid.
BJr6K, everyone has a Christine in their life in some respect. But not everyone is brave or self-aware enough to confront that.
Good post.
Thank you.
Okay, this might be a bit too personal, but… I feel I can safely admit this here.
Some of us HAVE thought about Debbie Gibson within the past 30+ years. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. (Also, she wound up posing for Playboy as well after Tiffany did.)
(It was a reference to Debbie that made me realize that something was… different about the writing on Sally Forth when Francesco Marciuliano took over. Ted was talking about Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, which he described as “The movie that dares ask the question, ‘What if Debbie Gibson were the world’s leading ichthyologist?’.” Hilary’s response: “I have no idea who that is, but I have to see this movie!” or somesuch.) (Look, sometimes I like the simple things in life. I know Ces has his detractors, but I’m a fan.)
Thanks for the correction. I removed the Tiffany joke because it didn’t make sense anymore. I prefer to simply post corrections when I make a mistake, but doing so would been wordy, and I didn’t want to throw off the overall tone of the piece.
Tiffany! Now that is a name totally forgotten to me for all these years. One of my girlfriends was totally into her music. Well goes to show you everything wasn’t great back in the day—even though Batty thinks so.
Tiffany… somehow both the best and worst part of Jetsons: The Movie. She’s no Janet Waldo as Judy Jetson, but without her on board we don’t get the wonderful Bob Kurtz-animated mid-movie music video set to her singing “You and Me”.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 42 of In The Name of The Father
THANK GOD THE HAROLD L. DINKLE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST ASSHOLE’S PITY PARTY IS FINALLY OVER (hopefully)
Thank you for sharing, BJ6K. I really appreciate your insight and your candor and, as you so often do, you hit the nail on the head about what an enraging and unearned mess Dinkle’s sad sack tour of his father’s wreckage has been. And at the risk of sounding rote, I really am sorry that you experienced the abuse that you did.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had a few years ago at my last high school reunion that made me look at what I long considered a relatively minor occurrence in a different way, a way I probably should have looked at it back then. I got to talking to “Jack”, who was a friend I hung out with when at school but not really outside of it. He was a smart and funny guy, and we had similar senses of humor and a mutual interest in comics and cartoons. I had not seen him at all since we graduated, and it was good catching up and reminiscing… and then I mentioned that relatively minor occurrence.
One thing Jack and I and a couple of my other friends got really in to as high school upperclassmen in the early 2000s was the humor that began to proliferate on the still fairly nascent internet. It’s funny when I remember how the high school “computer” teacher (what a job, had to teach kids the basics of Excel and serve as school-wide IT) had taken care to block things like AIM and those dreaded chat rooms, stuff that popular media warned about giving teens access to, but did nothing to prevent us from visiting sites like Maddox, Seanbaby, YTMND, or Newgrounds. It was at Newgrounds, on school computers, where we discovered what we then believed to be the funniest thing in human history, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US. We watched the techno music video version every chance we got, memorized and quoted the bit to what I am sure was the increasing annoyance of our teachers and peers… and began writing lines from that All Your Base video on dry erase boards around the school when no one was looking.
One day late in the school year we had a fire drill. Line up, walk out and stand in the parking lot, wait 5 minutes, walk back in. But this time we didn’t walk back in after 5 minutes. This time the fire department showed up. Then the police showed up. Then more police cars showed up. A K9 unit arrived. After about an hour we all walked back in and finished the school day. Weird.
The next day I got called in to the principal’s office. I was very confused. The principal revealed that the previous day’s fire drill was the result of a bomb threat and he wanted to know what I knew about the threat… someone had written “somebody set up us the bomb” (one of the mangled translated English lines from the All Your Base video) on a dry erase board and someone had told the principal that I was either involved in this or that I would be able to explain it to him. I used his computer to show him the Newgrounds All Your Base video and told him that I and a number of other students found this funny and that some of us had been writing lines from it on the dry erase boards the past several months. Now it was his turn to be confused… he, clearly bewildered, chewed me out for a few minutes and told me that punishment would be pending. He also revealed that he knew I did not write the offending phrase on the dry erase board. Almost immediately after leaving his office I started to find the whole situation absurd and humorous, certainly the part where I had to explain “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” to a guy who probably had only just recently and begrudgingly began using e-mail.
Jack wasn’t at school the day after that, and for another couple of days. Turns out all of us who were in on finding All Your Base funny had been hauled into the principal’s office (guess our stories all corroborated) and Jack had admitted to writing the offending “somebody set up us the bomb” and was given a brief suspension for it. When he returned we didn’t talk much about the incident, just kind of shrugged and said “that was weird”. We remained good friends to the end of high school.
I mentioned this memory to Jack an a couple other friends with a chuckle (and probably a smirk… forgive me, please), but Jack didn’t laugh. He quietly told me that the principal had actually come down quite hard on him and that he was nearly kicked out of school rather than suspended. He still felt humiliated by the whole situation and remained frustrated at how the school administrators seemed to not want to believe the whole thing was a silly misunderstanding. I was mortified that I had brought the whole thing up, but more so that I had not really considered what Jack had gone through in this situation that I was looking back on even in high school with a laugh. Shame on me for that, I have no excuse. I apologized to Jack and we moved the conversation on to better topics, but that moment has really stuck with me.
I still think the situation is ridiculous enough to be humorous, even as I now always consider Jack’s words when remembering it. I do get where the school administrators were coming from, this was only a couple of years after the tragic events in Columbine after all and very few folks over the age of 40 understood much of what was going on in the internet at the time as well (for example, the “computer” teacher was insistent on every student and teacher accessing websites by using the search engine Dogpile.com). Even so, Jack was a kid who understandably did not think about the implications of writing the word “bomb” on a school dry erase board (especially given the context in which the word appeared). He was a good student and his behavior never posed any other problems at school to my observation. Surely there was a way for the principal to have reprimanded Jack for the disruption of the bomb scare while acknowledging the complete lack of malice in his intent.
To bring this back to TB… these experiences inform my very strong opinions on the Funky Winkerbean arc where Chien gets suspended for her school newspaper article about bullying, largely because it mentions Littleton, CO. Chien took the same kinds of slings and arrows in that story that Jack did in real life… but unlike Jack, Chien was deliberate in her use of the incendiary words that got her in trouble. She also knew the power of what she wrote and didn’t intend to publish it, it was Les who insisted on printing her article. And then Les got to play crusader on her behalf during the ensuing firestorm, suffering no consequences while she endured the media circus, suspension from school, and no real end to the bullying and social ostracism that she spoke out against. Les fended her, but took no responsibility for his defining role in the whole ordeal. It’s a disgusting story arc, a collection of pieces that could have materialized into a story but instead formed another soapbox for Les/TB while Chien is reduced to a prop.
Apologies for this tldr comment, but reading BJ6K’s words really got me thinking about this.
I just have one question. Was this pre- or post-9/11? Because it seems to me that would make a big difference.
Oh, a good point. This was in late 2002 or early 2003, so quite immediately post-9/11 and when feelings and fears were especially raw in regards to it.
Thinking further about it, I never really made this connection before but Boston Mooninite panic of 2007 could be seen as a similar situation; a piece of dopey humor causing a public safety panic due to the generation gap between the jokers and the folks in charge.
Yeah, that’s a pretty rough confluence of small problems turning into one huge problem. And you can’t really fault anybody involved. Schools have to take this kind of things seriously. It’s an easy message to misunderstand. And from the student’s perspective, it’s something so well-known he’s right to think somebody should have gotten it. And at the end we all judge each other for not knowing something we think everybody else should know.
“[W]e all judge each other for not knowing something we think everybody else should know.”
Sooo, you’ve seen me watching Jeopardy, have you?
Sorry this got caught in spam, Marty. Not sure why WordPress is being a hypersensitive diva.
Oh, okay. Thanks CBH.
“Sooo, you’ve seen me watching Jeopardy, have you?”
Well, yeah, that’s the fun of it.
By the way, Seanbaby and Maddox are two of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read.
Thank you so much for sharing, BJ6K. You bared a part of your soul to us, and we’re all wiser for having read it.
I know you said you didn’t want psychoanalysis, but I assume that meant for YOU. I’d love to do a little brain rummaging through ol Batty.
For example, you said you had a loving and supportive family which I assume included parents. Batty seems, (based on Jeff’s relationship with Rose) to have had a mother on the narcissistic spectrum that he went through years of therapy to attempt to sort out his feelings about.
We here sometimes mock Jeff’s mommy issues, and I consider it fair snark game. But when consuming the entire Rose and Jeff arc, it actually does a decent enough job of displaying what a relationship with a difficult parent could be like. I don’t have a narc mom, but I have a couple friends that do, and it’s uncanny to read Rose while thinking of them. It makes me err on the side of believing Batty himself probably did have a mother with a fraught relationship. And in everything he does and focuses on, you can feel the echoes of it.
So of course Harry had a parent that he felt he could never live up to that gave Harry self-esteem issues.
Conversely, Batty married his high school sweetheart and stuck with her forever. Thwarted love is the exception, not the rule, in the Funkyverse. Other than the DSH John, Wally, Becky love triangle, people just…end up together; first date to endless engagement to eventual marriage.
Given his difficulty writing about anything outside his own experience it’s a miracle that Funky and Cindy’s marriage fell apart as believably as it did.
All this to say,
In the 4th grade I told a girl in my class who was tone deaf that her singing sounded bad, and it made her cry, silently, standing right next to me in music class, and I didn’t apologize, instead I tried to explain I was just telling her the truth. So many memories I have forgotten, but her eyes filled with tears is burned into my brain.
I have a lot of opinions about Tom Batiuk’s mommy issues. I don’t want to mock anyone’s trauma, especially not now. And you’re right that the mother as depicted in the strip is a malignant narcissist. Was Batiuk’s mother really like that? “Objection, Your Honor, assumes facts not in evidence.”
The only thing we really know about Batiuk’s mother is that she tried to take his comic books away. And it wasn’t a permanent ban, like I saw when some of my Christian school weren’t allowed to read the most common, harmless things. (Think Rod and Todd Flanders.) There was certainly nothing preventing Batiuk from acquiring and reading comic books most of his life, including his youth.
Also, taking Batiuk’s comic books away is a very reasonable reaction to how he was behaving. Its 1965, and you’ve got a teenaged son who refuses to give up his childhood toys. Things like neurodivergence weren’t well understood. There was no nerd culture. What other choice did she have? High school in the mid to late 80s was brutal enough on people like that. She was probably trying to make him grow up, and trying everything she could to help him do that.
It seems to me that Batiuk might have been his own worst enemy. Look how punchable characters are when they succeed. That’s a broad hint that he’s not a really nice person.
The biggest problem is that his characters should be punched by his other characters. Any real human being would have gotten sick of Les Moore’s inability to move on. Harry Dinkle would have been fired from the industry in disgrace by 2000 or so. The wacky bus driver who blows off children at the bus stop and routinely destroys property would not have been tolerated.
Also, the Lizard Woman should be burned at the stake.
With Les there’s a part of me that can to some extent sympathize with him. Since this is the Being Vulnerable Hour, when I was a kid I had severe ADHD. I still do have ADHD, of course, but as a kid it manifested in the “bouncing off the walls” kind rather than just the easily distracted daydreamer stuff. So as a kid that made me into the goofy weirdo which meant that I got picked on and bullied pretty easily and while that largely stopped after elementary school when I’d calmed down, it’s still had a large impact on me up into the present.
It still left me kind of immature (which is a thing with ADHD from what I’ve read) and meant I had a harder time connecting with my peers. So a lot of that has had a giant impact on my self-esteem and kind of having a chip on my shoulder about the ways other perceive me and a need to feel like I’m accomplishing something, anything. But it’s also meant that I have a hard time doing anything because of the severe anxiety I have over the thought of being judged negatively by others. Even posting these articles, with each one I’ll have to fight off the negative thoughts about how it’s crap, everyone will realize it’s crap and thus look badly at me.
So on that level, much as it pains me to say it, I can connect with Les in a very broad sense. He was the dweeb who everyone picked on, it’s clear he developed a lot of issues related to his self-esteem and self-perception and a lot of how he acts as an adult is clearly a reaction to how he was treated when he was younger. These are things that would have actually been interesting to really explore. That he wants to be a writer because it’s the one thing he feels like he has some talent in and it’s as much about proving to himself and the imagined versions of everyone who picked on him that he’s not a loser as it is about a genuine love of writing. His wanting to be a teacher fueled partly by a desire to get back at the system that he felt had made his life so miserable, in an altruistic “I can do better and change the culture for kids like me” way but also in a spiteful “I can get back at the types of kids who made my life hell” way.
Like a lot of Batty’s characters, there is an interesting character and interesting stories to be mined from them. As ridiculous as they or his stories can be, there’s bits of ourselves that we can recognize in them. All that does though is make his shortcomings all the more annoying. There is a good and interesting character buried within Les Moore, or Harry Dinkle, or whoever but Batty lacks the ability to unearth them. He digs a little at the surface, says good enough, and has no real desire to go any deeper which leaves them to be a bunch of needlessly smug jackasses who get their way at every turn.
I’m not sure he knows about the interesting people buried inside his characters and less sure that he wants to. Watching Batton be smug about stick figure caricatures gives me that impression.
@Narshe: Well said, as you always do. And I can imagine that other people also related to Les Moore for similar (if not exactly the same) reasons as I did. Les was always a Trojan horse. Act I Les inadvertently resonated with some people. Because Tom Batiuk threw a dart at the “high school nerd” wall and hit a much more specific type of high school outcast that a lot of kids related to, for reasons far more complex than anything Batiuk’s comic book brain could understand.
Same thing with Dinkle. Batiuk tried to mimic a particular band director he personally knew, and inadvertently captured what Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss did: an incompetent, egotistical person who thinks the world revolves around what his wants, and doesn’t care about any of the other six things in all his underlings’ schedules. I had a lot of Dinkles in my school and work careers. None of them taught band.
So don’t be ashamed of being one of many people who were tricked by this. Especially not when you can explain the trick as eloquently as you do. Everything you wrote is so damn on point, I can’t even quote you without feeling like I’m undermining a larger point.
Believe me, absolutely nothing you’ve ever written here is crap. And no one else thinks that either. I was the one who wanted you to join the blog staff, and the rest of the team was 100% behind it. Maybe I was being egotistical because I see your writing style is similar to mine, but damn, you’ve got a legit talent. You dissect some things far more precisely than I ever could.
I can relate to the fear that you’re not doing a good job, and I fight it myself. But I think you should trust your own judgment more. Instead of worrying about how crap something might be, try to recognize when you’ve done something great. It happens a lot more often than you think, dude. Your writing doesn’t show any signs of self-doubt; it is confident, clear, and incisive when it’s trying to be.
I’ll give you a meta example. Before I posted this article, I requested feedback from others (including you) on whether it was too creepy, too embarrassing, or too personal, anything like that. Then I realized: “Oh, wait a minute, that’s the exact problem I’m claiming I solved!” Part of this exercise was about getting past my toxic shame. I’ve spent too much of my life regulating myself out of fear people might think I’m weird, off-putting, etc. I learned to put that feeling away. From the love of God, don’t spend any more of your life worrying about that!
I have learned my fears were never unique to me, but were quite common. The ADHD gives you a unique challenge, but I imagine even that is more common nowadays.
Cheers.
RE: Mon. 7/13’s C’Shaft (?):
Just a quick note to say that the good folk at Arcamax have outdone themselves this morning. Printing the Sunday strips sans black ink was always amusing, but as of 2:20 Eastern time this morning all of their cartoons are MIA, each replaced by the same photo of L.A. Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani on the mound. I can’t begin to guess what’s going on there.
Shohei is good at putting up shut-outs.
Re: Crankshaft, Monday July 13 2026
Good dear lord, does this mean the story is still going? I mean, it’s not Dinkle, but this whole mess started with Eugene, and now he’s back, so… is this a continuation? (It’s not like Batiuk bothered to give us a “And thus we conclude the Pulitzer Prize-winning story ‘In the Name of the Father'” caption or anything.)
yeah I’m worried we have another week of this
A week? Boy, are you an optimist!
7/13: You know when would been a good time for Batiuk to tell us where he moved to? SIX WEEKS AGO. That way, he could have avoided ‘being bullied’ by jokes about Eugene dying. Too bad funny books rotted his mind.
My experience with teachers rotates around what they’re taught. This is because I had figured out how to sound out words when I was five and according to them, I wasn’t supposed to because the prevailing method was that idiotic Dick And Jane Make People Hate Reading shit.
Thanks a million to everyone who read my story and responded. A lot of you had a lot to say too! I’ll read and respond to everyone’s posts probably this afternoon. I’d rather do it later than dash off a bunch of half-assed responses.
I appreciate your sharing your story with us, and I’m happy that writing it down it brought you some closure. Sometimes it takes us until we’re way until adulthood before we realize how much incidents from our past affect our entire mindset, and sometimes it takes even longer to make peace with it.
Thank you.
It was a feeling succinctly described in this classic Nendroid comic.
An anonymous mixtape? I wasn’t that pathetic. 🙂
Does anyone remember Star Trek 5? I thought it was bad when it first came out, though a while ago, I saw it again and thought was better than I remembered. One aspect of it is that the “villian” has a way of identifying people’s pain. You can find longer versions of the scene online, but Kirk’s response definitely resonates with me, even if I don’t necessarily agree. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/8DzMSFccXtc?vl=en
Last year, I attended my [some large number]th high school reunion with my wife of 30+ years. (My wife didn’t attend my high school.) I suppose the details aren’t worth recounting here, but with one specific person there, I definitely felt some awkwardness (which I believe was mutual) not about what happened, but what didn’t, but might have.
Star Trek V gets a little high on its own ideas and shows a lot of cracks from a script that endured too many re-writes and edits and a budget that didn’t match the ambition of its vision. But the vision is clear and Shatner (he directed and wrote the initial script) delivers the message well, especially when he is the one giving the lines. The pain speech and ” What does God need with a starship?” are good bits. For all of the mockery that Shatner’s trademark delivery gets, the guy rarely fails to sells his lines with it.
I had an absolutely brilliant coworker about a decade ago who professed to be a big Star Trek fan, a much much smarter fellow than me and a more productive worker to boot. He knew he was brilliant too, a fact he did not hide all that well, but that wasn’t generally an issue for me and we got along fine. He did, though, have a bad habit of pestering our office manager with all kinds of pontification about religion and worldview… he had left the faith he grew up in and had very deep feelings about it (both the reasons he left and the aspects of it that he very clearly missed). This, I did not care for, not because I disagreed with his pontification (though I often did), but because my workspace was well within earshot of these quite frequent conversations and because he generally came across as being more interested in vexing the office manager by challenging her views rather than trying to have a truly meaningful conversation.
One day, though, he starts going on with the office manager about pain in the same manner as Sybok and for once I had to jump in the conversation… and did so by citing Kirk’s pain speech from Star Trek V. I’m still shocked that he, a genuine Star Trek fan, left me such an opening. I couldn’t resist taking it. That the rest of that day was fairly quiet was nice as well.
My whole experience didn’t totally soured me on religion. I’m not an observant man, and I would best be described as an agnostic, but I’m not one of those people who makes hating the church their identity. (So yeah, that guy would annoy me too.) I’m open to becoming active in a church again, but I would enforce strong boundaries. My neighborhood’s pretty liberal, and a lot of churches emphasize welcomeness, with things like rainbow flags displayed. So there’s probably one where I could fit in if I wanted.
I also had a phase where I read a lot of stories by people who left… well, let’s just call them pushier, more domineering sects of Christianity. I wasn’t in one of those, but I strongly related to what people who left those types of churches went through.
That’s what opened my eyes to shunning. Shunning is practically standard operating procedure in such places, and something they encourage members to do, even to their own loved ones. I never had to deal with that – I didn’t lose any friends, for the most part – but there was a sense of “the school has decided that our friend Banana Jr. 6000 is to be shunned, and there’s nothing we can do to help.” As if they’d been so thoroughly conditioned that they couldn’t even see the violence inherent in the system.
I’ve long thought that “Great moments in otherwise mediocre movies” would make a great bit of web content. I’ve mentioned the John Lithgow spacewalk in 2010. Also, Trrry Crews signing that Vanessa Carlton song in White Chicks.
By the way, Fan Fan, I love that you brought this up. I need my pain too. I needed to discover what my pain really was. I don’t want magically resolved either. It’s a piece of who I am, and I learned from it.
This is how you obtain wisdom. Thanks for sharing your story. It made me reflect on my youth. I had low self esteem and confidence due to a couple of public school teachers but I’m not bitter about it. They were only doing what they thought was right and self esteem and confidence can only be built by one’s own effort.
I was a pretty decent drummer/percussionist in high school and so I got to play in a lot of the cool bands. This brought some women my way naturally, but I didn’t have the confidence to build a sustainable relationship with any of them. I also couldn’t be the player like the lead guys in the band were. I didn’t want to use people, but my lack of confidence also played a part.
Anyways, your story was much more interesting than anything going on in Crankshaft and Mary Worth.
“More interesting than anything going on in Crankshaft and Mary Worth” may be the faintest praise. I’ve ever received. 😀
But in all seriousness, thank you.
Ha ha, yeah, I put as much thought into my words as Batty does!
@Rusty: and got a much better result.
Occasionally you will read or hear someone say that they have no regrets in life. That’s a load of crap. We all do.
Absolutely. My regrets mostly consist of “things I should have said” and “things I wish I hadn’t”.
That really is most of them, isn’t it? Not “I should have made this major life choice instead of that one.” Like taking a job or moving to a city. That kind of a choice, we can live with the consequences of. It’s the choices we make accidentally through little things we say or don’t say that hurt us the most. I’m still hurting because of something I wouldn’t let somebody else say.
Okay, so the “tale softly told” is now being softly (and slowly) retold? Are we doomed to see Eugene visit Lillian, leading to a revelation about Dinkle, every six weeks from now until Doomsday?
By the by, who’s the gal driving Eugene (who was able to drive or row himself prior to this) around? He has heretofore had no family around to speak of. Is she a worker at the nursing home he moved into? A nurse at the hospice he’s checked into? A cemetery manager taking him to view nice lakeside gravesites? Inquiring minds want to know!
Not to worry, J.J.! Batiuk’s got a nine-week arc scheduled for May-July 2028 that will give us the backstory on this mysterious character (hint: we may have seen her before, so scour your FW/John Darling archives for clues!) — plus how it all ties in to Mason Jarre having had polio as a child just before the polio vaccine was developed in the 1980s [sic]. Special bonus: Ed Crankshaft will appear as a silent extra in at least three strips!
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 43 of In The Name of The Father
I THOUGHT WE WERE FINISHED WITH THE DINKLE PITY PARTY
CAN’T WE JUST SHIFT TO ED RUNNING OVER MAILBOXES INSTEAD
No, we can’t. We have to watch Batiuk preen about what a clever person he is and how stupid other people are.
This is what he calls being “subtle.” Subtle means you say an important thing in a small way. It doesn’t mean that you pad your story with a bunch of nothing that actually detracts from the point.
Also: if you read everything people have had to say about this arc, they’re actually genuinely interested in where Eugene’s gonna end up living. The stakes of that are way higher than Dinkle working through an invented trauma from two never-seen ancestors..
When asked to defend not getting to the point that actually mattered, it’s likely he’ll trot out the excuse of it being writing. This is not the argument clincher he thinks it is.
I read every word. It’s not easy to expose yourself in such stark words. Thank you.
Thank you.
7/14: Batiuk thinks he’s being cute by not telling us things.
On a side note, this random thing was one of my 29 million Internet feeds this morning:
Come on, we all know who it is, don’t we?
Marianne Winters?
Ooo, close!
Les Moore?
So sorry, the answer we were looking for “Lisa!”
Of course, the standing ovation wasn’t for award-winning Best Actress Marianne Winters, or for the trophy recipient, Guy Who Vaguely Helped Somehow Les Moore, but for the late Lisa Crawford Moore, the woman who suffered more than anyone in all of hunan history! And who bravely went before Congress and said… some stuff.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. Our next category is “Comic Book Creators From Exurban Cleveland.” Ooh, tough category.
Batiuk may think these strips make him Charlie Chaplin, but he’s more like Billy Bright (anyone get the reference?).
Dick Van Dyke fans will!
It’s gotta be ComicBookHarriet, right? She won an Oscar for her week-long performance of blogging about that week in early 2020 where Dinkle talked about squirrels with Lefty, as I recall.
Since it appears they forgot the dialogue in today’s strip, here’s a helpful guide:
PANEL 1: Lillian: “Eugene? What are you doing here?”
PANEL 2: Eugene: “You see this bowtie? Someday – you won’t know when, you won’t know where. But I’m going to wrap this bowtie around your neck and squeeze the life out of you for your crimes.”
Hope this helps!
heartwarming:)
No jury would convict him.
With apologies to Sparky.
Shermy wept.
Chef’s kiss to you!
Grade A.
16 upvotes.🤣 Death to Loathsome Lill. I’m a notorious Lillian hater. I’m glad so many people feel the same way, DEEP HATRED!!!
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 44 of In The Name of The Father
(ZZZZZZ)
Looks like they left off the dialogue AGAIN.
PANEL 1: Eugene: “Or maybe I’ll just shoot you. Double-tap you in the back of the skull. It’s what you deserve, you… [Robotic voice] WARNING!”
PANEL 2: Robotic voice from Eugene: “This unit has violated its Asimov directives. Immediate shutdown implemented.”
Lillian (thought balloon): “A robot? Maybe I don’t need those idiot twins after all…”
Wasn’t expecting Batiuk to tie all this back to The Burnings finale from Funky and the robotic bookstore operator (I’m assuming) but, hey, this is more interesting than that Dinkle crap we just spent a month on.
7/15: Again, it’s not somehow creative to deliberately frustrate the reader by cheating like this. In English, it’s called being a dick..
Not to mention tedious.
And annoying.
Mad Magazine did dialogue free panels much better than this. You could tell what was going on and still get the joke.
There were entire features in Mad Magazine that had no dialogue, like Spy vs Spy. Good lord, why can’t Batiuk understand that if there are no words, the art needs to sell the joke? These are people just standing around looking at each other while nothing happens around them.
Because he’s superficial.
Because they knew what they were doing. Batiuk reminds me of a bad fanfic author who copies what he sees without understanding it.
Always interesting to see Batiuk demonstrate that he can suck in many different ways. He can go the word zeppelin route, sure — but he can also suck without a single syllable being uttered. Nevertheless, there’s a consistent thread. His sucking always ties into the massive, massive chasm between his overweening ambition and his underwhelming storytelling skills….
I wrote on Goomics how pretentious Batty’s writing has been this past week. That Batty was trying to be the comic strip equivalent of Ingmar Bergman with the dialogless panels. Another commenter’s reply summed it up perfectly before the GoComics nannybot removed his comment. He wrote verbatim, “Batyuk is trying to write checks his [redacted] can’t cash.” Not even censoring yourself can save you from the wrath of the GoComics autoModerator.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 45 of In The Name of The Father
(Eugene walks out the door and back into the car, and pulls out a sledgehammer and gives it to Lillian)
Eugene: Use this to put a end to Harry L. Dinkle once and for all.
7/16: I’ve no idea what he said before but it won’t loosen her tongue.
He sure is making a big fuss out of Eugene moving to the apartment above Montoni’s, isn’t he?
Nah, that apartment is for young folks just starting out like the nearly 50-year-old Mopey & Mindy. It’s off to Bedside Manor for Eugene to join the other husks.
Goodbye?
Someone post the Mad Max “that’s bait” meme…
Okay, this was all set up weeks ago before Batty pivoted to the Dinkle thing. And now we’re back to Eugene. (Talk about The Long Goodbye.)
So anyway, Eugene is finally going to hang his miserable self to the regret of no one, and then Batty will somehow amazingly tie these two arcs together in a brilliant, shocking, and deeply provocative Pulitzer-bait entry.
Which will suck so much swamp water that it will be brought in to clean up the mess in the Reflecting Pool once and for all.
Ladytron – “Destroy Everything You Touch” is a great tune. I have added it to my playlist.