Vaguely Politics-Shaped Content

This blog has a longstanding “no politics” rule. But we have to tiptoe into it sometimes, such as when Tom Batiuk makes another saving throw for relevance. The July 25 Crankshaft was one such strip. It’s such a mess I have to respond to it in bullet point form rather than an essay.

• Tom Batiuk must have really liked this joke, because he shortened a week of Batton Thomas gushing over The Flash #123 at Komix Korner to squeeze it in. I wonder if we’ll get today’s Batton Thomas strip as bonus content, as an alrernate version on Arcamax, or if there will be a later week where… never mind, I answered my own question.

• Timing! July 25 is not the time for a joke about July 4 celebrations. It’s still better than this, though:

• Nice epiphany, Dinkle. It shouldn’t be distracting that the focus of a long story arc makes his next appearance in a one-off joke strip. But putting Dinkle back in front of his choir destroys anything that In The Name Of The Father might have been about. It is the final proof that Dinkle never realized that he is a clone of his father: an egotistical, abusive, widely despised band director.

• The fake name destroys the joke. Tom Batiuk loves his phony brand names… sometimes. And there’s no pattern to it. Today’s strip names the “Celebrate America 250” concert. The real names of the two competing celebrations were America250, established by Congress in 2016, and the Freedom 250, established by Donald Trump and the Trump Administration for their usual reasons.
  
  Freedom 250 – not America250 – is the one that had the problem of artists cancelling once they found out what they’d signed up for. Country singer Martina McBride had an eloquent response:

I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to be a voice for those who have felt like they didn’t have one. It greatly upsets me that any fan who has been moved by my music may now feel like I’m abandoning the meaning behind those songs. I assure you, that is not the case. I appreciate every single fan who has reached out. 

Martina McBride (@martinamcbride) / what used to be Twitter. Note also that Martina McBride gets actual fan mail.

Today’s strip is clearly referencing the problem of big artists like McBride cancelling their appearances at Freedom 250. The made-up name of the wrong celebration confuses the joke. But the clear intent also means:

• Batiuk picked a side, even if he thinks he didn’t. Poster Marty DaVille made this point. Mocking the cancellation fiasco technically puts Batiuk in the same category as comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, who came under fire for daring to suggest that any Donald Trump project wasn’t quite as successful as its press releases claimed.
  
• He missed an actual good joke. The above problems aside, this would have worked:

• The punchline makes no sense if you don’t follow the Funkyverse closely. Dinkle – and other “content creator” characters like Pete and Les – spend their entire lives being handed every opportunity they want on a silver platter. If you didn’t know that, the punchline revealing that an elderly church choir had a gig at a national Independence Day celebration would be confusing. (I know I’ve been using the word “confusing” a lot.)
  
• And it misses another actual good joke. Considering the generally unimpressive roster of artists who did perform at Freedom 250, Harry Dinkle might as well have been a real-life headliner. You know who else cancelled? Milli Vanilli.
  
  (Well, kind of. There’s some drama over who Milli Vanilli even is. But the band name is such a universal joke that there’s no need to process semantics. Or whether they performed or not. Or whether they performed or not, even if they did go on stage. Like I said previously, I did stand-up in the late 1980s. Piling on Milli Vanilli is practically a reflex.)
  
• The church’s tax exempt status is an unnecessary detail. Batiuk seems to draw his word balloons before he writes what they contain. This often results in them being full of words that detract from the strip’s point. A better joke would have landed on something that actually happened in real life. Such as, Dinkle losing his job like Colbert did. But Batiuk wouldn’t dare even joke about that.

Batiuk crammed everything he could think of into this joke. None of it works, works together, resembles the real-life event it’s riffing from, or makes any sense.