Batiuk is playing some real twisted mind games with us this summer. After an agonizing prestige arc that dragged on forever, we begged for it to end. Then we got almost an entire week of Batton Thomas waterboarding us with smothering smirks topped off with a titty twister of a political strip for that final jolt of torture. All so the ‘kids these days confuse Ed’ arc feels like the tender touch of a comforting friend. There are serial killers that don’t play with their victims this much!
Without further ado, please enjoy the second week of my half-assed rewrite of Batiuk’s stupid prestige arc.
Some notes for us all to ponder. And I’d love some of your opinons on this. Because while we all complained that Batiuk’s story dragged on and on, I feel like the week I just wrote moves even slower.
Punchlines are hard. And mushing the plot around to squeeze them in means each of my strips has to convey less information than one of Batiuk’s exposition dump strips.
At this point in Batiuk’s story Harry has already conveyed quite a bit of information about his dad, but IMO that was to the detriment of the story. Information about Larry is conveyed again and again and again throughout the tale with no clear progression of one tidbit to another, which makes the story feel like it’s not progressing no matter how many times they change locations. It’s just a bunch of factoids.
Harry also has no obvious change throughout the story in his feelings toward his father. For five weeks he talks about him with the same tone. And for someone who claims he felt distant from his father, he spews a lot of insight into how his father thought and felt even before he finds the convenient journal. The showing is not matching with the telling.
In true Batiuk fashion, ITNOTF is full of objects that are held up and explained. Trumpets and journals and pictures and sheet music and albums. But that leaves no space for characters to feel and react and say something funny. So a lot of detail might get left on the cutting room floor in ‘Sentimental Journey’. I’ll let you decide if that’s a mistake or not.
Most important for this week, I wanted Crankshaft to have a classic-Crankshaft reason to tag along with Lil and Dink’s stupid trip down memory lane.
Son of Stuck Funky 
It isn’t actually any of her business how Dinkle got along with his dad. That’s the crux of it.
7/30: Way to be stupid, Thing One and Thing Two. You need to be escorted of his property.
And of course, one of them is a full-time writer.
Say what you will about Sean, that’s better writing today than “Lisa’s Story: The Movie,” “Murder at the Bookstore” and “Rip Tide, Scuba Cop” combined.
At least you can understand this one
One of the things you’re struggling with, CBH, is that you’re trying to polish up a story that’s fundamentally deeply flawed. The world’s greatest chef can’t make ptomaine into a gourmet dish; the world’s most renowned surgeon can’t revive a cadaver.
As a writing exercise, it’s interesting to see if you can make Batiuk’s work better. (And you have!) But don’t beat yourself up if you don’t make it into something golden. Batiuk is not simply a rewrite away from a Pulitzer — there are instructions written on the back of boxes of ramen noodles that have a better shot at copping that prize.
Because Batiuk will not evolve beyond the limits Gardner Fox established.
Yeah, CBH polished this turd as well as anybody could. She shouldn’t worry about leaving details on the cutting room floor. The whole arc should have been left there. There is no actual story.
Bonus points for “tension builds.”
ComicBookHarriet,
Tom Batiuk should hire you. Now there’s a match made in heaven. But he should. Why? In 23 captions you made Lillian interesting. I really enjoyed “crowbar” and “whole cup of coffee”. One last note, back in 1973, the USAF stationed me in Omaha Nebraska. (That is Ak-Sar-Ben spelled backwards!) I joined a church that had a bus ministry. We dropped a girl off and her musical dad had a giant treble clef on his garage door. I always encourage you to write books. Obey your elders. Amazon costs you little. I promise I will buy your book AND read it.
💝🍉💖🫂🌺💐🌹
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed walks away from Sean and his friend, and notices Riki Samejima beating the shit out of Wataru Sasaki nearby his garage, Ed then pulls out a flamethrower and sets Wataru on fire)
I liked the “we carpooled” gag, a lot. Laughed out loud.
I have limited opinions on this weeks’ Davis Does Bingo Wilkin or whoever these two kids are supposed to be.
Man…..he didn’t last past the Carter Administration, did he?
Yes, a fate that should have befallen most of TB’s characters too.
Starting with Dick Facey.
Oh, That Wilkin Boy! Believe it or not, Bingo’s comic book ran until midway through Reagan’s first term, October of 1982.
Still, though….the Funky gang should have followed him into oblivion.
7/31: In his zeal to prove that something that he didn’t grow up playing is bad, Batiuk isn’t thinking through what losing at Grill BLAST means: lighting the barbecue properly. It’s like he was in a bus simulator and didn’t back into a mailbox trying to make a sharp turn.
Your scripts are very good, Harriet. Really; they have humor and they fit the characters. As you allude to, though, it is clear that Tom had a very different intent with his exposition dumps at this phase of the storyline. At this point, Tom deemed it critical to namedrop the various places involved (contradictions to past storyline be damned, as was demonstrated previously here), and I’m not sure how that could have been improved beyond possibly having Ed pretend to be an idiot and jumble up the place names even though he’s lived there his entire life and would otherwise know what they are.
Truly, this and the previous entry show the finger waggers just how easy it would be for someone to take the strip over. “Why don’t you make a strip yourself?” they say, and these posts show exactly how it could be done. Easily.
RE: Today’s strip (07/31) in CS – if “licensing” is pending, would you really have a logo printed out and pasted on a wall? I guess it could have been printed on plain paper and taped up (without the Tom Batiuk shoddy taped corners). Where exactly are they, anyway? Eh, whatever. The strips have Ed in them and Tom’s banking on two themes that surely resonate with its current readers: “video games in 2026 are still 2600 adjacent” and “all young people are idiots”, so, I can’t say I fault Tom for making what works nor expect anything different here.
I’m not proud, but I once shot down a finger wagger who asked “Where’s your nationally syndicated comic trip?”, by mentioning my current job paid better.
Sadly, I see many cartoonists adopting a Sunday only (weekday repeats) philosophy, or leaving the trade all together, and worry about the future of comics. Nowadays, being a cartoonist seems to be a hobby more than a profession. So glad to see Nancy Beiman of Furbabies back this week after a month long hiatus. After reading her end of June announcement strip of her decision to take a sabbatical (and her comments in the discussion), I feared she was fed up with GoComics and was a goner.
I agree, [0]. You give Comic Book Harriet Dan Davis’s services, she’d blow Batty’s efforts out of the water. 100 percent.
First, I’ll join those who said that Monday’s “He’s not here!” was actually funny. The two video game dopes who appear to have been sent mysteriously from the year 1999 and their pre-“license” logo are idiotic. The storyline I want is for Crankshaft to say, “you know what would make a great game? My bus route!” and try convince them to turn it into a driving game. He takes them along on one of his daily trips and they are both terrified by his driving and horrified by his behavior towards the young students in his charge (he of course is having a great time. At the end of the ride they get off the bus, eyes wide with fear, and back slowly away, saying, “uh, yeah, we’ll get back to you.” As they walk off, we see that one guy has a giant wet spot down the front of his shorts. Shaggy: “Dude, did you spill your Mountain Dew on yourself?” Buzzcut: “Uh….yeah, that’s it…it’s Mountain Dew! Well, it was at one point…” And we return Cranky to normalcy.
8/1: You can tell he sucked at being an English teacher too, can’t you?
I was rather blown away by Narshe mentioning a couple of blogs ago that Batty needed help writing stories about teenagers by attempting to hire Sean McKeever. A rather surprising thing to discover considering Batty was a middle-school teacher, and allegedly had other chances to observe high school students, post academic career.
So, Batty may have contracted out some of the writing to Sean McKeever as well as the illustrating duties to John Byrne Et. al. Hunh. Batty doesn’t have confidence in his drawing or his writing? Can’t draw and can’t write. Other than that he’s one hell of a cartoonist. /s
But perhaps he’s a whiz at ruling panel borders, a la Baldo Smudge.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. So, we finally get an entire week featuring Ed Crankshaft, and the “joke” is he’s lousy at video games? At a minimum, I was hoping Beavis and Butthead (Sean and whatever the other guy’s name was) would have gotten blown up real good by Ed’s grill. Welcome to Crankshaft Lite.
And yet it’s still the best thing he’s written in months … maybe years!
True. But that first panel teeing up “Grill Blast is a bust” was just too easy a target to resist.
Tom’s got a new blog entry, called “Funky’s Back Pages”, showcasing his amazing skills of prognostication.
Yeah, that’s it. The whole post. Truly his ability to predict the future is unparalleled.
What is Tom praising himself for here?
(besides his usual praise of himself being Tom)
I’m starting to wonder what his unedited, unpublished strips look like. “Why you not publish my week-long series of what my poops look like?!”
Gawd. Imagine spending 15 minutes in Montoni’s with this senile lunatic. “PEPPERONI! It looks like my MOM who ripped up my COMICAL BOOKS!” (throws pizza out door; gets dragged back to the “Home” again)
“THE PEPPERONI HAD HER EYES! Always JUDGING!!”
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
Seth: Fuck this, Let’s go play some Double Dragon instead.
Seth’s Friend: Yeah.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Pam notices Wataru, who has somehow survived getting set ablaze by Ed a few hours ago)
Pam: Dad, who is that guy standing next to the garage, and why is he covered in burn marks?
Ed: Wataru Sasaki, I set him on fire after the guy who beat his ass up told me that Wataru and some other guy named Sakata beat the shit out some kid named Hiroshi just to turn Kunio Fu’unji against him. Oh, he also assisted this rich asshole in trying to seriously injure students from another team so the rich asshole’s school could come out on top on field day.
(Wataru staggers towards Ed, but Ed ignites the grill in front of him, sending him flying and lands hard on the rooftop of Westview High School, and then a a giant rock lands on him, crushing him)
Wataru: BARF!
RE: Sun. 8/2’s C’Shaft:
Well, I for one am certainly glad to see the powerful life lessons Harry spent most of June and July learning while he explored his father’s past stayed with him and helped him change his ways. Dear Lord, what a tool.
That arc was never about changing his ways. It was about justifying them. Dinkle learned absolutely nothing.
It reminds me of the Andy Griffith episode where Barney says to Gomer that he has Thelma in his hip pocket. Thelma gets furious at Barney for being taken for granted and goes out with Gomer to make him jealous, which finally gives Barney a clue (with Andy’s intervention) that he screwed up. At the end of the episode, Barney makes the same exact hip pocket comment again, showing that he learned nothing from opening his mouth the first time.
The main difference being, of course, that The Andy Griffith Show was well-written, funny, genuinely serious or heart-tugging on occasion (I’m thinking of the episode with Opie and the bird), AND had characters you cared about.
Oh, and had strong cultural impact and won awards.
Oh! And showed that characters who only read comic books really weren’t the brightest members of society.
It’s never about changing ways. It’s about finding a new reason to be damaged and damaging.
Why Batty insists on doing something that is nominally an ongoing dramedy when all of his stories effectively take place in their own vaccuums is beyond me. We’re supposed to be shocked that Daddy Dinkle was a drunk who Susan Smithed himself (the actual woman, not the character) and then move on.
Because of his messed up fixation on tripe.
8/2: A fancy name for being a megalomaniac. Cool, cool, cool.
8/3: A week dedicated to how hard it is for dumb old people to replace a cell phone is better than what we’ve been seeing.
I’m always amazed at how long Puff Batty can draw out a strip before he gets to the action, and then reward us with no action at all. Two panels of nothing whatsoever is absolutely standard.
Today, Monday:
P1: Crankshaft rides a riding mower on his lawn.
P2: Crankshaft rides a riding mower on his lawn.
P3: Crankshaft rides a riding mower on his lawn and a cell phone falls from his pocket onto the ground. WHAT A TWIST!
What’s the purpose of the first two panels? Why, it’s called writing.
Tom, CBH has ably demonstrated in her post above how to make every panel earn its keep. Be a dear and study her work, would you?
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
(ZZZZZZ)
Today’s Crankfuckery
Lemme guess, this week is gonna focus on Ed running over his phone with the lawnmower
8/4: Lithium ion batteries catch fire when damaged by simpletons…..it’s a Flash Fact.
Let me guess; this will be a week of mostly dialogue-free strips, the only exception coming on Thursday, when Ed tenderly picks up his mangled and barbecued phone and says “Goodbye.”
We’ll learn that his phone was directly descended from the first phone created by Alexander Graham Bell somehow and the phone’s father loved to make calls until its owner drunkenly dropped it in a toilet destroying it and Ed’s phone lets loose one sad final ring, the ringtone of its father phone, as it expires and goes off into the great Apple Store beyond.
Boy, if there’s any topic rife for lotsa laffs, it’s lithium ion battery fires right next to a house’s (presumably vinyl) siding.
Wait a minute … could this Crankshaft arc be … THE BURNINGS?
Surely we are not that fortunate… right?
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 2 of The Byrnings 2: Electric Boogaloo (Maybe)
(Ed notices the grass get set ablaze, and then resumes using his lawnmower, before he can get the lawnmower going, however, it explodes, killing him)
8/4: Pmmmmmm gets in the bad wordplay today.
Well, actually, Pam, it doesn’t. But you do you.
Someone has no idea what a lithium battery fire looks like. I love that this strip has charcoal grill explosions that create mushroom clouds and permanent orbital satellites, and Li-ion battery fires that look like a marshmallow burning at the end of a stick.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed holds up the phone like Hamlet was holding the skull of Yorick)
Ed: Alas, my poor iPhone, I knew it well.
6/16: We’re never going to learn what happened to Eugene but we are dealing with a battery fire still. Priorities, eh?