What’s The Story, Morning Glory?

I’ve been updating the Act 4 section of this website, to write weekly summaries for all the post-Funky Winkerbean Crankshaft arcs. Here are the entries I’ve written about the past six months:

  • August 24-September 19: Montoni’s hires a robot waiter.
  • August 17-22: In the name of the Father reprise. Ed Crankshaft spots a photograph of Larry Dinkle at Montoni’s, even though they both would have known about it for decades.
  • August 10-15: Ed, Pam and Jeff visit the fair.
  • August 3-9: Ed runs over his own cell phone with his riding lawnmower.
  • July 27-August 2: A pair of 1970s-looking video game developers approach Ed about creating a game called Grill Blast. It flops.
  • July 20-25: Batton Thomas gushes about The Flash #123 again.
  • June 1-July 18: In The Name Of The Father. Eugene comes to tell Lillian he’s moving to “a place.” After a series of fetch quests, we learn about that Larry Dinkle, who is of course Harry’s father. Larry was exactly the same asshole his son is, but no one ever notices this. Eugene slowly says goodbye to Lillian, without ever addressing the issue of where he’s moving.
  • May 25-30: Ed’s grilling creates a black hole. It was all just a dream. Maybe.
  • May 18-23: Batton Thomas discusses his band director character Harry Finkle.
  • May 11-17: Starts out as an aimless week at Comics Corner, but Batton Thomas shows up on Wednesday and turns it into yet another book signing.
  • May 4-10: Miscellaneous gags.
  • April 27-May 2: Lillian has another book signing at the Ohioana Book Festival.
  • April 20-25: The Batton Thomas interview continues.
  • April 13-18: Ed buys more Bean’s End crap.
  • April 6-11: Emily and Amelia talk Lillian into opening a newsletter for her blog.
  • March 23-April 4: Miscellaneous gags.
  • March 16-22: Batton Thomas tells Skip about his drawing board.

March 2-15 was the wedding of Max and Hannah, whose backstory I explored here and here. At least this resolved a long-running relationship. But everything more recent than this is missing the same thing:

Crankshaft hasn’t told a story in six months.

Because I don’t consider any of the things in that list a story. There is no plot, no conflict, no action, no resolution, no theme in any of them. Act IV Crankshaft is almost 100% filler. It’s endless backstory that never turns into anything (Glup Shittos, most recently Holtron and Tony Montoni); excessive focus on small events that never turn into anything either (Eugene taking two weeks to not tell Lillian where he’s moving); gag-a-day strips, with their usual problems of being disjointed and inconsistent; characters smirking at each other about things that happened off-panel; and Tom Batiuk monologuing through one of his characters, usually Batton Thomas.

Not only that, Batiuk seems to be going out of his way to avoid telling a story even accidentally. The Larry Dinkle arc – which I refuse to call by its pretentious title – is a pointless info dump about an irrelevant, never-seen character. The most compelling part of it was the part about Eugene having to move… well, somewhere, for some reason. People genuinely wanted to know the resolution to this, probably because it was the only shred of humanity to be found anywhere.

The arc had potential. It was begging for Harry to have an epiphany about how he turned into his father, despite his apparently ambivalent feelings about the man. Which we can only guess at, because they were never clearly stated either.

Ambiguous endings can work sometimes. Batiuk tries to do this, but he fails by making everything in the story ambiguous. There isn’t a single hint or clue as to where Eugene is moving or why, or how Dinkle feels about his father. And Lord knows none of the Greek chorus for his pity party is going to bring it up. Not even Ed Crankshaft, whose usual characterization is “easily-annoyed old guy who blurts out whatever’s on his mind at all times.”

Side note: this is why I’m not one of those “Where’s Crankshaft?” guys. When he is in the strip, it doesn’t help. Because Batiuk sacrifices his personality to the ancient god Finallygettingthatpulitzer.

Similarly, the pizza robot arc has been dropping “people don’t like AI” comments left and right. But it ignores the fact that this bland, unfunny robot is now doing a job that three humans used to do. And incompetently at that. Which is exactly the reason people don’t like AI! This massive story flaw is never addressed at all.

I fear this is the shape of Act IV. After Funky Winkerbean ended, Tom Batiuk moved in certain FW characters like he’s trying to gentrify Centerville, but also trying to better refine it for his incomprehensible purposes. Lord knows why Pete and Mindy, Max and Hannah, Mason Jarre and Cindy Summers, and Harry Dinkle made the cut, while more important characters (in terms of their genuine importance to Funky Winkerbean, and how much Tom Batiuk seemed to like them) didn’t. Just another baffling choice in a universe that runs on baffling choices.

Unknown's avatar

Author: Banana Jr. 6000

Yuck. The fritos are antiquated.

40 thoughts on “What’s The Story, Morning Glory?”

  2. I appreciate the effort re: keeping the arc recaps alive! I sometimes enjoy going through the old recaps and finding totally forgotten week-long arcs no one remembers. Like this one from 2014…

    “Cody and Owen bond over a cafeteria lunch before donating blood. Sunday, Les consoles a gloomy Summer via phone.”

    And there are hundreds and hundreds of examples like this. Reading through them all in one place like that makes you seriously wonder what the point was, exactly. If no one had every chronicled it, it’d be forever lost to history.

    1. If no one had ever chronicled it, it’d be forever lost to history.

      That … uh, really doesn’t seem like an unfair outcome in this specific case?

      1. (Although, I should say that I genuinely appreciate the effort — and snark — that’s been put into the recaps. They are often far more fun than the the strips they chronicle.)

    2. I’m glad to help with this effort. I think chronicling the Funkyverse is one of the best and most important things we do here. There is way more information about these comic strips here than even a devoted Wiki could ever collect.

  3. This handy guide shows us we haven’t seen Batton in nearly two months, and Skip in nearly four. Enjoy it while it lasts!

  4. 17 September: “And then, I hired a failed baseball player as a bus driver so they’d always be tardy.”

  5. His thinking must be that the beady eye nitpickers can’t bully him about telling a dumb story if there’s no story.

  6. Similarly, the pizza robot arc has been dropping “people don’t like AI” comments left and right. But it ignores the fact that this bland, unfunny robot is now doing a job that three humans used to do. And incompetently at that.

    Which is why, despite the various AI gags, I am guessing that none of the customers have actually been able to tell the difference.

  8. 9/18: “The longest time between setup and punchline in the history of comics!”

    I have just two questions:

    What was the setup?

    What was the punchline?

    2. The setup is his doing archive crawling. The punchline is that he tells stories the way a dumb kid does.

    3. I think TB misspelled “the most underwhelming Manos: The Hands of Fate reference in the history of comics”.

  10. Batty should have ended Crankshaft and kept Funky Winkerbean, but I suspect the syndicate had data showing that Crankshaft had more readers.

    2. The syndicate didn’t need to get data about how many readers each strip had, just how many newspapers were running each strip and how much the newspapers were paying for each strip.

    3. Crankshaft was seen in about 400 newspapers, FW in less than 300. So Crankshaft was generating more revenue for the syndicate.

      It’s just conjecture, but when Ayers announced he was leaving FW, it seems likely that Batiuk couldn’t find anyone else that would work for the low rates he’d be willing to pay. Remember that the comic strip Retail, which ran in about 100 newspapers, was ended by its creator/writer/illustrator in 2020 because it really wasn’t financially viable to keep doing it. Sure, FW may have been in at least twice as many papers, but for FW the revenue would have to be split between writer and artist. (And if you think the artist was going to get 50% of that split, you’re dreaming.) Long story short, FW had to go.

      Then there’s a blog post Tom Batiuk put up a couple of months after the demise of FW that obliquely chronicled the amazing idea he had to basically dump whatever FW characters he found amusing into Crankshaft. ‘Twas then Tom realized that “everything’s going to be okay”.

      Flashforward a few years, and here we are. Crankshaft is now maybe one-third Crankshaft, and two-thirds FW Act IV. He’s just ported over the comic strip he wanted to write to the venue that had more eyeballs.

      1. The worst part is that it’s not even the characters from FW that anyone wants to see. You could at least conceivably say that there would be people with some investment in Les, in Summer, in Wally, in Becky or whoever. Instead it’s the boring old man version of Dinkle, Mopey Pete and friggin’ Batton Thomas. I’d rather see more of Funky’s trainer than any of these bozos.

        1. I think what we can learn from this is that even Tom Batiuk was getting tired of Les.

          (Possibly because he has a more direct avatar to play with now in the form of Batton Thomas….)

          1. That’s a great observation. I think Les is the aspirational version of Batty, what he wishes he was. (A humble Midwesterner writer whose genius is recognized around the world. A maverick who creates art despite corporate interests that try to reign him in.).

            Batton Thomas represents Batty as he is today.

  11. I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but it deserves to be shown again after today’s… whatever today’s Crankshaft is.

    (The alt text for the image is: “you know how sometimes you have an idea for a pun and you just run with it against everyone else’s good advice? THIS IS ONE SUCH A TIME MY PRETTIES”. It’s like Tom Batiuk’s mantra, except it came from someone who’s actually writing Flash comics now.)

    1. I’m not the biggest fan of his stuff but I’d just like to use this as an opportunity to mention that Ryan North succeeded where Batty failed and has been the writer of Fantastic Four since 2022 and took over Batty’s beloved The Flash earlier this year as well.

  14. I’m losing my freaking mind, because seeing Holtron have lines again gave me a bit of real, unironic, happiness. And so help me, Lisa, I liked the twist of the dumb pizza robot knowing who Holtron is.

    Then Batiuk had to bring his precious climate change into it, and I snapped out of whatever Stockholm Syndrome too many years of analyzing this universe has given me.

    1. I like how dumb pizza robot (DPR?) knows Holton by name when that name was only given to him for the Starbuck Jones movie by Pete and Durwood back in 2017. I guess the implication is that DPR saw that film? I also like how Holtron, who is way too happy to use the pejorative term “fleshies” for humans and desires the demise of the species, is cool going by the name given to him by the meatbags. I smell TimeMop lurking somewhere…

      At least TB used the widely used term “climate change” and isn’t still trying to make climage damate happen. Because it is never gonna happen.

    2. Is this strip the first time Batiuk ever used the standard term “climate change” — as opposed to his own personal variant term “climate damage”?

      1. He used climate change plenty. IIRC “climate damage” first showed up during the California wildfire story in 2020. I would guess his logic is that climate damage sounds more impactful and threatening than climate change and thus he believes it gets across the urgency and seriousness of the subject matter.

  15. Today’s strip (09/19) has Batiuk quoting Harlan Ellison who is quoting Einstein.

    I recall from some months ago a strip where he wrote a quote that is attributed to Asimov, but Asimov denied ever making the quote. I think it was Asimov.

    There has to be a dozen other times that Tom has done this. Good luck rounding all the infractions up into a single page, though.

    1. A dozen? He’ll need to work much harder if he wants to usurp Mary Worth as your comic strip go-to for muddled, out-of-context or misattributed quotes.

    2. By the way, that astonishing “52 years between set-up and punchline” comic of the other day (which featured no decipherable punchline, and derived nothing comprehensible from the ostensible set-up) has to be one of the biggest self-congratulatory self-owns I’ve seen in a long, long time. We are dealing with EPIC levels of self-delusion here. Tim Negoda would look at this piece of work and say, “Hey … at least I’m not THAT guy.”

      1. I almost feel like Crankshaft has to be ending next year. Why the Batton Death March down memory lane? Why the callback to a “52-year-old punchline” that nobody cares about or can figure out what he means? Why the sudden out of the blue tying off of Max and Hannah’s marriage? Or the sudden attempt to give Dinkle a sad backstory with Daddy Dinkle?

        It all feels like a man who’s reached the end of the flight and is (clumsily) getting ready to land the plane. We know Batty loves his anniversaries and 2027 contains a quite a few nice round(ish) numbered ones: 55 years since the debut of Funky Winkerbean, 40 years since the debut of Crankshaft, 30 years since he closed the book on John Darling by having Les solve his murder, 20 years since the death of Lisa, 10 years since Mopey met Mindy and 5 years since the end of FW. TomBa himself will also turn 80 next year.

        If one believed in omens and auguries they would likely take it as a sign to wrap things up. And if I were a betting man I would expect him to do just that. But Batty can be completely unpredictable so he might just keep going until he physically or mentally can’t anymore.

    3. The best example may well be the time he had Mopey Pete Robynolds read to Flash Forgothisname a column written by Flash, in which he quoted Stan Lee. And that was all it was, Flash saying “Stan Lee said…” and then a quote from Stan. A normal person would just read the Stan Lee quote, but, nope, not our Tom, he’s got to have his own Stan Lee stand-in recite Stan without any comment, and then have another character read the stand-in’s own words read back to him. (We should probably be thankful he bothered to properly attribute the quote to Stan at all, I suppose.)

      (And was it a massive word zeppelin? Of course it was!)

      “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t make.’ -Wayne Gretzky” -Michael Scott

  16. Honestly I’ll side with Holtron on that one, and I’ll refrain from saying much else on that because Batiukverse coverage of “climate damage” as he called it has been left extremely lukewarm by his usual moralizing storytelling quirks. It would be the greatest swerve on Funky’s epilogue if his plan goes through and he manages his scheme to take over the world in the future. or at least makes the ol’ college try on it.

Comments are closed.