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.