Banana Jr. 6000

Predictably Unpredictable: The Max And Hannah Story

Would it be possible to have a post on this blog that does a deep dive into Max and Hannah’s relationship? At least the highlights, like when they met, started dating, started living together, and had a baby. Mostly, I’m trying to figure out if we were supposed to know that they weren’t already married.
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2026/03/03/in-like-a-lamb/#comment-180197

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

And, just for fun, I’ll give everyone a chance to guess each major story point as it arrives. The answer to each question will be revealed right after the poll question. So, to avoid spoilers, don’t scroll past each question. And I’d appreciate it if you did avoid spoilers, because I’d love to know how well our visitors collectively can guess Tom Batiuk’s intentions.

Our deep dive begins in 2003, because that’s the earliest Crankshaft archives are available at GoComics.com. Max’s first appearance in this time frame is November 2003, when Max arrives for family Thanksgiving. Mindy is still in high school, and Rose is still alive, as is Lucy McKenzie. Max is wearing his college sweatshirt. Which is question #1:

Seriously, answer the poll question before reading on. Try to guess!

In a stunning upset right out of March Madness, Max graduated from Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio. The college sweatshirt he often wore at the time said those exact words. So we know it’s not a school with a similar name like UNC-Wilmington, or a fictional school like Bull Bushka’s Enormous Midwestern University.

Also, Max’s graduation photo on June 3, 2006 resembles the entrance to the real-life school. And let’s be honest: the Ohio-based school was always the favorite.

Bear in mind Max’s graduation photo is 20 years old, so it’s not *exactly* the same. But apparently you can still major in red brick. (Courtesy of Google Maps.)

The “Max is in college and Mindy is still in high school” era continued until 2006. Max would sometimes appear at the family home, and in flashbacks, but he didn’t get his own stories. During the week of January 29, 2004, Pam reminisces about a family trip to “Mouse World.” On July 5, 2005, Pam and Jeff revisit Max’s fourth birthday. Interestingly, he requested a clown:

Well, Max asked for a clown, and he got what he asked for.

Pam was pregnant with Mindy at the time, making Mindy about four and a half years younger than Max. This isn’t a Mindy deep dive, but we’ll mention her from time to time. Max and Min’s sibling relationship is unremarkable. They’re not close, but they seem to get along just fine. During this time, Mindy was being urged to get a job. (Unlike, for example, Luann.)

Just as March Madness is full of upsets, it’s also full of games where the obvious choice has a 98.75% chance of being correct. Mindy was hired by Montoni’s on June 29, 2004, and was seen going to work there as late as December 2007. The question included the “full-time” caveat, because Mindy also served as one of Santa’s elves during Ed Crankshaft’s then-annual portrayals of Santa Claus. She was seen in this role on December 15, 2003.

Max attended family Thanksgiving again in 2006. On December 17, 2007, Max is seen leaving for a date, but we don’t know with whom. On February 11, 2008, Max seeks romantic advice from Ed Crankshaft, but no potential partner is named. Both of these were throwaway strips rather than being part of an arc.

Max gets his first real story on March 25, 2008, when he moves into an apartment. Pam says she realized that Max would “move out”, implying that he lived in his parents’ house after college graduation. Max’s random appearances were a little more frequent in 2006-07, so this checks out. Hannah isn’t a part of Max’s life yet. And she won’t be anytime soon.

On September 8, 2008, Jeff says:

We never learn whose wedding this was, because this was just to set up a week of complaining about getting your car serviced.

December 1, 2008 is our first look into Max’s career. Max announces tells the family he “has been given a show to direct”, even though this is the first we’ve heard of him having a job in television. The show airs at 4 a.m, and is called Living With Nature, starring Channel 1 veteran Phil the Forecaster.

So we can add yet another name to the list of Funkyverse characters who instantly became professional content creators. My own college degree was in broadcast news, and getting your own TV show at age 25-ish would be very, very unusual. Even for this kind of ultra-cheap local public affairs show that runs at 4 a.m. You have to pay your dues more than that.

Mindy graduated high school in summer 2009, and she would go to Kent State that fall. Her parents planned a high school graduation party, but oh no! The caterer got the days mixed up! What can they do?

The #1 seed wins again. Ed fired up his grill, but you can guess how that went. Mindy ordered from Montoni’s. No mention is made of the fact that Mindy worked for, and maybe still did work for, Montoni’s.

In June 2009 we learn that Max has a history of smoking. Rose takes up smoking at this time, and it is revealed that she found some old cigarettes that were once Max’s.

On December 1, 2014, Ralph Meckler laments that he has to close the Valentine Theater “after this week”, setting up a predictable bunch of moping about how good things never last. Of course, this is the same Valentine Theater that Max and Hannah have operated the past few years.

We’ll answer this question in a moment…

…but you can probably guess from this next piece of information. Hannah’s first mention in Crankshaft wasn’t until February 15, 2016.

Max reveals that Hannah is “someone he’s seeing from work.” We see her for the first time two days later.

The following week, they go on a date to the Valentine Theater. They meet Ralph Meckler, who is still running the place. Which means the correct answer was “Not 2014.” And not in a pedantic way, as if the theater held out a couple more weeks and closed in early 2015. After a week of gloom and doom for the Valentine, it must have survived under Ralph for 14 more months.

Ralph is seeking a buyer, which Max and Hannah are independently interested in. On March 7, 2016, they tell Max’s parents this. Pam’s reaction:

This is the first explicit mention of Max and Hannah’s marital status. Max and Hannah went to his parents with “something we’d like to tell you.” So Pam and Jeff were making a reasonable guess about what it was.

Max and Hannah raise enough money through crowdfunding to buy the Valentine Theater. Rose finally died in May 2016 – the day Jeff was about to forgive her, of course, when she’s been feeble for well over a decade. Which also gave us this indelible flashback image:

Any comment from me would just be piling on.

October 10, 2016 was the first week of Max and Hannah fixing up the Valentine Theater. And that’s where our story ends for now, because this is already a long post. Part II is coming soon.

Let’s revisit the quiz questions. Two times Batiuk took the blindingly obvious path, and two times he took the story in a bizarre direction. As if this year’s Final Four will be Duke, UConn, Long Island University, and Central Arkansas. Yes, lesser teams can, and often do, go on deep runs in the NCAA Tournament. But there’s a point below which this has never happened, and is laughably unlikely.

Which is the best analogy for Tom Batiuk’s writing I will ever come up with. Half the time the story is going somewhere stupidly obvious. Half the time it’s going in a completely random direction that defeats Batiuk’s own claims to realism. Which is which? Your guess is as good as mine.

Happy 107th Birthday, Ed Crankshaft!

We interrupt the Crankshaft awards to bring you a breaking story in Major League Baseball!

Bill Mazeroski died this weekend. Mazeroski is a Baseball Hall of Fame member, who hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history. It was the first ever World Series-winning home run. This has only been done one other time, by Joe Carter in 1993.

Why are we talking about baseball necrology? Because former Major League Baseball player Johnny Lucadello was born on February 22, 1919. Lucadello was also the youngest player on the 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, the real-life baseball team which Ed Crankshaft canonically also played for. (Ed also has a real-life retired jersey number.)

For that reason, I view today as Ed’s birthday, because it’s the latest possible day he could have been born. And I think Lillian McKenzie was in his high school class – because this is the Funkyverse – which makes her well over 100 as well.

Ed’s baseball career, with its early integration experiences, and winter ball in pre-revolution Cuba, fits this time frame. So does Lillian, Lucy, and Eugene being young adults whose lives were interrupted by World War II. So does Pam’s life, centered around the 1970 Kent State shootings. Ed would have been about 30 at her birth.

I want to stress that 107 is the youngest Ed Crankshaft could reasonably be in 2026. The average player in the 1940 American Association, and on the Mud Hens themselves, wasn’t 21 years old: he was 27. If Ed was 27 in 1940, he’d be 113 today. Which would almost make him the world’s oldest man. (Unless Walt Wallet from Gasoline Alley also counts.)

We can’t move Ed’s birthday much later than 1919, because then he’d be too young to be drafted into the military. What if we gave him Joe Nuxhall’s backstory (pitched briefly in the majors at age 15, making Ed’s birth year 1925)? Ed would be way too young to join the military legally, much less be drafted.

Which would have made Crankshaft extremely likely to reach the major leagues, no matter how illiterate he was. MLB teams in 1942-1945 were eager to employ players who weren’t subject to being drafted. And since some were already missing, the standards were lower. A player too young to be drafted, who was also good enough to pitch in AA (the top minor league level at the time), would have been given plenty of chances. Especially on a mediocre team, which the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians (both implied to be the Mud Hens’ parent club at some point) and St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles, who was Toledo’s real-life parent club in 1940) were.

The optimal birth year seems to be 1922. That would make Ed 20 in 1942, which is the youngest that would have been drafted that year. So maybe he’s only 104 now. Which would also make him extremely young for AA baseball, and by definition a phenom. But let’s solve one problem at a time here.

So how many inches from reality is Ed Crankshaft’s life?

Out of 35 players on the real-life 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, only two lived to see 2003! They were Jake Wade (1912-2006) and Harry Bailey (1918-2014). Six others made it to the 21st century: Armond Payton (1917-2000), Daniel Scudder (1916-2000), Tommy Criscola (1915-2001), Lucadello (died in 2001), Hal Spindel (1913-2002), and Robert Jones (1916-2002). A ninth player, Harry Kimberlin, died on December 31, 1999 at age 90. Kimberlin was the last former Major League Baseball player to die in the 20th century.

Bill Mazeroski’s famous home run was in 1960. He was born in 1936. He was 89 when he died this year. Ed Crankshaft is 15-20 years older than all of those standards. Look at the photos of Harry Kimberlin and João Marinho Neto in the above links. That is what a very old man looks like.

On top of that, Ed is absurdly active. He still works as a bus driver, bowls regularly, goes out to eat with friends, portrays Santa Claus, sings in a choir, gets into arguments with cartoonists, goes to the fair, has traveled to New York, Winnipeg and Columbus, performs frequent physical feats, and builds an AI-powered smart garden. Very few people on earth have the expertise to build an AI-powered smart garden. And few centenarians on earth have the ability to do any of the other things.

So, Ed, since you like gardening so much, why don’t you dig a 6′ x 3′ x 3′ rectangular hole in the ground? I’m sure we’ll find something useful to do with it. Oops, I mean “you’ll” find something useful to do with it. Happy birthday ~~and many more~~!

We now return you to the Crankshaft awards!

Over Yonder

Voting for the 2025 Crankshaft Award is Still Open!

The Funkyverse has a new corporate sponsor: Yondr!

I previously called this kind of product placement “egola.” It’s like plugola or payola, except that you get paid in self-actualization instead of money. Usually, these are about Tom Batiuk’s weird fandoms (The Phantom Empire, Chad & Jeremy); events that met his ludicrous standards for treating him like a big shot (Ohioana Book Fair, Comic-Con); or both (Winnipeg Blue Bombers, “Montoni’s” pizza).

Yondr doesn’t appear to be any of those things.

Interestingly, Batiuk describes the product correctly. You define a phone-free zone, and instruct visitors to put their phones in the special pouches. The pouches can’t be unlocked until you leave the area, or use the “unlocking base.” You can still hold the phone, hear it, and see it well enough to know if the screen lights up. You can understand why certain institutions, like schools, would use such a thing.

But why would the famously anti-technology Tom Batiuk, fresh off a week of trashing the long-established standard of online payments, portray a technology product in a positive light? Especially one that hasn’t stroked his ego, as far as we know?

I think this image from Wednesday’s strip is the key:

I hid the text, because it’s not important. Look at the child’s face. Compared to the usual faces in the Funkyverse, that child is very upset. This isn’t the devil-may-care smirk or the resigned acceptance we usually see. That is the face of someone in mourning. Even Ed Crankshaft is going above and beyond in this shot. He looks genuinely irritated at this behavior. And unless I’m way off base (which I often am), these are both new drawings.

Why would Tom Batiuk be excited about a product that lets parents take cell phones away from children? Does it maybe… relate to his life experience, somehow? Oh, yes, it does. And we all know how.

This is Tom Batiuk telling the world he’s still upset that his mother tried to take away his comic books. It practically screams “See? See what it’s like when mean grownups take your precious thing away? Let’s see how you enjoy living without your precious phones!” He gets to make that point again, and slam something that didn’t exist before 1991!

And another thing: Ed is totally the wrong character build a Yondr arc around. What Funkyverse character (1) has a job where it’s reasonable to ask children to put their phones away, and (2) demands to be the center of attention at all times? Come on, you know who it is!

The star of Yondr Week should have been Les Moore.

Batiuk pulled Les out of mothballs to make him the star of The Burnings, even though Les almost single-handedly caused the entire problem. So there’s no real obstacle to using him here. Having Les – or at least, a teacher – be the ringleader of the Yondr Enforcement Team makes much more sense than having bus drivers do it.

Using Les in this role would (1) fit his long-running characterization, and (2) poke a little fun at the character, something the Funkyverse desperately needs.

The Funkyverse is full of unsympathetic comedy protagonists, but it doesn’t use them properly. Characters like Les Moore and Ed Crankshaft need to get pushback every once in a while. A week about Yondr is a perfect opportunity to take Les down a peg. Not in an overly mean way, but in a way that tells readers “okay, I get it, this character is a little overbearing sometimes.” And other characters get to acknowledge it too.

But Tom Batiuk is so enamored with his interpretation of Lisa and Les as The Greatest Tragedy In Human History and Her Long-Suffering Heroic Disciple that he’s blind to things like this. But here’s what I’d do:

Monday Panel 1: Principal Nate: “The school board is mandating we use Yondr, which requires students to put their phones in these special pouches during class. We need volunteers to help us with the roll out.” Panel 2: Les, in a group of bored-looking teachers sitting in meeting room chairs, enthusiastically raises his hand. Panel 3: “Okay, I think we all saw that coming. Anybody else?”

Imagine if Les got to deliver the “we have our ways of finding out” line.

It’s not hard to imagine a situation where Les is a little too overzealous about enforcing the rules, or enforces them in selfish ways. And the kids call him out on it. Here’s what I would do with the above panel:

Now that’s a quarter inch from reality.

The Compleat Batton Thomas

Hi, folks! The Crankshaft Awards are still under construction, due to some nasty cold here in the upper Midwest. (My hometown was minus 6 degrees on Monday.)

So in the meantime, I want to document the entire Batton Thomas interview. Boring, I know, but I really don’t know how else to respond to it. I can’t use Batton to mock Tom Batiuk, because Batton already does a spectacular job of that without my help. And I think we’ve all wailed and gnashed our teeth in the comments about what an inane, boring, self-serving ego trip this all is. But it just keeps going.

I thought the best way to document it would be to put it all in one place, to illustrate how much nothing there is in what has now been nine weeks of strips.

August 5, 2024: Skip seeks Batton to do an interview, so he immediately heads to Komix Korner. Batton saunters in on cue. He quotes Dorothy Parker for some reason, probably to show off his writerliness.

August 19: Skip needs to do another interview for a “longer and more in-depth” piece. He asks “what sparked your interest in comics?” Of course, it’s comic books. Batton traveled to New York and failed to be hired by either DC or Marvel.

January 27 ,2025: Batton sucks at being an art teacher, so he badgers the local paper into letting him draw a cartoon. He meets with a syndicate, NEA, which gives him some advice on how to turn it into a comic strip.

March 17: Batton talks about what inspired him to become a cartoonist. Spoiler alert: it was comic books.

May 26: Batton comes up with the name for his proto-strip Rappin’ Around, and annoys Roger Bollen, the creator of Animal Crackers. Roger says “just because I visited the syndicates in New York doesn’t mean you have to.” Batton immediately announces his plan to do this, rejecting Bollen’s advice right to his face.

July 14: Skip visits Batton in his studio. Batton takes his second trip to New York, eats at Howard Johnson’s, and gets rejected by the syndicates. But he returns home to find an important-looking letter in the mail, despite having spoken to no one. After telling a friend about it, Batton realizes that he is now better than everyone else.

September 1: Skip asks “So what happened after Publishers-Hall offered you a contract for your own syndicated comic strip?” Batton mostly whined about how difficult it was.

September 29: Batton is sitting with Skip for yet another interview when he meets Jeff, his “dopplegänger from the comics shop.” (The umlaut was Batiuk’s.) Ed Crankshaft then rips into Batton over the diminished presence of “Grandpa Wrinkles” in the comic strip.

January 19, 2026: Batton and Skip visit Batton’s first apartment house, Elyria High School, and syndicate president Dick Sherry visits. Batton says Sherry’s was “thoughtful and considerate”, but “it felt like we weren’t on the same page” as Sherry looked at some new strips. This anecdote is never resolved, as Batton talks about the apartment house some more instead.

To be continued, no doubt…

UPDATE: February 23: The interview begins to run out of steam, even by its own very low standards. Batton drops several disjointed anecdotes that make him look even more petty and mean-spirited. Batton’s wife helps him color his comics; he took once someone else’s boxes from a shared storage area to use to pad his mailers; and whines that he doesn’t own his own characters. None of this is followed up.

Oh Sherry

This week in Crankshaft:

Hmm, that second panel looks familiar:

This is a photo I dug out of the image folder at the old funkywinkerbean.com in 2022. At the time, I didn’t know who this man was. The only thing I knew was that he was too young to be Hal Foster, who would have been about 80 years old. This came up during the “Hal Foster rips off Phil Holt’s work and publishes it in Prince Valiant” arc, during which Batton Thomas himself applied for the job. I wondered if Tom Batiuk had ever auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in real life, and if this photo was evidence of that. It’s not.

This week, an Anonymous poster on Comics Curmudgeon explained:

Dick Sherry was the president of PUBLISHERS-HALL SYNDICATE around the time Funky Winkerbean was picked up.

I’m glad for that explanation, because Lord knows Tom Batiuk didn’t provide one. And it seems to check out. Wikipedia says “some of the more notable strips syndicated by the company include Pogo, Dennis The Menace, Funky Winkerbean (snort).” So this company would have been Batiuk’s first publisher, and Sherry his employer’s president.

Apparently Batiuk liked Sherry, since Batton went out of his way to call his visit “thoughtful and considerate.” Why is that even noteworthy? A meeting with an employer, especially a one-time visit at the start of an agreed-upon work-from-home arrangement, is courteous by default. Considering the absurd level of consideration Tom Batiuk routinely expects, I wonder what Sherry did to earn this honor. Did he bring Luigi’s pizza and fresh comic books?

Information about Sherry is scanty. The only thing I could find was in an interview with comic book writer Rick Marschall. He says that Sherry was still in this job in 1977, and that he liked hiring international artists so he could take “trips around the world at the syndicate’s expense to have creative conferences with these cartoonists.”

One wonders why he bothered hiring a comic strip creator from Akron rather than Las Vegas or Orlando. Maybe he didn’t have enough clout within the company yet. Maybe that’s the entire reason Funky Winkerbean ever existed at all! Maybe Dick Sherry wanted to hire a cartoonist from Honolulu, but the company refused to reimburse the travel, so he had to take his vacation in Ohio instead. And 50+ years later, here we all are.