Banana Jr. 6000

Lucy’s Story

This week’s post will be an installment of This Week In Act IV, and also a historical deep dive into a past Funkyverse tale.

Crankshaft has been revisiting the Lillian-Lucy-Eugene love triangle. The week ended today with Eugene sailing a boat solo into the waters of Summit Lake, a real place in Akron. The story looks like it continues into next week, so we’re not going to cover it all today.

I say “we” because this post is very much a team effort between Comic Book Harriet and myself. There will be at least one follow-up to this post, even if the Crankshaft story ends at this point. (It’s hard to imagine how a story can end with an old man boating into a lake by himself, but Batiuk gonna Batiuk.)

We must also give an assist to Comics Curmudgeon guest host “Uncle Lumpy”, who made the definitive comment about this story 13 years ago.

Eugene, Lucy — this is not romantic, touching, or poignant. It is stupid, and you two deserve exactly what you got.
https://joshreads.com/2011/10/friday-post-3/

Cup Holder Week Has Been Cancelled

I had so much to say about this week in Crankshaft.

Why did the week start with a holy war against cup holders and fancy armrests?
Why are fancy armrests an issue when you can simply ignore them if you don’t want to use them?
Who hates fancy armrests so much they’d choose a movie theater just because they don’t offer them?
Why are these the same seats the Valentine Theater had before it closed down, became a strip club, and re-opened? Was this some kind of 1940s strip club? (Knowing Tom Batiuk’s tastes, it probably was.)
Why did Crankshaft and Mary Marzipan enter the theater after Max and Hannah were cleaning it up, something you would do at the end of the night? What non-existent customers even made this mess?
Who did Ed and Mary pay for their ticket? Did they just walk into the theater?
Why are they on a date (confirmed by Mary) when she broke up with him in 2010? We haven’t seen Mary since her “bus driver PTSD“, at which time she and Ed were not depicted as a couple.
Who’s watching Max and Hannah’s small child?
Why is the theater down to two customers when it looked like this three weeks ago? How the hell is this theater viable?
Why have they already stopped showing Starbuck Jones III? Could they only afford one screening? Did it bomb harder than Rise of Skywalker?
How is this even a prank? Shouldn’t a prank confuse or mislead you? All he had to do was look at the sign.
Could Max and Hannah be any more boring, even compared to other couples in this boring universe?

Back To The Future

For the first time in awhile, this week in Crankshaft wasn’t straight-up Funky Winkerbean Act III. It starred Ed Crankshaft and his family, in a staple Crankshaft story: Ed’s barbecues causing a major disaster. But it was a great example of many things that are wrong with Tom Batiuk’s storytelling in general, and invites commentary for that reason. It’s going to be a cavalcade of TBTropes, some old and some new.

The week started with Mindy informing Pete that he’s “not really dressed for a grill-out” at her house. The suggested gear is, of course, protective gear against fire and explosions. Yuk yuk.

How does Pete not already know of Ed’s grilling misadventures? He’s been dating Mindy since 2017, and the “engagement tiger” incident was in 2019. They’ve been on multiple trips together.

On top of that, Ed’s grill-outs have resulted in criminal charges of destroying the earth! You’d think Pete would be aware of that incident. If the earth was destroyed, where would Pete get his comic books?

So What Does It All Mean?

This week, Tom Batiuk gave us a classic Funky Winkerbean story. Also, he posted some nonsense on his blog about Harry and Donna going back in time to play “Defenders” again.

This week’s Crankshaft is once again worthy of comment as an extension of Funky Winkerbean Act III. It gave us a Funkyverse staple: the “young people just starting out” story. Tom Batiuk loves this story, as he loves any story where he can just walk the characters through the procedure again. Even when it doesn’t make sense for the character, as it doesn’t with Pete.

Continue reading “So What Does It All Mean?”

Within 11 Months

The DVD version of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has a 75-minute feature called Within A Minute. Its purpose is to illustrate how much work went into producing one minute of the finished movie. It starts with the statistics: 910 people put 70,441 man-hours into this one minute. Then it shows a huge, three-dimensional chart of the hierarchy of these people. It reminded me of the “code” scene in Wreck-It Ralph.

Continue reading “Within 11 Months”