Saturday’s Crankshaft is a great example of a comic strip that is innocuous, but infuriating if you ever paid attention to the Funkyverse.
On the surface, it looks like a particularly mawkish installment of Pluggers. Oh, for the good old days, when store operators used mechanical 1970 Grocery Game-style cash registers and memorized where everything was. (Implied: instead of using computers, which Tom Batiuk is known to dislike.) Continue reading “Practice What You Preach”
Not long after I posted about last week’s arc about a real-world eclipse, regular poster J.J. O’Malley compared it to a Peanuts arc from June 15-20, 1963, which also coincided with a real-world eclipse. Several other posters also chimed in about the comparison:
Oh, if only I had faith that TB was funny enough to just rip this off completely…
billytheskink, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2024/04/03/total-eclipse-of-the-old-fart/#comment-169174
Well, he did rip it off completely. The rest of it, not so much. Continue reading “Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.”
So this week’s Crankshaft plot has been about Ed renting out space at Pam and Jeff’s house to view the upcoming solar eclipse. Or, as a Comics Curmudgeon poster put it:
Tom Batiuk saw that the 2024 eclipse would pass right through Ohio, and immediately thought, “How can Crankshaft be a horrible person about this?”
https://joshreads.com/2024/04/the-only-fools-here-are-all-of-us/#comment-2783092
Credit where it’s due, though: this is a timely, Ohio-relevant story, which we rarely get in the Funkyverse. The total eclipse will happen next Monday, April 8, and the path of totality will pass over the Cleveland metropolitan area. Since we don’t know exactly where Centerville is – and it’s implied to be a far-out Cleveland suburb anyway – the story is highly relevant. Continue reading “Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart”
So Tom Batiuk’s recent email newsletter started off with this December 2008 strip:
Comic Book Harriet wondered why Batiuk chose to highlight this seemingly random strip in his email newsletter. I have a different questrion:
Why did Tom Batiuk choose to include this absolutely disgusting strip in his email newsletter? Continue reading “Bad Parenting From Beyond The Grave”
Poster Y. Knott and I have been talking about Tom Batiuk’s history of Pulitzer Prize nominations, and I need to correct the record about something.
Tom Batiuk was a genuine Pulitzer nominee once, in 2008, for the year of work when Lisa died. You can view the list of Pulitzer winners and Finalists for the Cartooning category at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/215. He was not a finalist in 1987, which I’ve long incorrectly claimed he was. So that’s my fault, and I apologize to poster Y. Knott for not checking my facts first. I have a journalism background and I need to be better than that. Continue reading “Is Tom Batiuk Really An Award-Winning Writer?”
Son of Stuck Funky 