In my tedious dissection research currently ongoing of the stupid Skip and Batton interview, I nearly let an important anniversary pass us by! So thanks to CSRoberto for reminding me that this week we are celebrating 54!
No, not that one.
No, not that one either.
Instead, the 54th Anniversary of the first Funky Winkerbean Strip!
And, since things have been so unbearable on the Crankshaft front, I thought I’d throw up some choice 1972 material.
I MEAN CHOICE 1972 FUNKY WINKERBEAN MATERIAL!!!
Covering a wide range of topics Batiuk would never touch now! Like…
Cannibalism.
Cultural Appropriation.
Body Shaming.
Trad Wives.
Or Livinia in general.
And who can forget that there was once a time Batiuk dared to pretend he didn’t deeply revere Baseball and Comic Books.
But of course…some things never change.
54 years later and he still won’t shut up about climate change.
And the levy will NEVER pass.
And Tom will always find a way to insert himself into his comic.
And Les Moore is an unbearable human tumor no one wants to see. At least we can be greatful we’ve had more than a year of his absence!
Funny to think about how the ‘Kid’s These Days’ this strip was originally about are now all pushing 70. World leaders, congresspeople, CEO’s, generals and admirals.
“I mean, this is surely the generation that will figure out that whole Middle East thing, right?”
But at least you can look back and see where old Funky Winkerbean predicted the future.
Yeah, that is pretty far fetched and ridiculous.
Funky Winkerbean, if only we knew what we had when we had it.
Thank the Lord! We have an ugly and abominable week of anemic puns and malaprops at Dale Evans! I do have to laugh at today’s strip, where there’s a weird fern hanging above Crankshaft’s head in an area that would be just kind of randomly hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the restaurant. I mean we’ve never seen that before! Right? The conglomeration of shoddy art stealing slaves using the name of ‘Davis’ is such a stupid collective moron.
Oh…no… wait… we have seen this before.
Don’t know what Ayers was thinking there!
But surely Ayers isn’t to blame for Angie’s terrifying lidless stare and the hideously askew ‘Menu’ from Monday.
I swear on the decaying blonde Barbie jammed in the background of the Luigi’s bandbox, if we do not get Ed Crankshaft on Monday, doing one of the eight or so things that Ed Crankshaft has done for the last 38 years, then I will create an effigy of Tom Batiuk from old pairless socks and ritually burn it at the stake! This is not (just) a joke! I’m serious! On Monday morning when I go to GoComics there had better be a comic strip with an elderly asshole buying another Bean’s End boondoggle! Or else!
Am I coming across as aggressive? Maybe it’s because of this stupid week of Batton blathering about his precious Bristol Board. Because Batton, as Batiuk’s wish fulfilment Mary Sue, of course needed no ghost artist providing pencils for him to trace.
Heaven forbid Batiuk give Batton his own Avers Chuckson! He might have to write Batton having a relationship with someone who isn’t a goat looking git with a smartphone.
Still aggressive? Hmm….maybe it’s because of this comment by my own dear Co-captain.
One of Batton’s most obnoxious remarks had spilled, nearly word for word, from my lips months before that August strip. Should I be mad?
See, I dabble with a bit of fanfic writing now and then. Every few years, some movie or show or comic or video game or web series will spawn some mentally completish narrative in my brain and I’ll spend a few months to a year binge building the outline of an epic tale of cringe and feels. Sometimes I’ll even start writing the story down. Sometimes I’ll even show a couple equally cringe friends, so we can cringe and feels together.
Thus far, I usually lose steam after a bit, and it becomes more and more tedious and frustrating to put words to word document. I go full GRRM mode and eventually move on to another project, promising I’ll finish what I started I swear. Once I even did! (Do not ask to see it, it is 15% lost to digital hell, and 100% too niche and cringe for even you, my wonderful nitters)
Anyway, I was talking to one of my friends, (the one with the epic webcomic, who did the Westviewcrumb Tinies for us.) As I whinged to her about once again getting bogged down in a fic, she asked me, “Do you like writing?”
And I said, right away, not knowing that I was copying Dorothy Parker and WOULD be echoed by Batton of all people.
“I like having written.”
Because that’s the honest truth, for me. I love having written. I love going back to reread stuff I wrote even decades ago. I find my own jokes funny. The scenes I put down give me just the feels I was wanting to be feeling. The characters speak to me because I put the damn words in their figurative mouths. The set ups and pay off feel balanced and satisfying.
It’s like cooking for yourself, knowing just how much garlic and lemon and sugar you really really like. If eating your own handmade pasta was 100% more egotistical and narcissistic.
But writing, unless I’m in one of those wonderfully manic moods, can be an absolute CHORE. If I could have my rough drafts extracted from my brain and into a word processor by a helmet covered in needles, I’d do it. Definitely.
But I know that my dear Banana Jr. didn’t mean ‘loving having written’ in exactly the way I do. He’s clear about that in the rest of his comment.
And this is demonstrated SO SO CLEARLY in this godawful Skip and Batton interview drivel. Nothing (heaven help us– so far) has been about the stories Batton wanted to tell, it has been about wanting to achieve the social status of a writer. Like a forensic investigator dissecting a rotting corpse, maybe this wretched storyline deserves a deeper analysis…
FARM REPORT FOR THOSE SO INCLINED:
Monday was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit with a foot and half of snow. Today it was 85. All four seasons in one week. Someone get Mother Nature some lithium because the bitch is bi-polar af.
Had our first calf of the year on St. Paddy’s Day, on a day barely warm enough to leave it out on pasture. We’re up to four calves today, including a widdle moo with widdle Ray Bans.
Not much to go on for Monday’s Crankshaft, as people in GoComics were guessing, Max and Hannah’s news could be anything from a move to another pregnancy to an official marriage ceremony to make this common-law arrangement religiously blessed. (Bonus points for me if they bring up Covid as a reason they didn’t have a ceremony before)
And bonus points for TrespassersW who guessed yesterday on GoComics.
Love seeing the official Crankshaft comments section popping off like that. It’s the kind of passion and engagement that has Andrews McNeel Universal paying Batiuk the big bucks!
Here in Iowa we were supposed to start off March with 3 inches of snow Sunday night, but instead got nada. The old farmer’s wisdom of my father says that it means the end of March is going to be nasty. In like a lamb, out like a lion.
Speaking of the dramatic juxtaposition of ferocity with helpless infantilism.
Chihuahuas.
In my doggy deep dive of last week for the backstory of Homer II, another pooch popped up. Grandma Rose Murdoch’s pet Chihuahua, Tinkerbelle.
Similar to Homer II, Tinkerbelle’s origin seems to be sometime in the 90’s. The earliest reference I could find was this strip during Crankshaft’s near death experience in Strike Four!.
Grandma Rose staying for a few days was a regular fixture during holidays, and always brought the pocket dog along with for Crankshaft to complaina about.
Tinkerbelle would also have to stay over after Rose had fallen on the ice. Unlike poor Homer chained to his doghouse, Tinkerbelle had the full run of the house.
News alert! Roland/Rolanda wasn’t the first transgender character in the Funkyverse! She was beaten out by decades by a dog who somehow changed pronouns in 2006. Should we chock this up to Batiuk forgetting that he’d once thought it was funny to name a boy dog Tinkerbelle, and regendering it by accident? Probably. Is that what I’m going to do? No. I’m going to imagine that Rose replaced the male Tinkerbelle with an identical but female dog. She seems like the type.
When Rose moved in with Pam and Jeff, Tinkerbelle was also allowed to join the household. She didn’t take kindly to Homer or Pickles, and they didn’t seem too enthused about her either.
Pickles hated her so much that the GoComics coloring monkeys accidently turned him orange.
And boy that first panel’s Pickles looks familiar…
Gotcha Davis!!!
Crankshaft had nothing but disdain for the yappy ankle biter…until one two week arc in 2009.
Did Tinkerbelle’s brave sacrifice mean that Crankshaft would stop hating on the sweet little pupper?
Nope. And Crankshaft’s cold rejection of Tinkerbelle eventually drove the dog to depression.
And finally, in 2010, rumball assisted suicide.
Seriously.
Tinkerbelle’s last appearance is much like Homer’s: ingesting chocolate before disappearing forever.
So Batton Thomas’ wife is just Cathy? No cute rearranging of syllables? No inversion of letters. Just Cathy. Fine.
I hate it.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate Batton since I began to blog. There are 547 published blog posts on this site I have posted under my name. If the word hate replaced each letter of each word of those 547 blog posts, it would not equal ONE ONE-BILLIONTH of the hate I feel for Batton as I type this. For Batton. HATE. HATE.
I do not hate Tom Batiuk, no. Tom Batiuk is a real life human, with real thoughts and real feelings and a real family. He has enjoyed hot, fresh pizza. He has seen the beauty of fall leaves. He has felt pain. He has made others smile. I can lay no irredeemable crime against humanity at his feet. I cannot hate him. Pity him, yes, but not hate.
But Batton is a fictional device. Batton is a narcissistic conceit. Batton is made of thoughtless, heartless computer goo and transmitted through wires and radio waves. He’s not a real life person. And I HATE him. Like I would hate the melanoma growing from an ugly tattoo on the back of a stranger.
This week is miserable. Almost makes me nostalgic for last week, when we got to watch uncanny traced photo people converse about the unnecessary renovations they were doing to an abandoned doghouse.
Abandoned? Indeed. For Homer the dog was last seen August 6, 2010. Wherein E fed him chocolate cake. And I guess we can surmise that the elderly dog died. Because we never see him again.
Yes, Cranky, as opposed to those things you ignorant git. Unless vermin contain caffeine or theobromine, or cat poop is laced with the methylxanthines that block adenosine receptors.
In truth, this last appearance of Homer is shocking, and not because of the dog murder. It’s because Homer had already disappeared for two whole years before this. He hadn’t been seen since taking stock of Grandma Rose’s chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, in July 2008.
I don’t know how often the old dog showed up in the 90’s. But in the 2000’s he was very much on the back burner. Heck, he wasn’t even on the stove. He was in a coffee can of grease kept in a cupboard above the stove.
He was allowed in the house on Christmas Day 2007.
He slept through fireworks on July 4, 2006.
Cranky took him on a walk to piss on Lillian’s saplings in March of 2006.
He briefly escaped being chained up to a flimsy doorless doghouse in the dead of winter in January 2006. Wonder if Tom got some hatemail for this one.
On September 27, 2005, he goes comatose with boredom.
In June of 2005 Homer gets his last proper full week arc, where we learn that his ‘boy’ doesn’t care for him and can’t even remember his name.
21 years ago Crankshaft enslaved his elderly dog and forced him to shovel snow. The GoComics coloring monkeys decided the sight was so horrific it turned Pam’s hair white.
October 2, 2004, we got a lovely little wordless strip. No notes here.
August 12, 2004, the Murdoch/Crankshaft household was kind enough to make sure Homer wasn’t Toto’ed in a twister.
July 25, 2004, Homer is let in the house to get his treat ration, and Mindy proves she’s Pam’s daughter by asking the classic Pam question.
May 30, 2004. Ayers draws an adorable pupper cowering behind his flimsy doghouse.
This strip displays something I wish Ayers and Batiuk had consciously cultivated, especially in their later years: put kids and pets in the damn background of strips! I’ve talked at length how the consistency of the physical locations in the Funkyverse give it real tangibility. I wish we had that same consistency with the people living in those locations.
We wouldn’t be asking ‘Where’s Wally Jr.?” or ‘Wait, who the f**k is Pickles?’ or ‘Does Mitch even live with the Murdochs anymore?’ if they had been placed in the background or foreground where appropriate. I will say Ayers was better at this with Pickles up through the early aughts, where the cat is often drawn just standing around in the yard while Ed yammers about his brand new combine harvester. But there’s a million million yard strips where he could have doodled ol Homer to remind us that the dog still exists.
May 4, 2004 is the earliest GoComics strip I could find with Homer.
Homer isn’t in the first four Crankshaft books, so they must have got him after, maybe sometime in the early to mid 90’s if Mindy’s age in this strip from Strike Four! is anything to go by.
In Roses in December, Homer has his Lassie moment, sort of.
And this brings up that Homer is actually Homer II. Named, (presumably) for Ed’s childhood dog. Long Dead Homer was mentioned long before Homer II was introduced.
Poor Homer II, named for a long dead and better loved dog. Neglected, forgotten, dismissed. He wasn’t even Ed Crankshaft’s favorite pet.
Son of Stuck Funky 