No Passtime For Old Men.

We here in the Funkyverse commentary community are currently gritting our teeth through the second week of ‘Senior Baseball’ hijinks in the copy-pasta nightmarescape that is Crankshaft. The art has been awful, and the gags as limp as a hand-me-down training bra. On the upside, at least this arc involves Crankshaft himself, and I would even venture that today’s strip comes closer to an acceptable joke then we’ve been used to so far this year. It’s inoffensive, and I have a sneaking suspicion it might make the shortlist for best of 2024. Though this says more about the dire state of comedy in 2024, than the quality of the strip itself.

For those of you new to the Crankensphere, Cranky’s been on a senior baseball/softball league for nearly 20 years, giving Davis plenty of clipart to select from this week. We’ve even already had a week of Davis, senior baseball material in 2017. Looking at those gives a good indication of how far his photoshop efforts have fallen off.

And hey, at least I’d say the vast bulk of these strips are tolerable to good, with a few real gems. So if you wanted to actually ENJOY Crankshaft this week, take this little trip down memory lane with me!

2005

Look! It’s Matty Kornbluth!
Continue reading “No Passtime For Old Men.”

Well Exercised Futility.

Since Crankshaft is still languishing in a Dinkle tinged purgatory, and since tornado watches had me part homebound today, (my neck of the woods was spared,) I spent some time with my Complete Funky Winkerbean volumes this afternoon. Because if Batiuk is gonna drag out the taxidermized horse of Claude Barlow, World’s Worst Composer, and whip the desiccated carcass around for a week, I’m gonna hide in my archives and soothe myself with digging through the dumb running gag’s origins.

Last month, I did a post on Dinkle’s history as an author where I touched on Claude for a bit. But at that time I still didn’t have the volume where I could definitively point to a strip as the first mention of the composer. On April 28, 1976 we get the first mention of a book on greatest band directors, which quickly turns, classic Dinkle style, into egocentric self-aggrandizement. There were only a handful of strips of Great Band Directors.

April 29, 1976
Continue reading “Well Exercised Futility.”