I swear a Chien post is coming. Harvest has sapped half my energy and the other half was thrown away pitch by pitch watching the Cubs flail their way into the post-season only to trip and fall in a heartbreaking game 5 in the NLDS.
Now all I have to cheer for is anyone beating up on the Dodgers. Bummer.
In my drained malaise, I thought about Batiuk and his silly obsession with the ‘melancholy beauty’ of fall leaves. Last year I posted the first Existential Leaves arc of 1975. While I scrape together the energy to clean out grain bins and tackle Les Moore on Trial (With the School Board), I thought I’d treat you guys to 1976’s week of Fatalistic Philosophical Foliage.
Such an outdated Quercuscentric outlook. The Pinaceae were here before that, bigot!
“Climate damage means we won’t have any snowmen!”
“When a staminate and a pistillate are stirred up by great wind…”
Serious question. How is one leaf older and wiser than the other leaf?
Why is the younger leaf a buckaroo? Why didn’t he see the branches snap? How do leaves see? This is like Toy Story logic all over again!!!!
So the leaf prefers the prospect of death to continued interaction with an out-group? There’s a political joke somewhere in there I’m too lazy to construct.
I wanted to wait for last week of Crankshaft to complete before composing a post on it. I wanted to take in all six days of that awe inspiring arc. And I wanted a good long time to mull it over.
I was deliriously happy reading Crankshaft last week. It brought me such joy, but I’m having trouble putting my feelings into words. Because the happiness comes from a place so esoteric and weird I don’t know any good ways to describe its origin.
Let me try to dissect it. As best I can.
Batiuk’s strawman bellyaching about comics not being funny has been spouted before, but mostly always by a series of nameless men and women, sometimes not even pictured.
This time, he put all the complaints in the mouth of Crankshaft: the namesake character of the entire strip, and the most well liked character left in it. The only character that hasn’t been completely swallowed up by Batiuk’s ego and eroding theory of mind and spat back out as a pathetic manchild simpering over comic books (or one of the blonde brainless hivemind Banana Jr brought up in his last post).
Batiuk doesn’t come across as the winner here. Not to me. Because the protagonist of Crankshaft is Crankshaft.
It was oddly compelling, to have a character get a chance to bitch at their stupid creator, have the creator attempt to put them in their place and fail. What a self own! What an own goal! It’s practically Biblical.
You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “You did not make me”? Can the pot say to the potter, “You know nothing”?
Isaiah 29:16
In this case, I’d say the pot can tell the potter, “You know nothing.” Because Batiuk sure as heck doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. All he’s done is make Crankshaft the spokesperson for every snarky commenter that keeps his strip afloat.
Maybe he realizes this. Maybe this is some kind of 3D chess move of giving his warring camps of snarkers vs fans figureheads to rally behind, all to keep his strip relevant. Maybe that’s what Batiuk meant by Saturday’s strip. Hate readers are readers after all. He certainly hasn’t shut down his comments section, unlike other creators on GoComics.
Whatever Batiuk’s true motivation, the one who really lost out on all this is his pathetic avatar, Batton. No one liked him anyway, and an entire week of passive aggressive smirking leaves him about as tolerable as Spanish Flu.
And, as if to prove the supremacy of Ed Crankshaft, what do we get to start out this week? Two classic Crankshaft strips starring Crankshaft that were actually pretty funny.
IMO, a muddled aphorism does not a joke make. So I had a stab at a couple rewrites of today’s joke. Please rate, critique, comment, and let me know your favorite. And let me see the best jokes YOU can whip up!
It seems ol’ Batiuk has finally taken to heart all the complaints about not enough Crankshaft in Crankshaft. And he has decided to rectify this by shoving ol’ Crank into the St. Spires Choir, even though the ol’ coot has never before shown any musical inclination in his life beyond badly butchering popular lyrics to the chagrin of his family.
I am not even going to dignify the last week of Crankshaft with any kind of detailed response. Y’all have lambasted it well and truly in the comments here and elsewhere, and there is nothing I want to add.
Except to point out that the exact same Batton face was used twice today, just flipped horizontally. I would call it lazy, if Davis hadn’t gone above and beyond with his stock image searches to bring Batton’s sepia toned flashbacks to stilted nonsensical life.
Let us go back to an earlier time. When the art was fresh, but the writing was just as insufferable.
To re-orient ourselves into Chien’s Story,
In 1998, Chien was introduced as a wannabe avant garde, misanthropic snarker with a goth sense of fashion.
I posited that we should be asking four questions when going over Chien’s history.
1.) Is Chien truly unique in personality?
2.) Where does Chien come from?
3.) Is Chien morally/intellectually/philosophically justified in the author’s eyes?
4.) What can Chien’s portrayal tell us about how Batiuk views and writes the internal lives of women?
From 1998 to 2000 we saw Chien and her best friend Ally working for the school yearbook and newspaper. We saw them butt heads with Bull Bushka over including pictures of the football team in the yearbook, and in the next year they published a hit-piece in the school paper about the hypocrisy of the new dress code.
In my analysis I pointed out the many many times Chien was demeaning and dismissive toward ‘The Cool Kids’. I posited that while this was believable for her character, Batiuk does a ham handed job of framing it, never realizing that by making Chien an intellectual elitist that gets off on being an outsider, he turns her into just another kind of bully.
And now we reach September 11, 2000. And a disaster of an arc begins.
First things first. This strip. I will give THIS ONE strip credit.
This nearly wordless strip establishes that Chien dresses the way she does because she personally thinks it’s cool and likes it. She is literally doing it for an audience of one, herself. This helps to make her sympathetic.
NOW THE HORROR.
Your friends call you ‘dog’? Kay. And what is up with this second person narration? Is this some kind of Chick Tract.
(Kind of)
No, of course you’re not like them Chien. You’ve never mocked or belittled, pointed at and humiliated others because you thought you were better than them.
Oh wait…
But no. You’re not like them. They’re preps and dress preppy.
I will stop referencing ‘My Immortal’ by Tara Gillesbie when it stops being relevant.
Oooooookay. Don’t even really know where to begin to pick this one apart. Like, it’s 2000, right? Wouldn’t adults expect classrooms to be wired for telephones?
Batiuk is obviously trying to put his Boomer audience in the shoes of a Gen X student. But barring the technology upgrade how does Batiuk even show that school is different.
And then there’s the nonsensical Columbine namedrop over the top of blatant and egregious bullying? What does that even mean? What has changed?
The going popular narrative being bandied about at the time was that Columbine was the result of preps bullying outsiders, and there was much hand wringing and pushing of anti-bullying initiatives. Why are we seeing bullying?
Batiuk is, once again, incorporating a real life tragedy into in little universe in the most stupid way. Some of you may argue he does this to grandstand and get accolades. But I also think there’s a weird coping element to it. He takes a problem that troubles him, shoves it awkwardly into his playhouse, and solves it to his own satisfaction. Like a kid whose parents are fighting soothing themselves by making the dollies kiss.
But wait. It gets worse.
I have no words. I can only respond using a visual aid.
For fucks sake. It’s like Batiuk is writing a self-aggrandizing Tinder profile for Les.
So, all this boils down to, “You are Chien, you think about Les Moore.”
Son of Stuck Funky 