Author: ComicBookHarriet

With the advent of good ol’ Cranky bitching to a poor receptionist at the doctor’s office on Sunday, I think we can finally say that, ‘In the Name of the Father’ has reached its conclusion.

And boy, what a tale uh….softly…told it was. I’m guessing by ‘softly’ Batiuk meant ‘lacking direction, momentum, or motivation.’

It was awful, truly. So, for me, it was great. Because at least awe at awfulness is a feeling. His attempts at regular old Crankshaft gags, while objectively of better quality, leave nothing to be remarked on. It’s eating a stale, dollar store box of chocy-chip cookies, and remembering the taste of name brand Chips A’hoy. Forgettably disappointing.

But the arc we just got was a greatest hits medley of all Batiuk’s best sins. We got plot holes, weird retcons, call-backs to people who died in horrible ways, failed attempts to be artsy and profound, depression, ruin, and wry grins.

I went back and binged the entire seven weeks in one go. It took six minutes. Like many of Batiuk’s prestige pieces, it does improve somewhat being consumed this way, because you’re not stuck too long on a strip that’s nothing more than inane exposition, or a bland bit of conversation.

Somewhere along the line Batiuk has forgotten entirely that his audience will be reading his stories one strip at a time, with 24 hours between strips. No one is going back and rereading this dreck in massive chunks except for me. So, even if not gunning for a laugh out loud punchline, each strip should do something more than blandly progress the weeklong conversation.

RIVETING

That’s just one of many guidelines for writing well that Batiuk has either forgotten, willfully ignored, or never knew in the first place.

I confessed in some earlier posts that I dabble occasionally in the dark arts of fanfiction, and as I muddled through this nonsense for more than a month, my fanfic addled brain couldn’t help but cough up a version of the story that I saw as better.

I held myself to the constraints of being more or less the same story, told in way consistent with the best possible version of Batiuk’s style, taking up the same seven weeks. I briefly thought about trying to paste strips together for the true fan comic experience, but the task was too daunting, even for me. I hope you’ll accept my script format.

So, nestle in dear nitters, for a the first part of a story entitled, ‘Sentimental Journey’… which like all tales competently told begins with an inciting incident.

Week One:

To Be Continued…

Now, let me talk through a couple of my creative decisions, and how I think they fix some of the problems I think wrecked ‘In the Name of the Father’.

1.) Do not include Chippewa Lake Park. Yeah, both places are real and existed and it’s plausible Lucy and Eugene would have visited both. But all Batiuk did by adding a new location was confuse absolutely everyone. He’s spent 30 plus years building up Summit Beach Park as special. Keep things focused! (Something you’ll hear me repeat.) So everything here is Summit Beach and the Wisteria Ballroom again.

2.) Don’t try to make Eugene’s moving a big mystery. Two of the strips in the first week of ITNOTF were all ominous about Eugene moving. The audience doesn’t care about Eugene alone, he’s a bland quaternary character. You can’t build any stakes on his fate. The audience instead needs a little reminder about what the ancient love triangle is all about, as Lil is a main character of the strip.

3.) Try to make things specific to the characters. The only day that kind of maybe worked that whole week was maybe the “Good old days, getting old days strip.”

Except that it these sort of platitudes could be blathered by any two characters in this strip looking at any old picture. I did my best to make things a bit more personal.

4.) A wider range of emotions. Other than a few ominous side eyes by Eugene, most of the week in ITNOTF is full of bland grins. I tried to throw in some shock, surprise, concern and sadness.

5.) A bit of classic Dinkle behavior. If we’re going to learn Dinkle’s hardass personality was in reaction to his father, let’s get a little taste of it when he’s first shown in the story.

6.) Crankshaft being Crankshaft in Crankshaft. While he stood around blankly staring for most of ITNOTF, I hope to weave actual Crankshaft time into this, even if he doesn’t have a ton to actually do.

I acknowledge that one way this week still fails is in setting up clearly for the audience any question that would make them interested in what is next in the story. Lil taking the photo to Dinkle is plausible, but there’s no real stakes to it.

By talking about how Lucy loved the old band music, I’m hoping to establish why Lil would care at all about who Larry Dinkle was and follow Harry around listening to his stories. I also planted a little reminder of the whole thwarted proposal fiasco, so maybe people would speculate that I would finally resolve that.

I am welcome to any kind of criticism on this. After all, I’m not a Pulitzer Nominated Cartoonist of 50 plus years. I’m just a woman who has written some fanfic and binged some YouTube videos on story structure by other amateurs .

Stay tuned.

Man, I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our nation’s birthday than by dragging a small cadre of elderly people through the dilapidated remains of a defunct amusement park, to the jagged, tetanus riddled shell of a dance hall, and then making them listen to a trumpet solo squeezed out between the withered, puckered, trembling lips of a fat, retired, band director.

When placed my bet that this would end with a musical performance at Chippewa Lake, I was picturing an official performance of both of Dinkle’s elderly musical groups at the grand opening of the Chippewa Lake Nature Park. A celebration of the community coming together to honor the past while creating a safe and clean space for future generations to enjoy. But no, in the Funkyverse Chippewa Lake is still a ghostly wreck.

Why are you so hung up on squatting in everlasting ruins, like a maggot in a corpse? Go ahead and honor what your local community is doing, Batiuk. Please. They’re even opening a little museum on the park grounds, you should be all over this shit!

While the train crash of this story has been miles more entertaining than endless Skip and Batton arcs, and I will never turn down a Batiuk prestige arc inanely told, I still wish we were getting some traditional 4th of July grill explosions. With all the fuss being made over the 250th, I’m surprised Batiuk didn’t cook up some shenanigans like he did for the Eclipse.

Fifty years ago he was all over the Bicentennial. He milked it for gags for more than a year. From one off gag strips starting in 1975, to an arc starring Dinkle, a leading up to a two week honeymoon to Colonial Williamsburg in July of 1976.

I promised Sorial Promise a SnowBelle update. Here she was on 7-3, just before being loaded up and taken out to pasture to meet her first boyfriend.

They grow up so fast… sniff.

Is that members of the St. Spires choir wandering into some kind of abandoned location? Banana Jr! I’ll take the payout for my bet.

And to answer this question.

Let me pull up the handy guide I use when tallying up year end appearances for Awards Season.

So from left to right we’ve got Pat, Mary Jane, Lois, Lil, Ed, Nancy Harriet, and Harry. No sign of the Bedside Manor band yet. And what a choir is going to do with sheet music intended for a big dance hall band is still a mystery.

‘In the Name of the Father’ has been a real treat for me in the way a decaying fever dream of a wannabe auteur can only be. Weirdly ambitious, disjointed, and with all the artistic merit poorly implemented cut and paste technology can provide.

As in so many things Batiuk tries, there’s a kernel of a solid idea inside the poorly processed shit. Elderly man connects with the memory of the long dead father with whom he had a complicated relationship. Making Larry Dinkle a sad drunk who never really achieved his dreams might be considered unnecessarily maudlin by many. But can you imagine this story if there WASN’T any hint of tension or conflict? If Larry was just a perfect and perfectly happy Harry clone in a different decade? This story would go from laughably bad to mind numbing.

Of course it doesn’t work, because the Crankshaft audience doesn’t care about Dinkle’s journey and has no investment in his feelings toward his dead dad. Lillian and Eugene’s feelings about dead Lucy have been done to death, and no longer carry any conflict to resolve, and using them as the launch pad to get this tour through Larry Dinkle’s history has no thematic cohesion to it.

Why doesn’t Batiuk give Cranky himself some old arcs like this again? I’d love for the old coot to DO something for once. It’s not like the old geezer doesn’t have history you could mine for some bittersweet end of life stories. Have him find his dead wife’s diary! Dead people apparently always have diaries hanging around in case you need narration over panels, ideas for your next novel, or blackmail material for wannabe reality TV producers.

But I’d still take this over Skip and Batton any day of the week.

Why did Batiuk even attempt something this borderline ambitious so late in the game? Well. I have another error that needs retracting.

Both Banana Jr, and I, had misremembered and misread this strip.

Batiuk’s mouthpiece says, “I love writing, and hate having written.”

Batiuk loves writing. He hates NOT doing it.

I still say that what Banana Jr. and I used this as evidence to argue is still true. Batiuk does love the idea of being a writer. His ego wants that identity label, and it’s more important to him than the actual stories he creates.

But it’s hard to read something like what we’ve gotten the last month and assume that Batiuk doesn’t also have some weird compulsion to weave together these nonsensical narratives. He loves writing. His brain craves the process of creation no matter how demented and lackluster the final results. It’s what makes him who he is. It’s why Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft didn’t become a Family Circus like zombie strip with no passage of time, only rotating around the same 20 safe jokes with all the regularity of a church liturgy.

Yeah he’s also only got those 20 jokes. But between them you sometimes get something like ‘In the Name of the Father.’

I poked around in the archives just a little bit. I was hunting for an arc I remembered when Harry’s daughter, Halle, visited him and he talked about how he regretted how much band directing had taken him from her. I couldn’t find the exact arc, but I did find a couple fun strips nonetheless.

Happy Father’s Day!

Big Daddy Batiuk decided that today, we get to create our own strip.

Here’s my version!

Okay. So it is really just an error that, as of the writing of this blog post, has been up all day and never corrected.

It’s not the only error born of laziness from this week.

For example.

Wait…

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiitttttttt…..

You mean to tell me, Summit Beach Park was…ALSO…a real place?

OH FOR PETE’S SAKE

Sigh.

I want this to be a lesson to all of you out in readerville: never take the apparent depth of the ad-hoc ‘research’ that we do on this blog as a completeness of perspective.

I was one quick Google search away from avoiding an unforced error. And for a moment, when I read iansdrunkenbeard’s post, the dumb egomonkey part of my brain wanted to smile and nod and play along like OF COURSE I knew that Summit Beach was also a real place. But I decided to fess up. Because it’s an important lesson.

I had taken what I’ve learned about the way Batty operates and my own experiences and presuppositions and decided that Summit Beach was fictional. Because from my more modern perspective it seemed far fetched to me that in real life, less than 30 miles from each other, there would be two waterside amusement parks, with roller coasters and midways and boat docks, and named dance halls that burned down.

But I was wrong. The 1900’s through the 1950’s was a different time. A time of more local amusements. A time when you could have a crowd of ladies dancing arm in arm with each other and no one would ever assume that meant the Wisteria Ballroom was a lesbian hotspot.

Does this mean that I was completely wrong, and that the Chippewa Lake Amusement Park was in no way an inspiration for all the Lucy/Lil/Eugene shenanigans? No.

Not according to this lovely little youtube video I found… (From the ironically tited DinkLife channel)

The location of Summit Beach Park was redeveloped as housing in the 60’s. So, unlike the Summit Beach of the Funkyverse, there was no abandoned park lingering on and decaying for decades that Lucy or Eugene or Lillian could wander around. That part of the afterlife of Chippewa Lake Park was stolen for the fiction.

But, while the Starlight Ballroom burned down in 2002, the real life Wisteria Ballroom met a firey end much earlier.

(Don’t think about how Pam is canonically 76. It will only hurt your brain)

And yes, the Summit Beach Dance Pavilion and Roller Rink looks much closer to the comics.

Interestly the entrance sign used for the park sometimes would revert to an older reference. An Ayers error!?

Also of note, remember a couple years ago, where Eugene went to a somehow now open Summit Beach and tried to drown himself with a dilapidated canoe?

That also is seemingly based on real life now. As just this summer, after years of planning and a couple seasons of construction, there is now a small park with concessions, a pavillion and complete with kayak rentals open at Summit Lake again.

That’s nice.

Yes, yes, I haven’t posted in forever, many thanks to Banana Jr 6000 and Narshe etc etc…

More importantly what the hell is going on this strip?

That is NOT the Starlight Ballroom in Chippewa Lake Park. THAT is an amalgamation of two different comic panels drawn decades apart, one of which included a different fictional band leader and band.

And the other, is a panel from Lillian’s imagined afterlife for Lucy. So don’t ask me how Eugene was able to pull a photograph from purgatory itself.

What unites the two, other than the copy pasting work of some poor computer intern posing as Dan Davis? They’re both supposed to be in the Wisteria Ball Room at Summit Beach Park!

This:

Is not Eugene and Lucy dancing at Chippewa Lake. Because it’s them at Summit Beach.

A location established as so important to Lucy that in the throes of dementia she somehow found her way there!

A location established for decades and decades. 30 years at minimum!

Now it’s pretty obvious, with only the barest bit of research, that Summit Beach Park was always based on the real life Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio, just south of Medina, which closed in 1978 after a hundred years of operation.

The grounds sat abandoned, the play place for vandals and urban explorers, slowly being consumed by nature and burned by arsonists for more than 40 years, providing reference photos for Batiuk to pass on to Ayers.

The ride track in the foreground was the Tumble Bug. Only one ride of its kind remains in operation at Kennywood.

I will say that the Wisteria Ballroom and the Starlight Ballroom don’t share much resemblance on the outside. Artistic license perhaps? After all ‘arcade’ literally means a whole bunch of arches. Wisteria looks more early 20th century amusement and looks less like a two story Village Inn.

Inside The Starlight Ballroom looked like this:

Until it looked like this:

And then in 2002 it looked like this:

(The Wisteria Ballroom was confirmed burned down in strips dating back to the 90’s btw. Did the Crankshaft strips inspire an arsonist? Was the arsonist Batiuk himself? Questions!)

Still, the most important question remains, what the heck is going on here?

A few possibilities.

1.) It’s an error. Batiuk is going senile, and is mixing up his fictional locations with the real world locations they’re based on.

But in Sunday’s strip we get those stupid ticket stubs in the title panel.

Lovingly copied from an Ebay listing photo.

Seems pretty specific and high effort to have ‘Davis’ pulling up. So what is going on? Gleeb over in the GoComics comments section may have figured it out.

So I’m putting my money on gleeb’s notion that Batiuk is choosing to muck around with 30 years of continuity and water down Summit Park as a place of importance to Lucy and Eugene in order to crowbar in a current local Ohio event. Banana Jr, put me down for betting that this whole stupid arc ends with Harry Dinkle directing his choir/band of geriatrics at the opening of the new Chippewa Lake Nature Park. Eugene will shed a single wistful tear as he watches on TV from the comfort of his prison or nursing home or anchorite’s cell or desert island or wherever he’s going.

Funny that Batiuk would look back so fondly on The Starlight Ballroom. That is where, in 1937, Lawrence Welk made his first radio broadcast. And Batiuk’s relationship with Welk is…fraught.

Funnier still that Ed Crankshaft is acting like he’s never heard the name Larry Dinkle before. Because his best friend for life, Ralph Meckler, played trumpet in his band.

lol