ComicBookHarriet

The Crankshaft Awards 2023: Part 1!

Welcome nitpickers, and snarkers, and funkers of all ages to the First Annual Crankshaft Awards! In honor of our surviving strip, its surviving protagonist, and the dedicated team of dedicated cartoonists that put Crankshaft together, I have created the following award to hand out.

In this piece, I tried to capture the essence of Crankshaft in 2023. Thus, I spent about ten minutes using art I stole off of Google scribbling this together in MS Paint and called it good enough.

A Year of Crank!

At long last, and without further ado, your nominees for

The Crankshaft Awards 2023!

Voting commences immediately, and will be open for about a week!

Vote Here!

The Horrifying Return of Dinkshaft.

Now that we’re back at St. Spires, TFH has whipped up another vastly superior interpretation of Sunday’s strip.

I wonder if Batiuk realizes how tone deaf Sunday’s strip was to the religious set? It’s one thing to shout about football fields being for marching bands. But screaming from the choir loft that a place dedicated to the worship and reverence of a higher power is just another venue for your own self-aggrandizing artistic pursuits comes across as blasphemy to the believer and insensitive to the agnostic.

Massaging the Truth

Correct me if I am wrong, but Ed going to get a massage is it a new arc for Crankshaft? I find this story-line original and funny. How about you?
Sorial Promise, January 19, 2024

Funny? Tolerably so, for me at least. The last three have at least been within the same universe as recognizable comedy. This should be the baseline of Crankshaft, not a week of no jokes, no conflict, no real plot, as one hunk of stale toast hands the keys to a failure of a restaurant to another hunk of stale toast and his pretzel stick appendage of a partner.

Original? Well, Cranky is no stranger to a massage. Back in 2014, when he threw out his back, his resistance to a massage served as the concluding conflict of the plot. And by the end…things started to look pretty…familiar.

Everyone asks, “Where’s Crankshaft?” No one asks, “How’s Crankshaft?”

I hope all the snarkers out in Nitpickerville are keeping safe and warm. It got juuuuust toasty enough, (20 Freedom Units on the thermometer,) for my dad and brother and I to go wading through two foot deep drifts to put up a stretch of electric fence.

*Not pictured, Night King, tauntaun, White Witch, Snowpiercer.*

Fellow fine blogger, MopMan had a really good question on the last post.

And it’s a very valid line of inquiry. So, for all your edification, of the 206 strips that Ed appeared in, there were 59 where he didn’t have any dialogue. That sounds like a lot, but it’s rather deceiving, as in many of these strips Cranky was still very much the focus. I broke down Cranky’s silent strips as follows.