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.
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.”
BARF.
Buckle in folks. This one’s a doozy.
So sue me, Crankshaft spending a week hiding under his bed was far FAR from the worst arc of 2025. I daresay that I saw a strip or two that might make the 2025 Awards shortlist.
Is it the best week of a comic strip in bed that I’ve ever seen? Not by a long shot. Pastis had this in bag years ago, with a strip so funny and relatable my mom clipped it out and put in on her fridge.
But Crankshaft this week was perhaps better than the worst of the ‘Garfield in Bed’ strips, which are their own dedicated subgenre with decades of history.
1979
1987
But I’ll say this for Garfield recently. The art may be recycled, but the jokes have gotten pretty avant garde.
Maybe like evolution and natural selection redesigning the crab over and over and over…all strips will eventually become Heathcliff.
Expect the Chien recap to spin back up. I just have to reorient myself with our favorite goth queen.
EDIT!!!!
I am editing this to declare that I had NO IDEA when I photoshopped my joke strip that the next arc would be Batton and Skip. I was just trying to think of the most repulsive thing that Cranky could be hiding from.
I swear. I swear on my two foot high stack of The Complete Funky Winkerbean volumes. I had no concious idea what this week would bring.
Hang on real quick. I’m off to pick the next lotto numbers!
We need an experiment to see if this is general precognition, or if I’m just uniquely cursed to foresee the future of Crankshaft.
Sunday saw a repeat of one of Batiuk’s oldest jokes. The ‘One Leg At A Time’ coach speech. He’s been pulling out that old groaner for more than FIFTY YEARS.
Looks like we are finally, FINALLY, at the end of this summer’s Big Blue Bomb. Thank you to everyone who carefully took us through a play by play of the hideous stupidity in the comments. I can’t wait for next year’s edition of “Batiuk Takes a Tax Deductible Vacation,” when Dinkle is inducted into the Grand Ol’ Opry for being the most authentic country music sensation since Lil Nas X.
Continue reading “A Many Feathered Cap”
Son of Stuck Funky 