Son of Stuck Funky – Son of Stuck Funky

The Compleat Batton Thomas

Hi, folks! The Crankshaft Awards are still under construction, due to some nasty cold here in the upper Midwest. (My hometown was minus 6 degrees on Monday.)

So in the meantime, I want to document the entire Batton Thomas interview. Boring, I know, but I really don’t know how else to respond to it. I can’t use Batton to mock Tom Batiuk, because Batton already does a spectacular job of that without my help. And I think we’ve all wailed and gnashed our teeth in the comments about what an inane, boring, self-serving ego trip this all is. But it just keeps going.

I thought the best way to document it would be to put it all in one place, to illustrate how much nothing there is in what has now been nine weeks of strips.

August 5, 2024: Skip seeks Batton to do an interview, so he immediately heads to Komix Korner. Batton saunters in on cue. He quotes Dorothy Parker for some reason, probably to show off his writerliness.

August 19: Skip needs to do another interview for a “longer and more in-depth” piece. He asks “what sparked your interest in comics?” Of course, it’s comic books. Batton traveled to New York and failed to be hired by either DC or Marvel.

January 27 ,2025: Batton sucks at being an art teacher, so he badgers the local paper into letting him draw a cartoon. He meets with a syndicate, NEA, which gives him some advice on how to turn it into a comic strip.

March 17: Batton talks about what inspired him to become a cartoonist. Spoiler alert: it was comic books.

May 26: Batton comes up with the name for his proto-strip Rappin’ Around, and annoys Roger Bollen, the creator of Animal Crackers. Roger says “just because I visited the syndicates in New York doesn’t mean you have to.” Batton immediately announces his plan to do this, rejecting Bollen’s advice right to his face.

July 14: Skip visits Batton in his studio. Batton takes his second trip to New York, eats at Howard Johnson’s, and gets rejected by the syndicates. But he returns home to find an important-looking letter in the mail, despite having spoken to no one. After telling a friend about it, Batton realizes that he is now better than everyone else.

September 1: Skip asks “So what happened after Publishers-Hall offered you a contract for your own syndicated comic strip?” Batton mostly whined about how difficult it was.

September 29: Batton is sitting with Skip for yet another interview when he meets Jeff, his “dopplegänger from the comics shop.” (The umlaut was Batiuk’s.) Ed Crankshaft then rips into Batton over the diminished presence of “Grandpa Wrinkles” in the comic strip.

January 19, 2026: Batton and Skip visit Batton’s first apartment house, Elyria High School, and syndicate president Dick Sherry visits. Batton says Sherry’s was “thoughtful and considerate”, but “it felt like we weren’t on the same page” as Sherry looked at some new strips. This anecdote is never resolved, as Batton talks about the apartment house some more instead.

To be continued, no doubt…

Oh Sherry

This week in Crankshaft:

Hmm, that second panel looks familiar:

This is a photo I dug out of the image folder at the old funkywinkerbean.com in 2022. At the time, I didn’t know who this man was. The only thing I knew was that he was too young to be Hal Foster, who would have been about 80 years old. This came up during the “Hal Foster rips off Phil Holt’s work and publishes it in Prince Valiant” arc, during which Batton Thomas himself applied for the job. I wondered if Tom Batiuk had ever auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in real life, and if this photo was evidence of that. It’s not.

This week, an Anonymous poster on Comics Curmudgeon explained:

Dick Sherry was the president of PUBLISHERS-HALL SYNDICATE around the time Funky Winkerbean was picked up.

I’m glad for that explanation, because Lord knows Tom Batiuk didn’t provide one. And it seems to check out. Wikipedia says “some of the more notable strips syndicated by the company include Pogo, Dennis The Menace, Funky Winkerbean (snort).” So this company would have been Batiuk’s first publisher, and Sherry his employer’s president.

Apparently Batiuk liked Sherry, since Batton went out of his way to call his visit “thoughtful and considerate.” Why is that even noteworthy? A meeting with an employer, especially a one-time visit at the start of an agreed-upon work-from-home arrangement, is courteous by default. Considering the absurd level of consideration Tom Batiuk routinely expects, I wonder what Sherry did to earn this honor. Did he bring Luigi’s pizza and fresh comic books?

Information about Sherry is scanty. The only thing I could find was in an interview with comic book writer Rick Marschall. He says that Sherry was still in this job in 1977, and that he liked hiring international artists so he could take “trips around the world at the syndicate’s expense to have creative conferences with these cartoonists.”

One wonders why he bothered hiring a comic strip creator from Akron rather than Las Vegas or Orlando. Maybe he didn’t have enough clout within the company yet. Maybe that’s the entire reason Funky Winkerbean ever existed at all! Maybe Dick Sherry wanted to hire a cartoonist from Honolulu, but the company refused to reimburse the travel, so he had to take his vacation in Ohio instead. And 50+ years later, here we all are.

Out in the Cold

If any of you are wondering where the heck the Cranky Awards are, blame the ghost of WP Sullivan who died in my bedroom in 1929. He hexed the boiler in my elderly house causing a total meltdown in subzero temperatures. The freezing cold fallout left my roommate and I playing musical chairs with the circuits on our fuse boxes to see how many heaters we could plug in before the finest electrical wiring provided by the post-war, pre-moon landing era completely exploded.

See children…this…this is called a fuse box. Our ancient ancestors used to slot pennies in these to burn their houses down…

In that shuffle, computers took a back seat to more pedestrian concerns. Like making sure our toilet didn’t freeze.

But now we have a boiler again. And I have a vicious head cold! So Cranky Awards should be appearing shortly!

Just as soon as I get done cuddling my cast iron radiator like a recently resurrected lover.

One Sore Keester

I’m hard at work narrowing down the best, worst, and slappable of 2025, don’t you worry my nitters. But in the meantime a comment by my co-captain sent me down a little rabbit hole.

Indeed BJ6K, this George Keesterman

Is the same George Keesterman who appeared on the cover of the very first Crankshaft collection published in 1992.

A Lot of Squawking!

Gosh the last few weeks have been for the birds, eh? Though the feeder box titmouse measuring contest between Lillian and Ed does go way back.

Many of you in the comments on the last post noted that ol Ed Crankshaft really padded out his appearance scores this year. In comparison to last year’s paltry 167 appearances, or 2023’s 206, Ed’s 240 appearances in 2025 almost get him back to pre Funkypocalypse levels such as 2021’s 266 strips.

When I dug into the Panels Speaking numbers, the reason for this bounce back became clear.

Ed Crankshaft	333
Pam Murdoch	144
Batton Thomas	98
Jeff Murdoch	81
Lillian McKenzie	74
Andy Clark	35
Harry Dinkle	26
Lena	25
Ralph Meckler	24
Skip Rawlings	23
Mindy Murdoch	23
Rocky Rhodes	21
Pizza Box Monster	15
Pete Reynolds Roberts	15
Emily Mathews Reynolds	15
Amelia Mathews Reynolds	12
George Keesterman	11
God (Dinkle)	8
Chris Crankshaft	8
Mary Marzipan	6
Eugene Roberts	6
Crazy Harry Klinghorn	6
Pat (Choir)	4
Angie	4
DSH John Howard	3
Curt Cameron	3
Walt (BM)	3
Mrs. Johnson	2
Mayor Bob Kane	1
Nate Green	1
Mary Jane (Choir)	1

Batton Thomas blathered on for 98 EXCRUCIATING PANELS. We got five weeks of Batton and Skip interviews, as well as a week of Akron Comic Con nonsense on top of a week of Batton smirking his way through Ed Crankshaft’s complaints.

Yesterday, in response to Dinkle’s meagre 16 strips in 2025, our dearly beloved be ware of eve hill commented, “Could this be a case of Batty reading the comments and giving the audience what they want? Nah.”

But I think there IS something to this.

Driven by his impending mortality and neurodivergent obsession with being completely known and understood Batiuk is bound and determined to let his author avatar spend weeks spouting out a self-aggrandizing autobiography as thinly veiled as Sydney Sweeney’s tits in a sheer, red-carpet special.

But he knows this isn’t what a large portion of his audience expects or wants. We know he knows because he put their complaints in a character’s mouth for his avatar to respond to.

His audience demanded ‘Where’s Crankshaft?” and he gave us Crankshaft. Batiuk made him join the church choir so he could be there. Batiuk made him go with Jeff to the Bombers game. Batiuk wasn’t willing to concede his most precious darling of Batton, but he did toss nearly every single other toy out of the pram to lighten the burden of outrage Batton would bring. A look at the spreadsheet of Where Strips Took Place proves it.

Number of Strips by Location 2025

Crankshaft’s House	130
	Outside	48
	Kitchen	29
	Living room	28
	Cranky’s Room	14
	Computer	5
Bus Barn	41
Montoni’s	32
Dale Evans	27
Village Booksmith	20
Canada	18
St Spires	12
Doctor’s Office	7
New York	7
Margo Lanes	7
County Fair	7
Ohioana	6
Akron Comiccon	6
Batton’s House	6
Centerview Historical Soc	6
Dinkle’s House	4
Westview High	4
Komix Korner	4
Bedside Manor	4
Lilian’s House	1
The Valentine	1
Ralph’s House	1
Channel 1	1

(Some Cranky’s house strips aren’t included in one of the sub categories.)

The Valentine? One strip. Hannah and Max never speak this entire year. Komix Korner? Four strips. No Atomik Komix. Montoni’s number is padded by the stupid interview, if not for that it would have had like 12 strips. Pete and Mindy’s numbers are way down. Bus Barn crew numbers are through the roof.

Like a petulant child who washes his hands while insisting the entire time he doesn’t need to. Like a game developer insisting they’re right and have never been wrong when confronted, only to quickly change the subject and never willingly bring the conversation up again. Batiuk changed his behavior this year while pretending he didn’t need to.