Son of Stuck Funky – Son of Stuck Funky

Max And Hannah, Part 2: The Valentine Years

This is Part 2 of our deep dive into Max and Hannah. Part 1 is here.

Max and Hannah bought the Valentine Theater from Ralph Meckler in 2016. October 10, 2016 was their first week of ownership. It was a disjointed mix of them fixing up the place up, receiving their first customers (Jeff, Pam, and Ed) and Max being tired from the stress of working two jobs.

Citing burnout, Max quits his job at Channel 1 on January 12, 2017 to run the theater full-time. Both Pam and Ed Crankshaft point out that Channel 1 is paying the better part of his salary (even though Max gripes about being underpaid), so this may be an unwise move. Nobody ever points out that Hannah has been working the same two jobs, and is not depicted as being fatigued, despite her having the more physically demanding Channel 1 job of camera operator.

I never noticed it until now, but women are much expected to be much tougher than men in the Funkyverse.

Again, I was a broadcast journalism major in the 1990s, so trust me on this: those live TV-grade cameras are heavy. But Max is the one who’s falling asleep on the job, Peppermint Patty style.

On January 25, 2018 during a blizzard, Ed Crankshaft brings a busload of school children to the Valentine, who have to spend the night there. The incident gets positive coverage in the Centerville Sentinel, back when it still published news stories. July 26 is another round of Pam and Jeff helping to spruce up the theater.

On March 31, 2019, Jeff visits an apartment and says “I appreciate you two having me over for dinner,” implying that Max and Hannah are now living together. This apartment building isn’t the same one Max moved into in 2008. It’s probably another real-life building Tom Batiuk and his wife lived in at some point.

June 3, 2019 is almost identical to last week’s arc. Hannah and Max go to Pam and Jeff’s house with a major announcement: they’ve decided to incorporate! Which, combined with the last week’s strips, and the “we’re buying the Valentine” announcement from 2016, means they bait-and-switched a marriage announcement three different times. And I guess they never incorporated either, because incorporation was a declined option on March 6, 2026.

But it doesn’t end there. In October 2019, they invite Pam and Jeff to the theater with yet another surprise: Hannah is pregnant!

There’s teasing a big reveal, and then there’s just being jerks. When it’s the fourth time you’ve done this, and you order custom printed balloons before you’ll tell your own mother what’s going on, you’re just being jerks. Smirk your heads off, you smug bastards.

That story ends on October 20, 2019:

And we have the answer to the question many of you have been asking! Yes, Max and Hannah having a child out of wedlock is established Funkyverse lore. As Pam explained it at the time, they wanted to “focus on more important stuff.” Given the bizarre priorities of Funkyverse characters, you’re welcome to guess what those might be. Lord knows Tom Batiuk doesn’t tell us.

On February 10, 2020, Ed Crankshaft and Mary Marzipan show up for a Butter Brinkel marathon during a blizzard, necessitating a second overnight stay. This was also the very beginning of the real-life global pandemic. Why do people in this town insist on going to shows during life-threatening conditions, like COVID and blizzards? Remember Dinkle’s “Christmas Messiah” near the end of Funky Winkerbean?

It is during this second overnight stay that Hannah gives birth to Mitch. Infamously, Ed Crankshaft helps with the delivery. Which may be the most unrealistic thing in the history of the Funkyverse. I’m not a woman, but I think that if Ed Crankshaft offered to help me give birth, my immediate reaction would be DO NOT LET THAT MAN ANYWHERE NEAR MY HOO-HAH FOR ANY REASON.

Especially if he’s going to make **that** face about it.

Mitch is first seen and heard on February 27, 2020. Jeff “covers for” Max at the theater for a week while they adjust to parenthood. On July 27, the Valentine is showing The Phantom Empire. Max takes Mitch to the theater “because it’s never too soon to introduce a child to culture.” Even though that child is five months old, and his irregular aging hadn’t started yet.

May 9, 2021 is the first sign of trouble at the Valentine. Max tells Hannah not to bother disinfecting the seats, because “their draw was an older audience that doesn’t want to go out to a movie theater now.” By May 21, a strip club is interested in buying the place. Here’s my version of that story:

“Why was there placenta on my seat?” may be my favorite sentence I’ve ever written for this blog.

On May 27, Pam and Jeff visit. Max calls them “the biggest crowd we’ve had since we re-opened.” They’re the biggest crowd we’ve ever seen, even before COVID, other than the night Ed brought a busload of school children.

They start vacating the theater. On June 4, Pam offers to let Max, Hannah, and Mitch move into the apartment over the garage. Oh well, at least it’s not the apartment over Montoni’s for a change. This move happens in September 2021. January 17, 2022 is the first time we see Max, Hannah, and Mitch around Pam and Jeff’s house. They would start appearing as background characters at that location, much like when Max was staying there between his 2006 graduation and 2008.

On August 1, 2022, Max and Hannah go back to Channel 1. This is what 17-month-old Mitch looks like now:

Apparently they were playing Jumanji, and Mitch aged ten years while he was trapped in the game board. That’s quite a screw-up, even by Crankshaft’s standards.

Amazingly, Channel 1 hands them their old jobs back. One wonders what happened to the cameraman and director of yesterday’s show, roles that must have been filled by someone. Which is another highly unrealistic depiction of media jobs. Max and Hannah are about as replaceable than fast food workers. Year after year, universities are still cranking out dozens more journalism graduates than there will ever be jobs for again. Not to mention the scores of self-made content creators thanks to YouTube, and affordable consumer-grade video production tools. So Channel 1 would have plenty of qualified applicants on file.

August 2022 saw the ransomware attack on Channel 1. It was Hannah who had the brilliant idea to air old John Darling episodes, since they were stored on physical tapes that weren’t held hostage by the ransomware. This kept Channel 1 on the air without having to pay the ransom of…

Next month, a Deus Ex Comic Books arrives to save Max and Hannah from their own passive idiocy.

Mason got all his money from making the Starbuck Jones movie, so this qualifies as a Deus Ex Comic Books.

It’s Mason Jarre and Cindy Summers! Note that the Valentine livery and movie theater entrance is still up, even though it closed down a year ago, and a strip club existed there in the interim. Timemop must have been a regular.

Mason immediately offers to buy the building from unlicensed guest character Lois Flagston from Hi & Lois, looking like a deranged psycho the entire time.

Ed Crankshaft happens to wander by during this conversation. Like most American small towns, Westview/Centerville has no concept of privacy, so they discuss this celebrity couple’s financial business right in front of this complete stranger. Ed conveniently mentions that his grandson and his wife once ran the theater, so Mason wants to take them to dinner. Of course, they go to Montoni’s. Mason tells Max and Hannah he wants them to run and manage the theater “based on their experience there.”

Which is even more ludicrous than them being re-hired at Channel 1. At least they were competent Channel 1 employees, which is more than can be said for their management skills. They’re the ones who ran the Valentine into the ground with their endless Phantom Empire screenings, and insistence on remaining open during blizzards. Once again, the story acts like they’re the only two people on earth who could possibly do this job.

On October 1, they get their first paycheck from Mason. Of course, it’s gigantic.

And the Funkyverse business cycle is complete!

Be from the remote outskirts of Cleveland.
Have Tom Batiuk-approved opinions on How To Do Media Things Correctly.
Find a rich person who shares those opinions.
Wait for the rich person to throw money at you to manage it for them. Because rich people have zero interest in ever making a profit, or in hiring people with any useful skills.

Mason became to the Valentine Theater what Chester Hagglemore was to Atomix Komix, what Pink Productions was to Lisa’s Story, and what Mordor Financial was to the Centerview Sentinel. They’re the faceless entities that exist solely to swallow huge losses, so Batiuk’s beknighted small-town yokels can have mainstream media careers with complete creative control. And, of course, be paid big money themselves.

In spite of their new-found tax bracket, December 2022 shows Max and Hannah are… still working at the TV station?

Despite getting huge paychecks from Mason Jarre to do their dream job, and a Channel 1 paycheck on top of that, they were never seen moving back to an apartment. And they continued to make walk-on appearances in household stories. Which implies that they’re still mooching off Pam and Jeff to this day.

In 2023, Skip Rawlings shows up to ask about the theater’s reopening, which happens in May 2023. His interviewing skills weren’t any better then. The next month, Mason flies in for the grand re-opening. And we all know what the main attraction is!

This may be the most Funkyverse panel ever created. Especially if you don’t know who’s asking the question.

The pandering continues. Mason also wants to premier Starbuck Jones III: The Rise Of The ~~Disney Lawsuits~~ Bandelorians at the Valentine. And he wants to meet with Harry Dinkle, because he wants to use Claude Barlow music in the movie.

Which is mind-bendingly stupid, but isn’t worth any further deconstruction. Because Max and Hannah were never constructed in the first place.

Max and Hannah are the same as Atomik Komix. And Les Moore. And Lillian McKenzie. And Skip Rawlings. And Mason Jarre. And Harry Dinkle. And Batton Thomas. They exist to fuel stories about small town people who run a media empire the way Tom Batiuk thinks it should be run, and be handed ego tongue baths and piles of money for it.

Despite this couple’s obvious purpose as story enablers, Tom Batiuk has decided that their marital status was a loose end that needed to be tied up. He made a similar decision that near the end of Funky Winkerbean, that Cory Winkerbean and Rocky Rhodes needed to put a ring on it.

But that was justifiable in the context of Funky Winkerbean ending. Weddings are a great excuse to get all the characters in one place, so we can see them one last time. As stupid as that arc was, it was also the final appearance of characters like Keisha Williams, Maddie Klinghorn, and Rocky and Cory themselves. That’s not the case this time, though.

Or dare we hope?

Predictably Unpredictable: The Max And Hannah Story

Would it be possible to have a post on this blog that does a deep dive into Max and Hannah’s relationship? At least the highlights, like when they met, started dating, started living together, and had a baby. Mostly, I’m trying to figure out if we were supposed to know that they weren’t already married.
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2026/03/03/in-like-a-lamb/#comment-180197

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

And, just for fun, I’ll give everyone a chance to guess each major story point as it arrives. The answer to each question will be revealed right after the poll question. So, to avoid spoilers, don’t scroll past each question. And I’d appreciate it if you did avoid spoilers, because I’d love to know how well our visitors collectively can guess Tom Batiuk’s intentions.

Our deep dive begins in 2003, because that’s the earliest Crankshaft archives are available at GoComics.com. Max’s first appearance in this time frame is November 2003, when Max arrives for family Thanksgiving. Mindy is still in high school, and Rose is still alive, as is Lucy McKenzie. Max is wearing his college sweatshirt. Which is question #1:

Seriously, answer the poll question before reading on. Try to guess!

In a stunning upset right out of March Madness, Max graduated from Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio. The college sweatshirt he often wore at the time said those exact words. So we know it’s not a school with a similar name like UNC-Wilmington, or a fictional school like Bull Bushka’s Enormous Midwestern University.

Also, Max’s graduation photo on June 3, 2006 resembles the entrance to the real-life school. And let’s be honest: the Ohio-based school was always the favorite.

Bear in mind Max’s graduation photo is 20 years old, so it’s not *exactly* the same. But apparently you can still major in red brick. (Courtesy of Google Maps.)

The “Max is in college and Mindy is still in high school” era continued until 2006. Max would sometimes appear at the family home, and in flashbacks, but he didn’t get his own stories. During the week of January 29, 2004, Pam reminisces about a family trip to “Mouse World.” On July 5, 2005, Pam and Jeff revisit Max’s fourth birthday. Interestingly, he requested a clown:

Well, Max asked for a clown, and he got what he asked for.

Pam was pregnant with Mindy at the time, making Mindy about four and a half years younger than Max. This isn’t a Mindy deep dive, but we’ll mention her from time to time. Max and Min’s sibling relationship is unremarkable. They’re not close, but they seem to get along just fine. During this time, Mindy was being urged to get a job. (Unlike, for example, Luann.)

Just as March Madness is full of upsets, it’s also full of games where the obvious choice has a 98.75% chance of being correct. Mindy was hired by Montoni’s on June 29, 2004, and was seen going to work there as late as December 2007. The question included the “full-time” caveat, because Mindy also served as one of Santa’s elves during Ed Crankshaft’s then-annual portrayals of Santa Claus. She was seen in this role on December 15, 2003.

Max attended family Thanksgiving again in 2006. On December 17, 2007, Max is seen leaving for a date, but we don’t know with whom. On February 11, 2008, Max seeks romantic advice from Ed Crankshaft, but no potential partner is named. Both of these were throwaway strips rather than being part of an arc.

Max gets his first real story on March 25, 2008, when he moves into an apartment. Pam says she realized that Max would “move out”, implying that he lived in his parents’ house after college graduation. Max’s random appearances were a little more frequent in 2006-07, so this checks out. Hannah isn’t a part of Max’s life yet. And she won’t be anytime soon.

On September 8, 2008, Jeff says:

We never learn whose wedding this was, because this was just to set up a week of complaining about getting your car serviced.

December 1, 2008 is our first look into Max’s career. Max announces tells the family he “has been given a show to direct”, even though this is the first we’ve heard of him having a job in television. The show airs at 4 a.m, and is called Living With Nature, starring Channel 1 veteran Phil the Forecaster.

So we can add yet another name to the list of Funkyverse characters who instantly became professional content creators. My own college degree was in broadcast news, and getting your own TV show at age 25-ish would be very, very unusual. Even for this kind of ultra-cheap local public affairs show that runs at 4 a.m. You have to pay your dues more than that.

Mindy graduated high school in summer 2009, and she would go to Kent State that fall. Her parents planned a high school graduation party, but oh no! The caterer got the days mixed up! What can they do?

The #1 seed wins again. Ed fired up his grill, but you can guess how that went. Mindy ordered from Montoni’s. No mention is made of the fact that Mindy worked for, and maybe still did work for, Montoni’s.

In June 2009 we learn that Max has a history of smoking. Rose takes up smoking at this time, and it is revealed that she found some old cigarettes that were once Max’s.

On December 1, 2014, Ralph Meckler laments that he has to close the Valentine Theater “after this week”, setting up a predictable bunch of moping about how good things never last. Of course, this is the same Valentine Theater that Max and Hannah have operated the past few years.

We’ll answer this question in a moment…

…but you can probably guess from this next piece of information. Hannah’s first mention in Crankshaft wasn’t until February 15, 2016.

Max reveals that Hannah is “someone he’s seeing from work.” We see her for the first time two days later.

The following week, they go on a date to the Valentine Theater. They meet Ralph Meckler, who is still running the place. Which means the correct answer was “Not 2014.” And not in a pedantic way, as if the theater held out a couple more weeks and closed in early 2015. After a week of gloom and doom for the Valentine, it must have survived under Ralph for 14 more months.

Ralph is seeking a buyer, which Max and Hannah are independently interested in. On March 7, 2016, they tell Max’s parents this. Pam’s reaction:

This is the first explicit mention of Max and Hannah’s marital status. Max and Hannah went to his parents with “something we’d like to tell you.” So Pam and Jeff were making a reasonable guess about what it was.

Max and Hannah raise enough money through crowdfunding to buy the Valentine Theater. Rose finally died in May 2016 – the day Jeff was about to forgive her, of course, when she’s been feeble for well over a decade. Which also gave us this indelible flashback image:

Any comment from me would just be piling on.

October 10, 2016 was the first week of Max and Hannah fixing up the Valentine Theater. And that’s where our story ends for now, because this is already a long post. Part II is coming soon.

Let’s revisit the quiz questions. Two times Batiuk took the blindingly obvious path, and two times he took the story in a bizarre direction. As if this year’s Final Four will be Duke, UConn, Long Island University, and Central Arkansas. Yes, lesser teams can, and often do, go on deep runs in the NCAA Tournament. But there’s a point below which this has never happened, and is laughably unlikely.

Which is the best analogy for Tom Batiuk’s writing I will ever come up with. Half the time the story is going somewhere stupidly obvious. Half the time it’s going in a completely random direction that defeats Batiuk’s own claims to realism. Which is which? Your guess is as good as mine.

In Like a Lamb…

Not much to go on for Monday’s Crankshaft, as people in GoComics were guessing, Max and Hannah’s news could be anything from a move to another pregnancy to an official marriage ceremony to make this common-law arrangement religiously blessed. (Bonus points for me if they bring up Covid as a reason they didn’t have a ceremony before)

And bonus points for TrespassersW who guessed yesterday on GoComics.

Love seeing the official Crankshaft comments section popping off like that. It’s the kind of passion and engagement that has Andrews McNeel Universal paying Batiuk the big bucks!

Here in Iowa we were supposed to start off March with 3 inches of snow Sunday night, but instead got nada. The old farmer’s wisdom of my father says that it means the end of March is going to be nasty. In like a lamb, out like a lion.

Speaking of the dramatic juxtaposition of ferocity with helpless infantilism.

Chihuahuas.

In my doggy deep dive of last week for the backstory of Homer II, another pooch popped up. Grandma Rose Murdoch’s pet Chihuahua, Tinkerbelle.

Similar to Homer II, Tinkerbelle’s origin seems to be sometime in the 90’s. The earliest reference I could find was this strip during Crankshaft’s near death experience in Strike Four!.

Grandma Rose staying for a few days was a regular fixture during holidays, and always brought the pocket dog along with for Crankshaft to complaina about.

Tinkerbelle would also have to stay over after Rose had fallen on the ice. Unlike poor Homer chained to his doghouse, Tinkerbelle had the full run of the house.

News alert! Roland/Rolanda wasn’t the first transgender character in the Funkyverse! She was beaten out by decades by a dog who somehow changed pronouns in 2006. Should we chock this up to Batiuk forgetting that he’d once thought it was funny to name a boy dog Tinkerbelle, and regendering it by accident? Probably. Is that what I’m going to do? No. I’m going to imagine that Rose replaced the male Tinkerbelle with an identical but female dog. She seems like the type.

When Rose moved in with Pam and Jeff, Tinkerbelle was also allowed to join the household. She didn’t take kindly to Homer or Pickles, and they didn’t seem too enthused about her either.

Pickles hated her so much that the GoComics coloring monkeys accidently turned him orange.

And boy that first panel’s Pickles looks familiar…

Gotcha Davis!!!

Crankshaft had nothing but disdain for the yappy ankle biter…until one two week arc in 2009.

Did Tinkerbelle’s brave sacrifice mean that Crankshaft would stop hating on the sweet little pupper?

Nope. And Crankshaft’s cold rejection of Tinkerbelle eventually drove the dog to depression.

And finally, in 2010, rumball assisted suicide.

Seriously.

Tinkerbelle’s last appearance is much like Homer’s: ingesting chocolate before disappearing forever.

Homerward Bound, The Uncredible Journey

Mr. Finkle….LORD HAVE MERCY.

So Batton Thomas’ wife is just Cathy? No cute rearranging of syllables? No inversion of letters. Just Cathy. Fine.

I hate it.

Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate Batton since I began to blog. There are 547 published blog posts on this site I have posted under my name. If the word hate replaced each letter of each word of those 547 blog posts, it would not equal ONE ONE-BILLIONTH of the hate I feel for Batton as I type this. For Batton. HATE. HATE.

I do not hate Tom Batiuk, no. Tom Batiuk is a real life human, with real thoughts and real feelings and a real family. He has enjoyed hot, fresh pizza. He has seen the beauty of fall leaves. He has felt pain. He has made others smile. I can lay no irredeemable crime against humanity at his feet. I cannot hate him. Pity him, yes, but not hate.

But Batton is a fictional device. Batton is a narcissistic conceit. Batton is made of thoughtless, heartless computer goo and transmitted through wires and radio waves. He’s not a real life person. And I HATE him. Like I would hate the melanoma growing from an ugly tattoo on the back of a stranger.

This week is miserable. Almost makes me nostalgic for last week, when we got to watch uncanny traced photo people converse about the unnecessary renovations they were doing to an abandoned doghouse.

Abandoned? Indeed. For Homer the dog was last seen August 6, 2010. Wherein E fed him chocolate cake. And I guess we can surmise that the elderly dog died. Because we never see him again.

Yes, Cranky, as opposed to those things you ignorant git. Unless vermin contain caffeine or theobromine, or cat poop is laced with the methylxanthines that block adenosine receptors.

In truth, this last appearance of Homer is shocking, and not because of the dog murder. It’s because Homer had already disappeared for two whole years before this. He hadn’t been seen since taking stock of Grandma Rose’s chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, in July 2008.

I don’t know how often the old dog showed up in the 90’s. But in the 2000’s he was very much on the back burner. Heck, he wasn’t even on the stove. He was in a coffee can of grease kept in a cupboard above the stove.

He was allowed in the house on Christmas Day 2007.

He slept through fireworks on July 4, 2006.

Cranky took him on a walk to piss on Lillian’s saplings in March of 2006.

He briefly escaped being chained up to a flimsy doorless doghouse in the dead of winter in January 2006. Wonder if Tom got some hatemail for this one.

On September 27, 2005, he goes comatose with boredom.

In June of 2005 Homer gets his last proper full week arc, where we learn that his ‘boy’ doesn’t care for him and can’t even remember his name.

21 years ago Crankshaft enslaved his elderly dog and forced him to shovel snow. The GoComics coloring monkeys decided the sight was so horrific it turned Pam’s hair white.

October 2, 2004, we got a lovely little wordless strip. No notes here.

August 12, 2004, the Murdoch/Crankshaft household was kind enough to make sure Homer wasn’t Toto’ed in a twister.

July 25, 2004, Homer is let in the house to get his treat ration, and Mindy proves she’s Pam’s daughter by asking the classic Pam question.

May 30, 2004. Ayers draws an adorable pupper cowering behind his flimsy doghouse.

This strip displays something I wish Ayers and Batiuk had consciously cultivated, especially in their later years: put kids and pets in the damn background of strips! I’ve talked at length how the consistency of the physical locations in the Funkyverse give it real tangibility. I wish we had that same consistency with the people living in those locations.

We wouldn’t be asking ‘Where’s Wally Jr.?” or ‘Wait, who the f**k is Pickles?’ or ‘Does Mitch even live with the Murdochs anymore?’ if they had been placed in the background or foreground where appropriate. I will say Ayers was better at this with Pickles up through the early aughts, where the cat is often drawn just standing around in the yard while Ed yammers about his brand new combine harvester. But there’s a million million yard strips where he could have doodled ol Homer to remind us that the dog still exists.

May 4, 2004 is the earliest GoComics strip I could find with Homer.

Homer isn’t in the first four Crankshaft books, so they must have got him after, maybe sometime in the early to mid 90’s if Mindy’s age in this strip from Strike Four! is anything to go by.

In Roses in December, Homer has his Lassie moment, sort of.

And this brings up that Homer is actually Homer II. Named, (presumably) for Ed’s childhood dog. Long Dead Homer was mentioned long before Homer II was introduced.

Poor Homer II, named for a long dead and better loved dog. Neglected, forgotten, dismissed. He wasn’t even Ed Crankshaft’s favorite pet.

Crankshaft Awards 2025, Day 7: The Worst is Yet to Come.

Ending The Crankshaft Awards 2025, and giving out the award for the worst strip during a Batton and Skip arc feels appropriate, doesn’t it?

After expressing my personal affection for Ed Crankshaft as a character yesterday, today the more objective part of my brain has to admit that Crankshaft as a strip this year was pretty meh. Davis is phoning in the photoshops like never before. The GoComics colorists are similarly lazy. Cranky was more befuddled than properly cranky, and almost all the best jokes were recycled.

The only thing Batiuk shows any passion for is pandering to whoever will give him a nod and breaking his back shoving his nose into his navel for another abysmal Batton interview arc.

Where is Batiuk taking us this year? I have no idea. But we’ll be here to point and laugh, and reminisce about old times good and bad. And who knows, maybe next year it’ll be harder to pare down the list of shitty strips to just eight.

The Worst Crankshaft Strip of 2025

Nostalgia Blinders

Dinkle’s Wet Dream

A Fitting Memorial

Check Please!

No Politics

That’s Not Humor

Linus’ Blankie

Trigger Happy

And your winner is…

Dinkle’s Wet Dream

The nitters have spoken. In a year with a month and a half of Batton strips and given four, FOUR, Batton strips nominated, you all decided, albeit not in a landslide, that a sweaty somnolent Dinkle having Old Testament flavored dreams of his own greatness was worse.

Now, you all want a Homer deep dive? Because that’s what I’m working on next!