I went on a little reference search tonight, just as a treat.
First, the Prince Store at Minneapolis/St Paul Airport.
This one may have come from a Batiuk provided reference picture. I found out that the dangly ceiling garlands are how the store looked as of August of last year.
I’m guessing most of the obviously traced stadium panels were similarly from Batiuk’s private stash of vacation photos. But I did manage to pull in some good ol’ Google slop. Some are only possibly the reference.
Some are a shoe-in.
Statue of Louis Riel.
The Provencher Bridge with Cityscape.
And now, for my favorite.
Blue Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea
And last of all, I believe the lady Mountie was supposed to be a cameo of this poor sweet law enforcement officer, who most definitely didn’t deserve the shame.
Boy Mountie looks OLD by comparison. I mean in art style. Guessing he’s pulled from some ancient Ayers arc of yesteryear.
A very wise man once said, “N’interrompez jamais un ennemi qui est en train de faire une erreur.“
Unfortunately for all of us, he said this in French, which is a language no one speaks but the French, (who are too snooty to translate) and French Canadians (who are somehow even snootier than the French).
I asked Grok what the saying meant and it gave me this.
“Never interrupt Banana Jr. 6000 when he’s on a roll.”
But I cannot stay silent anymore. I am well and truly sick and tired of this disgusting state of affairs going on in Crankshaft right now.
I’m not talking about the shameless pandering to the Canadian Football League, the city of Winnepeg, Princess Auto Stadium, poutine as a food, or the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.
I’m talking about the eponymous so-called protagonist himself, Ed Crankshaft. The old bastard is too damn agreeable these days. It makes me SICK.
For the first week he sat idly by watching Pam and Jeff angst over damaged sports apparel with the disinterested flat affect of a cow watching CSPAN. Barely got a quip out. And since then he’s been all grins and enthusiasm. Even when he’s ‘complaining’ it’s more Mr. Magoo than Misanthropic.
This is what we have now:
And this is what we NEED:
Humor is subjective. But anger is funny. Anger is energy. Anger is passion. Anger is life.
It is what this strip was built on. It’s CRANKshaft, not GOOFstick.
Get rid of this passive, grinning, empty headed dundermuffin, and give me back a Crankshaft with some spite. MAKE CRANKY GRUMPY AGAIN!
And what is up with this best buddies relationship between Cranky and Jeff these days?
Be-ware-of-eve-hill said it well on the last post.
In the old days Crank and Jeff’s relationship was dynamic, fun, and a breeding ground for jokes. Because they couldn’t stand each other and weren’t shy about it.
Jeff and Ed, the blue-collar bus driver and the white collar accountant, they didn’t understand each other, and were brimming with resentment, and yet sometimes found common ground, or had moments of connection.
Was the old relationship a lazy copy of Archie and The Meathead? Maybe. But stock conflict straight from the trope rack is better than this anemic bland bond built of nothing.
So this is my rallying cry! Make Cranky Grumpy Again! And let him go back to hating Jeff just as much as the rest of us do!
Have you ever gotten a self-serving holiday or birthday gift? Like, a starter package for a pyramid scheme, from a pushy friend who’s been trying to recruit you for months? Or an accessory for a device you don’t have, from someone who has it, and wants you to get interested in it? Or a donation in your name, to a cause they support but you don’t?
That’s exactly what this arc feels like.
First, let’s keep in mind how bonkers this story already is. The plot mechanism is “Pam damaged Jeff’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt,” which, again, is a plot borrowed from media for pre-schoolers. Replacing it might have cost $50 total, including international shipping. Instead, Pam took the grandiose step of buying two tickets to a Blue Bombers football game, without even asking anyone if they wanted to go a game.
A game in Winnipeg. Which is almost 1000 air miles away from Cleveland. Toronto is only 300 miles from Cleveland by car, would have been a much better tourism destination, and every CFL team plays a game there every season.
Pam’s “gift” of a $50 football ticket obligated its recipients to spend well over $1,000 each. The flight from Cleveland to Winnipeg starts at $650. Plus taxes, fees, hotel, meals, ground transportation, and border crossing costs. Updating passports, if you need to do this, is also expensive and time-consuming.
So who paid all these add-on expenses? And why?
Jeff paid the trip expenses, because he’s the only one with a real job. This would make basic sense. Crankshaft has a job, but I doubt it pays much. And it obligates Jeff to spend money he may not wish to or be able to.
Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because somehow he is independently wealthy. This would explain a lot. I’ve long wondered how Ed is able to buy gobs of stupid crap online, while the family shrugs off the massive property damage he causes. There are real-life stories of janitors and teachers who built impressive savings accounts over their long lives. Crankshaft doesn’t seem the frugal type, but time is on his side. A penny saved in 1940 (when he was already an adult) would be worth $3.17 in 2024 according to online inflation calculators.
Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, becausehe’s the grownup. This would be consistent with how parent-child relationships work in the Funkyverse. Children are treated as subservient wards even when they’re in their 70s. Witness the Funky Winkerbean storyline where Holly’s mother bullies her into doing a cheerleading show where she gets seriously injured, and has to be treated a time when the family is doing home renovations, and Montoni’s is failing. Nobody ever says a word about this.
Pam also paid for the trip expenses, as part of the gift. This would fit Batiuk’s overarching theme of a mother wife doing having to pay penance for destroying the child husband’s special fandom object. But how does Pam have this kind of spare money lying around?
Pam paid the trip expenses, to force Jeff and Ed to get along better. This theory would address a long-ignored problem in the Funkyverse: Jeff and Ed should hate each other. They’re not blood relatives; they’re in-laws.
Ed’s shenanigans – which includes water damage to Jeff’s precious comic books – have done infinitely more damage to Jeff than one ruined t-shirt. Jeff is long overdue to give Ed a The Reason You Suck Speech that would push the one from Family Guy into second place.
The joke is that Quagmire’s many criticisms of Brian are all 100% canonical.
Ed wouldn’t like Jeff either, because Ed is needy of attention, and he would see his child’s spouse as a competitor for it. Fortunately, the Funkyverse is very asexual, sparing us from a Wilbur and Dawn Weston situation.
But let’s lighten up. These two disparate, unfriendly men traveling together for a common purpose should be rife with comedic possibilities. Planes Trains and Automobiles, the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, the original Toy Story, and family movies like Step-Brothers, mined gold from such a premise. But unfortunately, the Funkyverse is also very conflict-averse.
Instead, we’ve gotten one week on the mechanisms of appeasing a toddler, and a week on the banalities of air travel. At least Jeff’s puke-inducing Inner Child hasn’t shown up yet. But he still might.
The last possible explanation:
Pam wants to get both Jeff and Ed out of her life for a few days. As much as Jeff should be a tightly wound ball of hatred, Pam should be far, far worse. She’s forced to constantly indulge two idiot manchildren and their consumptive, destructive ways. Any woman would have left both of them decades ago.
This could be a fun twist. It’d be nice to see the story cut to Pam enjoying a day of peace and quiet in the house, wearing a self-satisfied smirk that would be justified for once. But Pam is a woman, and the Funkyverse is very disinterested in women.
But why else would she buy Ed a ticket, when he wasn’t the aggrieved party?
In the last thread, poster csroberto compared Jeff’s behavior last week to that of widely-detested PBS Kids brat Caillou (pronounced KY-yoo). In fact, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers arc so far has been a remake of a story in Caillou. The story is called “Caillou’s Teddy Shirt”, and you can watch the entire 3-minute scene here:
One day, Caillou is dismayed to notice that his younger sister Rosie is wearing “his very favorite shirt,” though the importance of this shirt was never depicted previously. He cries, throws a tantrum, screams for mommy, and says “Rosie is wearing my teddy shirt!” Mommy explains that it’s too small for him to wear anymore, and gives it to Rosie as a hand-me-down. But Caillou doesn’t care, saying “it’s not too small for me! It’s mine!” and petulantly stomps off. Mommy’s reaction is to immediately pull the shirt off Rosie, saying “I need this shirt.” Rosie is understandably upset, but is quickly calmed when Mommy promises to put on her usual shirt.
Caillou puts the shirt on, and it’s much too small now, but Caillou doesn’t care. He tries taping the shirt in place, but that doesn’t work. Mommy brings a family photo album to show Caillou he was wearing the shirt at a much younger age. Then Mommy actually apologizes to Caillou for not asking his permission first, and offers to put it “in a special place to keep it forever.” Caillou gets the idea to put the shirt on the teddy bear.
Which doesn’t solve any of the actual problems. Caillou’s misbehavior was not corrected, Rosie still needs a new shirt, and Mommy has now poisoned the well for hand-me-downs for the rest of the children’s lives.
Last Monday, Jeff was dismayed to notice that he couldn’t find “his Winnipeg Blue Bombers game t-shirt”, though the importance of this shirt was never depicted previously. He doesn’t cry, throw a tantrum, scream for mommy, or petulantly stomp off, because Tom Batiuk would never be that direct. Everything must be implied. So look at Jeff’s face all of last week:
That is not the face of a man who can’t wear the shirt he wants to for a televised football game. That is the face of a man who lost all his documents five minutes before his tax evasion trial. The emotion is way too intense for the stakes.
Note also that none of these pictures are re-used. The emotion being expressed here is so important to Tom Batiuk that every single drawing of it had to be unique. Unlike Batton Thomas’ smug face, which we saw three times in 12 days, and have seen at least three more times since then:
The Crankshaft story then plays out differently than the Caillou story, but it’s still an exercise in appeasing bratty behavior that should have been corrected instead. And even the supremely spoiled Caillou wasn’t gifted a vacation as a replacement for an inexpensive shirt.
Making matters even worse, the Caillou story didn’t take place in front of another adult. Ed seems to be enabling the whole situation, saying “something is rotten in the state of Delaware” about Pam’s shiftiness. He also gloated when he received the reward, even though he wasn’t a party to the proceedings.
There’s also a little bit of a revenge fantasy about it all. It’s well-known that Tom Batiuk has never forgiven his mother for attempting to take away his comic books. This story plays out like a child’s revenge fantasy against a parent who has offended them in some way. And Pam is Jeff’s wife, not his mommy. It’s a little sick, honestly.
There is also question of whether tickets to a football game 1,000 air miles away with your father-in-law is even a good gift. But we’ll explore that another day.
Since the Winnipeg Blue Bombers weekmonthyear endless arc has begun, it’s a good time to talk about a Funkyverse concept I’ve been wanting to give a name to. This is another installment in my TBTropes series.
“Payola” was the practice of individuals accepting money to play certain songs on the radio. It was the early days of mass media, and radio DJs found they were well-positioned to accept bribes from record companies who wanted their work on the airwaves. A similar concept was “plugola,” which was a product endorsement done outside the traditional advertising arrangement. Congress started putting an end to these practices in 1959, at the same time they went after against rigged TV game shows.
This isn’t really what Tom Batiuk does in his comic strips, though. Poster The Drake of Life nailed his motivation:
I assume TB is a fan because someone related to the team paid him a tiny bit of attention and he glommed onto it desperately.
I believe this also. But neither “word “plugola” nor “payola” works to describe all the corporate logos, borrowed intellectual property, and childhood favorites that that drive plots in Funky Winkerbean and its spinoffs. Batiuk isn’t getting money under the table to do this. I’ve invented the following TBTropes term to describe it instead:
Egola: any plot element in the Funkyverse that exists to indulge Tom Batiuk’s ego.
I gave it the same -ola ending. It’s pronounced with emphasis on the E, rhyming with “Ricola” from those TV commercials.
Let’s list some examples of Egola in the Funkyverse:
Winnipeg Blue Bombers
Ohio Music Educators Association convention
Ohioana Book Fair
The Phantom Empire
The Flash
other comic book properties he likes, like John Howard’s Batman logo t-shirt and the Superman art during last week’s interview
San Diego Comic-Con
the negative renaming of companies Batiuk doesn’t like, like FleaBay and Toxic Taco
stories where the characters pretend to share Tom Batiuk’s own shallow opinions, like “climate damage” and school tax levies
Plots about Lisa’s Story, which is really just promotion for Batiuk’s own real-life books about it
Montoni’s, in its role as a stand-in for Luigi’s pizza of Akron, Ohio
The entire book publishing process, as depicted. Which, according to Tom Batiuk is: declare self “good writer”; write book off-panel; get agent; design cover; do book signings; do interviews; do more book signings; win awards; do more book signings; design more covers; win more awards; repeat.
The entire character of Batton Thomas
Especially his endless, insufferable interview with Skip Rawlings. (Holy cow, how big does your ego have to be to think that two dinner meetings isn’t enough time to interview you properly?)
Drake of Life went on to say:
Think he’ll bother to make up a story about why Jff’s a fan?
I don’t think he will. Even though it would be stunningly easy to justify Jeff’s interest in the CFL instead of the NFL: he’s from Cleveland. I’m sure the woebegotten Browns have driven plenty of people to get behind teams like the St. Louis Battlehawks rather than the local team. (And I root for an NFL team whose last big game was the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.)
Exploring Jeff’s thought process could be great fun. There’s a whole Internet culture of football fan bases poking fun at each other, like Drew Magary’s “Why Your Team Sucks” series, and YouTube creators like UrinatingTree and BenchwarmerBran. You could do that kind of story here.
Instead, Pam and Ed have been talking to Jeff like he’s Rain Man having a fit about missing Judge Wopner. “It’s still in the wash”? He was wearing it the last 15 times we’ve seen him! This is an excuse you’d give your two-year-old who’s upset about misplacing a stuffed animal. I wonder how bad this is going to get.
(Canonical side note: if it’s true that this is Jeff’s “game shirt”, that means anytime he’s wearing it, he’s trying to watch a Blue Bombers game. Go back and read that “Ed dials his own cell phone” Sunday strip again, and imagine Jeff is a football addict who’s being distracted from his precious game. Gives it some of that subtext it needed, doesn’t it?)
Son of Stuck Funky 