Fantasy Football

Happy New Year, everyone!

This week’s Crankshaft, spanning 2025 and 2026, celebrates a time-honored football tradition: Game Helmet Day! every year, football teams update their playbooks between Christmas and New Year’s, and give out game helmets to fans who make the best suggestions! If you get a game helmet, it is customary to wear it to bed the first night…

…in some universe, apparently.

This story is ridiculous. Even by Tom Batiuk’s standards. At least the Westview Scapegoats more or less resembled a high school football team. Even in Act II, when Batiuk was apparently getting ideas from whatever writers’ room at Disney gives us movies like Air Bud.

Writing the description of what’s honest-to-God happening in Crankshaft felt like this:

Read the first paragraph again, but imagine Ren is calmly explaining it to you, in his “the Prozac just kicked in” voice. Game Helmet Day sounds just as silly and random as Yak Shaving Day, doesn’t it?

Because Tom Batiuk giving himself awards isn’t good enough for the Funkyverse anymore. No, no, no: all awards must take the exact form Tom Batiuk requires. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers already gave Ed Crankshaft an official game ball, instead of having him arrested for barging into a secured area. The team can’t just send Crankshaft a letter informing him of their glorious decision to keep using his play! The rules of courtesy on Planet Batiuk require a second team award, even though he already got one! (Needless to say, phone calls or Internet communication are completely out of the question.)

Tom Batiuk’s writing is about as subtle as a 7-year-old’s Christmas list. It also applies to that dumb Batton Thomas interview, which is probably starting up again soon. That story exists because Batiuk is telling the world how he wants to be treated by interviewers. He expects journalists to sit in rapt attention, and let him drone on for hours about whatever boring comic book-related topic he wants. Oh, and you’re paying for his lunch. (On the plus side, it’s just Luigi’s/Montoni’s.)

Note also that the team caved to Crankshaft’s demand. When Ed asked about having his play added to the team playbook, on August 15, 2025, he was told “not in this lifetime,” as if it was an absurd request (which it was). Now he gets a permanent place in the playbook, and a peace offering, as if he were Genghis Khan. Maybe the team is trying to create a harbinger of Ed’s long-overdue death. I don’t blame them for trying.

OH CHRISTMAS TREE!

Did Sunday’s strip ring a few recognition bells in long time Crankshaft readers?

Well, it should have.

The Crankshaft/Murdoch family has flip flopped on real vs artificial trees a few times over the last couple decades.

The late aughts were an era of live trees at great cost.

2007

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Then…in 2014, an arc on an artificial tree.

This all ended with a strip with some VERY FAMILIAR artwork.

I guess a couple years later, in 2016, they’d reinvested in fake.

And early in the Davis era, in 2018, another new artificial tree. And Pam is the one who throws a fit over fakery, despite a few years earlier championing the idea. I’ll let the continuity error slide this time, as the jokes in the arc are at least smirk worthy.

But I guess nostalgia won out again by 2020.

I’ve gotten a real tree ever since I moved out on my own, usually white pine, though I’ve also paid top dollar for some frasier furs. My mom has a three piece artificial tree she’s used ever since my sister scored a husband allergic to pine.

How about your nitters? Real or fake.

Christmas Time Means Time For Reruns!

Happy holidays to everyone in the SoSF community! I’ve enjoyed another year with all of you. I am honored that people continue to visit this strange little corner of the web, and read and comment about the even stranger world of Funky Winkerbean. I’m amazed that this community continues to thrive four years after the strip ended.

In the penultimate year of 2021, most of March was devoted to Dinkle answering an ad to become the new choir director at St. Spires Church in Centerville.

At the time, I used this story to make a parody Photoshop story of Harry Dinkle accidentally becoming a porn star, and posted it in the comments. It was well received. I recently realized that a lot of our visitors may never have seen it. So we decided to reprint it here, to have some new content that isn’t about dead birds or pizza box-wearing entities. I hope you enjoy it too.

NSFW Warning: The story contains lots of sexual content… in the same way late-night Cinemax movies did in the 1980s. In all seriousness, discretion is advised.

Enjoy.

Hold the Pickles

WHAT ABOUT THE BIRD, TOM?

We’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see if Ed Crankshaft presses fat lips to cold beak and puffs Pam’s Christmas Cardinal back to life, and Batiuk just shifts gears to Pam and Minty redecorating a Christmas tree that should have been well and truly decked as of Thursday afternoon when Pam strung lights under the watchful eye of her blood red companion.

And all so Batiuk can, once again, flash us that hysterical landmark, 425 West Avenue, Elyria, Ohio. The starter apartment of Pam and Jeff, Ann and Fred, and Batton and his nameless Cathy Clone.

While the bird’s fate is unknown, a surprising, long memory holed, friend has emerged from the reference sheets. Appearing for the first time in the Davis era, on Wednesday we saw a feline resembling Pickles the Tomcat. Last seen on December 23, 2016, during Ayers tenure.

Wherever Pickles has been the last nine years, I’m guessing it included a short stay in the Pet Sematary. Since the mangy old feline debuted in Crankshaft’s first couple years, while Max and Mindy were still young.

Back in the glory days when Crankshaft still had the personality of a lime-encrusted sea urchin.

Save the Cat and Pet the Dog are tropes as old as time. A quick shorthand to show the true empathy innate in a character. If you want to show your character is a slimy fake, you have a seemingly ‘nice’ person kick a dog.

If you want to show that the grumbles, grousing, and belly aching of a cantankerous old coot are just the timid farts of an emotionally constipated man, you have him get a cat.

Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal MUSHROOM MUSHROOM

I miss the early days of the Internet. It was devoid of toxic social media, and full of goofy creative stuff. If you’re not familiar with the primitive brainrot the title refers to, you can see it here. (WARNING: It will burrow into your brain like those Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan worms. If you do recognize the title, it probably already has. Sorry about that.)

This week’s cardinal arc reminds me of Badger Badger Badger. There’s a cardinal, and… that’s it. It exists as part of a larger work that defies any narrative sense. It’s practically trying to be a meme.

I know I’ve joked about the cardinal being Lisa’s ghost, and that’s still the favorite on the odds board right now (-500). But now, dragging out Lisa’s corpse for the millionth time seems too straightforward for Tom Batiuk. He seems to be veering into the avant-garde. As evidenced by this week’s Ingmar Bergman coloring. (NOTE: I initially missed that this effect was borrowed from Schindler’s List. Thanks to Y. Knott in the comments.)

I say this because I was baffled by the December 13 strip that ended “Pizza Box Monster as Santa” week. He gets paid by Lillian, shakes her hand, and then this:

What on earth was Tom Batiuk aiming at here?

Yes, that’s the building where this week’s proceedings occurred, but what is the point of sticking it at the end of the story? The second panel, PBM saying “Pizza on earth!”, is the kind of thing Batiuk would normally use for a punchline. It’s almost like he drew this panel and forgot to use it, so he stuck it here.

Sometimes you can end a story just by pulling back and putting it into its larger context. Like in A Streetcar Named Desire (the stage version, not the movie) or Cameron Crowe’s Singles. But that’s not what’s happening here. This isn’t a scene of people wandering around, enjoying Christmas, or anything else that would lend weight to the story. Not that there was much of a story to begin with.

I think Tom Batiuk is trying to mimic visual effects, and heartwarming endings, he’s seen in movies and TV shows. But he has absolutely no idea how to execute them, or why. That’s what I think we’re getting at the end of this week: an ornately staged, but confusing, ending.

UPDATE (December 19): And with this morning’s strip, Batiuk’s true intentions are revealed: