Son of Stuck Funky

No Passtime For Old Men.

We here in the Funkyverse commentary community are currently gritting our teeth through the second week of ‘Senior Baseball’ hijinks in the copy-pasta nightmarescape that is Crankshaft. The art has been awful, and the gags as limp as a hand-me-down training bra. On the upside, at least this arc involves Crankshaft himself, and I would even venture that today’s strip comes closer to an acceptable joke then we’ve been used to so far this year. It’s inoffensive, and I have a sneaking suspicion it might make the shortlist for best of 2024. Though this says more about the dire state of comedy in 2024, than the quality of the strip itself.

For those of you new to the Crankensphere, Cranky’s been on a senior baseball/softball league for nearly 20 years, giving Davis plenty of clipart to select from this week. We’ve even already had a week of Davis, senior baseball material in 2017. Looking at those gives a good indication of how far his photoshop efforts have fallen off.

And hey, at least I’d say the vast bulk of these strips are tolerable to good, with a few real gems. So if you wanted to actually ENJOY Crankshaft this week, take this little trip down memory lane with me!

2005

This Week In Act IV: More Montoni’s

Guess what?

After an internal discussion, Son of Stuck Funky has decided that we will do regular updates again.

Because Crankshaft has officially become Act IV of Funky Winkerbean. We’ve been tracking it that way for awhile, and this week seemed like the right time to make it official. For me, this week was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And I was the first to advance the idea of doing regular updates again, so maybe I’m the most sensitive of our team members. But they’re all on board with it!

Continue reading “This Week In Act IV: More Montoni’s”

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor!

Heya folks, gonna be light on the commentary for this one, as a baby bottle calf kept me out late tonight. But I thought it would be fun to look back on the first time Montoni’s sponsored a baseball team. Enjoy!

The Two Scariest Words In The Funkyverse

It’s been over a month since Harriet promised you an epic screed from me, about the three weeks Crankshaft spent on three different book signings (two for Dinkle and one for Batton Thomas). I haven’t delivered it yet, because I said I wanted to make sure the arc was over.

It wasn’t over. It’s still not over yet. It may not be over for months. Continue reading “The Two Scariest Words In The Funkyverse”

Well Exercised Futility.

Since Crankshaft is still languishing in a Dinkle tinged purgatory, and since tornado watches had me part homebound today, (my neck of the woods was spared,) I spent some time with my Complete Funky Winkerbean volumes this afternoon. Because if Batiuk is gonna drag out the taxidermized horse of Claude Barlow, World’s Worst Composer, and whip the desiccated carcass around for a week, I’m gonna hide in my archives and soothe myself with digging through the dumb running gag’s origins.

Last month, I did a post on Dinkle’s history as an author where I touched on Claude for a bit. But at that time I still didn’t have the volume where I could definitively point to a strip as the first mention of the composer. On April 28, 1976 we get the first mention of a book on greatest band directors, which quickly turns, classic Dinkle style, into egocentric self-aggrandizement. There were only a handful of strips of Great Band Directors.