A Very Funky Week

Welcome to the second installment of This Week In Act IV. This Crankshaft arc had no characters or overt ideas from act IV. But it was still a cavalcade of everything that sucked about latter-day Funky Winkerbean, and how that suckitude has infected Crankshaft.

Let’s start with Monday’s strip. The previous week was about Ed Crankshaft soliciting Montoni’s to sponsor his softball team. Ed told lame jokes for a week, then it ended with Mindy and Pete at the softball game, meeting the detestable one-armed news reporter Skip. I ended last week’s post by calling this “undue attention from the local media.”

I undersold it. Because now there’s a frickin’ TV reporter at the game! Are they broadcasting live? Is it viewable on my ESPN app, between kabaddi and the New Zealand pro basketball league? Can I bet on Summer Silver Senior Slowpitch Softball Society games on DraftKings? Did they really need two media outlets to report on a 93-year-old softball player turning 94? It’s like something out of The Onion. “Local Old Man Is Now Slightly Older.” How much media coverage does this small town need? Especially when 60% of residents are content creators themselves?

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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

Look! It’s Matty Kornbluth!
Continue reading “No Passtime For Old Men.”

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”