Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.

Not long after I posted about last week’s arc about a real-world eclipse, regular poster J.J. O’Malley compared it to a Peanuts arc from June 15-20, 1963, which also coincided with a real-world eclipse. Several other posters also chimed in about the comparison:

Oh, if only I had faith that TB was funny enough to just rip this off completely…

billytheskink, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2024/04/03/total-eclipse-of-the-old-fart/#comment-169174

Well, he did rip it off completely. The rest of it, not so much. Continue reading “Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.”

Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart

So this week’s Crankshaft plot has been about Ed renting out space at Pam and Jeff’s house to view the upcoming solar eclipse. Or, as a Comics Curmudgeon poster put it:

Tom Batiuk saw that the 2024 eclipse would pass right through Ohio, and immediately thought, “How can Crankshaft be a horrible person about this?”

https://joshreads.com/2024/04/the-only-fools-here-are-all-of-us/#comment-2783092

Credit where it’s due, though: this is a timely, Ohio-relevant story, which we rarely get in the Funkyverse. The total eclipse will happen next Monday, April 8, and the path of totality will pass over the Cleveland metropolitan area. Since we don’t know exactly where Centerville is – and it’s implied to be a far-out Cleveland suburb anyway – the story is highly relevant. Continue reading “Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart”

A Big Hit!

I hope that all of you who celebrate the season had a very Happy Easter. I made the mistake of offering to host our family’s celebration at my place this year, and I was exhausted last night! After cooking enough steak to choke a T-Rex, and littering my house with so many ceramic bunnies you’d think I’d petrified the cast of Watership Down, I collapsed.

So just a short post today. While I was melting together an unholy concoction of Velveeta, butter, sour cream, and sharp cheddar, I was talking to my housemate and we realized that she had never seen the Skunky Funkybuns stand up sketch by the late, great Dan Ronan. So I pulled it up for her to watch real quick. She thought it was amazing, but wondered if the part where the Batiuk expy hit a guy with his car was based on anything. I didn’t used to think so. I thought it was just a funnier stand in for Batiuk using his own experiences with cancer to write Lisa’s Story. But last week I did a little archive dive to that had me flipping through some volumes of Funky Winkerbean that I hadn’t looked at quite as closely before, and maybe Dan was referencing this arc from Act I instead? Anyone else remember this one? Continue reading “A Big Hit!”

What’s New is Old Again.

Spring has well and truly sprung around here. Despite a few days of moderately cold temperatures, things are greening up, baby calves are dropping, and I’ve been scrambling around in the dust underneath vertical tillage machinery dragging a grease gun along behind me.

So here’s some baby pictures for those of you who enjoy the ‘CBH posts unrelated farm nonsense’

Continue reading “What’s New is Old Again.”

A Full Deck.

March 27th is upon us. And you all know what that means?

Happy Birthday, Funky Winkerbean!

Funky Winkerbean the comic strip would be 52 years young today, if it hadn’t tragically passed on in some kind of time bubble collapse at the age of 50 years and 10 months.

Funky Winkerbean the character also celebrates his birthday on March 27. He’s anywhere from 52 to 80, depending on what time of day you ask Tom and/or his editor. Continue reading “A Full Deck.”