Post Season Affective Disorder

I swear a Chien post is coming. Harvest has sapped half my energy and the other half was thrown away pitch by pitch watching the Cubs flail their way into the post-season only to trip and fall in a heartbreaking game 5 in the NLDS.

Now all I have to cheer for is anyone beating up on the Dodgers. Bummer.

In my drained malaise, I thought about Batiuk and his silly obsession with the ‘melancholy beauty’ of fall leaves. Last year I posted the first Existential Leaves arc of 1975. While I scrape together the energy to clean out grain bins and tackle Les Moore on Trial (With the School Board), I thought I’d treat you guys to 1976’s week of Fatalistic Philosophical Foliage.

Such an outdated Quercuscentric outlook. The Pinaceae were here before that, bigot!

“Climate damage means we won’t have any snowmen!”

“When a staminate and a pistillate are stirred up by great wind…”

Serious question. How is one leaf older and wiser than the other leaf?

Why is the younger leaf a buckaroo? Why didn’t he see the branches snap? How do leaves see? This is like Toy Story logic all over again!!!!

So the leaf prefers the prospect of death to continued interaction with an out-group? There’s a political joke somewhere in there I’m too lazy to construct.

He’s a regular Bud Belichick.

Own Goal Post

I wanted to wait for last week of Crankshaft to complete before composing a post on it. I wanted to take in all six days of that awe inspiring arc. And I wanted a good long time to mull it over.

I was deliriously happy reading Crankshaft last week. It brought me such joy, but I’m having trouble putting my feelings into words. Because the happiness comes from a place so esoteric and weird I don’t know any good ways to describe its origin.

Let me try to dissect it. As best I can.

Batiuk’s strawman bellyaching about comics not being funny has been spouted before, but mostly always by a series of nameless men and women, sometimes not even pictured.

This time, he put all the complaints in the mouth of Crankshaft: the namesake character of the entire strip, and the most well liked character left in it. The only character that hasn’t been completely swallowed up by Batiuk’s ego and eroding theory of mind and spat back out as a pathetic manchild simpering over comic books (or one of the blonde brainless hivemind Banana Jr brought up in his last post).

Batiuk doesn’t come across as the winner here. Not to me. Because the protagonist of Crankshaft is Crankshaft.

It was oddly compelling, to have a character get a chance to bitch at their stupid creator, have the creator attempt to put them in their place and fail. What a self own! What an own goal! It’s practically Biblical.

You turn things upside down,
    as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
    “You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
    “You know nothing”?

Isaiah 29:16

In this case, I’d say the pot can tell the potter, “You know nothing.” Because Batiuk sure as heck doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. All he’s done is make Crankshaft the spokesperson for every snarky commenter that keeps his strip afloat.

Maybe he realizes this. Maybe this is some kind of 3D chess move of giving his warring camps of snarkers vs fans figureheads to rally behind, all to keep his strip relevant. Maybe that’s what Batiuk meant by Saturday’s strip. Hate readers are readers after all. He certainly hasn’t shut down his comments section, unlike other creators on GoComics.

Whatever Batiuk’s true motivation, the one who really lost out on all this is his pathetic avatar, Batton. No one liked him anyway, and an entire week of passive aggressive smirking leaves him about as tolerable as Spanish Flu.

And, as if to prove the supremacy of Ed Crankshaft, what do we get to start out this week? Two classic Crankshaft strips starring Crankshaft that were actually pretty funny.

To Everything, There Is A Season

I want to take off my snarker hat for a moment, and talk seriously about the future of Crankshaft.

We thought the past week would be yet another week of Skip Rawlings’ endless, pointless, onanistic interview with Batton Thomas. It turned out to be something much worse.

After what we saw this week – Tom Batiuk using the title character of Crankshaft as a tool to bash readers who want to see more of Crankshaft in the strip, and additionally as a strawman for Tom Batiuk’s tired “comic strips have to be funny” canard – there is one inescapable conclusion:

It’s time for Ed Crankshaft to die.

And I don’t mean that maliciously. I mean it in the way that a long-suffering family pet, who can’t be cured or even helped, needs to die. It’s a gut-wrenching decision to have a pet put down, but sometimes it’s the merciful thing to do.

Because the way Ed Crankshaft was used this week is appalling. How much do you have to hate your own creation, and all of its followers, to use that creation to mock their desire for more of it? I haven’t seen a production insult its audience this much since 1968.

Crosses The Line Twice takes Refuge In Audacity.

And this isn’t the first time Batiuk has acted like this. He killed off John Darling so the syndicate could no longer use the character (even though no one would ever want to). He’s bitter about the name Funky Winkerbean, because he thinks it held the strip back; the character Funky Winkerbean got pushed into the background. When Funky did appear, his arcs tended to center on his misfortunes: alcoholism, obesity, ego, incompetence, bad luck. And now Batiuk is bitter that readers want to see Crankshaft in Crankshaft, so he used the character to mock them. Notice a pattern?

The worst part of it is: these are his genuine fans. “Where’s Crankshaft?” isn’t something this blog thought up. It’s a common sentiment in online comment areas, from people who presumably enjoy the comic strip as Batiuk intended. They prefer Ed’s antics to the self-indulgent meandering slop Batiuk has been filling it with since Funky Winkerbean ended.

These are the people Batiuk should be trying to please. Or at least, listen to. “Where’s Crankshaft?” is essentially positive feedback. It affirms his decision all those years ago to give Crankshaft his own world. People seem to enjoy the cranky old bus driver and his antics.

Personally, I have no strong feelings about Ed Crankshaft. I don’t like or dislike him more than any other character. He’s a selfish, egotistical, malicious, unemployable jackass, but so are most male characters in the Funkyverse. But I do think Crankshaft deserves some dignity. He does not deserve to be used as a punching bag by an arrogant creator trying to make a point.

There are several reasons why the death of Ed Crankshaft would be beneficial to Crankshaft as a whole:

  • It’s way, way overdue. Ed Crankshaft is at least 106 years old. I base that on the fact that he played for the 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, and the youngest member of that team was born in February 1919. It’s also consistent with other mileposts of his life. He fought in World War II. He was an advocate for black baseball players in the early days of integration, which would have been the late 1940s. He played professional baseball in Cuba, which ended halfway through the 1960 season. His daughter Pam was a student at Kent State in 1970, making her birth year about 1950, at which time Ed was in his early 30s.

I know there are some individual strips that contradict that chronology. Like when Crankshaft claimed to admire Vic Power and Rocky Colavito growing up. But I think those were all caused by Timemop. If Tom Batiuk can use a time-traveling janitor to fix all his continuity errors, I can use a time-traveling janitor to break them again. Nudge!

If Batiuk truly believes his comic strips are the only ones where characters age realistically, it’s time to let nature take its course.

  • It would attract attention to the strip. Tom Batiuk loves media attention, and he loves killing off his own characters to get it. This would be another opportunity to do that. Alert the New York Times.
  • It would require no new writing or artwork. We already know Ed’s future, because it’s been shown in the strip. During the “Funky Winkerbean is ten years in the future from Crankshaft” era (2007-2022), Ed was depicted in FW as a decrepit husk.

We also know where he’s going to die: at a baseball game. So no new story needs to be written. Existing art can be repurposed or recreated. Which is a common practice in Batiuk’s work nowadays.

  • It would be a nice Continuity Nod. The Funkyverse loves revisiting its own stories, and this would do that.
  • It would be a satisfying end. It would bid farewell to the character in a way that lets readers and other characters say their goodbyes to the cranky old bus driver. In other words, it would be the opposite of what happened in Star Trek: Generations.
  • It would signal the strip’s change in direction. Have you ever seen (or been part of) a couple that really needs to break up, but they won’t pull the trigger on it? They just hang around together, hoping things will get better? Ed Crankshaft’s continued presence in Crankshaft feels like that.

    Batiuk clearly wants to turn the strip into Funky Winkerbean Act IV, full of comic books and writing awards and Dinkle and Montoni’s and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and interviews of himself and cheap award-baiting. And Ed Crankshaft is in the way of all that.

    If I’m right that Batiuk is bitter about being pressured to include Ed in the proceedings, the best thing he could do for his readers and himself is retire the character permanently. It would end the “Where’s Crankshaft” questions, because readers would know he isn’t coming back. (Though death can be a dubious thing in the Funkyverse.)
  • It would let Tom Batiuk do what he claims he wants to do. Batiuk constantly complains about having to be a gag-a-day writer. If Ed Crankshaft isn’t around anymore, there’s a lot less need for gag strips in Crankshaft. It removes a writing crutch Batiuk has leaned on for far too long. And it calls his bluff. You want to write serious drama, not gags? Fine. Get rid of the main character you have to write gags for.

Of course, he’d also need to get rid of Dinkle. But that would only take one panel:

And if Tom Batiuk doesn’t want to kill off Crankshaft or Dinkle, I’ve got another character he can get rid of:

Doppelgängerstadt

Here’s a writing tip: Don’t make jokes that draw attention to your worst tendencies as a writer.

Today’s joke in Crankshaft was that the insufferable Batton Thomas called himself the “doppelgänger” of the slightly less insufferable Jeff Murdoch. Complete with umlaut. One of those worst tendencies is how Tom Batiuk loves to get little details like this right, while ignoring the basic history of his own world and characters.

But that’s not the worst tendency I’m here to talk about today. The below images are of nine different women from the Funkyverse:

And to show that they all don’t just look alike, here are some hints about the group:

  • Five of them have made some kind of audio-visual product. (Obviously, #2 is one of those.)
  • Four of them are in long-term relationships with comic book-addicted dorks.
  • Three of them have only been seen as high school students.
  • Two are members of the original high school class of Funky Winkerbean.
  • Two of them are identical twins, who somehow manage to look different despite being indiscernible.
  • The number of characters who also appeared in both Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft is… well, your guess is as good as mine.
  • Amazingly, only one of them has written a book. And that book was only mentioned once.

Post your guesses in the comments. I’ll give everyone a day or two before I reveal the answer. Have fun!

(UPDATE: CSRoberto aced this quiz in the very first post. Alternate quiz: tell me who these women are, but wrong answers only, a la Y. Knott and The Drake Of Life’s posts. Have fun!)