The Crankshaft Awards 2023: Part 1!

Welcome nitpickers, and snarkers, and funkers of all ages to the First Annual Crankshaft Awards! In honor of our surviving strip, its surviving protagonist, and the dedicated team of dedicated cartoonists that put Crankshaft together, I have created the following award to hand out.

In this piece, I tried to capture the essence of Crankshaft in 2023. Thus, I spent about ten minutes using art I stole off of Google scribbling this together in MS Paint and called it good enough.

Continue reading “The Crankshaft Awards 2023: Part 1!”

What Are The Burnings?

Don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Crankshaft Awards! Voting remains open for about another 2 days.

I recently made my predictions of which Funky Winkerbean characters are likely to appear in Crankshaft in 2024. A major factor in these predictions was my guess at what The Burnings will be about, and which characters they will affect. And I already think I was wrong.

Continue reading “What Are The Burnings?”

You Don’t Have To Live Like A Refugee (More Predicted Funky Winkerbean Character Appearances In Crankshaft In 2024)

Don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Crankshaft Awards! Voting remains open for about another 5 days.

In Part 1 of this series, I predicted the seven Funky Winkerbean characters that will appear most often in Crankshaft in 2024. Here’s a recap of characters we’ve discussed so far, ranked by predicted most appearances:

  1. Mopey Pete Roberts/Reynolds (probability of appearing at least once in 2024: 99.9999%)
  2. Mindy Murdoch (99.9999%)
  3. Les Moore (99%)
  4. Dead Lisa (probability of being mentioned 99%; probability of actually appearing 20%)
  5. Dinkle (100%; has already appeared)
  6. Atomik Komix staff: Flash Freeman, Phil Holt, Darin Fairgood (55%)
  7. Pizza Box Monster (98%)

Dinkle’s off to a fast start, while Les and Lisa aren’t out of the gate yet. Continue reading “You Don’t Have To Live Like A Refugee (More Predicted Funky Winkerbean Character Appearances In Crankshaft In 2024)”

Crashing Ugly Cars

So I checked in on the BatBlog, and saw a new “Match To Flame” entry regarding an automobile accident involving our favorite comic strip, uh, writer, I guess. Based on the pics he posted, it looked like a pretty bad one, involving an airbag deployment (those really hurt. On TV it’s a big fluffy cushion of helpful air, but in real life it’s like being socked in the face with a giant cartoon boxing glove) and paramedics and whatnot. And I felt bad for the boring old coot, and genuinely hoped he was OK and all.

Then, however, I got to the part about his PT Cruiser, and I thought wait a minute, BatYam is still driving a PT Cruiser? And I figured OK, I suppose that if anyone still had a PT Cruiser, Batiuk would be a good candidate, because you know. And then he was droning on about his coat, and how months later it still had the indentation from the seat belt, and I realized that he was in fact jabbering about an old car accident he’d had years before.

And apparently, this sequence of events was the inspiration for the now-legendary “black panel” Funky Winkerbean & Cell Phone Girl car crash arc, which led to the creation of Starbuck Jones, which forever altered the course of the Funkyverse in stupid, tiresome ways no one could have possibly foreseen. But, thanks to his unique writing style, it took me a while to ascertain this, as the story could politely be described as “meandering”, at best.

So he wrote a nearly incomprehensible story about a chain of events that led him to focus more on his writing, and, just like always, it was written in a weird, strangely circular, and really annoying way, that made everything less clear than it was before. Some things never change.