Son of Stuck Funky

The Horrifying Return of Dinkshaft.

Now that we’re back at St. Spires, TFH has whipped up another vastly superior interpretation of Sunday’s strip.

I wonder if Batiuk realizes how tone deaf Sunday’s strip was to the religious set? It’s one thing to shout about football fields being for marching bands. But screaming from the choir loft that a place dedicated to the worship and reverence of a higher power is just another venue for your own self-aggrandizing artistic pursuits comes across as blasphemy to the believer and insensitive to the agnostic.

Massaging the Truth

Correct me if I am wrong, but Ed going to get a massage is it a new arc for Crankshaft? I find this story-line original and funny. How about you?
Sorial Promise, January 19, 2024

Funny? Tolerably so, for me at least. The last three have at least been within the same universe as recognizable comedy. This should be the baseline of Crankshaft, not a week of no jokes, no conflict, no real plot, as one hunk of stale toast hands the keys to a failure of a restaurant to another hunk of stale toast and his pretzel stick appendage of a partner.

Original? Well, Cranky is no stranger to a massage. Back in 2014, when he threw out his back, his resistance to a massage served as the concluding conflict of the plot. And by the end…things started to look pretty…familiar.

Everyone asks, “Where’s Crankshaft?” No one asks, “How’s Crankshaft?”

I hope all the snarkers out in Nitpickerville are keeping safe and warm. It got juuuuust toasty enough, (20 Freedom Units on the thermometer,) for my dad and brother and I to go wading through two foot deep drifts to put up a stretch of electric fence.

*Not pictured, Night King, tauntaun, White Witch, Snowpiercer.*

Fellow fine blogger, MopMan had a really good question on the last post.

And it’s a very valid line of inquiry. So, for all your edification, of the 206 strips that Ed appeared in, there were 59 where he didn’t have any dialogue. That sounds like a lot, but it’s rather deceiving, as in many of these strips Cranky was still very much the focus. I broke down Cranky’s silent strips as follows.

By The Numbers

Snowmageddon has hammered the farm. Heck, it’s hammered the whole country. Working at the gas station yesterday I had a steady stream of opinions from popsicle people of all ages on when winter was last this brutally cold and massively snowy all at once. We’ve got snowpiles at the end of alleys that keep climbing higher and higher like a Midwest mountain range of misery.

Had a mom saying her kids were sobbing in frustration looking at those tantalizing peaks from their windows, but stuck inside because of how ass-clenchingly arctic the temperature was.

So Cranky Awards season is, unfortunately, delayed. But between thawing cattle waterers and shoveling my way to the gas station, I did manage to whip up the spreadsheety goodness I know some of you crave.

Named Characters in Crankshaft in 2023, by order of appearance.

Slipping Away.

Apologies that the Cranky Awards are late, but Snowmageddon has hit the Midwest.

I hope everyone has been enjoying what seems will be an entire week of Crankshaft lying prone on the sidewalk while zoomers galk at him.

It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Literally. Though this time the role of Pam was played by the Generic Long Faced Youth.

We used to get hilarious strips of old people slipping and falling on the ice more often, when Rose Murdoch was still alive. For example, back in 2008, when Rose was still living alone in a house based on Batiuk’s childhood home.