Son of Stuck Funky

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.

Predicted Character Appearances In 2024

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year without Funky Winkerbean. Then again, has it really been a year without Funky Winkerbean? Those “new original Funky stories at from time to time” Tom Batiuk promised on his website never arrived. Because all the “new Funky stories” are going straight into Crankshaft. Why have web-exclusive content when you can just submit it as your day job?

Speaking of day jobs: my day job is working with financial data. Sports handicapping is a side interest. So I love making half-assed guesses from non-specific data. The great Comic Book Harriet has inspired me to apply these skills to the Funkyverse.

We just saw her third annual breakdown of character appearances in the Funkyverse. She also did this for the 2022 and 2021 years of Funky Winkerbean. I will to try and predict what the character appearances in Crankshaft in 2024 will be. I’m only interested in Funky Winkerbean characters, though. Characters like Lena and Keesterman belong in Crankshaft, so I don’t think they’re worth talking about here.

The count of FW characters in Crankshaft is a good data point to view how far Tom Batiuk is going to convert Crankshaft into The New Funky Winkerbean. For example: Pete Roberts/Reynolds was the sixth-most popular character in Crankshaft last year, behind only Ed, Lillian, and the Murdoch family. And all he did was go to Comic-Con, write Lillian’s author blurb, and re-open Montoni’s. In light of what we know about Montoni’s and Pete, that story arc only makes sense in ways that can be divided by zero. But Batiuk wanted Montoni’s back, so it’s back. I’ll speculate why in a moment.

Here are my predictions for the most prominent Funky Winkerbean characters in Crankshaft in 2024. I won’t guess exact counts, but a ranked order, and the probability each character will appear at all.

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.