Son of Stuck Funky

IMO, a muddled aphorism does not a joke make. So I had a stab at a couple rewrites of today’s joke. Please rate, critique, comment, and let me know your favorite. And let me see the best jokes YOU can whip up!

It seems ol’ Batiuk has finally taken to heart all the complaints about not enough Crankshaft in Crankshaft. And he has decided to rectify this by shoving ol’ Crank into the St. Spires Choir, even though the ol’ coot has never before shown any musical inclination in his life beyond badly butchering popular lyrics to the chagrin of his family.

Continue reading “The Contrarian”

I have often said that the Funkyverse is very meanspirited, in ways that are hard to quantify. Ed spending two of the last three weeks under his bed is a perfect example of that. While the story appears benign on the surface, it forces us to make a lot of discomforting assumptions about the world these people inhabit.

In art, negative space is the empty space around to the subject of an image. Negative space can be used to give the image balance, or to convey additional meaning. Especially in corporate logos. It also makes a good metaphor for this tendency of the Funkyverse.

I call it Emotional Negative Space: the unpleasant things Tom Batiuk’s writing forces the reader to assume, in order for a scene to make any sense.

The Funkyverse is inoffensive on the surface. Bland characters smirk at each other about the author’s many boring hobbies. But if we look at the negative space around the story – the assumptions that it requires – we can see how nasty it really is. And this is a particularly nasty arc.

A senior citizen suddenly hiding under their bed is a concerning sign. They may be anxious, afraid (perhaps of something that doesn’t exist), trying to regain control of their surroundings, or otherwise coping with dementia. Or it could be something more straightforward, like they’ve begun soiling themselves and are hiding their damaged clothes. Or they’re just ashamed of themselves. Many posters have mentioned seeing their loved ones decline, and lose their independence, as they aged. It’s not a fun thing to see.

In last Monday’s strip, Ed is hiding under the bed and refusing to go to work. We just saw Ed come back from an international trip, so he has no problems with mobility, unless they just started. Ed is also a pretty fearless guy. So this is very out of character.

On Tuesday, Pam is telling Ed (who is her father) that he’s “got to come out from under the bed!” Which is even more out of character. She’s got an angry look on her face, and her arms crossed in a demanding pose she never uses any other time. Especially not when Ed is about to do another $25,000 worth of property damage. Or when Jeff brought her a rock after almost getting himself killed in Bronson Canyon.

In good writing, someone behaving out of character can suggest that this a serious moment. Like when Calvin was heartbroken about the baby raccoon dying, or when the bookish Marcie slugged that sexist prick Thibault. But that’s not the kind of writing we get in this feature. We know the author better than that. This is a week of gag strips! By a man who thinks writing gag strips is beneath him.

By giving one of the characters cancer, (Tom Batiuk) was announcing that comic strips, like comic books, need not be restricted to gag-a-day formats and juvenile subjects. This was even more apparent when the same character’s cancer returned with a vengeance in 2007.

Okay, time to be serious again. Let’s consider the emotional negative space of this moment. Ed is being told he must go to work instead of hiding under the bed. I have just one question:

Why?

Seriously, why does Ed have to go to work? Why can’t he just stay home, or quit his job if he wants to? In a competently written feature, the reason might be “we need the money.” But motivations in the Funkyverse are never as straightforward or realistic as that.

Please note that I’m not being snarky here. I have said nothing about Crankshaft being a jerk who’s intentionally bad at his job; his addiction to online shopping; his propensity for wrecking other people’s stuff; or the male characters’ tendency to be dominated by women in mommy roles. I am trying to engage the feature on its own terms. I’m trying to understand why this scene exists in a “quarter inch from reality” world. It is cruel. It is abusive. It offers no justification for itself. And it is Dude, Not Funny.

I did mention Crankshaft’s age, because it’s relevant to the question of why he needs to go to work. However you want to carbon-date Ed’s life, he is at least three decades into his retirement years. Because his daughter Pam is at least one decade into hers! She and Jeff were traditional-age college students during the 1970 Kent State shootings. Do the math.

And don’t tell me “Timemop.” Timemop has no power here. Ordinary people in realistic worlds can’t live, work, spend unlimited money, get book contracts, and remain absurdly active into their 90s without supernatural involvement becoming obvious. Does anyone remember the movie Cocoon?

Ed seems to be having some kind of panic attack. But nobody ever acknowledges this, or expresses a drop of concern for him. They don’t consider that Ed may be getting too old for day-to-day work. Or that his concerns might be valid. We saw the school children drive an implied Hell’s Angel into quitting during the “bus driver shortage” arc, so he may have good reason to fear them. Which is another justification this story could have used, but didn’t: the community needs him to fill his role during a shortage of qualified bus drivers.

Ed is shown zero compassion, and is browbeaten off-camera into going back to work. And we’re never told why. Did he just cave? If so, to what? To the spineless Pam? Seriously? We don’t know what convinced him to go back to work, or what really drove him under the bed in the first place. He mentions a couple things, but they’re just cheap jokes.

Batiuk is never clear about how his audience is supposed to react to things like this. When Calvin and Marcie broke character, it was serious business, and the tone of the stories reflected that. Batiuk’s tone is all over the place, so we can’t make the inferences we need to.

We have to provide the subtext ourselves, because Batiuk won’t. And the only logical subtext is that Ed’s family is ignoring his distress, and what appears to be some troubling behavior.

I am not even going to dignify the last week of Crankshaft with any kind of detailed response. Y’all have lambasted it well and truly in the comments here and elsewhere, and there is nothing I want to add.

Except to point out that the exact same Batton face was used twice today, just flipped horizontally. I would call it lazy, if Davis hadn’t gone above and beyond with his stock image searches to bring Batton’s sepia toned flashbacks to stilted nonsensical life.

Let us go back to an earlier time. When the art was fresh, but the writing was just as insufferable.

To re-orient ourselves into Chien’s Story,

In 1998, Chien was introduced as a wannabe avant garde, misanthropic snarker with a goth sense of fashion.

I posited that we should be asking four questions when going over Chien’s history.

1.) Is Chien truly unique in personality?

2.) Where does Chien come from?

3.) Is Chien morally/intellectually/philosophically justified in the author’s eyes?

4.) What can Chien’s portrayal tell us about how Batiuk views and writes the internal lives of women?

From 1998 to 2000 we saw Chien and her best friend Ally working for the school yearbook and newspaper. We saw them butt heads with Bull Bushka over including pictures of the football team in the yearbook, and in the next year they published a hit-piece in the school paper about the hypocrisy of the new dress code.

In my analysis I pointed out the many many times Chien was demeaning and dismissive toward ‘The Cool Kids’. I posited that while this was believable for her character, Batiuk does a ham handed job of framing it, never realizing that by making Chien an intellectual elitist that gets off on being an outsider, he turns her into just another kind of bully.

And now we reach September 11, 2000. And a disaster of an arc begins.

First things first. This strip. I will give THIS ONE strip credit.

This nearly wordless strip establishes that Chien dresses the way she does because she personally thinks it’s cool and likes it. She is literally doing it for an audience of one, herself. This helps to make her sympathetic.

NOW THE HORROR.

Your friends call you ‘dog’? Kay. And what is up with this second person narration? Is this some kind of Chick Tract.

(Kind of)

No, of course you’re not like them Chien. You’ve never mocked or belittled, pointed at and humiliated others because you thought you were better than them.

Oh wait…

But no. You’re not like them. They’re preps and dress preppy.

Oooooookay. Don’t even really know where to begin to pick this one apart. Like, it’s 2000, right? Wouldn’t adults expect classrooms to be wired for telephones?

Batiuk is obviously trying to put his Boomer audience in the shoes of a Gen X student. But barring the technology upgrade how does Batiuk even show that school is different.

And then there’s the nonsensical Columbine namedrop over the top of blatant and egregious bullying? What does that even mean? What has changed?

The going popular narrative being bandied about at the time was that Columbine was the result of preps bullying outsiders, and there was much hand wringing and pushing of anti-bullying initiatives. Why are we seeing bullying?

Batiuk is, once again, incorporating a real life tragedy into in little universe in the most stupid way. Some of you may argue he does this to grandstand and get accolades. But I also think there’s a weird coping element to it. He takes a problem that troubles him, shoves it awkwardly into his playhouse, and solves it to his own satisfaction. Like a kid whose parents are fighting soothing themselves by making the dollies kiss.

But wait. It gets worse.

I have no words. I can only respond using a visual aid.

For fucks sake. It’s like Batiuk is writing a self-aggrandizing Tinder profile for Les.

So, all this boils down to, “You are Chien, you think about Les Moore.”

BARF.

Buckle in folks. This one’s a doozy.

So sue me, Crankshaft spending a week hiding under his bed was far FAR from the worst arc of 2025. I daresay that I saw a strip or two that might make the 2025 Awards shortlist.

Is it the best week of a comic strip in bed that I’ve ever seen? Not by a long shot. Pastis had this in bag years ago, with a strip so funny and relatable my mom clipped it out and put in on her fridge.

But Crankshaft this week was perhaps better than the worst of the ‘Garfield in Bed’ strips, which are their own dedicated subgenre with decades of history.

1979

1987

But I’ll say this for Garfield recently. The art may be recycled, but the jokes have gotten pretty avant garde.

Maybe like evolution and natural selection redesigning the crab over and over and over…all strips will eventually become Heathcliff.

Expect the Chien recap to spin back up. I just have to reorient myself with our favorite goth queen.

EDIT!!!!

I am editing this to declare that I had NO IDEA when I photoshopped my joke strip that the next arc would be Batton and Skip. I was just trying to think of the most repulsive thing that Cranky could be hiding from.

I swear. I swear on my two foot high stack of The Complete Funky Winkerbean volumes. I had no concious idea what this week would bring.

Hang on real quick. I’m off to pick the next lotto numbers!

We need an experiment to see if this is general precognition, or if I’m just uniquely cursed to foresee the future of Crankshaft.