Tag: Crankshaft

This. Weak.

Link To Today’s Strip

What could be worse than another Dinkle band convention arc? Ordinarily the acceptable answers would be “Les” or “nothing”, but today BanTom has a wild card up his sleeve in the form of that stupid f*cking bus-driving asshole Crankshaft, once again in retcon form. He JUST DID one of these horrible Crankshaft retcon jobs and it’s WAY too soon for another one now. I really hate Crankshaft and not in a fun “I can’t believe this still exists” kind of way, but like I hate yellow jackets at picnics and garbage juice dripping from the bottom of a full trash bag and pus seeping from an open wound. I try to encounter it as little as possible and when I accidentally stumble across it I’m instantly disgusted.  I’m never going to read it so stop trying to make me, OK? Nice “punchline” too, by the way.

As far as Becky goes, the sleeve is doing all the talking for her today. I told you, he never, ever passes up a chance to draw that sleeve. The Arm…never forget. Poor poor Becky, definitely one of the strip’s more downtrodden characters. She doesn’t really like her job, she’s married to a comic book store owner and she’s still always being overshadowed by Dinkle and his interminable stories. Plus there’s her mother, Wally and the arm thing too. She can’t even really smirk correctly either. It’s really quite a brutal legacy.

Batom Comics VS Reality

TB pivots from an industry about which he clearly knows little, to one that he professes to understand well…and still gets it wrong. Anyone who’s worked in or around the print industry knows that if a printer fucks up the job , he eats it; he re-runs the whole job at his own expense, not charging the client for a “correction run.”  Meanwhile TB amuses himself, if no one else, by name-dropping himself, and (mis-)quoting his Crankshaft strip from a month ago.

Blond Moments

Holly = fat, frumpy and blonde with misshapen head. Donna = fat, frumpy and blonde with HORRIBLY misshapen head. Got it.
–Epicus Doomus

Throw another shrimp on the barbie ’cause here comes another middle-aged blonde woman! The fact Mindy rhymes with Cindy and she’s Cindy– err, Cynthia Summers’s doppelganger isn’t helping matters in today’s strip. Living outside of Westview seems to have some advantages though, you don’t randomly wake up every six or seven years to find you’ve suddenly aged a decade overnight.

I don’t want to peek ahead, but I feel like I’m Nostradamus or something with what is about to go down. The thing is, Batty Tom has already done the Hey, stranger, your son is in the military? Have my $900 comic for a dollar.” schtick. I assume the more issues she gets the ones left over are scarcer and worth more money.

Not to coin nerd out here, but it’d be like finding out a friend of your coworker’s nephew from out-of-town is working on a penny collection so you offer to sell him a 1877 Indian Head Cent in XF condition for one cent because you think kids that still collect pennies are cute.

Megaphoning It In

Link to today’s strip

“Easy there, Becky…you’re beginning to sound like your mother.”

“I see my influence is finally rubbing off on you, Becky.”

(No third panel at all)

There, three “jokes” right off the top of my head that would have worked better than having the constantly cackling Dinkle make a stupid irrelevant reference to a character from a different strip no one cares about. This is one of those times when I just can’t grasp the logic at work here, unless it’s just pure unmitigated laziness, in which case I understand completely.

How many FW readers are even going to get that “joke”? I’d bet that they’ll both be confused and be forced to resort to going to the official Batom Inc. website, clicking on “complete cast of characters” and scrolling through the detailed information within in order to…oh, wait. Never mind.