Crankshaft – Page 7 – Son of Stuck Funky

Jumped The Comic Book

Harriet promised you an epic screed from me about this week’s shenanigans. This isn’t that screed, but it’s coming. In part because I want to be 100% sure there’s no second week of this arc. So right now, this is a quick TBTropes entry about the finale of the arc about the festival of Ohio-related books. I refuse to give them any more free advertising space than Tom Batiuk already has. Continue reading “Jumped The Comic Book”

Practice What You Preach

Saturday’s Crankshaft is a great example of a comic strip that is innocuous, but infuriating if you ever paid attention to the Funkyverse.

On the surface, it looks like a particularly mawkish installment of Pluggers. Oh, for the good old days, when store operators used mechanical 1970 Grocery Game-style cash registers and memorized where everything was. (Implied: instead of using computers, which Tom Batiuk is known to dislike.) Continue reading “Practice What You Preach”

Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.

Not long after I posted about last week’s arc about a real-world eclipse, regular poster J.J. O’Malley compared it to a Peanuts arc from June 15-20, 1963, which also coincided with a real-world eclipse. Several other posters also chimed in about the comparison:

Oh, if only I had faith that TB was funny enough to just rip this off completely…
billytheskink, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2024/04/03/total-eclipse-of-the-old-fart/#comment-169174

Well, he did rip it off completely. The rest of it, not so much. Continue reading “Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.”

Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart

So this week’s Crankshaft plot has been about Ed renting out space at Pam and Jeff’s house to view the upcoming solar eclipse. Or, as a Comics Curmudgeon poster put it:

Tom Batiuk saw that the 2024 eclipse would pass right through Ohio, and immediately thought, “How can Crankshaft be a horrible person about this?”
https://joshreads.com/2024/04/the-only-fools-here-are-all-of-us/#comment-2783092

Credit where it’s due, though: this is a timely, Ohio-relevant story, which we rarely get in the Funkyverse. The total eclipse will happen next Monday, April 8, and the path of totality will pass over the Cleveland metropolitan area. Since we don’t know exactly where Centerville is – and it’s implied to be a far-out Cleveland suburb anyway – the story is highly relevant. Continue reading “Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart”

Fight The Power!

Today’s TBTrope is about power dynamics. This is a subject I’ve wanted to explore for awhile now.

All fiction runs on Like Reality, Unless Noted. When we are consuming a story, we assume that the story’s world is like our own, unless the story says otherwise. We use our own knowledge to fill in the gaps about how things work. When we’re watching a rom-com, Emma Stone doesn’t turn to turn to the camera to explain to the audience how dating works. We all know how it works, from our own lives. And so it is with interpersonal dynamics.

In a story, one character may hold power over another. In the funny pages, the mechanics of this are often very simple. Adult/child, boss/subordinate, older sibling/younger sibling, aggressive person/timid person, and so on.

Funky Winkerbean used to understand this. In Act I, Bull was a bully and Les was his victim. Harry Dinkle was a hyper-demanding band director, whose students had no power to resist his orders. The characters made sense, even in the comically exaggerated world of Act I. We recognized these situations from our own lives. We understood the power dynamics in play.

By Act III, though, a new paradigm had emerged. I call it By The Power Of Batiuk. “The character in control of any situation is the character Tom Batiuk thinks should be in control of it, not the character who actually would be.”