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?”
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”
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.”
Don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Crankshaft Awards! Voting remains open for about another 5 days.
In Part 1 of this series, I predicted the seven Funky Winkerbean characters that will appear most often in Crankshaft in 2024. Here’s a recap of characters we’ve discussed so far, ranked by predicted most appearances:
Mopey Pete Roberts/Reynolds (probability of appearing at least once in 2024: 99.9999%)
Mindy Murdoch (99.9999%)
Les Moore (99%)
Dead Lisa (probability of being mentioned 99%; probability of actually appearing 20%)
Dinkle (100%; has already appeared)
Atomik Komix staff: Flash Freeman, Phil Holt, Darin Fairgood (55%)
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.
In all seriousness, today’s Crankshaft floored me. Again, we’re not going to make this a Crankshaft blog, but this is a big enough development to talk about.
Here was my initial reaction:
I absolutely didn’t expect this. What does it say about the Funkyverse that starting a story with a plot point, and then actually resolving that plot point, is a shocking outcome?
And honestly, it’s kind of sweet. I have to give Pete credit for an elegant and well-executed proposal. Sure beats Eugene’s “check yes or no” snail mail proposal to Lucy, John Howard’s awkwardness, and that “in the main” word salad Les spewed at Cayla. Mindy’s “I must be crazy” reaction was also sweet. She is crazy, and not for the reasons she thinks, but she finally got what she wanted. For one day, I’m rooting for this couple. They’ll probably destroy that tomorrow morning, though.
Because I think these are the first shots of the Funky Winkervasion. The annexation of Crankshaft by Funky Winkerbean has been building for awhile, but this arc is the declaration of war. Mason Jarre showing up to buy the Valentine theater, as forced as it was, at least had some connections to long-running events in Centerville. Montoni’s wasn’t even relevant in its own strip; its closure was trivial. But here it is, being brought back to life, presumably so it can become the new social hub of Crankshaft – which is set in a town some distance away. That’s not how small-town social hubs work.
Will tomorrow’s strip be more sweetness and light, or is it straight back to Pete’s nonsense plan to revive a dead restaurant with this dollar-store corporate mascot? Or worse, discussions of how they’re going to merge their comic books?
I want to hear what you all think about this, so I hope you’ll weigh in in the comments.
Son of Stuck Funky 