Tag: God why won’t this end

Happy 107th Birthday, Ed Crankshaft!

We interrupt the Crankshaft awards to bring you a breaking story in Major League Baseball!

Bill Mazeroski died this weekend. Mazeroski is a Baseball Hall of Fame member, who hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history. It was the first ever World Series-winning home run. This has only been done one other time, by Joe Carter in 1993.

Why are we talking about baseball necrology? Because former Major League Baseball player Johnny Lucadello was born on February 22, 1919. Lucadello was also the youngest player on the 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, the real-life baseball team which Ed Crankshaft canonically also played for. (Ed also has a real-life retired jersey number.)

For that reason, I view today as Ed’s birthday, because it’s the latest possible day he could have been born. And I think Lillian McKenzie was in his high school class – because this is the Funkyverse – which makes her well over 100 as well.

Ed’s baseball career, with its early integration experiences, and winter ball in pre-revolution Cuba, fits this time frame. So does Lillian, Lucy, and Eugene being young adults whose lives were interrupted by World War II. So does Pam’s life, centered around the 1970 Kent State shootings. Ed would have been about 30 at her birth.

I want to stress that 107 is the youngest Ed Crankshaft could reasonably be in 2026. The average player in the 1940 American Association, and on the Mud Hens themselves, wasn’t 21 years old: he was 27. If Ed was 27 in 1940, he’d be 113 today. Which would almost make him the world’s oldest man. (Unless Walt Wallet from Gasoline Alley also counts.)

We can’t move Ed’s birthday much later than 1919, because then he’d be too young to be drafted into the military. What if we gave him Joe Nuxhall’s backstory (pitched briefly in the majors at age 15, making Ed’s birth year 1925)? Ed would be way too young to join the military legally, much less be drafted.

Which would have made Crankshaft extremely likely to reach the major leagues, no matter how illiterate he was. MLB teams in 1942-1945 were eager to employ players who weren’t subject to being drafted. And since some were already missing, the standards were lower. A player too young to be drafted, who was also good enough to pitch in AA (the top minor league level at the time), would have been given plenty of chances. Especially on a mediocre team, which the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians (both implied to be the Mud Hens’ parent club at some point) and St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles, who was Toledo’s real-life parent club in 1940) were.

The optimal birth year seems to be 1922. That would make Ed 20 in 1942, which is the youngest that would have been drafted that year. So maybe he’s only 104 now. Which would also make him extremely young for AA baseball, and by definition a phenom. But let’s solve one problem at a time here.

So how many inches from reality is Ed Crankshaft’s life?

Out of 35 players on the real-life 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, only two lived to see 2003! They were Jake Wade (1912-2006) and Harry Bailey (1918-2014). Six others made it to the 21st century: Armond Payton (1917-2000), Daniel Scudder (1916-2000), Tommy Criscola (1915-2001), Lucadello (died in 2001), Hal Spindel (1913-2002), and Robert Jones (1916-2002). A ninth player, Harry Kimberlin, died on December 31, 1999 at age 90. Kimberlin was the last former Major League Baseball player to die in the 20th century.

Bill Mazeroski’s famous home run was in 1960. He was born in 1936. He was 89 when he died this year. Ed Crankshaft is 15-20 years older than all of those standards. Look at the photos of Harry Kimberlin and João Marinho Neto in the above links. That is what a very old man looks like.

On top of that, Ed is absurdly active. He still works as a bus driver, bowls regularly, goes out to eat with friends, portrays Santa Claus, sings in a choir, gets into arguments with cartoonists, goes to the fair, has traveled to New York, Winnipeg and Columbus, performs frequent physical feats, and builds an AI-powered smart garden. Very few people on earth have the expertise to build an AI-powered smart garden. And few centenarians on earth have the ability to do any of the other things.

So, Ed, since you like gardening so much, why don’t you dig a 6′ x 3′ x 3′ rectangular hole in the ground? I’m sure we’ll find something useful to do with it. Oops, I mean “you’ll” find something useful to do with it. Happy birthday and many more!

We now return you to the Crankshaft awards!

How Many Times Did Funky Winkerbean Jump The Shark?

I didn’t mean for that last post to be a poll, but it’s revealing how many individual Jump The Shark moments posters were able to identify in Funky Winkerbean. Here’s a compiled list, in roughly chronological order (because, as you know, Timemop).

Act I (1972-1992, ends with the original class’ graduation)

Act II (1992-2007, ends with Lisa’s death)

  • Lisa’s first detection of cancer (1998)
  • Wally dies in the minesweeping simulator
  • Becky loses her arm
  • The first class reunion
  • Susan Smith’s suicide attempt
  • Wally’s first homecoming (2003)
  • John Byrne’s guest stint permanently alters the artwork (2003)
  • Sadie Summers – not because she was a bad character as Tom Batiuk thinks, but because she was under- and mis-utilized
  • The post office bombing (USA!)
  • Lisa’s cancer returns in 2006, because of a hospital error
  • Lisa’s death (October 4, 2007)

Act III (2007-2022, ends when Funky Winkerbean ends and its characters move to Crankshaft)

  • Tom Batiuk skips ten years after Lisa’s death, throwing away a gold mine of story ideas. Which also prevents Les Moore (and Batiuk) from ever moving past Lisa’s death, when that was the stated reason for the time jump
  • Les screaming at Summer over a dress for the winter dance he was pushing her to attend
  • Les saying “yes you did” and getting pissy with Funky over a mild joke about Les attracting two women at once
  • Wally’s second homecoming, which destroyed the likeable Wally-Becky relationship, and needlessly added to Wally’s suffering
  • Lisa’s Story becomes a thing
  • Starbuck Jones become a thing
  • The emergence of Cayla as a character
  • Funky’s car crash and time-altering coma (2010)
  • casting Susan Smith as the antagonist in the Les-Cayla-Susan love triangle
  • the gay prom story where the gay teens never seen or talked about again
  • Morton Winkerbean’s remarkable but never-addressed recovery from dementia
  • Wally hooking up with Rachel and turning his life around
  • Cayla’s appearance changes
  • Lisa calls in a bomb threat from beyond the grave
  • Darin and Pete become major characters
  • The rise of Atomik Komix as a central location
  • “Where’s father?” – the resolution of the Zanzibar The Talking Murder Chimp story
  • The death of Bull Bushka, which was ultimately insurance fraud
  • Les walking back his earlier forgiveness of Bull
  • Darin makes a toy for his son, out of a handgun that was used to murder his grandfather
  • The entire finale, featuring a long -forgotten janitor who is revealed to be a time-traveling agent, tasked with ensuring Summer’s book gets written
  • “behavior-patterned algorithms that will let us define humanity as our nation” or whatever that drivel was

Act IV (Crankshaft, 2023-)

  • The Funky Winkerbean characters invade Crankshaft
  • The alleged Burnings
  • The Batton Thomas interview arc

And must be a lot more candidates than that… because that list doesn’t mention Dinkle even once.

This Week Is Going To Be Awesome! (That Was Sarcastic.)

This week’s story in Crankshaft actually offends me.

It offends me because I was a news journalist once upon a time. So I know firsthand what a huge amount of work goes into creating video content. Even a simple 90-second TV news story means you have to write scripts, schedule, shoot, edit, add on-screen graphics, mix sound, fix errors, and manage the whole project.

And YouTube content can be even more complex than that, with fancy animations and the like. Don’t let the lo-fi, “I shot this in my apartment” aesthetic of YouTube content fool you about how much effort it requires.

Computers make these tasks a lot easier now, but that just means you have more competition. Almost anyone can be a content producer nowadays. Which is a good thing! YouTube is full of great stuff, from people whose voices we never would have heard otherwise. It turns out, the world is full of Hal P. Warrens. And they’re making broadcast-quality stuff. (There should be a Warren Award for do-it-yourself filmmakers.)

But Tom Batiuk has decided that Lillian needs to be a media star for the 25th time now, so now she’s going to become The Reluctant YouTuber. As if this were even possible.

This week is a great example of something Epicus Doomus often says: Batiuk never runs out of new ways to be infuriating and boring at the same time. It’s recently become a sport for commenters at this blog to try and guess what the next week of Crankshaft will be about. Known future stories include the upcoming Pete-Mindy wedding; the trip to Winnipeg for a Blue Bombers game; a likely trip to San Diego Comic-Con in late July, even though post-Funky Winkerbean has pivoted away from Atomik Komix; the endless Skip-Batton Thomas interview; Cindy’s pregnancy at Age 75, which is entering its fifth trimester; and standard Crankshaft plots.

But no, Lillian needs to be rewarded for doing nothing again, when she’s one of the most vile characters fiction has ever created.

Never mind all the practical problems with the story. In today’s strip, it looks they’re shooting a TV commercial for Lillian’s Murder In The Blank series. This book has a limited appeal, and has already been out for months. A promo would serve little purpose. And they’re shooting it with a cell phone? The video quality is going to be crap.

It’s like they’re trying to do a BookTok thing. But BookTok is a community for readers to talk about what they read, not for writers to promote what they wrote. And Lillian’s work is probably self-published, which is another hurdle to clear. Book reviewers usually have a policy against reviewing self-published/vanity press works at all, because they insist that a book have survived the winnowing process of being selected by a publisher. I can’t imagine the BookTok community would be receptive to this old self-promoting crone.

Another thing that annoys me: the girls work for Lillian, not vice versa. Especially after the recent week where they demanded to be paid. I think she hired one, because the other one still works at Centerview Sentinel. (Well, at least we know how the paper is still getting made, while Skip sits in Montoni’s with Batton Thomas for months on end.) But as we all know, no Funkyverse character can refuse to do something some other character wants, even when they’re that character’s boss.

But what galls me the most is how dismissive the Funkyverse is of every profession that isn’t teaching high school, writing, comic books, or pizza.

Making web videos? Pfffft. Easy stuff that anyone can be famous at. Remember when Bingo the Cat wandered into a video, and St. Spires church raised enough money to pay the national debt? Remember when Frankie was handed a reality show to slander and humiliate his sexual assault victim who died of cancer? Remember when Hollywood just stood around and let Les Moore make all the decisions for “his” movie, paid him a bunch of money, and probably took a loss when it failed? Remember how Cindy Summers became a national TV news reporter despite being a lazy, vacuous idiot?

Remember when Funky humiliated that investment planner for no reason at all? Or the many times he was a jackass to a doctor and their staff? Or when he abused his position as support group coordinator to workshop his lame standup? Remember the “Toxic Taco”? Remember “FleaBay”? Remember became how Crazy Harry and Donna/The Eliminator became world champions of a notoriously difficult video game, despite rarely picking up a joystick otherwise?

And before this week is over, Tom Batiuk will make a YouTube star out of a 105-year-old woman who doesn’t even want to be one. Who also can’t even make her own website, or write her own biography. That’s a slap in the face to anyone who’s picked up a camera.

To answer Lillian’s question from Monday’s strip: yes, Lillian, you have lived far too long. But technology has nothing to do with it. Dieplzkthx.

(UPDATE: As of Saturday, Lillian had only two YouTube followers, but still manages to be smug and insufferable about it. The whole week was an exercise in phony humility. “Oh, poor little old me doesn’t know anything about YouTube.” Then starting on Thursday, she knows she needs a professional voiceover artist, and knows what a follower is.

Which speaks to the underlying problem of it all. All the books, all the videos, all the signings, all the awards, all the interviews that get created by the dozens of characters in the Funkyverse serve only one purpose: an ego wank for the creator. We never even see them creating the content, or even having any real desire to create it. Just like we didn’t see it this week. The plot is always: 1. Declare self a writer. 2. Receive praise.)

Paper or Plastic Dirt-Bag?

Link to today’s strip.

Never mind the title of this entry; sometimes it’s really hard to be clever, as Frankie (and a certain cartoonist) can well attest.   So, like a certain cartoonist might say, you grab a word out of the material in front of you and think, “What goes with ‘dirt’?”  You might find yourself surprised by your findings.  And not in a good way.

Anyway.  So, Frankie and Lenny see Mason and Marianne walking away toward the studio soundstage.

Somehow, this gives Frankie ideas.  Big ideas–the kind his boss, Fred Flintstone, wants.  The kind he knows Fred will see, and he’ll get that maniacal gleam in his eyes.   “Boys,” he’ll say, “boys, this–this is good.  This is really, really good.  Yabba-dabba-do!”

And, using a bit of imagination, I can see the headlines now:

As Alfred E. Neuman once offered, “Perfect for framing or wrapping fish!”  What he once said about his own portrait might now apply to certain sections of the newspaper in their entirety.