it's called "writing" – Son of Stuck Funky

What’s The Story, Morning Glory?

I’ve been updating the Act 4 section of this website, to write weekly summaries for all the post-Funky Winkerbean Crankshaft arcs. Here are the entries I’ve written about the past six months:

August 24-September 19: Montoni’s hires a robot waiter.
August 17-22: In the name of the Father reprise. Ed Crankshaft spots a photograph of Larry Dinkle at Montoni’s, even though they both would have known about it for decades.
August 10-15: Ed, Pam and Jeff visit the fair.
August 3-9: Ed runs over his own cell phone with his riding lawnmower.
July 27-August 2: A pair of 1970s-looking video game developers approach Ed about creating a game called Grill Blast. It flops.
July 20-25: Batton Thomas gushes about The Flash #123 again.
June 1-July 18: In The Name Of The Father. Eugene comes to tell Lillian he’s moving to “a place.” After a series of fetch quests, we learn about that Larry Dinkle, who is of course Harry’s father. Larry was exactly the same asshole his son is, but no one ever notices this. Eugene slowly says goodbye to Lillian, without ever addressing the issue of where he’s moving.
May 25-30: Ed’s grilling creates a black hole. It was all just a dream. Maybe.
May 18-23: Batton Thomas discusses his band director character Harry Finkle.
May 11-17: Starts out as an aimless week at Comics Corner, but Batton Thomas shows up on Wednesday and turns it into yet another book signing.
May 4-10: Miscellaneous gags.
April 27-May 2: Lillian has another book signing at the Ohioana Book Festival.
April 20-25: The Batton Thomas interview continues.
April 13-18: Ed buys more Bean’s End crap.
April 6-11: Emily and Amelia talk Lillian into opening a newsletter for her blog.
March 23-April 4: Miscellaneous gags.
March 16-22: Batton Thomas tells Skip about his drawing board.

March 2-15 was the wedding of Max and Hannah, whose backstory I explored here and here. At least this resolved a long-running relationship. But everything more recent than this is missing the same thing:

Crankshaft hasn’t told a story in six months.

Because I don’t consider any of the things in that list a story. There is no plot, no conflict, no action, no resolution, no theme in any of them. Act IV Crankshaft is almost 100% filler. It’s endless backstory that never turns into anything (Glup Shittos, most recently Holtron and Tony Montoni); excessive focus on small events that never turn into anything either (Eugene taking two weeks to not tell Lillian where he’s moving); gag-a-day strips, with their usual problems of being disjointed and inconsistent; characters smirking at each other about things that happened off-panel; and Tom Batiuk monologuing through one of his characters, usually Batton Thomas.

Not only that, Batiuk seems to be going out of his way to avoid telling a story even accidentally. The Larry Dinkle arc – which I refuse to call by its pretentious title – is a pointless info dump about an irrelevant, never-seen character. The most compelling part of it was the part about Eugene having to move… well, somewhere, for some reason. People genuinely wanted to know the resolution to this, probably because it was the only shred of humanity to be found anywhere.

The arc had potential. It was begging for Harry to have an epiphany about how he turned into his father, despite his apparently ambivalent feelings about the man. Which we can only guess at, because they were never clearly stated either.

Ambiguous endings can work sometimes. Batiuk tries to do this, but he fails by making everything in the story ambiguous. There isn’t a single hint or clue as to where Eugene is moving or why, or how Dinkle feels about his father. And Lord knows none of the Greek chorus for his pity party is going to bring it up. Not even Ed Crankshaft, whose usual characterization is “easily-annoyed old guy who blurts out whatever’s on his mind at all times.”

Side note: this is why I’m not one of those “Where’s Crankshaft?” guys. When he is in the strip, it doesn’t help. Because Batiuk sacrifices his personality to the ancient god Finallygettingthatpulitzer.

Similarly, the pizza robot arc has been dropping “people don’t like AI” comments left and right. But it ignores the fact that this bland, unfunny robot is now doing a job that three humans used to do. And incompetently at that. Which is exactly the reason people don’t like AI! This massive story flaw is never addressed at all.

I fear this is the shape of Act IV. After Funky Winkerbean ended, Tom Batiuk moved in certain FW characters like he’s trying to gentrify Centerville, but also trying to better refine it for his incomprehensible purposes. Lord knows why Pete and Mindy, Max and Hannah, Mason Jarre and Cindy Summers, and Harry Dinkle made the cut, while more important characters (in terms of their genuine importance to Funky Winkerbean, and how much Tom Batiuk seemed to like them) didn’t. Just another baffling choice in a universe that runs on baffling choices.

Glup Shitto

In the Star Wars fandom, Glup Shitto is a general term for any small character with its own goofy name, home planet, job, species, and way too much backstory for the minor role it plays.

Think of some of the minor characters from the original 1977 movie, like the weirdos in the cantina. Thanks to the sequels, prequels, spinoff movies, TV series, animated series, novels, comic books, and the Star Wars Holiday Special, you can learn way more about them than you ever wanted to know.

You can understand why Glup Shittos exist. There was an insatiable demand for more Star Wars content, but the movies were very expensive and time-consuming to make. There was also a need to explain continuity problems, like “making the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs” when a parsec is a measure of distance, not time. Now there are all kinds of explanations about how the challenge was to get from Point A to Point B via the most hazardous route possible. I think the movie Solo also expanded on this, but I might have fallen asleep during that scene.

The Funkyverse is full of Glup Shittos. But Tom Batiuk misses the point of them.

Harry Dinkle has become a Glup Shitto, especially recently. In the original trilogy — Acts 1, 2, and 3 of Funky Winkerbean — Dinkle was an important character with an important role to play. When the main cast graduated from Westview High School at the end of Act 1, Dinkle could no longer be an effective antagonist. His power to bully the main cast ended when they were no longer his students anymore.

But of course, Tom Batiuk doesn’t realize this. So he started inventing more and more convoluted ways to write Dinkle stories. In Act 2, these were pretty reasonable. They centered on his interactions with his wife, later high school students, their parents, the targets of his door-to-door selling, the increasingly strange products he sold, and the Claude Barlow gags.

By Act 3, Dinkle was going deaf (but not really), anointing a successor in Becky (but not really), retiring (but not really), leading a nursing home band on a recording contract and a tour (yes, really) and weaseling his way into being a choir director (really). This was all a blatant attempt to keep writing Dinkle gags. Because, as we all know, Tom Batiuk is a serious artist and not a gag writer. Nope. He’s definitely not that.

Those were all bad stories, but at least they were stories. Which is more than you could say about Glup Shitto in Act 4 (post-2022 Crankshaft).

The recent In The Name Of The Father series explored Harry Dinkle’s upbringing, then never did anything with that information. We learned that his father Larry was a selfish, insufferable bandleader, so obsessed with music and fame that he was indifferent to his performers, and to his own family. It’s obvious that Harry Dinkle is a chip off the old block, but this was never acknowledged. Not even by his current performers, who are frequent recipients of his abusive behavior. One of whom is Ed Crankshaft, who’s supposed to be the guy who speaks his mind at all times.

It added additional information to Harry Dinkle’s life, like Glup Shitto stories do. But it never did anything with that information. It didn’t tell a new story, or even give us any new insight into the character. And there were a lot of tacked-on, irrelevant details, like the fact that Larry Dinkle loved noir movies, and died when he crashed his bus due to a heart attack and/or alcoholism. Batiuk couldn’t even be bothered to clarify which it was.

So we have the hallmarks of a Glup Shitto story — additional backstory for a minor character in the major story — but none of the benefits of it. Least of all, fun. Which is another reason stories get written about these minor characters. Often by unsanctioned writers:

Richard Pryor’s “Star Wars Bar” skit would have been very NSFW. It’s on Youtube though. Hint.

Last week, we had a Glup Shitto experience with Pete and Mindy. Their stories in Funky Winkerbean were bad enough, but they were more or less stories, like “awkward nerd hooks up with out-of-his-league attractive girl.” You can do this kind of story, but Batiuk botched the details.

Pete ran out of money at the county fair despite being a highly-paid, world class writer in this world. He also treats Mindy like garbage, a topic my friend Narshe will be exploring on Wednesday. And the fact that Pete and Mindy are both in their 50s by now, and it’s way too late for the “young kids just starting out” shtick.

Pete and Mindy have become relevant characters in Crankshaft, all to tack on a bunch of unnecessary backstory that goes nowhere. They revived Montoni’s! And the whole town brought all the decorations back! And they teamed up with the Pizza Box Monster! And they have a robot waiter! And… that’s it. Nothing was ever done with any of this. Montoni’s itself hasn’t even been the town hangout it used to be, which was at least a narrative purpose.

Act 4 has been running on Glup Shitto stories for a while, without those stories ever serving the unifying or narrative purposes they should. And we don’t see stories about minor characters that might be interesting to explore. Whatever happened to Chien? Why weren’t Cory, Rocky, Wally, Rachel, and Adeela rehired when Montoni’s re-opened? What are they doing instead? What effect did the short-lived strip club era have on Centerville? What happened to Cindy’s pregnancy? The sheer number of loose ends Tom Batiuk has left over his career should be a gold mine of material to explore. But it isn’t being used that way.

Tomorrow, we’re probably getting another deep dive into a character nobody cares about, and which serves no storytelling purpose. And that character is way overdue for an appearance.

The Cardinal Really Was Lisa

So Tom Batiuk’s version of Calvin’s raccoon ran in the last full week of 2025. And it went like so many other stories do in the Funkyverse:

Poor, innocent, helpless creature gets injured.
One of the Funkyverse’s designated heroes notices.
The designated hero makes a big show out of helping the poor, innocent creature.
The designated hero provides little actual help to the poor, innocent creature, and may even subject it to further injury.
The poor, innocent creature gets worse, for reasons that will not be blamed on the designated hero, even when they probably should be. (Optional: the poor, innocent creature may appear to get better for awhile first.)
Poor, innocent creature dies, having suffered more than they probably needed to.
Designated hero congratulates themselves while smirking. Never once do they ponder their own role in the death of the poor, innocent creature.
Tom Batiuk starts checking his mail for Pulitzer nominations.

This isn’t just the cardinal story we just saw. It’s also Lisa’s story. In some ways, it’s Bull Bushka’s story, Becky’s story, and other pointless tragedies in the Funkyverse. And some of you picked up on this in the comments:

“The actual miracle will be surviving with a broken spine.” – pj202718nbca

This is closer to the truth than you’d think. Most bird-window collisions result in the death of the bird, eventually if not immediately. Pam and Jeff made no attempt to ascertain the bird’s injuries, or take it to someone who could treat it. Though to be fair, most people wouldn’t know what to do when presented with injured wildlife. Which was part of the point of the Calvin and Hobbes raccoon story.

Calvin’s mom admits to Calvin that the raccoon looks badly injured. She also admits to Hobbes that she doesn’t really know how to help.. This concept was explored more in the story where Hobbes went missing after a break-in at the family’s home. But it’s nice to see it acknowledged here… because it’s something you’ll never, ever see in Funky Winkerbean. Characters like Jeff Murdoch and Les Moore are not allowed to acknowledge their own mistakes, must less admit them. Even when their mistakes are blatantly obvious to readers.

“I had predicted a ‘Christmas miracle’ with the bird getting miraculously better on Thursday. But it actually got better on Friday, albeit with the ‘Christmas miracle’ as the actual punchline.” – Green Luthor

This speaks to a huge problem in Tom Batiuk’s writing, and that is: his attempts at humor, and even ordinary banter, undermine the seriousness of the situation. Pam and Jeff stored the injured cardinal in an oven warmer when any box would have worked, which made it look like they were planning to cook it. The partial first week of 2026 has been a celebration of football helmets, after a football helmet was the symbol of Bull Bushka’s stupid death and his even more stupid life. And we saw “costs an arm and a leg” jokes in CBH’s reposted Christmas story, thankfully out of earshot of Becky. Has Tom Batiuk never encountered the concept of “too soon“?

The raccoon story has jokes in it, but they’re not at the expense of the injured raccoon. Nor are they at the expense of Calvin’s emotional investment. But this happens quite a bit in the Funkyverse.

Bull Bushka’s CTE death arc started with Linda and Buck Bedlow cracking wise about Bull’s need to do laundry – a common symptom of his condition. Similarly, Mort Winkerbean’s dementia (before it was magically cured off-panel) was played for laughs in a Sunday strip where Funky observed him repeating himself.

Though this doesn’t happen in Lisa’s Story, nosireebob. Lisa’s death is the greatest tragedy in human history, and must be treated with complete seriousness at all times. Everyone in the Funkyverse must adhere to Les Moore’s inscrutable standards of “protecting Lisa.”

“I can’t shake the dread that something bad is gonna happen to the cardinal even if yesterday’s strip turned out to be a cop-out.” – csroberto2854

He was right – the cardinal immediately bashed into the window again. Which was played for laughs. Which reinforces all of the above criticisms, and then some:

Relying on ambiguous art to make a joke work. The artwork in the above strip suggests that the cardinal flew through the open window, and then immediately doubled back, as if wanting to return to the house. However, if we assume Rule of Funny is in effect, it’s arguable that the cardinal was just being drawn from the more comedic angle.
Making the joke at the victim’s expense, again. Crankshaft hilariously says “Birds just don’t get glass!” Well, that’s exactly the problem, Ed; birds don’t perceive glass as an obstacle. If they see natural habitat on the other side, they will try to fly straight to it. This feels like mocking blind people for bumping into objects.

Contrast: Richard Pryor. Richard’s Pryor comedy material was about poverty, racism, broken families, prostitution, gang violence, substance addiction, and other awful things. But he never once trivializes those things, or mocks anyone for being affected by them. That’s how you combine tragedy and comedy effectively: by not letting the comedy undermine the tragedy.
The pervasive gloom of the Funkyverse. We initially see the cardinal recover, which threw off Green Luthor’s mental timeline for how the story would play out. But pj202718nbca turned out to be right: the recovery was a temporary respite, so Batiuk could prop up yet another tragic ending. Even though the tragic ending was going for a laugh this time.
The pervasive indifference and incompetence of the Funkyverse. Which are hard to tell apart, really. Tom Batiuk wants to sell his world of noble, caring, small-town Ohio people. But their actions bely this at every turn. Pam and Jeff ultimately did nothing to help the bird. Ed laughed when it got injured again. Les had little interest in keeping Lisa alive, and great interest in leveraging her death into the writing career he thought was his birthright. Becky didn’t even care about losing her own arm.

Maybe that’s why Tom Batiuk cured Mort Winkerbean and Harry Dinkle: nobody in Westview was capable of doing it. Or cared enough to try.

Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal Cardinal MUSHROOM MUSHROOM

I miss the early days of the Internet. It was devoid of toxic social media, and full of goofy creative stuff. If you’re not familiar with the primitive brainrot the title refers to, you can see it here. (WARNING: It will burrow into your brain like those Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan worms. If you do recognize the title, it probably already has. Sorry about that.)

This week’s cardinal arc reminds me of Badger Badger Badger. There’s a cardinal, and… that’s it. It exists as part of a larger work that defies any narrative sense. It’s practically trying to be a meme.

I know I’ve joked about the cardinal being Lisa’s ghost, and that’s still the favorite on the odds board right now (-500). But now, dragging out Lisa’s corpse for the millionth time seems too straightforward for Tom Batiuk. He seems to be veering into the avant-garde. As evidenced by this week’s Ingmar Bergman coloring. (NOTE: I initially missed that this effect was borrowed from Schindler’s List. Thanks to Y. Knott in the comments.)

I say this because I was baffled by the December 13 strip that ended “Pizza Box Monster as Santa” week. He gets paid by Lillian, shakes her hand, and then this:

What on earth was Tom Batiuk aiming at here?

Yes, that’s the building where this week’s proceedings occurred, but what is the point of sticking it at the end of the story? The second panel, PBM saying “Pizza on earth!”, is the kind of thing Batiuk would normally use for a punchline. It’s almost like he drew this panel and forgot to use it, so he stuck it here.

Sometimes you can end a story just by pulling back and putting it into its larger context. Like in A Streetcar Named Desire (the stage version, not the movie) or Cameron Crowe’s Singles. But that’s not what’s happening here. This isn’t a scene of people wandering around, enjoying Christmas, or anything else that would lend weight to the story. Not that there was much of a story to begin with.

I think Tom Batiuk is trying to mimic visual effects, and heartwarming endings, he’s seen in movies and TV shows. But he has absolutely no idea how to execute them, or why. That’s what I think we’re getting at the end of this week: an ornately staged, but confusing, ending.

UPDATE (December 19): And with this morning’s strip, Batiuk’s true intentions are revealed:

Finally, We Know What Happened To Lisa’s Test Results!

Remember when Lisa was told she was cancer-free when she wasn’t?

Today, we learned where Lisa’s radiology scans went!

Mom Of 3 Has Part of Lung Removed After Cancer Diagnosis. 2 Weeks Later, She Was Told She Didn’t Have Cancer

A British woman had part of her lung removed following a suspected cancer diagnosis, only to be told two weeks later that she didn’t actually have the disease.

The mother of three recalled to the BBC, “I had to go home and tell my children and parents that I had cancer. I tried to be strong for them, but I just fell to pieces,” adding, “You hear the word cancer and you automatically think you’re going to die.”

Erica Hay ended up having an operation in September 2020 to remove the lower lobe of her right lung. However, two weeks after the surgery, she was told that she didn’t have cancer, and the mass in her lung had been caused by pneumonia.

She claimed that the operation has left her with breathing difficulties, saying: “I’ve had asthma since I was 17, but my respiratory problems have increased unbelievably since the surgery. It’s completely floored me. Just talking or walking into the kitchen can set my symptoms off.”

“I am so very, very grateful that it wasn’t cancer, but I had to go through all of that and know this is probably never going to get any better now. It affects my work, my daily living, and at times it makes me feel inadequate as a [mother] and a wife.”

Hay has since pursued a clinical negligence claim. The case was resolved with a settlement. The hospital trusts involved haven’t admitted liability or causation.

You’re probably wondering how Lisa’s test results were given to someone who lives in Doncaster, England, thirteen years after Lisa died. And was diagnosed with a completely different kind of cancer than Lisa had. But we all know the answer to that!