ThisWeekInActIV – Son of Stuck Funky

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

My post from 9 days ago didn’t age well.

I bemoaned Tom Batiuk’s lack of ambition about his ambitionlessness, then he turns around and gives us his most ambitious ambitionless week yet.

This week is certainly trying to be something. And you don’t have to squint too hard to see what it is: a collection of noble statements about what America claims to be, juxtaposed with perceived current American realities.

A lot of commenters had great things to say about this week. Here’s the perfect place to start:

At no point has the conversation descended into arguments over politics. Though we all may have definite, even passionate, opinions on various political issues that are both compelling and well thought out, this isn’t an appropriate forum for that.
Y. Knott

To try and keep that tone, I will start by saying that I’m not here to talk about the rightness or wrongness of this week’s content. I’m here to talk about how well or poorly it is expressed. (You can probably guess which side I’m going to land on.)

Tom himself literally stated in the puff piece that he is not saying anything in the strips and is letting people make the commentary.
wherescrankshaft

Let’s dive into that puff piece! It is https://www.gocomics.com/extras/tom-batiuk-crankshaft-america-essay (hat tip to J.J. O’Malley).

Tom Batiuk Believes Comic Strips Can Do More Than Make Us Laugh

We’re not even past the headline yet, and it’s already obvious Batiuk wrote it.

As I said about Tom Batiuk’s interview with Terence Dollard awhile back: the people who interview Tom Batiuk do nothing but build strawmen out of softballs. One of Tom’s favorite notions is that he’s some kind of visionary for thinking comic strips don’t have to be funny. No one ever said they did! And some of the funniest strips are best remembered for their least funny moments.

From cancer to immigration, the “Crankshaft” creator has never shied away from difficult subjects.

OK, I’ll give him that.

For years, Tom Batiuk—creator of “Funky Winkerbean” and “Crankshaft”—has strived to expand the concept of a comic strip, challenging the idea that the art form is simply for laughs. This week’s “Crankshaft” storyline is a prime example: it uses recent news events to examine what it means to be an American today.

The center panel in four of the upcoming strips features a line of cursive handwriting plucked from a fictional essay written by Batiuk’s alter ego, cartoonist Batton Thomas, who we met back in the days of “Funky Winkerbean,” the comic Batiuk produced from 1972 to 2022. In one of the new strips, the line reads: “To me, America means home. A home where I feel safe and protected.”

In stark contrast, the very next panel features an illustration of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy detained by ICE agents alongside his father in January 2026 outside their home in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb. Dressed in a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, the child was held with his father for nearly two weeks at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. In a February interview with MPR News, his father said Liam continued to suffer from psychological trauma.

This sounds exactly like a high school essay, doesn’t it? The confident mastery of the obvious, the general air of pretentiousness, the tacked-on sentence clauses and irrelevant details.

Spider-Man backpack

Knowing what Tom Batiuk is really like, how important is that detail? If it was a Buzz Lightyear backpack, would Batiuk have ever learned of Ramos’ existence? He seems like the kind of guy who would have a Google News alert set up for the name of any comic book he thinks he should be the writer of.

The student essay by Batton Thomas in the “Crankshaft” strips echoes a real-life essay Batiuk wrote as a high school senior in 1965. He received an award from the local paper for the piece.

And now it has been written in a blog Tom Batiuk received an award and was written about in the newspaper. Will the next puff piece writer say “Batiuk has received an award and was written about in a newspaper and a blog”? Oh crap, now it’s a newspaper and two blogs.

A dream about that essay sparked the idea for the storyline, he says by phone

You heard it yourself, folks. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Tom Batiuk dreams about awards he won in high school 60 years ago. He said it. Not me.

In addition to young Liam Ramos, the images running this week include a masked ICE agent, the barbed wire fence outside an ICE detention center, and Jan. 6 rioters storming a barricade at the U.S. Capitol.

This article ran on Tuesday, and Batiuk just tipped off most of his shock moments for the upcoming week. And shock moments are all he has.

“The thing I like about the approach to this storyline,” Batiuk explains, “is that I don’t really say anything.

Same thing you’ve been doing for 25 years: not telling us anything. Just like you didn’t tell us where Eugene moved to or why. But you wrote two weeks of him saying goodbye slowly, and starting to go somewhere even more slowly.

I kind of left it to people to make their own decisions.

This is one of those things Batiuk likes to say about himself without really understanding it. He thinks it makes him sound noble, but he doesn’t realize how much his life’s work contradicts it. Tom Batiuk’s existence is a monument to his belief that all decisions should be made by him, or at least approved by him.

That doesn’t mean he’s not prepped for pushback—and he’s received plenty of that in his career.

Really? When? From who? Is he talking about that one time he got pulled from the Northern Wisconsin News over a joke that should have gotten him nationally roasted? Because it happened to Bobby Knight when he said a very similar thing.

Does he mean us? We don’t give pushback. We give thoughtful, critical analysis of his work. We don’t take him to task about his subject matter, except in his general choices of what to write about (“oh Lord, not another Batton Thomas week”).

Even Comics Curmudgeon rarely mentions his work anymore. And from what I’ve found on the Internet, genuine fans stopped bothering 15 years ago.

In his 54 years as a comic artist, Batiuk has used his strips to touch on thorny subjects such as teen suicide, book banning, capital punishment, and same-sex couples at the prom.

Again: I never said he didn’t try. However half-assed all four of those attempts were.

Six years ago, he penned a story arc in “Funky Winkerbean” about an Iraqi immigrant named Adeela seized by misguided ICE agents while delivering a pizza. She narrowly escaped deportation.

And we all know how she narrowly escaped deportation: by having Montoni’s ask Bill Clinton to do them a solid! During the first Trump administration. I wonder why the puff piece didn’t mention that.

Batiuk wrote himself into a corner, couldn’t write himself out, and then had to cover up his own incompetence in his own propaganda. Politics was this man’s true calling. North Korean politics.

Lisa Crawford-Moore

And here we are, folks! Somehow we went from real children and real American issues to Tom Batiuk’s Dollar Tree Lenore. Who’s been dead for 20 fucking years now. And who nobody ever really liked anyway.

But, in 2008, Batiuk was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in editorial cartooning for this work, which is collected in the book Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe.

10/10 no notes.

In “one of the best moments ever,” he says, he met a woman at a book signing…

You know how we always joke about there never being people at those book signings? Well, there’s your proof.

OK, I selectively quoted that to make a joke.

…who had read the strips and decided to get a mammogram.

Yet another real incident from Tom Batiuk’s life that ended up in the comic strip. Because of Lisa’s Story (available near you!) Marianne Winters discovered her own cancer, thanks to the great Les Moore! Marianne gave Les her Oscar Trophy, $1,000,000, a new car, the Pulitzer Prize, and a handjob.

Her doctors discovered a growth, which they safely removed. “I thought, wow, that’s all you can ask for from a comic strip,” Batiuk says.

It is unclear whether the growth or the comic strip was safely removed. I think they’re both equally toxic.

Batiuk is not the only comic strip artist to wrestle with challenging subject matter. Garry Trudeau used “Doonesbury”

Yes, let’s talk about Doonesbury, shall we? Let’s compare these two visionary cartoonists, since you’re trying to imply that Batiuk is on Trudeau’s level. Here’s how they each handled the same “difficult subject”:

Trudeau kept the gore offscreen to center the moment on the human emotion; Batiuk did the exact opposite. Keep in mind that Trudeau’s character is a soldier who would have been trained that limb loss was a possible outcome. Batiuk’s character was a high school girl who just won a prestigious music scholarship. Notice which one isn’t the least bit bothered. And which strip actually had a joke.

Notice also that Becky leads with “tell him I said hi”, as if her monumental act of forgiveness were the less important message. And the effects on her family were even less important! “Yeah, my mom’s a little bummed that I lost a 6-figure scholarship and a direct path to a prestigious career, and she’s suddenly gonna have to figure out how to pay for Kent Fucking State like everyone else in this craphole. But she’ll get over it.” And even a socially inept high school girlfriend on an ordinary day should have something more meaningful to say than “tell him I said hi.” Ugh.

the vast majority [of newspapers] do go along for the ride [by carrying controversial FW/CS strips]

Remember what I said about Batiuk being kicked out of the Northern Wisconsin News that one time? Thanks for proving my point. That joke was pretty accurate, wasn’t it?

And Mort Walker saddled Beetle Bailey with nightmares in 2013 to raise awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The “Sarge beats Beetle into a puddle for no good reason” jokes sure haven’t stopped.

[comic strips] come right to your house. There’s no privilege whatsoever.

Just like ICE!

people see their lives reflected in [the characters]

Yeah. So did I once.

With or without the laughter.

Large bet on “without.”

Limerence Front

Tom Batiuk’s latest attempt at a prestige arc, which he pretentiously titled “Dinkle, I Am Your Father” or something like that, is over.

Well, it’s not officially over. But I’m calling it over as of Thursday, because that’s the best place for it to end. I’m sure Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday will be full of Lillian smirking at us, and explaining how we’re supposed to interpret the ending. Which insults the reader, and undermines the point of leaving it ambiguous. But I’m done showing Tom Batiuk how to do his job.

This will also be the last leg of the strangest multi part post in SoSF history. Weather forecast: clear, smooth sailing. No trauma dumps or cluster f-bombs on the horizon. This post draws on elements of Destroy Everything You Touch, so read that if you haven’t already. Be warned: that post is also a M*A*S*H-level dive into my own psyche, tied into the two subplots of this tedious story. This post will continue that analysis, focusing on the Eugene and Lucy half of the story.

The problem is easy to explain. Eugene and Lucy is not a love story. Eugene and Lucy is a limerence story. Let’s start at the beginning:

Was it, Lillian? Was it really? Who besides you was even looking at them? It’s a dance! People are looking at their own dance partners! Like they should be! Get over your Main Character Syndrome! (No theory of mind, a central problem in all of Tom Batiuk’s writing, rears its ugly head again.)

This is not love, this is limerence. Also known as “putting someone on a pedestal,” “in love with being in love,” “infatuation”, “obsessive love”, and similar things that are bus stops between “crush” and “creepy.” It’s when you’ve built a fantasy version of someone in your mind, independent of any actual information you have about the person. This is a great explanation:

“Eternal Sunshine” is all about limerence. And it’s a damn good movie too.

Eugene and Lucy are a concept to each other. They’re both in love with the imaginary versions of each other they think will fulfill them. We don’t know anything about Eugene and Lucy, and they don’t know anything about each other, beyond one pleasant night at a pre-World War II dance, and an implied brief relationship. The story makes a lot of bold assertions about true love, but it provides zero evidence of that.

Most romantic relationships in the Funkyverse are actually limerence. They’re all arranged marriages between minor characters who don’t seem to have any reason to be together. This happens when your only source of how adult relationships work are comic books for 9-year-olds, and a marriage to your high school girlfriend.

John Howard and one-armed Becky are the most mismatched couple you could possibly create. She’s a disabled person with genuine talent, and is using it the best she can, hyper-motivated to prove she still has worth. He’s a lazy slob who only wants to spend all day in a comic book store, without ever contributing income to the family, or changing his T-shirt.

John and Becky, Bull and Linda, Mason and Cindy, Pam and Jeff, even Les and Lisa don’t even seem to like each other that much. (Exception: Funky and Holly genuinely do like each other, and have some sweet moments.)

I’ve long struggled with limerence, and it was a key reason many of my adult relationships fell apart. I took every relationship way too seriously, far more than my partner took it. Because I immediately turned any girl who gave me the time of day into a potential wife. I filled in any unknown data with what I wanted to be true. Limerence and low self-esteem is one hell of a cocktail.

The key is separating limerence from tangible qualities.

God, this show used to be so brilliant.

In Leaving Westview, I said:

In high school, I didn’t see anything but attractiveness and popularity as being important. I learned in adulthood that confidence, personality, positivity, values and common interests are far more important.

Let’s revisit Christine, my unrequited love from high school I introduced in Destroy Everything You Touch. (Inverted trope: I was her unrequited love.) She had personality, positivity, shared values and interests with me, and enough confidence to approach me when she otherwise didn’t have a flirty or forward nature.

This is not limerence. This isn’t me filling in the blanks with what I wanted her to be. These are genuine qualities I observed, based on many real interactions over a year or two. She was legitimately a very good potential partner, and would have been at any age. But in high school, I picked Ken O’Brien when Dan Marino was available. (Please note that Ken O’Brien was still a pretty good NFL quarterback, and two-time Pro Bowler. Susan, if you’re somehow reading this, I don’t regret picking you at all. You were awesome. My first kiss with you was one of the few romantic milestones in my life that actually went really well.)

Limerence can even make you idealize yourself! I caught myself comparing Christine’s 16-year-old self to my 54-year-old self, not my 17-year-old self. She was calm and easygoing, which I am now, but 17-year-old me very much was not. I was high-strung, and hadn’t learned how to manage my anger and frustration yet. Which might have been a serious obstacle in any real relationship with Christine. And I’ve had partners in my life who were attracted to me for qualities I definitely didn’t possess.

In the Funkyverse, limerence can apparently affect other people. Lillian seems to have swallowed the notion that Eugene and Lucy were some kind of destined couple that only didn’t get together because of her own selfish act. This is ridiculous.

If anything, Lillian should have been the one to tell her sister “oh come on, it was just one guy, get over it already.” Which is yet another way she should could have reversed her misdeed, but didn’t, even though she could have still covered up what she did. Lucy’s Story has a comprehensive list of the others.

It’s time for the lightning round! Today’s topic is Why This Story Sucks, Even By The Usual Low Standards Of The Funkyverse.

It’s too easy to move on. Despite my low romantic potential, I still preferred hoping for future opportunities in college over lamenting missed ones in high school. As any 18-year-old would.

Eugene never got a response to his letter, and interpreted that as a rejection of his marriage proposal. He served in the military until the end of World War II, and then came home. Imagine a returning soldier with a broken heart while V-J Day in Times Square is going on. No war veteran is going to be moping about the girl who said “no” years ago when they return home to a demographic abundance of females. Many of whom are throwing her panties at him, eager to start creating future baby boomers.

It should have been extremely easy for Eugene to forget Lucy and find a new girl. We’ll soon see why it wasn’t.

Something triggered my nostalgia. I haven’t been pining for Christine for 38 years. I never even thought of her for 37.95 of those years. Eugene has been in a consonant state of pining for Lucy since 1946, even though she died in 2009.

I don’t idealize the past. I realize that a relationship between Christine and I might not have worked out, for a million different reasons. Which would have been fine.

I spent most of my high school nights dreaming of random, unremarkable girls who caught my fancy at some point, but whom I never had the nerve to approach. They seemed unattainable to me. I daydreamed about how receptive they’d be to me, and how well-suited they’d be, even though I had no reason to think that. All while I ignored someone who actually was those things, and was trying to tell me she was interested. That’s what limerence does to you.

I recognize my own mistakes. Despite everything I wrote previously, I ultimately don’t blame anybody but myself. I could have started a relationship with Christine almost anytime I wanted to.

The failed relationship was a symptom of a much bigger emotional problem. This was obviously the case with me. My inner demons caused me to do an irrational, self-destructive thing to a desired relationship. We’ve often said that Eugene simply should have re-proposed to Lucy, or gotten a clarification of what her answer was. Why didn’t he?

Because Eugene was so afraid of rejection that he chose “no response means no” over Lucy actually telling him no. Why else would Eugene act like his “I’ll never bother you again” promise was more important to keep than his “I want to spend the rest of my life with you” promise? Which he didn’t keep anyway, because Eugene and Lucy had some kind of contact after that?

The four days of wordless, actionless panels imply that Eugene is moving into some kind of senior care facility, or hospice. And he’s ashamed of this. To be fair, dying at age 99 would be early compared to people like Lillian Mckenzie, Ed Crankshaft, and Mort Winkerbean. But I think there’s a much better explanation.

Eugene is moving into a mental institution.

Just like Lucy did.

And for the same reason Lucy did: because he was so in love with a concept that he let it destroy his entire life. And it also took Lillian down with it.

In a psychology class in college, I heard a story I’ll never forget. There was a psychologist who worked in a home of people having severe detachments from reality, to the extent that a woman would tell him she had a new baby every single day. The doctor said “even if I could push a button and cure her, I wouldn’t. She’s much happier where she is.”

So this is a bittersweet ending, which is an improvement from the just plain bitter we usually get. In the end, Eugene and Lucy got together, in a way. Unless this story is somehow still continuing. And if it is, then let me say with no irony whatsoever: bring on Batton Thomas!

Destroy Everything You Touch

After wandering through the wreckage of the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story, this week’s Crankshaft explored Harry Dinkle’s alleged self-esteem issues. We will talk about both of these stories today, how they’re connected, and how this led me to a surprising realization about my own life.

There are two important bits of background. The first is Lucy’s Story, which explains what the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story actually is.

Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy is drafted into World War II, boy snail-mails marriage proposal containing “no response means no” clause, jealous older sister hides that letter, girl has mental breakdown, boy and girl somehow go another 60+ years without ever discussing the topic again, girl dies in 2009, boy is still longing for girl in 2026, boy has to move to a new home at age 99, Crankshaft readers wonder if they’ll ever find out where boy will be living now. (There will be a follow-up post about that.)

I know that summary got strange, but this is a strange storytelling world. If you asked the author to explain, he would say “It’s called writing.”

The other is Leaving Westview, which turned out to be perfect prologue for what I’m about to say. I’ll repost the important part:

I said or did every one of these things. For real. For real for real.

And now:

Narshe’s great Part 3 of Summer’s backstory included this strip:

While this looks creepy on the surface – and is being done by a known creep – it is perfectly appropriate. We saw in the previous post that Lisa died on October 4, 2007. This is 15 days after that. It’s an emotionally powerful comic strip, which Funky Winkerbean was capable of producing sometimes.

But nothing will ever make Les Moore stop sniffing his dead wife’s clothes. Not 20+ years. Not a marriage to another woman. Not raising a mixed family, both racially and in the step-parenting sense. Not a phone call from Lisa from beyond the grave. Not a house that seemed to generate new Lisa artifacts every couple years. Not being handed a freaking Oscar trophy for a Hollywood movie about Lisa, which Les was sabotaging at every turn. Not other chances Les had to work through his grief.

Les smelling Lisa’s clothes is accurate and quite sympathetic. The aromas left from loved ones onto clothing, triggers memories in a very powerful way.
SorialPromise, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2026/07/08/surprise-youre-on-cancer-camera/#comment-182055

This is very true. A scent or a sound or song or a noise or a place or an object can trigger long-forgotten emotions, and turn you back into the person you were when you were having those emotions.

My first experience with this was when I was 21 and in college. I’d had a particularly triumphant night out clubbing with my best friend, Todd. We were staying at his parents’ house, and when we got there, they had some cheap bathroom product. The scent reminded me of my high school girlfriend, Susan, whose bathroom had that same product. I had no active feelings about Susan at that point. But the scent of flowers and petrochemicals in a $1.50 pharmacy item turned me from a young man happy about a rare successful night meeting women into… well, Eugene.

I recently had this experience again. Something very specific reminded me of my high school The One Who Got Away story (analogous to the Eugene-Lucy story), which helped me finally understand why she got away (the Dinkle story). This is all about people and things I haven’t thought about in a very, very, very long time. Which led me to into even deeper rabbit holes in my own head. And it finally showed me the bottom of the rabbit hole.

I’ll try to keep my story from getting too cringe. But today, I’d rather be cringe than whitewash uncomfortable realities. So buckle your seatbelts. This flight will be experiencing turbulence. Trauma dump up ahead.

I went to an emotionally abusive Christian elementary school that gleefully took a flamethrower to my self-esteem. I was a shy and introverted child by nature. The people my parents trusted to educate me used me as an object of ridicule and scorn. That piled an avalanche of self-doubt, which I didn’t previously have, on top of my shyness.

Long story short, the Christian school shunned me. And I have no idea why. Apparently, at some point between 6th and 7th grade, somebody decided I wasn’t the kind of Christian they wanted their Christian school to produce. Even though I was an agreeable child who did everything he was told, read the Bible, and got mostly A’s. But I’d already seen them do the same thing to other kids who deserved no such treatment either. There seemed to be about one kid a year who randomly got on the school’s bad side. It made no sense to me. And Christian schools aren’t in the business of teaching the critical thinking skills that might result in someone questioning their judgement.

So I’ve been dealing with self-esteem problems most of my life. Mine were caused by that very specific and identifiable thing. It wasn’t a combination of factors, or a vague, whiny Freudian Excuse like Crankshaft is pushing this week.

Funky Winkerbean appealed to me in 1988 because I related to Les Moore’s high school struggles, as depicted in the above strips. It was the only thing in media that seemed to understand what was going on in my head. So when its attempt at ripping off Peanuts ended with the girl wishing Les had asked her out, I felt personally betrayed. Even 16-year-old me didn’t believe that. That was the day I became a critic. It is my villain origin story. Mwahahahahaha!

I also shared something with adult Act II (1992-2006) Les Moore: wanting to be a writer, because of my perceived skill at it. I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up. It appealed to my writing skills, my sense of justice, and my failure to foresee that newspapers would become an obsolete medium. I would ultimately get a college degree in journalism, with a broadcasting focus. I promptly switched careers to Information Technology in adulthood, which I still work in today.

I’m honestly embarrassed to tell this story, because 50-something men should not be still processing failed high school relationships. But it’s too important to the larger story to omit, gloss over, or be vague about. And it’s a universe less creepy than anything Eugene does. More importantly, I refuse to worry about embarrassing myself anymore, for reasons I will soon make clear. So let’s go.

In high school in 1988 or 1989, I had creative a writing class in 2nd period, and journalism/high school newspaper class in 5th period. In both those classes was a girl named Christine. I still remember her last name; it was similar to that of a 1980s game show host.

One day, out of nowhere, Christine approached me before 2nd hour Creative Writing class about needing to talk, with this look on her face like it was something really important. I couldn’t imagine what this could be about, but I didn’t want to deal with it right then, so I said “talk to me in 5th hour.”

The truth is: despite my general cluelessness about how these things worked, I sensed Christine was going to tell me she had a crush on me. For some reason, I didn’t want that. And there was no logical explanation. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this girl. Not even by the sadistic social standards of high school. (Cindy Summers, I’m looking at you.)

I really liked Christine as a person. We worked together on the school newspaper. She was pretty. She was nice. She got along with people. She had no off-putting qualities. We had the same sense of humor. Considering that my defining trait in high school was doing open mic nights at legitimate adult comedy clubs, that should have been huge. (It was the late 80s. Everybody, including me, was trying to be the next George Carlin. Too bad none of us ever succeeded. Well, maybe Jon Stewart a little.)

By the time 5th hour arrived, I still didn’t want to deal with it, so I avoided her. The next day, we went back to being flirty/friendly with each other. That status quo remained for the rest of high school. But she never directly approached me again after that day. After graduation, we went our separate ways.

I tossed my high school yearbook in the trash decades ago. But I recently remembered what she wrote in it. “…and remember the girl who always STARES at you! Love, Christine.” With the game show host’s surname in place of her own, because that was a running gag between us. My God, how many times did this poor girl whack me with the clue-by-four?

But I had severe self-esteem problems. So severe that I sabotaged a potential relationship that I actually wanted. The idea that a desirable girl had a genuine interest in me made no sense in my mind.

It’s hard enough to approach the opposite sex when you’re an introverted, awkward, not-terribly-attractive teen. It’s impossible when you’re mentally convinced there’s zero chance of success, and that any failure will end with you being dragged in front of another classroom for another round of humiliation. So I friend-zoned myself. I threw away the chance to make a sweet, intelligent, pretty, funny girl I genuinely liked my first girlfriend. When all I had to do was stand there and let her initiate it.

I was so convinced of my own worthlessness that I couldn’t let that happen. I blocked her like Dikembe Mutombo.

I never rejected Christine. I rejected myself. I played the parts of both Lucy and Lillian. Christine tried to send me a love letter, and I hid it from myself. It was the most honest case of “it’s not you, it’s me” in the history of relationships.

That’s what a self-esteem problem looks like. So watching Crankshaft throw a pity party for Harry goddamn Dinkle severely pisses me the fuck off.

Harry Dinkle is not a person who had childhood trauma and self-esteem problems. Harry Dinkle is a person who caused childhood trauma and self-esteem problems in thousands of people over his career. (Including the elderly choralists who are following him on this journey.) He plays the role of the Christian school in my story. Not the victim.

Dinkle’s ego must be fed at all times, and doesn’t care how many people he has to grind up for meat. He’s a pervert, and this is how he gets his rocks off. The Colonel Khadafi outfit he wore like fetish gear doesn’t disprove that theory. And, as is often the case, he’s protected by a system that refuses to do anything about it.

What the Christian school did to me in 1983 made me reject Christine in 1989, and I didn’t even realize that until 2026. She liked me, and I liked her, but I rejected her. Why?

Because the Christian school psychologically abused me.

Now, I want to be very clear about a few things. One, there was never any sexual or physical component to this abuse. It was psychological only. Two, I had/still have a great family that was very loving and supportive about the whole ordeal, who made the right move. They yanked me out of that Christian school overnight, and put me in public middle school.

I probably could have used some counseling, but I think they didn’t know how to help me, and I definitely didn’t know how to ask for help. On top of all the debris that was in my head, I could be a difficult child in my own right sometimes.

Third, the psychological abuse was mostly traceable to one teacher at that Christian school. I don’t want to say that person’s name, because I’m afraid I might summon them, like Voldemort. So let’s leave that person in damnatio memoriae. And in hell, where they no doubt are today, according to the rules of their own belief system.

This is how abuse perpetuates itself. Someone hurt me, which ultimately made me hurt someone else (even though declining interest in a relationship is not a hurtful act if done tactfully). I never realized until now that tearing myself down, which was basically my coping mechanism, was also painful for the people who cared about me to watch. No wonder some them gave up on me.

Six years ago, I wrote this about the Dinkle family Thanksgiving:

Look how many details in this strip are about (Harry) Dinkle’s toxic workaholism. The house decoration and the choice of Thanksgiving meal are based on his career. The annual band turkey sale makes Harry tired of turkey, so turkey must not be served, no matter what anybody else wants. His daughter entered the same career as him, so you can guess what the table conversation is going to be about.

Look at (Dinkle’s wife) Harriet’s face as she presents the Thanksgiving non-turkey. Her weary eyes seem to be seeking his approval. Her daughter gives her companion an aside glance, as if to say “see, I warned you it’d be like this.” He seems to respond in kind, as if acknowledging he’s seen this in his own family. Harry is genuinely happy, because everything revolves around him, exactly as it should. And everyone knows it better stay that way.

This is the Thanksgiving of a family that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. And it’s a common theme in Funky Winkerbean.

This is the guy we’re supposed to feel sorry for, because “his stepfather was rough on his father”? Well, let me say this as clearly as possible:

Get the fuck out of my fucking face with that fucking bullshit.

I called this post Destroy Everything You Touch, because that’s what Tom Batiuk does to every “prestige arc” he gets his grubby, comic book-stained fingers on. His writing is so shallow he trivializes everything he tries writing about. It insults anyone who’s really experienced it. Which is why all those Lisa’s Story collections aren’t selling.

And Batiuk has tried writing about every trauma you could think of. Dementia, layoffs, freedom of speech, domestic terrorism, transsexuality, illiteracy, amputation, “climate damage”, bullying, war, PTSD, alcoholism, racism, coming out of the closet, football-induced CTE, suicide, cancer, and cancer incest. He did childhood self-esteem this week. Most of these things he’s tried writing about at least once.

(Also, musical titles are a recurring theme at this blog. And “Destroy Everything You Touch” is a god-tier banger.)

You. Do not feel. Do not know. What you steal.

Funky Winkerbean and now Crankshaft are misery porn. To the extent misery porn works, it’s because the storyteller spilled their guts onto the paper. Great personal memoirs don’t hold back about embarrassing and personal details that most people wouldn’t want others to know. Their brutal honesty makes them compelling to read, and helpful to people who are going through the same things.

Funky Winkerbean gives us this:

The greatest writer in the Funky Winkerbean universe is a not a man who spills his guts onto the page. It’s a man who’s too emotionally fragile to even read his own wife’s diary. So he passive-aggressives their daughter to reading an entry about her own mother being sexually assaulted. Nice guy, that Les Moore.

(Narshe, I apologize if I spoiled something you were planning to use in Part 4 of your story. But please do use it again. Because this may be the single worst thing Les Moore ever did. And there’s a lot of competition for that crown.)

I consider what happened with Christine the biggest mistake of my life. Not because I’m Eugene, still sad about a girl he lost because he couldn’t be bothered to find out what her actual answer was. But because I lost the better man I might have become a lot sooner if I had given myself a chance in that relationship.

However it might have gone – and unlike Eugene, I make no assumption that life would have been perfect after that – it would have been a net positive. Whatever happened, this girl was never, ever, ever going to humiliate me. Which I now know is what I was really afraid of.

It would have ended amicably, given me confidence and experience, and probably helped me face my inner trauma a lot sooner than I did. Christine would have been a better high school girlfriend for me than Susan was, though Susan was a pretty good one. (Other than some things that were my own fault, which is the nature of high school relationships.) And I would have saved Christine a little rejection and confusion. Lord knows life already gives you enough of that. Especially in high school.

Or maybe I’ve misread this entire situation, and Christine just wanted to tell me my fly was down.

(That was a joke. This story needed to end on a lighter note. And I refuse to second-guess myself anymore.)

One other thing I want to mention, because it ties into the “some things trigger deep memories” theme, and because it’s funny. While I was working through all this, I found a playlist of 1988 hit songs on YouTube, and set it to shuffle. This was the first thing it pulled up:

Mwahahahahaha! I am the Rickroller! You fell right into my devious trap!

I’m kidding. It was actually this:

Debbie Gibson is another woman I hadn’t thought about in 30+ years. Nor has anyone else.

I have no particular memories attached to this song. But the overwhelming 1988-ness of this music video reinforced the feelings I was working through. (This isn’t what initially brought Christine back into my head. It’s not important what that actually was.)

But imagine me, a 54-year-old man, blubbering about a blown high school date while listening to an obnoxiously peppy Debbie Gibson song. That’s a pretty funny visual. Imagine that happening to Jim Carrey in one of his better movies. Or Jack Black. Or Chris Farley, if I’m being honest about who would play me in a movie. (And if I’m being too honest: Rick Moranis, if he ate Chris Farley.) Or it could be treated seriously, in a movie like Fatso.

I hope I didn’t bait-and-switch you. You came here for newspaper comics snark, and I gave you my dead chicken moment. Which is what this feels like: discovering what my real problem was. I’d been trying to find it for 40 years.

This is why I know a lot about neurodivergence, and why I frequently mention it as a factor in the creation of these comic strips. I thought for a long time that my problem was untreated neurodivergence. But I could always recognize emotions and social cues adequately. I just couldn’t act on them, because of my crippling fear of humiliation. I’ve been throwing darts at the wall for decades, trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. But I think I just did.

I’d like to leave a few ground rules for the comments:

I’m willing to answer any questions anyone may have, though I reserve the right to be vague or silent about certain things.
Being an abuse victim isn’t my whole identity, and it will not become that. I have accepted that it’s a small part of who I am. But it will not destroy anything it touches, anymore. While I would never question anyone’s approach to processing their own trauma, I personally think some people lean a little too hard into the victim identity.
I realize a lot of people went through a lot worse than me. So there will be no Trauma Olympics.
I’m not looking for a pity party, safe space, psychoanalysis, therapy-speak, or anything like that. I just wanted someone to listen to my story. If you’re reading these words, you’ve done that, and you’ve done me a great service. Thank you. I actually feel really good about this whole thing.
I’m not looking for closure. I consider it closed. I said what I needed to say. The people who have been living rent-free in my head have been evicted.
I am open to reconnecting with Christine, but I’m sure she has a family that wouldn’t appreciate that. It’s not her job to help with my recovery. My only purpose was to document the key role she inadvertently played in fixing something that was very broken in me.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but please do not try to figure out who Christine is, or who I am. There are enough clues that someone with connections to our high school class could figure it out. But I have very little contact with any of those people anyway, I now live 1,300 miles away from my hometown, and I don’t do the social media thing.

Calvin & Hobbes had a terrific story where they try to build a robot, so Calvin doesn’t have to make his bed. Here’s the ending (SPOILER ALERT):

Psychological abuse and self-doubt made me throw away an opportunity to get to know a delightful girl who could have helped me a great deal in life.

And in a way, she did.

Where Is Eugene Moving? Who Cares? It’s A Dinkle Story!

This is the photograph Lillian is looking at in today’s Crankshaft:

Okay, it’s not exactly the same photograph. Today’s version has what appears to be entrance doors where the text appears in the above image. But it’s now obvious where this week’s heavily padded story is going. Lillian is going to notice the name of the bandleader, and connect it to her choir director/former Bedside Manor band director/former Westview High School band director/fascist dictator/World’s Greatest Asshole Harry Dinkle.

It also explains the cryptic, pretentious introduction from Monday’s strip:

We all spent a week wondering what the hell that could possibly mean, in the apparent context of a very old man being forced to move somewhere unpleasant. It means we’re going to explore Dinkle’s daddy issues!

Oh boy. Where to begin?

This is so obvious I’m embarrassed to write it. But one-time Putlizer nominee Tom Batiuk apparently doesn’t know it, so here it is: A very old man awkwardly telling a lifelong friend about “moving to a new place” is a serious topic. It is not a benign piece of information you use to fill space while you get to the more important matter of yet another found photograph of yet another dead person.

I’ve used the word “tonelessness” to describe Tom Batiuk’s writing, and this is another manifestation of it: not knowing what’s important to human beings and what isn’t. This week appeared to be setting up a “move to the retirement home” story. Which can be played for dark humor. But that didn’t happen here either. Nor is Tom Batiuk even remotely capable of this.

It was also unclear why this would have been a bad thing for Eugene. Bedside Manor is a recurring location, and is never depicted negatively. Not even when it should be.

But the uncertain future of a 99-year-old man is irrelevant. Or the reveal is being pushed to the end for some reason that makes sense only to Tom Batiuk. It’s a coin flip whether the story even bothers addressing the matter later on.

The story didn’t even need the tired “found photograph” mechanism, because Eugene’s sad little shoebox also contained this:

That appears to say “Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro by Larry Dinkle.” Lillian could have found this sheet music almost anywhere, recognized the surname, asked Harry about it, and the same story could have progressed from there. This also could have been done in two days, tops. (On a personal note: my first ever blog post complained about Batiuk using days to set up something he could have opened with. It’s filler all the way down.)

I have a lot more thoughts, but let’s take a moment and enjoy what we’ve got here: a genuine Funky Winkerbean Act III-style prestige arc! Have fun in the comments!

Caption Contest!

What is Keesterman saying?

This is just the last panel of today’s Crankshaft strip, with the tail of the word zeppelin pointing where it should. (And with a ridiculous coloring error fixed.)

The artwork looks more like Keesterman should be speaking, doesn’t it? It’s practically a reverse angle of the May 19 strip, where Batton and Skip are the foreground characters. Which they should be, since they’re focus of the ~~dialogue~~ monologue. Today’s strip has the background characters doing the talking, even though they’ve been the focus characters this entire week.

This is such a grade school-level composition failure, that it looks like Tom Batiuk is passive-aggressively making a point to the “where’s Crankshaft?” crowd. “Oh, you want more Crankshaft? Fine! I’ll make him the biggest character on the page, while I continue talking about what I want to talk about!” I wonder how Mr. Batiuk, the young art teacher, would have graded this if one of his students submitted it.

Also: why do Ed, Ralph, and Keesterman all look like they’re talking? Only one of them should be talking. Ralph appears to be taking a bite. But his expression doesn’t match that action, unless that is the wryest piece of apple pie in culinary history.

When I made that Luann crossover parody, I spent a lot of time editing mouths, so that only the person speaking had their mouth open. And Tom Batiuk can’t put in that level of effort? Even when his entire comic strip can be built from Colorforms at this point? And when he’s getting paid to do this, and I’m not?