Tag: ThisWeekInActIV

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 GoComics version.

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?

The Game Is On!

That insufferable jackass Batton Thomas is back to drone on about nothing while Skip pays rapt attention. Which means it’s time to evalulate the bets I solicited!

G1. When will the next week of the Batton Death March begin? May 18. One point if you got it right.

G2. Will Skip start the week by making a comment about “continuing the interview”? Skip said “so you talked the last time about…,” so that’s a Yes. One point if you got it right. He doesn’t have to say those exact words.

G3. Where will they meet? Not 100% confirmed, but it looks like Montoni’s, which is worth half a point. I’m sure Mindy will be by on Wednesday to drop off the pizza. (TUESDAY UPDATE: The presence of Ed, Ralph, and Keesterman in the background suggests they are at Dale Evans instead. And maybe that Batiuk is feeling some pressure to at least pretend Ed Crankshaft is still the main character.)

G4. What recording device will Skip use? Skip’s cell phone is visible. Half a point.

A7. How many times will Skip smirk? Wow, twice already, and it’s only Monday. We’ll count again at the end of the week.

M4. Who will Batton name-drop? Nobody yet, but I’m going to make a ruling that it has to be a real person. His “band director character” is obviously Dinkle, but that’s not what I’m looking for here.

M6. Will Batton act like a complete jackass at some point? Of course, he already has. Take your .0001 point and get out of here.

M7. Will Batton talk about doing actual work on Three O’Clock High or The Wrinkles? He mentions Bizarro Dinkle becoming popular, but that’s not the same as doing actual work. So not yet, but it could still happen this week.

M8. How many of the seven deadly sins will Batton commit? I’m counting today’s strip as Gluttony. Batton has spoken at so many potluck dinners that he got Tupperware poisoning, implying that he must have consumed a massive amount of the food there.

Also, I’m going to make a general ruling here: simply meeting at Montoni’s counts as Gluttony. Dale Evans, by itself, doesn’t count as gluttony, since they have some non-gluttonous offerings. Even if they’re just things Ed Crankshaft orders to do one of his stupid puns.

That’s everything I can evaluate so far, because the others are weeklong totals, or they are for events that can still happen later this week. By the end of the week (including a possible Sunday), this post will be a complete list of all the wagers that were offered. And I’ll tally up a winner of those of you who made selections.

Ian’s Drunken Beard is the early leader:

G1 – May 18

G2 – Yes

G4 – cell phone

M6 – Yes

That’s 2.5001 points! And some of his other plays like “7 smirks” and “6 deadly sins” look pretty good so far.

After this week, I’ll calculate the totals, and standardize the set of offerings going forward.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: We have a sideways panel, and some early artwork. That would fulfill the following:

A5. Will there be a sideways strip? 1 point, of 5 if there is a second one later this week.

A6. What early Tom Batiuk artwork will appear? This appears to be real-life pre-Funky Winkerbean artwork, which is worth 1.5 points if we can confirm it. Let me know if you can, or there’s a blog post explaining it.

THURSDAY UPDATE: Today we learn that “Harry Finkle” will straight-up commit murder, Crankshaft-Pop Clutch style, to sell band candy. Surprisingly, this doesn’t violate any new deadly sins. It’s not Wrath, because it’s not motivated by hatred. There doesn’t seem to be a deadly sin that covers what we would modern law would call “criminal negligence” or “involuntary manslaughter.”

Which makes me question whether the 7 Deadly Sins bet is viable. Batton either breaks them constantly (Pride, Sloth); never breaks them (Wrath); or are things Tom Batiuk would never have one of his own “good” characters do (Lust). Gluttony is largely a function of where/what they’re eating. Greed only manifests itself in the Funkyverse in the form of highly valuable comic books. As for Envy, Batton doesn’t commit this sin so much as he inspires others to commit it. The encounter with his wannabe rockstar neighbor right after he got his cartoonist gig is a perfect example.

I’ll honor the wager for this week, but I don’t think it’ll be part of the game going forward. (And yes, there will be a game going forward.)

FRIDAY UPDATE: We have the Batton face! That hits the easiest target on wager A1.

SATURDAY UPDATE: That word zeppelin isn’t quite big enough to fulfill A2. Will there be a word balloon that is more than half the size of the panel?

I will post a final tally after Sunday’s strip. (Sunday strips count, if the strip is related to the Batton Thomas interviews.)

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

I went to all the trouble of setting up a Batton Thomas betting pool, with options like “Will Skip start the week by making a comment about continuing the interview?” And the prick just rudely shows up on a Wednesday, hijacking a harmless week at Komix Korner. And re-uses that same smug drawing we’ve seen a dozen times by now.

How on earth did I fail to offer the option “yet another smug, insufferable book signing and not the actual interview”? In retrospect, that should be a standing offer in this wagering house. The Funkyverse is an endless parade of book signings for books no one would ever ready, by people who are incapable of writing them. My joss paper theory seems more plausible by the day.

(To make a house ruling: this week will not count as a Batton Death March week. So none of those wagers will be evaluated until the next fully-focused Batton Thomas interview week.)

If Tom Batiuk fulfills any promise to his readers, it’s the meta-promise he inadvertently makes to us snarkers: that his unhinged storytelling choices will be bizarrely entertaining. Who could forget Zanizbar, the talking, cigar-smoking murder chimp? Or Darrin’s decision to make a child’s toy of the handgun that killed that child’s own grandfather? Or Cindy’s late-life pregnancy, which was never resolved in any way? Or that this tiny town would have two people with almost-identical amputations, and no character would ever once comment on that? Or Timemop, and “humanity is our nation”?

But this kind of crazy is becoming less and less frequent. I often compare the Funkyverse to the infamous movie The Room. Crankshaft now feels more like 2010: The Year We Made Contact. Stanley Kubrick’s original 2001: A Space Odyssey could be dense and tedious at times, but it was also memorable and trippy, and told a strong story if you put the effort in. The sequel lost all the weird stuff, and told a straightforward, So Okay It’s Average story about interstellar Cold War cooperation, 20 years after the Soviet Union ended in real life. (The John Lithgow space walk scene is outstanding, though.)

The Funkyverse seems to be undergoing entropy. Its internal structure, what little there ever was, seems to be breaking down. I’ll tell you what I mean.

On June 1, 2024 – almost two years ago now – this blog made the decision to continue publishing, on grounds that Crankshaft was looking like a continuation of everything we that made the Funkyverse so compelling. And sometimes, it lived up to that meta-promise. The Burnings was probably the high/low point: an overhyped story about an out-of-date controversy, that did little more than demonstrate Les Moore’s complete immunity to the tiniest amounts of pushback.

But Batiuk has not been fulfilling that meta-promised. He has left certain tropes, like Atomix Komix and even Dead Lisa, mostly in Defuncty Winkerbean. Narshe recently gave an updated rotation of the frequent topics in Act IV Crankshaft:

– Batton Death March week
– Ed malapropisms week
– Jeff as a stand-in for Batiuk to lament something related to his interests week
– Montoni’s week
– [Emily and Amelia] manager for [Lillian] week
– Dinkle week
– Idiots at a book signing week

Narshe

That’s pretty accurate, though I would add two more to that list. The first one is a category I call the Legitimate Crankshaft Week. These are weeks that were just like what this strip contained before Funky ended. “Ed malapropism week” is the most common of these, making it a super-category to one of Narshe’s categories. But even native Crankshaft stories are less creative than they used to be. They’re usually propping up some lame premise like “bus driver shortage” for another milking.

The other new type is the miscellaneous week. These used to be rare, happening mostly at year’s end. But we’ve seen more and more weeks of generic, unrelated gags. And weeks that simply don’t adhere to the traditional Monday to Saturday schedule. The recent “Ed tries to scam eclipse observers” story ended on a Monday.

On a related note, I’ve been updating the “Act IV” menu that summarizes each week of post-2022 Crankshaft. And there’s barely anything to write anymore. If I can describe a week of this comic strip as “unrelated gags,” is the whole thing even worth talking about anymore? Is the entire system breaking down too much to be recognizable, even by our own definitions of what is entertaining about it?

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!

Over Yonder

Voting for the 2025 Crankshaft Award is Still Open!

The Funkyverse has a new corporate sponsor: Yondr!

I previously called this kind of product placement “egola.” It’s like plugola or payola, except that you get paid in self-actualization instead of money. Usually, these are about Tom Batiuk’s weird fandoms (The Phantom Empire, Chad & Jeremy); events that met his ludicrous standards for treating him like a big shot (Ohioana Book Fair, Comic-Con); or both (Winnipeg Blue Bombers, “Montoni’s” pizza).

Yondr doesn’t appear to be any of those things.

Interestingly, Batiuk describes the product correctly. You define a phone-free zone, and instruct visitors to put their phones in the special pouches. The pouches can’t be unlocked until you leave the area, or use the “unlocking base.” You can still hold the phone, hear it, and see it well enough to know if the screen lights up. You can understand why certain institutions, like schools, would use such a thing.

But why would the famously anti-technology Tom Batiuk, fresh off a week of trashing the long-established standard of online payments, portray a technology product in a positive light? Especially one that hasn’t stroked his ego, as far as we know?

I think this image from Wednesday’s strip is the key:

I hid the text, because it’s not important. Look at the child’s face. Compared to the usual faces in the Funkyverse, that child is very upset. This isn’t the devil-may-care smirk or the resigned acceptance we usually see. That is the face of someone in mourning. Even Ed Crankshaft is going above and beyond in this shot. He looks genuinely irritated at this behavior. And unless I’m way off base (which I often am), these are both new drawings.

Why would Tom Batiuk be excited about a product that lets parents take cell phones away from children? Does it maybe… relate to his life experience, somehow? Oh, yes, it does. And we all know how.

This is Tom Batiuk telling the world he’s still upset that his mother tried to take away his comic books. It practically screams “See? See what it’s like when mean grownups take your precious thing away? Let’s see how you enjoy living without your precious phones!” He gets to make that point again, and slam something that didn’t exist before 1991!

And another thing: Ed is totally the wrong character build a Yondr arc around. What Funkyverse character (1) has a job where it’s reasonable to ask children to put their phones away, and (2) demands to be the center of attention at all times? Come on, you know who it is!

The star of Yondr Week should have been Les Moore.

Batiuk pulled Les out of mothballs to make him the star of The Burnings, even though Les almost single-handedly caused the entire problem. So there’s no real obstacle to using him here. Having Les – or at least, a teacher – be the ringleader of the Yondr Enforcement Team makes much more sense than having bus drivers do it.

Using Les in this role would (1) fit his long-running characterization, and (2) poke a little fun at the character, something the Funkyverse desperately needs.

The Funkyverse is full of unsympathetic comedy protagonists, but it doesn’t use them properly. Characters like Les Moore and Ed Crankshaft need to get pushback every once in a while. A week about Yondr is a perfect opportunity to take Les down a peg. Not in an overly mean way, but in a way that tells readers “okay, I get it, this character is a little overbearing sometimes.” And other characters get to acknowledge it too.

But Tom Batiuk is so enamored with his interpretation of Lisa and Les as The Greatest Tragedy In Human History and Her Long-Suffering Heroic Disciple that he’s blind to things like this. But here’s what I’d do:

Monday Panel 1: Principal Nate: “The school board is mandating we use Yondr, which requires students to put their phones in these special pouches during class. We need volunteers to help us with the roll out.” Panel 2: Les, in a group of bored-looking teachers sitting in meeting room chairs, enthusiastically raises his hand. Panel 3: “Okay, I think we all saw that coming. Anybody else?”

Imagine if Les got to deliver the “we have our ways of finding out” line.

It’s not hard to imagine a situation where Les is a little too overzealous about enforcing the rules, or enforces them in selfish ways. And the kids call him out on it. Here’s what I would do with the above panel:

Now that’s a quarter inch from reality.