We’re back on a Crankshaft staple: old people moaning about how difficult their life is.
But do you ever think Crankshaft comes off a little …. humble-braggy? “Oh, look how old I am, I have it soooooooo rough.” And his eternal look of smug condescension doesn’t help.
Come on Ed, you should know that’s not how a “happy ending” works. Did you never visit the Valentine Theater during the brief time it was a strip club?
Back pain, muscle soreness, medication, Ben-Gay, and deep tissue massages are a 56-year-old man’s problem – not a 106-year-old man’s problem. Crankshaft and all his buddies should all be on their arthritic knees, thanking God for how healthy and active they all still are. They can live independently in their own homes, work, travel, and have full range of motion. And not a drop of dementia or cancer in any of them! (Ed probably has dementia, but it’s considered “quirky.” SEE ALSO: Weston, Wilbur.)
Ed reminds me of Dinkle in this regard. He’s always whining about how hard he has it, but we never see him experience any actual difficulty. Have you noticed that Dinkle’s much-maligned bands have never delivered a bad live performance? Same thing with Crankshaft. Those pain lines will disappear the second Batiuk wants to do another wacky gardening mishap. Or if he wants to give Ed a third sports award this year.
He also reminds me of kids I knew in middle and high school who were always saying “oh, I failed that test!” Despite talking up their status in the valedictorian race the rest of the time. Oh, shut up, Julie. We all know you didn’t fail. You got an A, or maybe a B if you did really bad. One of the great things about moving past high school was that I no longer had to indulge people like this.
In a world defined by pointless, inescapable tragedy, I often wonder if Crankshaft causes any lingering bitterness in others. Ralph Meckler, Les Moore, and Eugene are all characters I suspect wouldn’t appreciate Ed’s constant keening about his amazingly superior health. “Timmy/Lisa/Lucy died decades ago, and I’m supposed to listen to health complaints from this guy who’s harder to kill than The Terminator?”
This has gone on long enough. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Ed Crankshaft needs to die. Cut the cord, Tom. You want to stop writing gags? Prove it, by getting rid of the character you most need to write gags for. And please spare us the ten years of vegetative state you think Ed still has in front of him. You’re getting into Gasoline Alley territory.
After Pizza Box Monster week ended with this atrocity, let’s keep this discussion simple.
Let’s see how many things we can find wrong with this story. I’ll use this post to compile them into a list. GoComics and other such providers allow you to view comic strips for the past week without any login or account. So until Monday, anyone can view the entire week. Here are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
Let’s begin. The only rules are:
Be brief. Have you ever read the nmop-əpisdn answers in Hocus Focus? They’re very short, like “beard is missing” or “arms have moved.” Explain as much as you need to, but be terse. Keep it to a sentence if you can.
Stick to the actual content of this week’s strips. No meta-errors, or comments about Tom Batiuk’s production process.
Things that are wrong in the long-term context of the comic strip, such as Pete and Mindy’s marital status and their business relationship with PBM, are permitted.
Here we go!
Monday’s strip shows PBM leaving after helping decorate the restaurant. The pizza box costume would make any physical movement very difficult. (BJ6K)
The PBM costume has no visible eyeholes. (Y. Knott)
On Monday, PBM says he’ll “come back for lunch when things aren’t busy.” At almost any restaurant, lunch is expected to be busy. (BJ6K)
Gleeb points out that this could mean “the time we restaurant workers take lunch”, not “when lunch is served.”
On Tuesday, Pete calls PBM “one of their silent partners” in Montoni’s. No other partner has ever been seen or mentioned. (BJ6K)
Somehow, Pete and Mindy have somehow entered into a business relationship with an unknown person. (BJ6K)
Pete tells Mindy to “stop obsessing” over who the PBM is. Given that business relationship, she is right to want to know who this person is. (BJ6K)
On Tuesday, Pete and Mindy’s hands are visible. Neither is wearing a wedding or engagement ring. (BJ6K)
The spider on the video camera screen on Saturday doesn’t match the one we see in the restaurant on Tuesday. (Green Luthor)
Owners of a security camera would not block it with objects. Or if they did accidentally, they would notice and correct it before an incident happens. (Green Luthor)
The pizza that the PBM is served seems to shrink significantly in diameter between Thursday and Saturday. Compare how much counter space the pizza occupied on Thursday, compared to its much smaller depiction on Saturday. (Y. Knott)
Despite wanting to see the PBM, the characters seem to be going out of their way to avoid seeing him. (several)
How does Mindy know PBM was eating alone at the bar … unless she *saw* PBM eating alone at the bar? (Y. Knott)
By dining in the restaurant and removing his headgear, it is possible that the PBM is trying to reveal his identity. Pete, Mindy, and Ed fail to consider this. (BJ6K)
Even if Mindy didn’t see the revealed face *clearly*, it still seems counter-productive to leave the room with the PBM in it, only to essentially announce that “Hey, it sure would be neat to see the PBM’s face while the PBM is eating in the other room where I just was, watching the PBM eating. (Y. Knott)
The story assumes that Mindy and Pete would know who the PBM is. If we’re going to ignore the whole ‘business partners’ problem, then there’s no reason to assume the PBM is someone would be recognized by them. (Green Luthor)
PBM could mistakenly believe that they know who he is. (pj202718nbca)
There was never any obstacle to simply looking at the PBM. Even if there was, Pete and Mindy own the restaurant now, and can easily invent a reason to be wandering the dining area during business hours. Beyond even that, it’s Halloween, and they could hide their own identities in a costume if desired.(BJ6K)
Have at it in the comments. Let me know if you made a suggestion and I didn’t include it (or an equivalent one).
One of the drawbacks of my long-running TBTropes series is that the tropes have begun to repeat themselves. This was part of the design, though. I wanted to create a way to describe Tom Batiuk’s bizarre writing choices, so we can identify each when it appears. But this has made it harder to write new blog posts, because I’ve already explored the Batiukian technique de la semaine.
Like I said in the comments, I didn’t write about Buck Rub Week (October 13) or Crankshaft Lawyers Up Against Glitter Week (October 20), because I did almost two years ago. Almost everything in If You Make Sure You’re Connected, The Writing’s On The Wall applies perfectly to these two weeks of Funky Crankershaft.
I called this a Comedy Disconnect: “trying to be funny rather than communicate ideas, (sacrificing) reality in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs.” Which Batiuk does constantly. Despite routinely describing his life’s work in terms like “45 years in, ‘Funky Winkerbean’ creator isn’t going for funny.” He’s going for funny, but he certainly isn’t hitting it.
And we’ve got another reuse of an old technique this week: reusing a joke when it no longer makes any sense.
In Fight The Power, I wrote about how Batiuk continues to rely on Dinkle jokes long after the world changed in ways that rendered them problematic. Maybe high schoolers and high schools in the 1970s and 1980s had to silently tolerate Dinkle’s behavior. But senior citizens and churches in the 2020s do not. The environment changed, and the times changed. Act I Dinkle worked as a comically exaggerated depiction of megalomaniacal high school band directors. Now he just looks like a pushy, abusive lawsuit magnet.
Imagine a shot-for-shot remake of a classic teen/young adult comedy like Dazed And Confused or Fast Times At Ridgemont High or Revenge Of The Nerds set in the current decade. But it doesn’t update any of the outrageous details of life circa 1976-1983, or introduce anything that’s changed since then. This trope already has a name: Harsher In Hindsight. But since Batiuk loves to do this to his own work, I’ll give it its own name:
Not Funny Anymore: When a once-functional joke no longer works because the context around it has changed.
Harry Dinkle is Not Funny Anymore. Ed Crankshaft is Not Funny Anymore. And the Pizza Box Monster is Not Funny Anymore.
This is Halloween week. In Act III, PBM showing up at Halloween and terrorizing Montoni’s was one of the few fun things that happened in Funky Winkerbean. But the new reality is that PBM is now Pete and Mindy’s business partner. This reframes the underlying dynamic of “PBM is scary, because nobody knows who he really is.”
On Tuesday, Pete tells Mindy “you need to stop obsessing over who the Pizza Box Monster is.” No, Pete, you need to start obsessing over it. Because you’ve apparently entered into a business relationship with this person, and talked your fiancée into joining! Putting your trust, your financial future, and by extension your marriage, into the hands of an unknown person who wears a wacky costume, is skull-collapsingly stupid.
Never mind that this situation isn’t even possible anymore. Know Your Customer laws require any financial institution to thoroughly identify all parties early in the proceedings. And any party in the partnership would have the right to view any contracts they’ve signed. Mystery solved.
But it gets worse. Does Pete simply not care who the Pizza Box Monster is? Or does he know who it is, but isn’t telling Mindy? Because that’s a great way to destroy your spouse’s trust in you.
In a downstream joke that’s also Not Funny Anymore, Pete tells Mindy she’s beginning to sound like her grandfather Ed Crankshaft. The only reasonable response to that is an immediate trip to a neurologist. A young woman should not be talking like a 106-year-old dementia patient. Especially if Batiuk is going to act like Pete and Mindy are a generation younger than they actually are. Even more so when it overlaps with Dumbass Has A Point. Mindy is right to want to know this person’s identity, even if she doesn’t know why.
The scariest thing Pizza Box Monster could do this week is send Pete and Mindy a picture of himself in Russia with their life savings. Or even worse: their merged comic book collection. I guess they’d have to actually get married first, though.
I want to take off my snarker hat for a moment, and talk seriously about the future of Crankshaft.
We thought the past week would be yet another week of Skip Rawlings’ endless, pointless, onanistic interview with Batton Thomas. It turned out to be something much worse.
After what we saw this week – Tom Batiuk using the title character of Crankshaft as a tool to bash readers who want to see more of Crankshaft in the strip, and additionally as a strawman for Tom Batiuk’s tired “comic strips have to be funny” canard – there is one inescapable conclusion:
It’s time for Ed Crankshaft to die.
And I don’t mean that maliciously. I mean it in the way that a long-suffering family pet, who can’t be cured or even helped, needs to die. It’s a gut-wrenching decision to have a pet put down, but sometimes it’s the merciful thing to do.
Because the way Ed Crankshaft was used this week is appalling. How much do you have to hate your own creation, and all of its followers, to use that creation to mock their desire for more of it? I haven’t seen a production insult its audience this much since 1968.
And this isn’t the first time Batiuk has acted like this. He killed off John Darling so the syndicate could no longer use the character (even though no one would ever want to). He’s bitter about the name Funky Winkerbean, because he thinks it held the strip back; the character Funky Winkerbean got pushed into the background. When Funky did appear, his arcs tended to center on his misfortunes: alcoholism, obesity, ego, incompetence, bad luck. And now Batiuk is bitter that readers want to see Crankshaft in Crankshaft, so he used the character to mock them. Notice a pattern?
The worst part of it is: these are his genuine fans. “Where’s Crankshaft?” isn’t something this blog thought up. It’s a common sentiment in online comment areas, from people who presumably enjoy the comic strip as Batiuk intended. They prefer Ed’s antics to the self-indulgent meandering slop Batiuk has been filling it with since Funky Winkerbean ended.
These are the people Batiuk should be trying to please. Or at least, listen to. “Where’s Crankshaft?” is essentially positive feedback. It affirms his decision all those years ago to give Crankshaft his own world. People seem to enjoy the cranky old bus driver and his antics.
Personally, I have no strong feelings about Ed Crankshaft. I don’t like or dislike him more than any other character. He’s a selfish, egotistical, malicious, unemployable jackass, but so are most male characters in the Funkyverse. But I do think Crankshaft deserves some dignity. He does not deserve to be used as a punching bag by an arrogant creator trying to make a point.
There are several reasons why the death of Ed Crankshaft would be beneficial to Crankshaft as a whole:
It’s way, way overdue. Ed Crankshaft is at least 106 years old. I base that on the fact that he played for the 1940 Toledo Mud Hens, and the youngest member of that team was born in February 1919. It’s also consistent with other mileposts of his life. He fought in World War II. He was an advocate for black baseball players in the early days of integration, which would have been the late 1940s. He played professional baseball in Cuba, which ended halfway through the 1960 season. His daughter Pam was a student at Kent State in 1970, making her birth year about 1950, at which time Ed was in his early 30s.
I know there are some individual strips that contradict that chronology. Like when Crankshaft claimed to admire Vic Power and Rocky Colavito growing up. But I think those were all caused by Timemop. If Tom Batiuk can use a time-traveling janitor to fix all his continuity errors, I can use a time-traveling janitor to break them again. Nudge!
If Batiuk truly believes his comic strips are the only ones where characters age realistically, it’s time to let nature take its course.
It would attract attention to the strip. Tom Batiuk loves media attention, and he loves killing off his own characters to get it. This would be another opportunity to do that. Alert the New York Times.
It would require no new writing or artwork. We already know Ed’s future, because it’s been shown in the strip. During the “Funky Winkerbean is ten years in the future from Crankshaft” era (2007-2022), Ed was depicted in FW as a decrepit husk.
We also know where he’s going to die: at a baseball game. So no new story needs to be written. Existing art can be repurposed or recreated. Which is a common practice in Batiuk’s work nowadays.
It would be a nice Continuity Nod. The Funkyverse loves revisiting its own stories, and this would do that.
It would be a satisfying end. It would bid farewell to the character in a way that lets readers and other characters say their goodbyes to the cranky old bus driver. In other words, it would be the opposite of what happened in Star Trek: Generations.
It would signal the strip’s change in direction. Have you ever seen (or been part of) a couple that really needs to break up, but they won’t pull the trigger on it? They just hang around together, hoping things will get better? Ed Crankshaft’s continued presence in Crankshaft feels like that.
Batiuk clearly wants to turn the strip into Funky Winkerbean Act IV, full of comic books and writing awards and Dinkle and Montoni’s and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and interviews of himself and cheap award-baiting. And Ed Crankshaft is in the way of all that.
If I’m right that Batiuk is bitter about being pressured to include Ed in the proceedings, the best thing he could do for his readers and himself is retire the character permanently. It would end the “Where’s Crankshaft” questions, because readers would know he isn’t coming back. (Though death can be a dubious thing in the Funkyverse.)
It would let Tom Batiuk do what he claims he wants to do. Batiuk constantly complains about having to be a gag-a-day writer. If Ed Crankshaft isn’t around anymore, there’s a lot less need for gag strips in Crankshaft. It removes a writing crutch Batiuk has leaned on for far too long. And it calls his bluff. You want to write serious drama, not gags? Fine. Get rid of the main character you have to write gags for.
Of course, he’d also need to get rid of Dinkle. But that would only take one panel:
And if Tom Batiuk doesn’t want to kill off Crankshaft or Dinkle, I’ve got another character he can get rid of:
Have you ever gotten a self-serving holiday or birthday gift? Like, a starter package for a pyramid scheme, from a pushy friend who’s been trying to recruit you for months? Or an accessory for a device you don’t have, from someone who has it, and wants you to get interested in it? Or a donation in your name, to a cause they support but you don’t?
That’s exactly what this arc feels like.
First, let’s keep in mind how bonkers this story already is. The plot mechanism is “Pam damaged Jeff’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt,” which, again, is a plot borrowed from media for pre-schoolers. Replacing it might have cost $50 total, including international shipping. Instead, Pam took the grandiose step of buying two tickets to a Blue Bombers football game, without even asking anyone if they wanted to go a game.
A game in Winnipeg. Which is almost 1000 air miles away from Cleveland. Toronto is only 300 miles from Cleveland by car, would have been a much better tourism destination, and every CFL team plays a game there every season.
Pam’s “gift” of a $50 football ticket obligated its recipients to spend well over $1,000 each. The flight from Cleveland to Winnipeg starts at $650. Plus taxes, fees, hotel, meals, ground transportation, and border crossing costs. Updating passports, if you need to do this, is also expensive and time-consuming.
So who paid all these add-on expenses? And why?
Jeff paid the trip expenses, because he’s the only one with a real job. This would make basic sense. Crankshaft has a job, but I doubt it pays much. And it obligates Jeff to spend money he may not wish to or be able to.
Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because somehow he is independently wealthy. This would explain a lot. I’ve long wondered how Ed is able to buy gobs of stupid crap online, while the family shrugs off the massive property damage he causes. There are real-life stories of janitors and teachers who built impressive savings accounts over their long lives. Crankshaft doesn’t seem the frugal type, but time is on his side. A penny saved in 1940 (when he was already an adult) would be worth $3.17 in 2024 according to online inflation calculators.
Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, becausehe’s the grownup. This would be consistent with how parent-child relationships work in the Funkyverse. Children are treated as subservient wards even when they’re in their 70s. Witness the Funky Winkerbean storyline where Holly’s mother bullies her into doing a cheerleading show where she gets seriously injured, and has to be treated a time when the family is doing home renovations, and Montoni’s is failing. Nobody ever says a word about this.
Pam also paid for the trip expenses, as part of the gift. This would fit Batiuk’s overarching theme of a mother wife doing having to pay penance for destroying the child husband’s special fandom object. But how does Pam have this kind of spare money lying around?
Pam paid the trip expenses, to force Jeff and Ed to get along better. This theory would address a long-ignored problem in the Funkyverse: Jeff and Ed should hate each other. They’re not blood relatives; they’re in-laws.
Ed’s shenanigans – which includes water damage to Jeff’s precious comic books – have done infinitely more damage to Jeff than one ruined t-shirt. Jeff is long overdue to give Ed a The Reason You Suck Speech that would push the one from Family Guy into second place.
The joke is that Quagmire’s many criticisms of Brian are all 100% canonical.
Ed wouldn’t like Jeff either, because Ed is needy of attention, and he would see his child’s spouse as a competitor for it. Fortunately, the Funkyverse is very asexual, sparing us from a Wilbur and Dawn Weston situation.
But let’s lighten up. These two disparate, unfriendly men traveling together for a common purpose should be rife with comedic possibilities. Planes Trains and Automobiles, the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, the original Toy Story, and family movies like Step-Brothers, mined gold from such a premise. But unfortunately, the Funkyverse is also very conflict-averse.
Instead, we’ve gotten one week on the mechanisms of appeasing a toddler, and a week on the banalities of air travel. At least Jeff’s puke-inducing Inner Child hasn’t shown up yet. But he still might.
The last possible explanation:
Pam wants to get both Jeff and Ed out of her life for a few days. As much as Jeff should be a tightly wound ball of hatred, Pam should be far, far worse. She’s forced to constantly indulge two idiot manchildren and their consumptive, destructive ways. Any woman would have left both of them decades ago.
This could be a fun twist. It’d be nice to see the story cut to Pam enjoying a day of peace and quiet in the house, wearing a self-satisfied smirk that would be justified for once. But Pam is a woman, and the Funkyverse is very disinterested in women.
But why else would she buy Ed a ticket, when he wasn’t the aggrieved party?
Son of Stuck Funky 