My Dinner With Andre was a 1981 movie starring Wallace “Inconceivable!” Shawn, and director Andre Gregory. The entire movie is a restaurant-table conversation between the jaded, frustrated Shawn and the happier, new age-y Gregory, about their lives in the theater. Gregory recounts his very strange adventures, like experimental theater deep in the forests of Poland (when it was still a People’s Republic). Gregory argues that these experiences made him feel more human, more fulfilled, and better at his job. Shawn counters that most people don’t have the means to go lengthy journeys of self-discovery, and finds satisfaction in small things instead.
In Crankshaft this week, Tom Batiuk is having this conversation with himself. (And probably for the next two weeks as well.)
Last week’s Crankshaft was the same as Crankshaft in late August, 2023. Kind of.
At the time, two different sets of strips ran in the same week. One was about Ed causing wildfires that only ran on arcamax.com, and supposedly also in a handful of newspapers. Most newspapers, and online providers, got a benign series of disconnected strips, much like the miscellaneous weeks Tom Batiuk often does at the end of the year. We never really found out why, but it was likely due to the Canadian wildfire references being “too soon” after real-life wildfires forced the evacuation of provincial capital Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.
Well, I guess it’s been long enough now. The originally-censored strips were re-run as last week’s main Crankshaft content. To this day, Tom Batiuk’s blog has not addressed the original disparity or the re-run. It’s been covering its usual subject matter: merchandise promotion, Funky Winkerbean book promotion, random comic book covers, and ancient John Darling strips. I guess he doesn’t have any book signings coming up; those usually get mentioned.
The strips re-ran almost a year later, but were also reworded to remove references to the Canadian wildfires, making them “midwestern” instead. Here was the original strip I posted at the time:
And here’s the rerun version. The first panel was completely written to “In other news… a blanket of black smoke is spreading over much of the midwest this morning, making it seem like twilight during the day!” Maybe it’s still too soon to make fun of Canada?
This is a strange choice, because Canada was only incidental to the story in the first place. Canada was an in-story red herring; the cause of the wildfire in the story was explicitly shown to be Crankshaft’s usual selfish idiocy. The problem would have been solved by just re-wording one panel that wasn’t important to the story… which eventually happened anyway!
Paradoxically, the map in the original story emphasized the fact that this smoke wasn’t happening in Canada, by the clear outline of the Great Lakes you can see in Panel 2 above. In the re-run, this panel is colored differently, in a way that makes the geography less obvious. The Great Lakes are no longer blue, and some weather map symbols have been re-colored, obscuring the recognizable shape of the United States. So it was actually less of a potshot at Canada the first time!
This is like the “no men in the choir” incident. Tom Batiuk went to the trouble of an extensive edit to fix a non-existent problem that could have been easily worded around, or even explained away with no editing required. (The “man” could have easily been a non-choir passerby.) And the edits actually made the problem worse.
So the strip was yanked, delayed, bowdlerized, all of which made it less clear. Note also that the delay was almost exactly the same as Tom Batiuk’s usual lead time: eleven months. It was August 21 of last year and July 29 of this year. Apparently that’s the length of time needed for any edit, even a re-writing of one word zeppelin.
We didn’t cover Crankshaft the week before, because it was a standard Crankshaft week and not worthy of this blog’s attention. Remember, we said at the outset we wouldn’t cover it every week. But this Monday began with the insufferable one-armed Skip Rawlings looking to interview Batton Thomas, at the comic book store. You better believe that’s getting some commentary.
This week’s post will be an installment of This Week In Act IV, and also a historical deep dive into a past Funkyverse tale.
Crankshaft has been revisiting the Lillian-Lucy-Eugene love triangle. The week ended today with Eugene sailing a boat solo into the waters of Summit Lake, a real place in Akron. The story looks like it continues into next week, so we’re not going to cover it all today.
I say “we” because this post is very much a team effort between Comic Book Harriet and myself. There will be at least one follow-up to this post, even if the Crankshaft story ends at this point. (It’s hard to imagine how a story can end with an old man boating into a lake by himself, but Batiuk gonna Batiuk.)
We must also give an assist to Comics Curmudgeon guest host “Uncle Lumpy”, who made the definitive comment about this story 13 years ago.
Eugene, Lucy — this is not romantic, touching, or poignant. It is stupid, and you two deserve exactly what you got.
Why are these the same seats the Valentine Theater had before it closed down, became a strip club, and re-opened? Was this some kind of 1940s strip club? (Knowing Tom Batiuk’s tastes, it probably was.)
Why did Crankshaft and Mary Marzipan enter the theater after Max and Hannah were cleaning it up, something you would do at the end of the night? What non-existent customers even made this mess?
Who did Ed and Mary pay for their ticket? Did they just walk into the theater?
This week, Tom Batiuk gave us a classic Funky Winkerbean story. Also, he posted some nonsense on his blog about Harry and Donna going back in time to play “Defenders” again.
This week’s Crankshaft is once again worthy of comment as an extension of Funky Winkerbean Act III. It gave us a Funkyverse staple: the “young people just starting out” story. Tom Batiuk loves this story, as he loves any story where he can just walk the characters through the procedure again. Even when it doesn’t make sense for the character, as it doesn’t with Pete.
Son of Stuck Funky 
