Sad Friday
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Crankshaft, 7/3/26
Ugh, fine, I guess I’ll update you on what’s going on in this Crankshaft flashback: Harry Dinkle’s drunk dad was all set to debut a new song at the Starlight Ballroom, but then nobody showed up because they all liked Elvis now, and he threw the sheet music to the ground and stormed off, and later Eugene and Lucy picked it up. Anyway, then Dinkle Sr. drove away in a white-hot rage right into the lake, where he died! “That’s how he would’ve wanted to go out,” says Harry, about to play his father’s last song in the bombed-out ruins of the Starlight Ballroom. “At a real emotional low point.”
Judge Parker, 7/3/26
Hey, remember the early days of my coverage of this strip, when Sophie was a weird, unsettlingly adult-like child? Well, Neddie has scooted off to take a Hollywood meeting (you can tell because of the sunglasses) with her former roommate/writing partner and left Sophie in charge of Charlotte, who is the strip’s current weird, unsettling adult-like child, I guess to help her learn that someday she’ll grow up and become as normal and annoying as everyone else in this strip.
Crock, 7/3/26
Wow, a nose so big a maître d’ mistakes it for an entirely separate person? Can you imagine? That’s definitely the sort of thing that would lead someone to seek cosmetic surgery!
40 replies to “Sad Friday”
Crankshaft-I smell a new ongoing storyline. Who really killed Larry Dinkle?
MW-Wilbur actually wants Dawn to throw out the potatoes. He would do it himself but he’s grown rather emotionally attached to them and can’t bear the thought of throwing them out.
MW-Wilbur’s right, Dawn. Wilbur wants you to follow his bad ways.
FC-That’s it, Dolly, just shove that hot dog down your throat.
FC-Dolly learned how to eat hot dogs by watching Mommy.
JP-Suddenly I have this urge for melons.
Crock: That’s not a nose, that’s a conjoined twin!
CS: Ed sees the rusted out remains of the repurposed schoolbus that Dinkle drove into the lake and says; “Hey, that’s my gig.”
CS: Yeah, my life motto is now “I want to die an utter failure, like a noir hero!”
Also, I’m terribly confused (but so I suspect is Batiuk). Was this magical evening of music and death before WWII, when Eugene and Lucy parted, or after, when Elvis was on the television?
MW: Wilbur speaks into a cup to give his voice more gravitas. Using a Hello Kitty cup to do it is probably not the best choice.
JP: It’s perfectly understandable, given her surroundings, that a child Charlotte’s age would believe that a woman’s IQ is inversely proportional to her boob size.
They’re probably referencing Glenn Miller here, the real life big band leader, except that he went down in a plane over the English Channel while at the height of his popularity and doing something noble for the Allied troops, instead of crashing a bus while throwing a hissy fit.
So, it’s a bit like the real world but it went on long enough to see itself become eclipsed in popularity and narcissistic enough to be self-destructive. Seems on-brand for Crankshaft.
JP – It’s good to see Judge Parker get back to roots, where trashy women would routinely greet Sam Driver in the classic vamping posture. Though the fact Sophie is doing it to a child is more than a bit disturbing.
MW: I was going to make a comment about how Wilbur still routinely fantasizes about Iris, the character closest to Tommy than any other, but I’m too distracted by Dawn’s sudden shift into a Picasso painting.
Crankshaft: “He died as he lived, alone and in great pain.”
Remember when “Crankshaft” was the “funny” Batiuk strip? Who’d have thought I’d have been longing for an abysmal pun?
Shaft – “Like I’ve always said, my father died peacefully in his sleep, not screaming in terror like his passengers.”
@Ken:
After when Elvis was on television, which helps alleviate the “Wait, Lillian, Eugene and Lucy were teenagers at the break of WW2? Wouldn’t that make them nonagenarians at youngest?” by shifting everyone’s age 10 years, but then puts “the reason Lucy never tried to find Eugene again was because she thought he had died in the War” into question, since it can’t be WW2 anymore, and making it Vietnam kinda changes the story, I think?
Then again, this whole “Everyone abandoned Larry Dinkle” is (AFAIK) from repurposing panels from Eugene and Lucy’s flashbacks, except (again, AFAIK) those weren’t actually meant to represent an ever-dwindling crowd due to a lack of the performer’s popularity, those were representing Eugene and Lucy winning a dance contest by being the couple who lasted the longest dancing non-stop.
Like, it’s not Batiuk’s intent, in fact the total opposite, but I still hold it’s less nobody showed up because they all liked Elvis now and more if Larry Dinkle had just waited a couple more minutes for intermission to end, the crowd would have returned.
@Liam: ‘Who really killed Larry Dinkle?’ Ooo, I know this! The Murder Chimp in Lillian’s Bookstore with the Cancer!
MW: ‘I don’t want you to follow him in his bad ways, my daughter. Yea verily, we must burn-eth him at the stake-eth the next-eth time-eth we see him-eth!’
Phantom: ‘If that’s your actual voice, why does it sound like Ethel Merman?’
RMMD: Okay, place yer bets folks! Are the DeeDee twins going to:
A) Wanda’s Diner, where they will turn the head of Truck and cause marital strife?
B) Jordan’s Like the Country, where they will case the joint for things to steal later?
C) The Cafe at the Glenwood Motel, where they will discover that (gasp) their waitress is the famous former actress Lorna Starr who has gotten (double gasp!!) FAT!! They then turn the head of MudGus, leading to emotional strife.
S4th: I’d *like* to imagine that Ronan is just standing there thinking ‘What map? Honey, Ted is still holding his hipster’s Garmin GPS, and Sally is still holding her fob. Our rental cars are right over there! Did you all inhale something in the restroom? What the everloving hell are all of you talking about??’
Wary Morth:
“Dad, have you looked in a mirror?”
“What?”
“Wait a moment.” (Dusk goes to the kitchen and returns with a potato.) “Here, hold this next to your face and step in front of the mirror there.”
“…..I don’t get it.”
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Murky Tail:
Tell Gail Trail the cheque’s not in the mail, hail a cab and bail or the scam will fail, and she’ll either be run out of town on a rail or hand in her dinner pail.
_________________________________________
Wrecks Moregone:
“At last! I was getting tired of living on cat food!”
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Moregone Wrecks:
Scammer Twins go to Doug’s cafe, meet Mud, are immediately converted to the Path of Good by the Mirakle Method, are given free music lessons by Mud and Lorry and free acting lessons by Lorna. They then claim to be Julliard students and scam their way right into an orchestra.
“Hey wait, why can’t Crankshaft drive his bus into a lake and die?” thought everybody in this comic strip except Crankshaft, who was thinking about blowing up a grill this holiday weekend.
@Pozzo: Eh. While this sort of plotline was heartbreaking in, say, The Illusionist (2010, dir. Sylvain Chomet), everyone in the Batiuk verse is somehow intensely unlikable to begin with, so I feel very little.
JP: After years of being bogged down in endless CIA drama, I’m glad we’re finally getting back to the core of what Judge Parker is all about – rich, well-connected people getting handed success on a platter, and young blonde women showing off their breasts for no particular reason.
Crock: This joke would land better in a comic where characters don’t have noses bigger than their hands.
Crankshaft: “It’s how my old man always wanted to go: screaming as his vehicle careened off the road and crashed into a lake where he began seizing from a massive heart attack, spending his final moments in a mixture of agony and horror. It’s so poignant.”
Judge Parker: So, like, is Charlotte trying to convince everyone she’s some kind of demon or robot or something impersonating a child so that they’ll murder her? Because that’s the only real Watsonian reason for her behavior I can think of.
Crock: “And than we left the restaurant over their employee blatantly insulting and body-shaming my girlfriend. As far as I know, she ended up being fired for it. Guess managers actually don’t like it when their workers make pithy, sarcastic jabs at their customers for no reason.”
MW: If Wilbur has ever cooked potatoes, then I’m Miss Universe.
9CL: Over the last few days, Mom’s checks have affected Alistair’s physique like gamma rays affect Bruce Banner’s.
MW I refuse to believe that Wilbur allows a bag of potatoes to last long enough in his home for rot to spread.
Billie Jean is in a Crock strip
We all feel bad but
There’s nothing to be done
The comic’s just not fun
JP — “Give me whatever I asked for and this will be fine.” Charlotte certainly is a Parker-Driver!
Cranky: I’m genuinely starting to want to read Safe Havens, because Batiuk’s misery fetish is making the kinks in that comic sound outright charming.
CS Apart from all the timeline problems folks have pointed out, in what universe is the bandleader also the bus driver? Why would their *driver* abandon him when the players had walked off?
@Schroduck: If we’re really lucky, we might even get a panel set in a courtroom!
@Anonymous: Funky-Verse is part of a whole set of newspaper soap strips (Mary Worth, Rex Morgan, Judge Parker, Luann, etc.) that has a talent for making characters who would be sympathetic or tragic in any other story into the most unlikable, borderline despicable shitwads possible. In virtually anything else, under any halfway decent writer, Dinkle Sr.’s tale would be heartwrenchingly sad. Here, it just makes him look like the most pathetic loser to have walked the planet.
@Anonymous: “Eugene and Lucy winning a dance contest by being the couple who lasted the longest dancing non-stop”. That’s literally referencing the plot of infamously, borderline cartoonishly bleak and cruel movie They Shoot Horses Don’t They, and Batiuk portrayed it as cutesy and romantic? What the hell.
@Ukranazi Stepan:
On MW – ‘I don’t get it, all I see is the potato you’re holding. Am I supposed to see something else in this glass panel?’
@CanuckDownSouth: Probably for the same reason the players walked out. They hadn’t been paid in months because Elvis stole all the paying customers!
@Schroduck: Rest assured, the CIA drama *will* return. The continued presence of Chekov’s Charlotte here will see to that. I’m guessing it will be just around the time Ces finishes his latest “whimsical” nonsense over in ‘The Ted Forth Insanity Hour’.
“Crock” has barely any trace left of the Foreign Legion and colonial France. For example, here we are supposed to think that French people would think a very big nose is unappealing and something to be corrected. Preposterous!
This is the moment where Sophie turns around to do something, then when she turns back, Charlotte is suddenly in her 30’s right?
@ectojazzmage: re: They Shoot Horses Don’t They – yup, and now to add to the timeline confusion Guinness notes that dance marathons started to be banned in the US in the 1920s and early 1930s after contestant deaths, well before even the original eve-of-WWII-departure story
Squinted at the splotch in panel one of Crock till I realized it was the postman who’d just delivered that letter. A tiny bit of worldbuilding in a world that makes no sense, hastily assembled and barely human, in the service of a joke that’s not funny and pretty cruel. He’s just like me fr fr.
“My Father liked noir movies because of the leggy dames. He was a simple guy at heart.”
FC: I’ve seen hotdog carts and food trucks but are sidewalk food boxes a new trend starting in Arizona or an old depression era thing that now only exists in a few isolated regions of the country?
“We were told that my father probably had a heart attack”
“‘Told’? ‘Probably’? Wasn’t there a coroner report or a death certificate?”
“Not sure: they did not care to make one and we did not care to collect it”
@cheech wizard:ha, I missed your comment, but I immediately thought the same thing. I didn’t even notice Charlotte in the panel for a long time…
SH: Seeing what Pam/Palmtop did to him
(giving him a shapeshifting dog form that he can never get rid of)
It will be really awkward if they ever decide to break up.
Batiuk did it. I give up. For the love of comics, please bring back the bad word play instead of all of this! And more importantly, has Harry Dinkle been rambling on all this time and slowly attracting more and more people who have nothing better to do than listen to this rambling story that boils down to how the King of Rock and Roll is responsible for his father’s death?
***
These two doofuses (doofi?) have no business cracking wise about anyone else’s noses.
Crankshaft Noir movies were made under the Production Code, so the bad guy could never be shown as winning. Unlike in the Funkyverse.
Crankshaft:
“And it seems to have been brought on by his playing the Hollies’ ‘Bus Stop’ way too loud!”
@Ettorre:
“You didn’t care?”
“Does that surprise you? I didn’t bother looking at his diary for eighty years.”
Parenthetically, I am curious whether Dinkle Sr. wrote the last entry (“no customers — band left me — ‘Sunrise’ will never be heard — O the pain”) before or after loading the stage set onto the bus.