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!
67 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.”
_________________________________________
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.
Judge Parker:
I’m coming around to the view that Charlotte’s place in this strip is to occupy the role that the late Herve Villechaise’s ‘Tattoo’ had on Fantasy Island, offering reductionist, Occam’s Razor-like statements while the rest of the assembled multitude embarrasses itself with various utterances of worthless blather, tired aphorisms and meaningless word salads.
Crock: “Last chance guys!” (sad trombone sound following another lame joke) Crock lights fuse on cannon their standing in.
@Ken: Yeah, my life motto is now “I want to die an utter failure, like a noir hero!”
Wow, Sterling Hayden in either The Asphalt Jungle or The Killing would be great! Should I die from my gunshot wounds just as I arrive at my childhood horsie farm, or watch all my stolen money blow away in the airplane updraft just before the cops grab me because I waited to cross the street?
No, wait, Edmund O’Brien in DOA. Stomp into a roomful of detectives at the L.A. police station and say I WANT TO REPORT A MURDER and the cops all say who was murdered and I say ME!
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
MW: “But dad! The Rotten Potato Theory of human behavior was disproved years ago by the Sanrio market research team!”
@Bob Tice: If Charlotte starts rolling her eyes towards the audience in a “Can you believe this crap?” sort of way, I will forgive this comic.
Crock:
This being the French Foreign Legion and all, when the maitre d’ volunteers that the legionnaire and Billie Jean should be seated at a table for three, does that make him a ‘nez‘ sayer?
Crock: Well, I guess a big nose joke is more politically correct than a fat joke, right?
@ectojazzmage: Exactly.
Phantom: “Chatu the Wambesi….hear me….put your arms through the bars and we will pull you out, possibly slicing you like a hard boiled egg.”
RMMD: Jordan’s it is! That’s the only nice sit-down restaurant in this town. Whoops, they don’t do lunch.
@Ettorre: “The didn’t care to make one since the Interns were all glued to their new-fangled TeeVees and ‘Transistor Radios’ listening to that Elvis junk!’
Crankshaft: “The blues aren’t about feeling better. They’re about making other people feel worse,” Bleeding Gums Murphy once said. Now those words have become the motto Tom Batiuk likes and writes by.
So Harry Dinkle, Sr. is an expy of Hank Williams? Does that mean our Harry Dinkle is going to start going on racist rants against prominent polticians?
Crank – Ed still mourns…for the undeserved loss of a fine school bus….
JP – A hint of the old-time Juggs Parker….
WoI – The kid is not my son….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Crankshaft:
If, as Harry claims, Dinkle Sr. would have appreciated the manner of his death due to a deep-seated belief that the hero shouldn’t always win, then you’d think he would have already felt okay with the romantic defeat of being displaced by rock ‘n’ roll. I suspect that Larry enjoyed the hero losing in concept, but when it ended up happening to him he realized that it sucks, actually, and this realization means that as he lay dying he felt no peace, only indignation at the perceived injustice of it all. That’s pretty grim already, so you might be wondering where this storyline has left to go, but I have faith in the Funkyverse’s boundless capacity for suffering. Harry will probably play his father’s final composition, his magnum opus, and all his friends will tell him it fucking sucks.
Crock: A gigantic nose, you say? Why, that almost seems like the sort of thing one might depict in a visual medium. But then, what do I know, I am not a comic strip artist who died in 2008, nor the one who died in 2010, nor his son who retired in 2012.
Also Crock: This is not a strip about Billie Jean’s nose. It is a strip about her soldier boyfriend who is too cowardly to stand up to a restaurant worker’s bullying, based on biological characteristics. —Later on Vox, probably.
MW: “I hate rotten potatoes! You can’t make good French fries with them, or bake them, or make tasty chips, not even vodka! It’s a waste of starch! It’s a waste of caloric junk food! Tommy Beedle is a bad bag of chips!”
rex morgan mia –
couldnt the double mint twins make more money doing lap dances at the glenview motel for traveling salesmen then pretending to play the violin all day ?
@CanuckDownSouth: I haven’t been following this story, what with all the bleakness, lack of humor, and temporal anomalies, but I don’t think it was that uncommon for a band, especially one with a smaller following, to drive themselves around back then.
Blondie: Dag, a man of your age (90+ years) should know that you’ll get more fire protection with Johns-Manville asbestos shingles than some non-poisonous fire extinguisher.
Dustin: The brunette should put her phone inside a thick hardcover book from someplace’s University Press, as this is supposed to discourage eligible bachelors from hitting on her in a bar. And Dustin.
FC: Jeffy is only half raw-dogging it. If he wanted the whole food cart experience he’d just ask to have the empty bun dipped in hot dog water.
Beetle Bailey: A true man of his time, that being the 1950s, Amos doesn’t know how to put his dinner in an over for 20 minutes and wouldn’t if he could.
Luann: Ox has found the only other person in their friend group whose idea of “organizing socks” is more than just shoving two of the same color vaguely next to each other in a drawer, and good for him.
Judge Parker: “This strip has a disturbing focus on —” I cry out, and the sniper’s bullet fired from the Comics Curmudgeon comment section finds me even before I can finish saying “mammary glands.”
Crankshaft – Some say Larry Dinkle was like Billy Preston because he liked “a story ain’t got no moral / Let the bad guy win every once in a while.” But they’re wrong. Larry Dinkle was like Billy Preston because he wrote “a song ain’t got no melody.” And hell yes, he’s gonna play it to his friends, even if it he has to do it from beyond the grave.
@Comically Challenged: They had a paid driver, but the folks on the Winter Tour traveled in a old school bus that was famously drafty and cold. Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens couldn’t stand it any longer and chartered planes to fly ahead of the rest of the crew. On the fatal night, Waylon Jennings was supposed to be on the flight as well, but traded his seat to the Big Bopper, who had a cold. According to Jennings, he and Holly liked to tease one another. “I hope your bus crashes,” Buddy said to Waylon. “Well, I hope your plane crashes,” Jennings shot back, leading to a life of guilt, regret and cocaine abuse. Well, maybe not the last one, but it’s a much more interesting story than, say, the last six weeks or so of Crankshaft.
Crock – Aha! So that’s whose son the kid is!
Crankshaft – Batiuk finally realized that cancer deaths and hot topics didn’t win him that Pulitzer, so he’s going a different route this time. Surely the Pulitzer committee will appreciate bathos and glurge, especially in the hands of a writer who is a total hack.
JP – Has no one noticed that the little princess has done something to her hair? Today she’s a pumpkin haired brat instead of a raspberry haired brat.
FC – PJ is rightly concerned that he’ll choke on his hot dog if Daddy doesn’t bother to cut it up for him. I don’t want to think about what Dolly is doing. Billy had the good sense to stay home.
Frazz – Not the same as hatred, but Frazz and Caulfield are superior regardless of demographics.
At least today Caulfield and Mrs. Olsen are equal and in agreement. Next time they’ll have to double down on mocking her behind her back to make up for it.
Mary Worth – Am I the only one who thought that it was one bad apple spoiling the whole basket? There was even a song about it. I need a cliche review.
Don Abundio, translated:
[Sign: LADIES’ CLUB CHARITY BAZAAR]
“The final prize is a mystery date with a dashing gentleman”
“The winner is number 4827!”
“I got it!”
“He uses the same techniques to rig our local elections!”
[Sign: FIRST PRIZE]
@beer farmer: Um, probably not, given the observed state of traveling salesmen at the Glenwood Motel.