Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for June 13, 2024

Where’s Crankshaft?

Go on, Mopey Pete, tell him! Cause him so much pain that he uses your nose as a vertical punching bag!

“Ha ha. We all find your impoverished misery mildly amusing!”

And the LORD GOD spake: “Look on the bright side, Phil. You used to be over 100 years old! Before that, you used to be DEAD! You were one of the Elect, shown side by side with Saint Lisa in HEAVEN! But then the Lord Jehovah cast thee from Heaven, to the Eternal Pit of the Funkyverse! Your curse? To grow ever younger, to forever live and relive Tom’s mad fantasy of what he imagined a 1960s ‘comics bullpen’ was! To forever stalk the cold, empty streets of Medina, Ohio!”

JEFF, before the Majesty of the Lord, “I had that issue but my Mommy throwed it away. I coulda sold it on fleaBay.”

So, you’re kvetching about not keeping and selling your original art for big bucks, Phil? Have you forgotten that back in 2017—when you were canonically deceased—you left an assortment of Batom Comics covers to Dead St. Lisa’s spawn, Darwin Fairplay (your “ghost” appeared alongside Lisa’s at the charity auction Derwood held for them)? Now, all these years later and after you resurrected yourself in 2021, now you’re going to complain that you didn’t hold onto them? Makes perfect sense.

“Doom, despair, agony on me. Deep, dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. Doom, despair, agony on meeeee.”

“Where’s Crankshaft?”

Registering for unemployment benefits.

Maybe you shoulda leaves komix and joins pizza restaurant business like Mopey man here. Great money in there ya knows. You’d be rich. Rich!

Where are the BRICKS?

“Ah, here it is. Eighty-five cents.”

…..and save his anger for ever!

P 3: “….$1.2 million!….(smirk, smirk, smirk)….”

and friday they all order fish sandwich for lunch because cheap pete wont treat for a pizza

You want to feel real stupid, look at what 4,000 dollars spent on Amazon stock when first offered is worth today.

Ask for it back — I’m sure they will agree

Wait… “I sold the original art of that page for twenty bucks”? Is Philled Hole saying he got paid twenty bucks to draw that page when he was working on it back in the 1930s (he is canonically a contemporary of Siegel and Shuster; never mind that would make him about 100 years old)? If so, that’s not a horrible wage—if it took him, say, three days to produce each page, that’s still a lot more than the $4.19 per day average wage for a working man in 1935.

And if he means to say that sometime after he drew the page and got paid by his publisher, he sold the original piece of paper for twenty bucks, well, that’s kinda on him, isn’t it?

(edited to correct the name of the character. I can never tell Flush Foreman and Philled Hole apart)

Chester Hagglemore: What the hell are you doing here?! Get the hell out of here you quitter!

Chester boots Mopey Pete out of the office like Mr. Dithers booting Dagwood.

Fun fact: just about everything sold as “collectible” will end up declining in value.

Back in 1993, after my term as president of the Harley club, I was presented with a very fancy “Birth of a Legend” limited-numbered edition (only 500 ever made) Harley-Davidson beer stein (a very nice, German-made one-liter vessel with pewter lid). I promptly shocked everybody by filling this valuable collectible with beer and drinking from it. “That thing cost three hundred bucks!” one of the guys informed me, as if that would somehow render it too precious for mere Miller Lite (ghack… my taste in beer was horrible in those days).

I just looked on eBay. Somebody is trying to sell one of these things, number 231 of 500 (mine is number 064). Asking a whopping $100 or best offer. He will have to get at least $650 just to break even against its original price. No takers so far.

Poor Jeff Murdoch. He’s only an accountant. He doesn’t have a real job like creating comic books or owning a pizzeria. He’s never even written a book.

- The World According to Tom Batiuk

The true irony being that Batuik has to pay people to take his original art off his hands.

“Please… I don’t want to know!”

Too bad, buddy, it’s tough love time.

Actually, MoPete’s just playing with Phil. He knows nobody would touch a page of original Starsuck Jones “art” with a ten foot pole.

Starbux Jones original artist doesn’t want to know what that page he sold for $20 went for today, because he won’t get a share of that money.

Enough of But-plug Jones anyway…Let’s get back to Cranky!