Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for February 01, 2025

By this point I want to see Battin Zero dance at the end of a rope.

In the immortal words of George C. Scott in “Hardcore”: “Turn it off. Turn it off! TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFFFFF!!!”

“…And that’s how Schulz told me ’Li’l Folks’ became ‘Peanuts’. As for myself, they needed a quick replacement for their canceled ‘Flapper Fanny’ reruns.”

Ah yes the signature happy dance of Bat.. er.. Batton Thomas. Now not tell me he run a victory lap and high five himself in there too.

“It was a master class par excellance! It covered both drawing and baiting, at which always excelled!”

Panel 1: Mr. Scruffy dreams of coaxing Batty over to his place with more Mopetoni’s pizza…

Panel 3: Batty sits on a pinecone and is startled..

Where’s Crankshaft? Still eating those wings watching that second season of that show with Jff and Pmm on that sofa covered in pubic hair

We finally know how Skip Rawlings lost his arm. He chewed it off to get away from a Batton Thomas interview.

Unbeknownst to a rambling Batton Thomas, Skip Rawlings died four hours ago. He lost his will to live.

In its beginning, Batiuk’s comic cremated the heathens and the mirth.

Middle panel cell phone? No leftover pizza or even a tray? Gasp!

Oh and for the record we are at 53-13-3

Now I know where the phrase “If you want to see how the sausage is made” came from.

He may be doing Snoopy’s suppertime happy dance.

Zzzzzzz….

maybe skippy should have brought him to a place that served chili dogs or sloppy joes so he would have a good excuse to leave

And then I did Funky and then I did Cranky and then, and then, where am I? Help, I’ve fallen into my own comic strip, and I can’t get up.

Embarrassing

z z z z

………………………………………………………………………………

If there was ever any doubt this was going to go on for at least two weeks, it’s eliminated now.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Stupid

“Excuse me, sirs? It’s midnight and we’re closing. You have to leave.”

Every day I rush to GoComics to read the next installment of this Pulitzer worthy and scintillating arc. Is my sarcasm coming through?

Somebody, please correct me if I’m wrong. Isn’t this the third time Skip has interviewed Batton Thomas about his career for a feature story? It’s the third interview, and Batton has yet to reach the point where he was hired by a major syndicate. Batton has yet to share how he started Three O’Clock High, the comic strip he is allegedly most known for.

How many more of these bland, egotistical, obviously autobiographical “interviews” will TB inflict upon his readers in this strip’s future? Twelve? Twenty?

Thus far, these Batton Thomas interview story arcs have been limited to one week each. I hope this bloviating Batton Thomas nonsense is over for now, and we get a completely different story arc on Monday. Anything but more of this. Please.

He could read this strip and see a number of things NOT to do!

Why not get someone else to give life to Cranky, if you don’t want to bother with him yourself?

So I guess this means we pick up Monday with “three o’clock high.”

Yeah, I should have capitalized the name, but I don’t want to work any harder on this comment than Batty and Dangerous Dan did on the strip.

Here’s a title suggestion for Skip’s featured story on Batton Thomas:

The Batton Thomas Story: Out of the Blue and into the Bleah

Right now my Norwegian Forest cat is on my lap, making biscuits using my left thigh and I am getting phantom pains in my left foot. And it feels better than reading this strip.

I’m not in the standard camp of automatic nitpickers here (and I own the first several volumes of the “Funky Winkerbean” collections, which contains all the details in this past week’s “Crankshaft” among the introductory text pages of the first volume or so). But am I the first one here to bring up that this odd and dragging-on detour in “Crankshaft” is looking a lot like a lead-up to a retirement announcement?