Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for June 16, 2024

I think we can move the question “Is Crankshaft getting cancelled on 12/31/24?” to the “yes” box.

“Tick tock?” Wouldn’t the sound of a cuckoo clock work better here?

We take a break from kissing the four-color tuchis of Silver Age comic books to give you Mr. Ed Crankshaft, making only his third appearance this month in the strip that’s named after him. In this installment Ed hears the clockwork machinations of Death getting ever louder. Funny, I always assumed such musings on imminent mortality were the intellectual property of “Pluggers.”

I also thought Cranky was functionally illiterate until he was well into his “golden years,” so how can young dad Ed be reading to his daughters?

O’Malley, you’re eloquent, prescient, and somewhat annoying. I thought Tom and Dan did an excellent job on today’s strip, and while you picked up on some inconsistencies, the overall message of today’s strip is poignant; almost bittersweet. Please take back your nitpicking and enjoy a superb entry in 21st century comicdom.

Death.

As an older person, I do feel the passage of time with more emphasis.

So: Ed’s heroism in fighting baseball racism and fighting on Omaha beach is…Him sleeping with a dog? Watching his sweetie knit? This guy Tom. He’s a natural born storyteller.

Happy Folderol Day, Ed!

One o’clock.. two o’clock.. three o’clock.. Tock!

Not tells me he is upload this video on Tick Tock too.

Panel 5, Ed’s girlfriend: “Ed honey, maybe it’s NOT a bad thing that you lost the Hitler Look-a-Like contest again.”

You is getting older all your life and you beings to hears the clock running outta time louder and louder. What a sad and depressing way to starts a Sunday.

Ed sat on the porch swing of the house in which he grew up, and though the porch and the swing had been replaced many times over the years, what hadn’t been replaced were the memories it evoked in Ed. From the earliest times in his life, Ed remembered sitting on that swing as a young child with his mother lovingly by his side. Later, as an adolescent, the porch swing was a place to relax and dream of the day’s activities and adventures to come. As a young man home on leave from the Army, Ed and his wife enjoyed the cool summer evenings with a radio softly playing Glenn Miller in the background. And it wasn’t long after that Ed and his two children cuddled together as he read to them the same nursery rhymes that his mother had once read to him. Finally, Ed found himself one day alone on that same porch, sitting in the same swing, drifting back in time, reliving the same fond moments like a scrapbook from his life’s story, which were as indelibly etched into his heart and mind and more vivid than any photograph could have been. Not a single memory had faded over time, though Ed could hear the constant ticking of time reminding him that nothing in this life can last forever except our memories. Soon, Ed himself would fade into a memory that maybe someone else would carry on, sitting on that same porch, in the same swing, with the same relentless ticking of time reminding us that nothing lasts forever.

Even on Father’s Day, you cannot have a pleasant comment. Typical. I hope YOU do not have children, if so they have my sympathy.

Time marches on. Nothing lasts forever.

Yes I liked today’s Cranky also. My only criticism would be I’d like to have one panel with Ed in a Mudhens uniform.

Those old Westclox were LOUD.

And time marches on!

time keeps on ticking into the future… Steve Miller Band/Fly Like An Eagle

Good one. Many fathers sitting alone like that today.

Wow! Ed makes an appearance in his own strip! To sit alone and contemplate his death! Happy Father’s Day everyone!

Loving this — it’s bittersweet to reflect back on the days when I was young and they were little and their lives revolved around their parents. When I knew all their friends and we spoke every day..

What in the Wide World of Sport goes on here?

The last panel should’ve been a silent scene of a solitary tombstone… Tick tock, Ed…

This is so wholesome! I read this one on Arcamax first,but it’s much sweeter reading it bigger.

Lovely montage of Ed’s life, time does pass so quickly.

You answer that question. I believe you are functionally illiterate.

in every panel, the “tick tock” text gets larger

Crankshaft’s time is coming

Masky will bring him to hell soon

I thought he was illiterate back then?

Do we ever see Crank’s wife?

I guess the moral is when you’re an insufferable jerk your whole life nobody celebrates you on Father’s Day.

Nice offering from Batiuk, Inc. today. Shows us what they can do when they apply themselves. Happy Father’s Day, Tom.

The pessimist in me hopes the cartoonist isn’t just cramming a month’s worth of Ed into the strip because we won’t be seeing him for a while.

What an absolutely morbid and horrid strip for any day, let alone Fathers Day. What the heck were they thinking. Or were they.

Today is the second time in a couple of months we’ve seen Chris, Crankshaft’s younger daughter, as a child in the strip. We haven’t seen adult Chris for a few years now. Every time we do, it’s only when Ed is visiting her in NYC. I guess the terms of Chris’s probation won’t allow her to leave the state of New York?

Chris never visits home for the holidays? Did I miss a story where Pam and Chris no longer get along?

Such a very accurate and touching display of how time flies by as we age. But if you think this one’s good, take a gander at today’s Arlo & Janis which should touch your soul.

Sun is the same, in a relative way, but you’re older / Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Time and tides wait for no man.

Let’s riff on Harry Belafonte for a minute:

.

Where are you going my little one? Little one

Where are you going, my baby, my own?

Turn around and you’re two, turn around and you’re four

Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of the door

Turn around

Turn around

.

Turn around and you’re a young girl

Goin’ out of the door

Where are you going my little one? Little one

Little Dirndls and petticoats, where have you gone?

Turn around and you’re tiny, turn around and you’re grown

Turn around and you’re a young wife with babes of your own

Turn around

Turn around

.

Turn around and you’re a young wife with babes of your own

Where are you going my little one? Little one

Where are you going, my baby, my own?

Now, to drop that hot steamer in the punchbowl…

This is a mean spirited strip, and suggests to me that Tom despises the title character of this strip as much as he despised the title character in his previous strip. Yes, viewed in isolation its a cute, if cliched, commentary on aging and how we all hear the timer ticking down. But in the context of the last two years of Crankshaft, Batiuk’s doing what he did to Funky Winkerbean: exiling him from his own strip, and punishing him for not being what the Glorious Writer wants him to be.

For those who don’t know, in Act III Funky Winkerbean, the title character started showing up less and less often. And when he did show up, he was usually suffering—from alcoholism (though his AA meeting rambles eventually became something of an unintentional joke), overweight, aches and pains (remember all those “running with Les” strips, in which Tom’s author avatar did just fine despite being just as old?), divorce, his son being captured by the Taliban and thought dead not once but twice, and the eventual failure of his business. All this because (some say) Tom didn’t like his silly nickname, which Tom chose as the title for the strip. I never much bought into that; I always thought Tom hated Funky because he actually graduated from high school and put it behind him—unlike the other characters in the strip, who seemed to have never fully left.

So now today’s Crankshaft. Yeah, Cranky’s sitting on the porch swing recalling his past and hearing his “bury by date” clock ticking. Kinda sweet, until you consider the last week or two of the main story. This week alone we have seen children (Homunculus Jff), middle-aged adults (MoPete), older middle aged adults (Jff), old people (Flush Foreman) and dead-but-still-under-contract people (Philled Hole) actually doing things. Everybody else in the strip still seems to have a life, while the title character sits on the swing waiting to die.

????Slow day at everybody’s office