Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for August 09, 2024

I hate having written… but please, please, please buy my books.

This strip has Pulitzer Prize written all over it—in invisible ink.

“But it was still totally my own decision to end the strip! That’s how much I love writing! I definitely wasn’t canceled by the syndicate, nosiree, I ended it myself because I love writing it!”

Yeah, Dorothy Parker did say that. She also said, according to Barry Day (editor of P.G. Wodehouse) that she’d “prefer to clean out ferry boats, peddle fish or e a Broadway chorus boy”. Instead, according to Day, she said she was “only a hardworking woman who writes for a living and hates writing more than anything else in the world.” I don’t know; seems like a strange comparison. Why not pick Charles Schultz?

We, too, hate that you ever wrote.

How comes nobody today asked WHERE he is?

Wasn’t this supposed to be an interview for the paper? Why isn’t Skip writing anything down?

Well after all its called writing and its called having written!

Do he miss doing “3 Oh Clock High”? Gee. Why else does ya theenks he is turning his “Wrinkles” into his “3 Oh Clock High”?

Now he’s comparing himself to Dorothy Parker. Sheesh.

I just saw Crankshaft going into the Happy Panda Massage parlor. I guess he’s finally getting that groin pull worked on?

This is even worse than those ROMEOS who hang out at Dale Evans a few times a week…

I love reading comics but hate having read FW

She died in 1967………..long term influence??

Mopey Pete hates writing too. Why else would he abandon a lucrative writing career at Atomik Komix to reopen a failed enterprise?

Where are Mope and Mindy anyway? It’s not like Batyuk to miss an opportunity to feature them. Is Monotoni’s now operating self-serve on the honor system?

crankshaft trying to get that ring off pierre s collar always up to no good

crankshaft and pizza box monster at cleveland horror and comic expo

What is this comic book thing about?! Enough, already.

My favorite Dorothy Parker quote, most apropos for the devoted daily posters on Luann: “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

We hate his having written too!

Having gone through the process of writing a book, shopping it around, getting it published and watching it sell a disappointing number of copies (the fate of 99.9% of all new books), I take Parker’s words as meaning she disliked the process of writing but was pleased with the ultimate product. Batton’s reversal of that tells us a lot about his creator, and it’s consistent with his strips about AtomiK KomiX and Starsuck Jones, in which he shows us the Boys In The Bullpen but never more than a poster or cover of the actual result. Batty loves the act of writing, but couldn’t give a rat’s patootie about the end result. Yeah, and that shows in the finished strips, doesn’t it?

This is so NOT Crankshaft.

And read the brand new comic strip, MURRAY WORTHLESS

Ever since I was a kid, I think the attraction to comics was a kind of an imagining or a wish that you were there in the story, with the allure of the background, the characters, the action. This reminds me of the feeling, in that you’re glad you’re not there or any part of this.

To paraphrase from Mrs. Parker, who must be doing 360s in her urns right now, “And it is that point that marks the first place at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

Hey you two…you’re getting off track again! I come here to read Crankshaft not these discussions that aren’t funny and don’t include Mr. C!

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” – Dorothy Parker

“I’d rather have a frontal lobotomy than a bottle in front of me.” – Tom Batiuk

Cs: At this point I feel bad for Batiuk

What the everloving is Patton saying? It sounds profound, which means exactly what in this strip.

So he’s saying he loves to write but he hates what he produced?

What’s Three O’ Clock High about? The comic strip, not the movie.