Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for October 04, 2024

“The book isn’t banned, chucklehead! It’s just not on the school’s list of assignable books, or whatever gibberish the principal used!”

“And I’m not selling these copies! Les Moore bought them from Euphrates-Tigris and left them here for his students to pick up! Where have you been for the past forty days and nights? Fasting in the desert while waiting for Les Moore to tempt you?”

“Just listen to this—‘Dear Penthouse Forum; I’m an elderly school bus driver who never thought this would happen to me, but one day on my route two gorgeous grandmas came out in just their bathrobes and said to me…’ Ed, will you get your magazine out of my book!”

Lillian: “Here’s the first sentence! ‘It was a pleasure to burn…’ Um, let’s skip a bit…‘Burn the old crone and her books, we all chanted, laughing…’ UMM…”

Wow, who saw THIS twist coming?! Oh…everybody? (shrugs) “It’s called triting.”

Brief summary of the book: Guy Montag is a fireman in charge of burning books in a grim, futuristic United States. The book opens with a brief description of the pleasure he experiences while on the job one evening. He wears a helmet emblazoned with the numeral 451 (the temperature at which paper burns), a black uniform with a salamander on the arm, and a “phoenix disc” on his chest. On his way home from the fire station, he feels a sense of nervous anticipation. After suspecting a lingering nearby presence, he meets his new neighbor, an inquisitive and unusual seventeen-year-old named Clarisse McClellan. She immediately recognizes him as a fireman and seems fascinated by him and his uniform. She explains that she is “crazy” and proceeds to suggest that the original duty of firemen was to extinguish fires rather than to light them. She asks him about his job and tells him that she comes from a strange family that does such peculiar things as talk to each other and walk places (being a pedestrian, like reading, is against the law)…I think I’m going to go back and read this book again. I read it about 60 years ago. It wasn’t ‘forbidden’ then…

“We just wants you to stops selling banned books to ours kids”. BANNED BOOKS? WHAT BANNED BOOKS? There only one book in question here and it ain’t even banned in the first place. What a load of….. It’s called….you knows what!

I was hoping that Lillian holding the book in front of the crowd would have the same result from holding garlic in front of a vampire.

You go Girl ! , The reality of a situation like this is She would be Shouted down because……That’s what these people do !

The idea that they’d just stand there patiently while she reads to them is pretty ludicrous.

To recap: teenagers read Fahrenheit 451 because their teacher told them not to. An angry mob protesting said book is going to sit quietly and listen while an elderly woman reads it to them. Tom Batiuk tells his perplexed readers, “It’s called writing.”

Someone in the crowd yells out; “Spoilers!”

It’s too bad we can’t comment with gifs or post memes/pictures..

I really doubt if this crowd is intellectually able to even understand the words of this book you’re going to read excerpts from, Lillian.

I read 451 years ago and was unimpressed from a SF point of view. It is not his best work. But it is considered politically charged so I guess the trumps everything else. I preferred Asimov.

Keep on, Lillian!

Wasting your breath……..

batiuks next arc will be the art of watching paint dry

Lillian stood tall, unflinching before the crowd, their voices rising in waves of anger. “Monster!” they yelled. “You’re rotting the minds of our children, our future!” The words struck the air like fists. They called her slurs they barely understood—"Communist!" “Marxist!”—words they tossed like stones, eager to break her resolve. They spat these insults, desperate to condemn her, but their rage was blind, born out of fear rather than knowledge.

Ed stood beside her, silent but solid, watching. His hands were steady in his pockets, though his jaw clenched at the ugliness swelling around them.

Lillian didn’t flinch. Instead, she opened the book in her hands, her eyes scanning the pages of Fahrenheit 451. She looked up, her voice cutting through the storm of shouts. “Let me read to you a passage from this book,” she said. The crowd jeered, but she read anyway.

“‘If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you’ll never learn.’” Her voice carried over the noise, clear and steady. The crowd roared louder, but Lillian kept going, her grip on the book firm. “This book isn’t about poisoning minds. It’s about opening them. About not being afraid to learn, to think, to challenge ourselves.”

The mob screamed, faces twisted with disgust, hurling words like “degenerate” and worse, but Ed saw something else. In Lillian’s defiance, he saw courage. He saw the principles he had fought for all those years ago in the war—the right to think, the right to speak, the right to be free.

Lillian met their fury with calm, her voice unwavering. “Maybe being uncomfortable is what you need. Maybe it’s what wakes you up. There’s more than one way of thinking in this world. We’re not all meant to fit into a single mold.”

Ed watched the light of defiance in her eyes and smiled. Lillian was a woman willing to stand, even when hatred pressed down from all sides. And what she stood on wasn’t just stubbornness, but the very foundation of the freedom this country claimed to cherish.

Just call the cops and arrest the ignorant, arsonist, un-American mob of Nazis.

Did you tire of exploding grills, destroyed mailboxes, school bus hijinks, Bean’s End shenanigans, and malapropisms? Well, Tom Batiuk’s new and improved ‘Crankshaft’ is made for people just like you! Incredibly poorly written award-bait drama! Now with Cringe™ in every panel. Enjoy!

This is so ridiculous. I haven’t laughed this hard at a ‘Crankshaft’ strip in months. Thanks, Tom.

Splat!

Siding, siding! Glorious, singed turquoise siding!

Today’s comic strip is not coming up. All of my other comic strips that I follow are fine. Anyone else having the same issue?

I had an awful thought this morning. What if the “brave and courageous” Lillian isn’t really trying to persuade the mob to dissipate by reading several passages from the book? What she’s doing can be considered brave and courageous, fulfilling what Batty said about her in the puff pieces. But what if her reading from the book is only a delay tactic? What if Lillian is distracting the mob to give time for the tale’s true hero, Best Actress Award Winner Les Moore, to arrive? Best Actress Award Winner Les Moore, not Lillian, will be the TB’s ultimate hero of this story. Why bring Best Actress Award Winner Les Moore, Batty’s favorite character, out of mothballs only to play a supporting role to Lillian?

Despite his open defiance of the board’s “not approved to teach” order and the damage to the Booksmeller and Village Booksmith bookstores, I fear Best Actress Award Winner Les Moore gets away with it unscathed and comes out smelling like a rose. Oh, how I hate him.

Wow, talk about conflicted. I’ll be rooting for the hated Lillian McKenzie to be the hero over Best Actress Award Winner Les Moore. The lesser of two evils.

Don’t worry folks, Lillian should tire of reading to them sometime around Halloween.

I and a few others have commented that as printed the book clocks in at 150 to 160 pages; Lil’s is unusually large. I theorized that this edition is extra large print for a special class of the visually impaired which Les is teaching. I now think that Lil’s edition has dozens of stills from the movie. Lil is going to sit on a singed, half-burnt step—which miraculously does not break under her—and read to the mob. Occasionally she will turn the book to them so they can see the pretty pictures. The mob will be enthralled and since it is apparently still dark night they will set fire to their signs to illuminate the reading. Everyone will be happy and enlightened and go home to catch up on their sleep.

Cranky stands with his arms folded in defiance toward the crowd…….

Shades of “To Kill a Mockingbird”…

So, Batty thinks logic and reason and a few lines from Bradbury is going to get through to some MAGA terrorists?

He hasn’t been paying attention to what’s going on in real-world Ohio.

You can’t civilize a mob and you can’t fix stupid.

Does anyone else realize Lisa died 17 years ago today? I was 4 when it happened (Didn’t start or know about FW until I was 20).

To recap: the 1933 Nazi book-burnings were directed against a specific group of books (nearly all were written by Jewish authors) as part of a program to dehumanize a people, destroy their culture and eventually exterminate the people themselves.

The programs of prohibiting teaching and removing books from libraries in some states bears a disturbing resemblance, as most of the books that have been treated this way (go ahead, google it, I’ll wait) are by and about LBGTQ and/or Black people, whom the “banners” have openly stated are deviates and degenerates (terms the Nazis used for Jewish authors as well).

Fahrenheit 451 is about how TV and similar passive media were displacing reading (and perhaps thinking) in the early 1950s. The device of book-burning is directed at all reading and all books, and is an attempt by this non-reading, non-thinking culture to eliminate the few deviates left.

The Nazi book burning as a lead-in to the Holocaust, and the decline of reading in America (explored more formally in Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death, which asks whether our Republic can even operate in a culture where all public discourse must take the form of show business) are both important topics. They are also not that closely related. Batiuk seems to be mashing them together into a pointless muck.

Yeah, burning books is generally bad (though pulping and recycling surplus copies of trashy novels and outdated textbooks is not a bad idea). But what exactly is Batty trying to warn us about? That we are in the early stages of a pogrom? If so, against whom? (Oops, can’t talk about that, might offend an 80-year-old grandma in Toledo). That our TV/Internet culture is destroying our ability to think? Both? Something else entirely? I have no idea.

It’s called “writing.”

Beware of stupid people in large groups

I COULD get political, and, try to point out how the mobs statement of “we know all we need to know” sounds like sheep following some candidates. But I won’t.

listen old crow whatever you say wont change are mind and where gonna break your bodyguards hip !!!!

Crankshaft said, this is one time I’m glad I’m just a cardboard cutout.

Tomorrow, Lillian accidentally steps into the water puddle and melts.

Lillian, the Wicked Witch of the West(view): I’m melting! Melting! Oh, what a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little book like that could destroy my beautiful wickedness!

Yeah, yeah, I know. Lillian lives in Centerville, not Westview. Work with me, will ya?

Ed is wondering why he’s still there.

If she feels so strongly about any book reach out to the parents. Something our schools need to do as well.I am opposed to ANY indoctrination.