Your Favorite… Crab Cakes – A Crankshaft Collection


By Tom Batuik & Chuck Ayers (Andrews McMeel Publishing)
ISBN: 978-0-7407-2666-8

Although in a sharp decline, extended-narrative comics strips still have a place in modern cartooning. Indeed in the case of creators like Tom Batuik the slide into continuity is almost inescapable.

Thomas Martin Batuik was born in Akron, Ohio in March 1947 and attended the famous (for all the wrong reasons) Kent State University. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) and became a Junior High School art teacher. This endeavour soon inspired the creation of his legendary newspaper strip Funky Winkerbean.

The long-lived (originally gag-a-day) school-based strip launched on March 27th 1972 and over the years developed strong soap opera tendencies and a potent attention to contemporary social issues to compliment the humour.

It also spawned two separate spin-off strips: John Darling (1979-1990) and today’s star turn Crankshaft which began in 1987 and is still going strong seven days a week, with syndication in more than 300 newspapers across the world.

Batuik scripts and fellow scion of Akron Chuck Ayers illustrates the ongoing saga of a curmudgeonly senior citizen barely getting by in a rapidly-changing modern world. Ayers has also contributed cartoons to the Akron Beacon Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes and others and illustrated a number of school textbooks.

Deeply invested in nostalgia, family and day-to-day existence, the strip details how crusty old fart Ed Crankshaft grows ever older disgracefully and with great discontent. Ed has a job driving a school bus and derives much delight from annoying parents by driving off without their kids, reversing over mailboxes and holding up traffic whenever he can. In fact, these are all popular sports every school board bus driver indulges in…

Ed’s supporting cast include his wilful cat Pickles, two adult daughters Chris and Pam, son-in-law Jeff and grandchildren Max and Mindy, and, whereas the kids get to see him at his gruff sentimental best, the grown-ups usually get the raw edge of his confusion and ire with the increasingly chaotic state of contemporary life…

Ed was once a pro baseball player and in many episodes his skill in throwing missiles generates lots of laughs, but that eccentric career also provided one of the series’ most rewarding themes of social interest. Ed never learned to read and very late on began adult literacy classes, highlighting an issue that impacts a vast number of older readers.

Of equal import and power is a long running storyline with Crankshaft regularly accompanying old pal Ralph to the Sunny Days Nursing Home where Ralph’s wife Helen is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s Disease. Even here there’s a regular fount of golden-aged humour since Ed is a constant target for the amorous attentions of the institution’s army of love-starved widows…

This particular collection of strips – they’re all equally enjoyable and praiseworthy – spends a great deal of time depicting the road-raging joys of the School Run, explores Ed’s ongoing war with the newspaper delivery girl, his literal penny-pinching, a spate of funerals and weddings, the always-inclement Mid-Western weather and the coffee made by bus depot secretary Lena. Rumours are that it might well be considered a weapon of mass destruction…

Justice and Due Process take a holiday when Crankshaft serves on a jury, but those outbursts are balanced by wry reminiscences when Ed takes Max and Mindy on an extended tour of his scrapbooks…

Ed declares a vendetta on the mailbox of neighbour Mr. Keesterman, gleefully operates a bug-zapper that can be seen from space and proudly, loudly makes a spectacle of himself at doctor, dentist, barber, opticians and supermarket, but shows his softer side in visits with Ralph to Sunny Days a well as a school trip to the National War Memorial in Washington DC. Another milestone is reached when he wins a certificate for his reading proficiency but that only leads to more grief as he’s then expected to start using the Library computer…

…And then there are the kids who manage – despite all his efforts – to board Ed’s bus every morning. They may have the numbers, but he has experience, ruthlessness and a working knowledge of terror-tactics to keep the little monsters in line if they do get into his big yellow fortress…

He must love the little perishers really: after all, in vacation time he drives an ice cream truck to take the edge off the searing heat… if they can catch him…

Gently funny, powerfully engaging and offering some of the best zingers and put-downs in the comedy business, the assorted chronicles of Crankshaft are a family treat to shared and compared by all fans of cartooning excellence.
© 2002 Media Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved.