Crankshaft Given Timeout In Oshkosh

According to this column in the Oshkosh Northwestern, an odd cartoon October 24 run in the Tom Batiuk/Chuck Ayers feature Crankshaft (available for view through these archives) was enough to earn the feature a brief suspension from the pages of that paper. At issue was a joke the editors of that paper believe trivialized rape, a joke others have described as playing into a myth that rape is solely about sexual attraction and therefore not a concern for older women.

You can get an idea of how the cartoon played with comics fans by checking out Alan Gardner's comments threads. As for my view, I think it was a crappy joke. The Crankshaft character is bound to say stupid, hurtful things -- that's his modus operandi, along the line of an Archie Bunker or Gregory House. But this joke was presented in a way where it seems 99 percent likely the reader is supposed to find sympathy with Crankshaft's position in a way that we then afford him the virtue of puncturing the other women's vanity in that Dr. House way that's not very tactful. Without that, it's not really a joke at all, except in a very satirical way where we show a character saying something so asinine in a certain context the shock of it is humorous.

However, until there's a pattern of these things, I don't see this is as grounds for a significant indictment of the cartoonists, and I hope this doesn't turn into one of those Internet gotchas followed in a few days by a vigorous defense of the strip and its creators as if they were discovered transporting a body. It's just a joke that didn't work. You write 700 gags a year, for as many years as Batiuk has in a very successful career, you're going to have one or two where you don't see the other side of how it's going to be read (just as you're likely to subconsciously repeat someone else's joke a few times over the years, another classic gotcha-defense instigator). This is doubly true of a strip where one of the characters is supposed to act in cantankerous fashion or otherwise pushes the boundaries of acceptable behavior. The only thing that's slightly baffling is that even broaching the outer gates of a joke touching in any way on the subject of rape didn't set off the alarms of one of the production people that usually catch these things so that every possible reading of the strip was ascertained and a phone call was made to the syndicate editor.

I'm also impressed that the editors in Oshkosh are that on top of their comics page.
 
posted 10:06 pm PST | Permalink
 

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