Ephemera

Some work ran in Crankshaft this week that not every newspaper chose to run. Since I wanted the work to be seen, I’m running it here.

Tom Batiuk Believes Comic Strips Can Do More Than Make Us Laugh

From cancer to immigration, the “Crankshaft” creator has never shied away from difficult subjects. His latest storyline takes a look at America today.

By Chris Raymond

For years, Tom Batiuk—creator of “Funky Winkerbean” and “Crankshaft”—has strived to expand the concept of a comic strip, challenging the idea that the art form is simply for laughs. This week’s “Crankshaft” storyline is a prime example: it uses recent news events to examine what it means to be an American today.

The center panel in four of the upcoming strips features a line of cursive handwriting plucked from a fictional essay written by Batiuk’s alter ego, cartoonist Batton Thomas, who we met back in the days of “Funky Winkerbean,” the comic Batiuk produced from 1972 to 2022. In one of the new strips, the line reads: “To me, America means home. A home where I feel safe and protected.”

In stark contrast, the very next panel features an illustration of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy detained by ICE agents alongside his father in January 2026 outside their home in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb. Dressed in a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, the child was held with his father for nearly two weeks at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. In a February interview with MPR News, his father said Liam continued to suffer from psychological trauma.

The student essay by Batton Thomas in the “Crankshaft” strips echoes a real-life essay Batiuk wrote as a high school senior in 1965. He received an award from the local paper for the piece. 

A dream about that essay sparked the idea for the storyline, he says by phone. “I had won that contest and I had written about it in ‘Funky’ on more than one occasion,” Batiuk adds, “and so the idea occurred to me to juxtapose the America that my high school eyes saw with the America my eyes see today … I picked some iconic images from the news to contrast with what the essay said.”

In addition to young Liam Ramos, the images running this week include a masked ICE agent, the barbed wire fence outside an ICE detention center, and Jan. 6 rioters storming a barricade at the U.S. Capitol.

“The thing I like about the approach to this storyline,” Batiuk explains, “is that I don’t really say anything. I kind of left it to people to make their own decisions.” 

That doesn’t mean he’s not prepped for pushback—and he’s received plenty of that in his career. In his 54 years as a comic artist, Batiuk has used his strips to touch on thorny subjects such as teen suicide, book banning, capital punishment, and same-sex couples at the prom.

Six years ago, he penned a story arc in “Funky Winkerbean” about an Iraqi immigrant named Adeela seized by misguided ICE agents while delivering a pizza. She narrowly escaped deportation.

But, as Batiuk told NPR in 2007, it was the “Funky Winkerbean” character, Lisa Crawford-Moore, who walked him through some of the most challenging storylines of his career, starting with her teenage pregnancy and proceeding through motherhood and two bouts with breast cancer.

“She showed me that, you know, this medium could handle the weight of ideas like that,” he explained in the interview.

Plus: The Comics That Made History

Batiuk first took Lisa through breast cancer in 1999, a storyline that ended with her in remission. After his own diagnoses of prostate cancer in 2003 and thyroid cancer two years later, he returned to her story, and in 2006 her cancer came back.

Though readers pleaded with him to spare her, Lisa eventually succumbed to the illness in 2007 at age 36. One disheartened reader emailed Batiuk to say, “You’re ruining comics for everyone.”

But, in 2008, Batiuk was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in editorial cartooning for this work, which is collected in the book Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe.

In “one of the best moments ever,” he says, he met a woman at a book signing who had read the strips and decided to get a mammogram. Her doctors discovered a growth, which they safely removed. “I thought, wow, that’s all you can ask for from a comic strip,” Batiuk says.

Batiuk is not the only comic strip artist to wrestle with challenging subject matter. Garry Trudeau used “Doonesbury” to help readers make sense of the Vietnam War, drug abuse, political corruption, and the AIDS crisis. And Mort Walker saddled Beetle Bailey with nightmares in 2013 to raise awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Over the years, a few of the 400-plus newspapers that carried Batiuk’s “Funky Winkerbean” strip elected not to publish strips with sensitive subjects. The same goes for the 300-plus papers that carry “Crankshaft.” But the vast majority do go along for the ride, including some that have leveraged the opportunity to educate readers by adding public service articles about sensitive topics like teen pregnancy. Batiuk’s team assists with those efforts by providing research materials.

“Comic strips are the perfect place to present things like this,” Batiuk  says. “They’re the most democratic art form ever. You don’t actually go to a palace, you don’t have to go to a church, you don’t have to go to a museum to engage with them—they come right to your house. There’s no privilege whatsoever.”

In the end, comics make issues like these easier to grasp. “These characters come into people’s homes and they become friends, because people see their lives reflected in them,” he explains. “They see them going to the drug store, dealing with something at the supermarket, and their lives are reflected back at them. “You show them something through that window and it becomes more powerful.”

With or without the laughter.