Coinciding with Comic-Con this week, my booth, the latest issue of Rob Hanes Adventures, and I all make a cameo in today’s Crankshaft syndicated comic strip, courtesy of Crankshaft’s creator-writer Tom Batiuk and artist Dan Davis, when some characters make a trip down to the convention in the strip!
Tom, of course, is the cartoonist creator of the long-running comic strip Funky Winkerbean, which he retired at the end of 2022 after 50 years of syndication—it was a strip I grew up with when I lived in New York and which I have started to revisit now that the strip is being collected. Crankshaft spun off from Funky Winkerbean in 1987, with many characters appearing in both strips.
Tom is a real comics fan and not only did I discover he liked my work, in 2016, he commissioned me to do a faux comic-book cover featuring characters he created and drew in his childhood—it appeared in the Feb. 14, 2016 episode of Funky Winkerbean, fulfilling a childhood dream (albeit for one day) to do a newspaper strip! (It was a fun piece to do and Tom graciously said I really nailed it, saying he knew I’d be the right person for what he had in mind.) I’ve met Tom in person on his occasional forays to Comic-Con and, as I reported last year, had a lovely dinner with him and his wife when he was a guest at the show!
Obviously, it was quite a surprise and honor when Tom contacted me earlier this year to tell me about his plan to portray me and my booth in this sequence—in fact, because he wanted to feature the cover to my latest issue in the strip, his request provided the impetus for me to produce the cover when I did, since he needed it in time to deliver the strip to the syndicate (usually a few months in advance). Anyway, yes, I’d been keeping this under wraps since early spring and how cool now to see it in print!
Below is the color version of the strip that posted online...
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