CLEVELAND, Ohio — “Crankshaft” is no stranger to serious. Tom Batiuk’s humorous and pithy comic strip has covered subjects such as adult illiteracy, Alzheimer’s disease and school violence in extended story arcs. In a new series premiering in over 300 newspapers including The Plain Dealer on Aug. 26, the strip is tackling the increasingly common and politicized trend of banning books.
“Books have always mattered to me,” Batiuk, an Akron native and Medina resident, said. “They’ve been an important part of my life, and so it was less choosing this topic than it was not ignoring it. Because the topic is out there.”
Indeed, according to the American Library Association, more than 4,200 books were targeted for censorship in 2023, the most since the group started tracking such efforts. With students heading back to school, Batiuk thought it’d be a good time to talk about it.
“My dad taught me how to read by reading me the funny pages in the paper,” he recalled. “Then when the bookmobile would show up at my school, it just became a rhythm for me — to hit the library and read books.”
“I wouldn’t want to see any of my books getting banned, and I’d like to support other authors.”
But this isn’t simply a personal issue for the cartoonist. It’s a societal one, too.
“When you ban books and don’t allow kids to see and experience what authors are saying, it shrinks their ability to think critically. That’s a fundamentally important thing,” Batiuk said.
“When you look at books that have been banned throughout history going back to Copernicus’s ‘Revolutions’ or Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ which is an allegory of the Holocaust, book banners are invariably on the wrong side of history.”
Censorship has particularly become a familiar tactic in the playbook of conservative-leaning groups and candidates. But Batiuk isn’t worried about “Crankshaft” becoming too political for some of his readers.
“It might be, but I feel good about the work,” he said. “I’m happy with what I was able to say through the characters and the changes that happen in them.”
The storyline focuses on Lillian, the local bookstore owner and next-door neighbor of the comic’s protagonist, cantankerous school bus driver Ed Crankshaft. The Westview school board has banned “Fahrenheit 451,” a book that high school teacher Les Moore had planned to cover in his class. Lillian steps up to provide copies of the novel to his students, which puts her in the middle of a metaphorical and literal firestorm.
“It added another layer to Lillian that I hadn’t dealt with before,” Batiuk said. “There was a reservoir of fortitude and courage that I hadn’t seen.”
In addition to Les Moore, the series features the return of a handful of characters from “Funky Winkerbean.” Batiuk’s original, classic strip ended in 2022, but its characters occasionally turn up in “Crankshaft” and on his website.
“I never really left them,” he said.
Of course, it wouldn’t be “Crankshaft” without Ed.
“There’s a neat sequence when he’s helping Lillian and goes into a backstory about how he didn’t know how to read when he was younger and what led to him becoming an adult who could read,” Batiuk said.
Book banning is a complicated subject. You might think it would be difficult to tackle in a comic strip. But just like he’s done for decades, this latest arc showcases Batiuk’s ability — combined with Dan Davis’ artwork — to tell stories with depth, wit and a rich cast of characters.
“I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years. I almost talk in three panels,” he said. “Even with a topic as serious as this, there’s a natural behavioral kind of humor that comes through. That’s what I try to tap into.”
The storyline runs through October. By the end of it, Batiuk hopes the series serves as a spark that gets his readers to think about this type of censorship and what they’d do if it happened in their town.
“If they read this and see that I’ve made a point about how crucial books can be to people’s lives and how banning them is detrimental, that’s a good thing,” he said.
The book-banning series in Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis’ “Crankshaft” premieres Aug. 26 and runs through October.
