Over Yonder

Voting for the 2025 Crankshaft Award is Still Open!

The Funkyverse has a new corporate sponsor: Yondr!

I previously called this kind of product placement “egola.” It’s like plugola or payola, except that you get paid in self-actualization instead of money. Usually, these are about Tom Batiuk’s weird fandoms (The Phantom Empire, Chad & Jeremy); events that met his ludicrous standards for treating him like a big shot (Ohioana Book Fair, Comic-Con); or both (Winnipeg Blue Bombers, “Montoni’s” pizza).

Yondr doesn’t appear to be any of those things.

Interestingly, Batiuk describes the product correctly. You define a phone-free zone, and instruct visitors to put their phones in the special pouches. The pouches can’t be unlocked until you leave the area, or use the “unlocking base.” You can still hold the phone, hear it, and see it well enough to know if the screen lights up. You can understand why certain institutions, like schools, would use such a thing.

But why would the famously anti-technology Tom Batiuk, fresh off a week of trashing the long-established standard of online payments, portray a technology product in a positive light? Especially one that hasn’t stroked his ego, as far as we know?

I think this image from Wednesday’s strip is the key:

I hid the text, because it’s not important. Look at the child’s face. Compared to the usual faces in the Funkyverse, that child is very upset. This isn’t the devil-may-care smirk or the resigned acceptance we usually see. That is the face of someone in mourning. Even Ed Crankshaft is going above and beyond in this shot. He looks genuinely irritated at this behavior. And unless I’m way off base (which I often am), these are both new drawings.

Why would Tom Batiuk be excited about a product that lets parents take cell phones away from children? Does it maybe… relate to his life experience, somehow? Oh, yes, it does. And we all know how.

This is Tom Batiuk telling the world he’s still upset that his mother tried to take away his comic books. It practically screams “See? See what it’s like when mean grownups take your precious thing away? Let’s see how you enjoy living without your precious phones!” He gets to make that point again, and slam something that didn’t exist before 1991!

And another thing: Ed is totally the wrong character build a Yondr arc around. What Funkyverse character (1) has a job where it’s reasonable to ask children to put their phones away, and (2) demands to be the center of attention at all times? Come on, you know who it is!

The star of Yondr Week should have been Les Moore.

Batiuk pulled Les out of mothballs to make him the star of The Burnings, even though Les almost single-handedly caused the entire problem. So there’s no real obstacle to using him here. Having Les – or at least, a teacher – be the ringleader of the Yondr Enforcement Team makes much more sense than having bus drivers do it.

Using Les in this role would (1) fit his long-running characterization, and (2) poke a little fun at the character, something the Funkyverse desperately needs.

The Funkyverse is full of unsympathetic comedy protagonists, but it doesn’t use them properly. Characters like Les Moore and Ed Crankshaft need to get pushback every once in a while. A week about Yondr is a perfect opportunity to take Les down a peg. Not in an overly mean way, but in a way that tells readers “okay, I get it, this character is a little overbearing sometimes.” And other characters get to acknowledge it too.

But Tom Batiuk is so enamored with his interpretation of Lisa and Les as The Greatest Tragedy In Human History and Her Long-Suffering Heroic Disciple that he’s blind to things like this. But here’s what I’d do:

Monday Panel 1: Principal Nate: “The school board is mandating we use Yondr, which requires students to put their phones in these special pouches during class. We need volunteers to help us with the roll out.” Panel 2: Les, in a group of bored-looking teachers sitting in meeting room chairs, enthusiastically raises his hand. Panel 3: “Okay, I think we all saw that coming. Anybody else?”

Imagine if Les got to deliver the “we have our ways of finding out” line.

It’s not hard to imagine a situation where Les is a little too overzealous about enforcing the rules, or enforces them in selfish ways. And the kids call him out on it. Here’s what I would do with the above panel:

Now that’s a quarter inch from reality.

The Compleat Batton Thomas

Hi, folks! The Crankshaft Awards are still under construction, due to some nasty cold here in the upper Midwest. (My hometown was minus 6 degrees on Monday.)

So in the meantime, I want to document the entire Batton Thomas interview. Boring, I know, but I really don’t know how else to respond to it. I can’t use Batton to mock Tom Batiuk, because Batton already does a spectacular job of that without my help. And I think we’ve all wailed and gnashed our teeth in the comments about what an inane, boring, self-serving ego trip this all is. But it just keeps going.

I thought the best way to document it would be to put it all in one place, to illustrate how much nothing there is in what has now been nine weeks of strips.

August 5, 2024: Skip seeks Batton to do an interview, so he immediately heads to Komix Korner. Batton saunters in on cue. He quotes Dorothy Parker for some reason, probably to show off his writerliness.

August 19: Skip needs to do another interview for a “longer and more in-depth” piece. He asks “what sparked your interest in comics?” Of course, it’s comic books. Batton traveled to New York and failed to be hired by either DC or Marvel.

January 27 ,2025: Batton sucks at being an art teacher, so he badgers the local paper into letting him draw a cartoon. He meets with a syndicate, NEA, which gives him some advice on how to turn it into a comic strip.

March 17: Batton talks about what inspired him to become a cartoonist. Spoiler alert: it was comic books.

May 26: Batton comes up with the name for his proto-strip Rappin’ Around, and annoys Roger Bollen, the creator of Animal Crackers. Roger says “just because I visited the syndicates in New York doesn’t mean you have to.” Batton immediately announces his plan to do this, rejecting Bollen’s advice right to his face.

July 14: Skip visits Batton in his studio. Batton takes his second trip to New York, eats at Howard Johnson’s, and gets rejected by the syndicates. But he returns home to find an important-looking letter in the mail, despite having spoken to no one. After telling a friend about it, Batton realizes that he is now better than everyone else.

September 1: Skip asks “So what happened after Publishers-Hall offered you a contract for your own syndicated comic strip?” Batton mostly whined about how difficult it was.

September 29: Batton is sitting with Skip for yet another interview when he meets Jeff, his “dopplegänger from the comics shop.” (The umlaut was Batiuk’s.) Ed Crankshaft then rips into Batton over the diminished presence of “Grandpa Wrinkles” in the comic strip.

January 19, 2026: Batton and Skip visit Batton’s first apartment house, Elyria High School, and syndicate president Dick Sherry visits. Batton says Sherry’s was “thoughtful and considerate”, but “it felt like we weren’t on the same page” as Sherry looked at some new strips. This anecdote is never resolved, as Batton talks about the apartment house some more instead.

To be continued, no doubt…

Oh Sherry

This week in Crankshaft:

Hmm, that second panel looks familiar:

This is a photo I dug out of the image folder at the old funkywinkerbean.com in 2022. At the time, I didn’t know who this man was. The only thing I knew was that he was too young to be Hal Foster, who would have been about 80 years old. This came up during the “Hal Foster rips off Phil Holt’s work and publishes it in Prince Valiant” arc, during which Batton Thomas himself applied for the job. I wondered if Tom Batiuk had ever auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in real life, and if this photo was evidence of that. It’s not.

This week, an Anonymous poster on Comics Curmudgeon explained:

Dick Sherry was the president of PUBLISHERS-HALL SYNDICATE around the time Funky Winkerbean was picked up.

I’m glad for that explanation, because Lord knows Tom Batiuk didn’t provide one. And it seems to check out. Wikipedia says “some of the more notable strips syndicated by the company include Pogo, Dennis The Menace, Funky Winkerbean (snort).” So this company would have been Batiuk’s first publisher, and Sherry his employer’s president.

Apparently Batiuk liked Sherry, since Batton went out of his way to call his visit “thoughtful and considerate.” Why is that even noteworthy? A meeting with an employer, especially a one-time visit at the start of an agreed-upon work-from-home arrangement, is courteous by default. Considering the absurd level of consideration Tom Batiuk routinely expects, I wonder what Sherry did to earn this honor. Did he bring Luigi’s pizza and fresh comic books?

Information about Sherry is scanty. The only thing I could find was in an interview with comic book writer Rick Marschall. He says that Sherry was still in this job in 1977, and that he liked hiring international artists so he could take “trips around the world at the syndicate’s expense to have creative conferences with these cartoonists.”

One wonders why he bothered hiring a comic strip creator from Akron rather than Las Vegas or Orlando. Maybe he didn’t have enough clout within the company yet. Maybe that’s the entire reason Funky Winkerbean ever existed at all! Maybe Dick Sherry wanted to hire a cartoonist from Honolulu, but the company refused to reimburse the travel, so he had to take his vacation in Ohio instead. And 50+ years later, here we all are.