Stop, Collaborate And Listen

My post from 9 days ago didn’t age well.

I bemoaned Tom Batiuk’s lack of ambition about his ambitionlessness, then he turns around and gives us his most ambitious ambitionless week yet.

This week is certainly trying to be something. And you don’t have to squint too hard to see what it is: a collection of noble statements about what America claims to be, juxtaposed with perceived current American realities.

A lot of commenters had great things to say about this week. Here’s the perfect place to start:

At no point has the conversation descended into arguments over politics. Though we all may have definite, even passionate, opinions on various political issues that are both compelling and well thought out, this isn’t an appropriate forum for that.

Y. Knott

To try and keep that tone, I will start by saying that I’m not here to talk about the rightness or wrongness of this week’s content. I’m here to talk about how well or poorly it is expressed. (You can probably guess which side I’m going to land on.)

Tom himself literally stated in the puff piece that he is not saying anything in the strips and is letting people make the commentary.

wherescrankshaft

Let’s dive into that puff piece! It is https://www.gocomics.com/extras/tom-batiuk-crankshaft-america-essay (hat tip to J.J. O’Malley).

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

We’re not even past the headline yet, and it’s already obvious Batiuk wrote it.

As I said about Tom Batiuk’s interview with Terence Dollard awhile back: the people who interview Tom Batiuk do nothing but build strawmen out of softballs. One of Tom’s favorite notions is that he’s some kind of visionary for thinking comic strips don’t have to be funny. No one ever said they did! And some of the funniest strips are best remembered for their least funny moments.

From cancer to immigration, the “Crankshaft” creator has never shied away from difficult subjects.

OK, I’ll give him that.

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.

This sounds exactly like a high school essay, doesn’t it? The confident mastery of the obvious, the general air of pretentiousness, the tacked-on sentence clauses and irrelevant details.

Spider-Man backpack

Knowing what Tom Batiuk is really like, how important is that detail? If it was a Buzz Lightyear backpack, would Batiuk have ever learned of Ramos’ existence? He seems like the kind of guy who would have a Google News alert set up for the name of any comic book he thinks he should be the writer of.

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.

And now it has been written in a blog Tom Batiuk received an award and was written about in the newspaper. Will the next puff piece writer say “Batiuk has received an award and was written about in a newspaper and a blog”? Oh crap, now it’s a newspaper and two blogs.

A dream about that essay sparked the idea for the storyline, he says by phone

You heard it yourself, folks. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Tom Batiuk dreams about awards he won in high school 60 years ago. He said it. Not me.

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.

This article ran on Tuesday, and Batiuk just tipped off most of his shock moments for the upcoming week. And shock moments are all he has.

“The thing I like about the approach to this storyline,” Batiuk explains, “is that I don’t really say anything.

Same thing you’ve been doing for 25 years: not telling us anything. Just like you didn’t tell us where Eugene moved to or why. But you wrote two weeks of him saying goodbye slowly, and starting to go somewhere even more slowly.

I kind of left it to people to make their own decisions.

This is one of those things Batiuk likes to say about himself without really understanding it. He thinks it makes him sound noble, but he doesn’t realize how much his life’s work contradicts it. Tom Batiuk’s existence is a monument to his belief that all decisions should be made by him, or at least approved by him.

That doesn’t mean he’s not prepped for pushback—and he’s received plenty of that in his career.

Really? When? From who? Is he talking about that one time he got pulled from the Northern Wisconsin News over a joke that should have gotten him nationally roasted? Because it happened to Bobby Knight when he said a very similar thing.

Does he mean us? We don’t give pushback. We give thoughtful, critical analysis of his work. We don’t take him to task about his subject matter, except in his general choices of what to write about (“oh Lord, not another Batton Thomas week”).

Even Comics Curmudgeon rarely mentions his work anymore. And from what I’ve found on the Internet, genuine fans stopped bothering 15 years ago.

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.

Again: I never said he didn’t try. However half-assed all four of those attempts were.

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.

And we all know how she narrowly escaped deportation: by having Montoni’s ask Bill Clinton to do them a solid! During the first Trump administration. I wonder why the puff piece didn’t mention that.

Batiuk wrote himself into a corner, couldn’t write himself out, and then had to cover up his own incompetence in his own propaganda. Politics was this man’s true calling. North Korean politics.

Lisa Crawford-Moore

And here we are, folks! Somehow we went from real children and real American issues to Tom Batiuk’s Dollar Tree Lenore. Who’s been dead for 20 fucking years now. And who nobody ever really liked anyway.

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.

10/10 no notes.

In “one of the best moments ever,” he says, he met a woman at a book signing…

You know how we always joke about there never being people at those book signings? Well, there’s your proof.

OK, I selectively quoted that to make a joke.

…who had read the strips and decided to get a mammogram.

Yet another real incident from Tom Batiuk’s life that ended up in the comic strip. Because of Lisa’s Story (available near you!) Marianne Winters discovered her own cancer, thanks to the great Les Moore! Marianne gave Les her Oscar Trophy, $1,000,000, a new car, the Pulitzer Prize, and a handjob.

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.

It is unclear whether the growth or the comic strip was safely removed. I think they’re both equally toxic.

Batiuk is not the only comic strip artist to wrestle with challenging subject matter. Garry Trudeau used “Doonesbury”

Yes, let’s talk about Doonesbury, shall we? Let’s compare these two visionary cartoonists, since you’re trying to imply that Batiuk is on Trudeau’s level. Here’s how they each handled the same “difficult subject”:

Trudeau kept the gore offscreen to center the moment on the human emotion; Batiuk did the exact opposite. Keep in mind that Trudeau’s character is a soldier who would have been trained that limb loss was a possible outcome. Batiuk’s character was a high school girl who just won a prestigious music scholarship. Notice which one isn’t the least bit bothered. And which strip actually had a joke.

Notice also that Becky leads with “tell him I said hi”, as if her monumental act of forgiveness were the less important message. And the effects on her family were even less important! “Yeah, my mom’s a little bummed that I lost a 6-figure scholarship and a direct path to a prestigious career, and she’s suddenly gonna have to figure out how to pay for Kent Fucking State like everyone else in this craphole. But she’ll get over it.” And even a socially inept high school girlfriend on an ordinary day should have something more meaningful to say than “tell him I said hi.” Ugh.

the vast majority [of newspapers] do go along for the ride [by carrying controversial FW/CS strips]

Remember what I said about Batiuk being kicked out of the Northern Wisconsin News that one time? Thanks for proving my point. That joke was pretty accurate, wasn’t it?

And Mort Walker saddled Beetle Bailey with nightmares in 2013 to raise awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The “Sarge beats Beetle into a puddle for no good reason” jokes sure haven’t stopped.

[comic strips] come right to your house. There’s no privilege whatsoever.

Just like ICE!

people see their lives reflected in [the characters]

Yeah. So did I once.

With or without the laughter.

Large bet on “without.”

Salt Farming

I been out of the loop for a few days, as harvest ratchets up to a fever pitch I haven’t had much time for anything else. I had read the dumb pumpkin patch Sunday strip, and then blithely ignored the internet for the next few days. But as I was taking wagons of soybeans into the elevator this afternoon I was musing over the next installment of my dumb fanfiction, and had decided to try to make an effort to work on it tonight.

I open up the blog, my GoComics, and BLAM! Right in my face! The turgid, forbidden, presence of that most verboten of blog topics: Politics.

You want to debate immigration reform vs enforcement? Go on over to GoComics and preach your gosh darn heart out. It’s what Batty and his entire crew are praying for, a little attention, a good old slap fight, a bit of salt pouring from peoples’ keyboards giving a shot of bitter flavor to Batiuk’s bland, white bread, existence.

Here let us all point and laugh at Batiuk for, once again, taking a serious issue and making it all about himself by tacking real world controversy to his 60-years-past high school achievement.

Let us ponder what the juxtaposition of past Les Moore panels in a story being narrated by Batton Thomas about his own history, and Batton claiming it’s a fictional representation of himself, means for the decaying logic of this entire Funkyverse. Remember Les Moore and Batton Thomas know each other! They’ve met multiple times!

Did they just have very similar experiences? Did Les Moore plagiarize Batton’s earlier essay? Did Batton include a fictional Les Moore into his fictional comic strip, based on the life of a real person he knew and presumably stalked after he noticed a similarity in their life experiences?

Is Batton so senile that he cannot tell his own memories from another’s? Does Batton secretly desire to BE Les Moore and fantasizes about taking over his life in a twisted Talented Mr. Ripley situation? Has he been stalking him his entire life, fictionalizing it all the while in a strip no one in the Funkyverse bothers to read?

Who really mixed up the scans of Lisa’s cancer that led to her treatment being interrupted for months? Someone who wanted to write about a writer writing about his dead wife and needed a ‘model’ to work off of?

Is this entire years long interview just an incredibly dedicated undercover operation where Skip seeks to expose Batton for the murder of Lisa Moore?

I promise an end to my stupid fanfic, just as soon as I stop being so mad at Batiuk for shoving politics in my safe space while I’ve been suffering through months of life in a battleground state. For Halloween I’m going as a Incredible Pulp made entirely of unsolicited political flyers. Does anyone else want to go as one? I’ve got enough of the darn things to outfit an entire parade of pulp monsters.

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Let’s face it: Tom Batiuk is giving us nothing to talk about anymore.

In What’s The Story, Morning Glory, I lamented the lack of any kind of actual story since Max and Hannah’s wedding in March. The two months since then have been more of the same: aimless filler weeks, tired Crankshaft tropes, and forced references to unloved latter-day topics like buck rub and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

I’ll let a recent comment get me started:

I almost feel like Crankshaft has to be ending next year.
It all feels like a man who’s reached the end of the flight and is (clumsily) getting ready to land the plane.

Narshe

I didn’t think this at first, but it’s getting harder to deny. I originally classified the tedious “In The Name Of The Father” as a non-story. But at least it was a Batiukian attempt at one: full of word zeppelins and pretentious award bait, signifying nothing. At least it was snark fodder. We’re not even getting that anymore. And his blog hasn’t mentioned any upcoming stories.

I’ll let Narshe continue:

We know [Batiuk] loves his anniversaries and 2027 contains a quite a few nice round(ish) numbered ones: 55 years since the debut of Funky Winkerbean, 40 years since the debut of Crankshaft, 30 years since he closed the book on John Darling by having Les solve his murder, 20 years since the death of Lisa, 10 years since Mopey met Mindy and 5 years since the end of FW. TomBa himself will also turn 80 next year.

This is all true. And if the awards-obsessed Batiuk hasn’t gotten his Golden T-Square by now, additional years aren’t going to get him one. (Though I still think he’s totally earned it.)

It’s hard to tell what’s going on in Tom Batiuk’s head. His own blog, and occasional mainstream news articles which he appears to write himself, have a very consistent tone. He presents his work as a combination of Charles Schulz and James Thurber: a cultural icon full of memorable, beloved characters, while also being a realistic literary look into the lives of downtrodden Ohioans. Except that “downtrodden” means “denied access to comic books” and “so passive they won’t lift a finger to solve their own problems.”

But man, it has to be taking a toll on his ego, especially considering how massive it is. It’s hard to keep doing something you think deserves a reward, and never getting that reward, and never even be mentioned for it anymore. The man peaked with that one Pulitzer nomination in 2008. And that second one is never coming.

I’m a generation younger than Tom Batiuk – I was born only two months after Funky Winkerbean was – and I can feel my own mortality starting to kick in. I also have a living parent who’s in their 80s now, and whose increasing limitations are obvious. Batiuk has to be noticing this in himself. And somebody has to be talking about it, if only his own wife, and other close friends who are going through the same thing.

I recently commented that Act IV (post-Funky Winkerbean) has now devolved into a gelatinous Act V. But I don’t think there’s a real reason to distinguish them. Crankshaft is still maintaining the low standard it’s had for decades; it hasn’t turned into Apartment 3-G, at least not any worse than it has been for years. The attempts at ambition are just fewer and farther between.

The end of the Funkyverse is now an inevitability. Even if it isn’t next year, it won’t be long after.

Graduating Into Irrelevancy

Act III began with so much promise for Summer Moore. As the daughter of what had become the strip’s ostensible lead character and his holy bride — the focal points of the Most Important Stories Ever — most would assume that Summer would naturally fall into the role of being the focus of the new generation. In a sense that is indeed what happened as of all of the so-called Funky Kids she’s clearly the one who up to this point had gotten the most attention… but that’s mostly because of how little Tom Batiuk seemed to care about them. She got her place as the centerpiece of the high school stuff almost by default and even then, by this point she had begun fighting for that position with Owen and Cody, characters that clearly resonated more with Batty as they were the requisite Funky/Les duo.

Outside of basketball stories taking place in the winter, Summer’s presence is mostly just that; present. A character who hangs around but doesn’t do much of anything. For her final year of high school that’s really not going to be changing all that much. Her knee having exploded earlier in the year, by the summer it looks to be mostly healed as she’s back to shooting hoops with Keisha in a set up for a week of already tired “Les meets weirdos at a book signing” strips.

She does at least make fun of him upon his arrival home, however.

She also gets to be a sounding board for Les’ complaints about how Hollywood is mucking up the Lisa’s Story adaptation.

“They asked if the masked death concierge was necessary and I was just so offended!”

With the ghastly gold digger exiled from both Westview and the strip, there’s nothing standing between Cayla and the man of every woman’s nightmares. Les decides that it’s time to do the most important thing he’ll need to do in his post-Lisa life which means a fancy dinner at Montoni’s and sitting Cayla down on Lisa’s bench to tell ask her if she’d be willing to be his favorite runner-up. Cayla, of course, gleefully accepts and they arrive back at Les’ wondering how to spring the news on their kids. But of course the “rents” don’t realize that Summer and Keisha are eavesdropping on them like 8-year-olds.

In celebration of his new engagement, Les gets invited to the cookout and spends labor day with Cayla’s family. Summer gets half-assedly drawn in the background of a couple of panels but the main event is getting to see Les hit in the face with a softball.

Hahaha!

Summer also gets to show up kicking off the requisite Lisa’s Legacy week which by now is beginning to feel like something Batty includes more out of obligation than interest.

Fall and the start of the new school year also brings with it one of Batty’s favorite stories: school levies! And surprise surprise, the ignorant clods once again voted it down so now the raises of Linda Bushka, Jim Kablichnick and the other two teachers at WHS are in jeopardy. But not just that, funding for athletics have been gutted too. Bull had earlier tried getting around this by implementing a “pay to play” scheme for the teams but that’s not enough and with the failure of the levy, it’s announced that the sports programs are being shuttered.

To add insult to injury, Les and Cayla decide to “cheer up” their kids by feeding them some Montoni’s slop.

But while everyone else mopes, Funky decides to do what characters in this series very rarely do and take some initiative. It turns out that he’s the head of the local Chamber of Commerce and he’s not about to take this problem lying down.

His genius idea is to hold a raffle and go around to local businesses so that they’ll offer prizes for it. I’m not really up on how all of this stuff works so I’m not sure if a raffle would actually be enough to subsidize an entire school’s athletic programs for the year which I assume would be in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollarydoos. But I suppose that’s why Batiuk is the somehow reasonably successful cartoonist while I’m snarking on his comic strip for free.

Funky gets to work and by “gets to work” I mean we get a couple of days of a travel agent pawning off onto him a trip to climb Kilimanjaro that they weren’t able to get rid of in something that is totally not foreshadowing.

Come the day of the big raffle, Les is naturally there to buy a ticket and Bull is there to, in a roundabout way, call him a loser. That’s how I’m interpreting it at least.

But TB is the master of dramatic irony so of course Les does in fact win a prize and what prize does he win? Why that Kilimanjaro trip! Beacuse like a master bowler, Batty sets ’em up and knocks ’em down. Les being who he is, he’s not exactly thrilled but Summer, being who she is, is excited.

But good news, Funky’s raffle scheme somehow worked and the season is saved. Summer gets her final season after all!

TB, being the master storyteller that he is, decides to wrap up this year of tribulation for Summer with some levity by having Bull rile her up a bit about her rehab.

It’s also Dopey’s birthday so Summer decides to rile him up by giving him AARP membership; LMAO. And of course St. Lisa has a tape for just this moment as well. Why she’d have a tape for a random birthday instead of a milestone one is beyond me but Lisa’s going to do what she’s going to do and inserting her desiccated visage at inopportune times seems to be her final act of revenge on the world and the people in it.

But with all the rehab, all the effort to save the sports programs, the Lady Goats begin the season with a losing streak potentially flushing everything down the crapper.

But Summer realizes there may be a solution and tells Bull of a mythical figure: someone who, prior to his arrival, managed to actually bring a championship to Westview. None other than Ann Fairgood, her half-brother’s adoptive mother.

Why Bull wouldn’t know this considering he was a student at Westview while Ann was a teacher and coach is beyond me but by this point we know that continuity for Batty basically only exists when the immediate story calls for it to. Whatever, he goes to the Fairgoods’ home to talk to Ann and brings her in to give a motivational speech about her own history.

But when she suggests some plays he decides to go one step further and name her the new assistant coach. This winds up paying off, unsurprisingly, and the Goats snap their losing streak.

With this, the Westview girls proceed to turn things around and tear up the (regional? conference?) tournament.

By knocking off Big Walnut Tech they’ve made it to the state championship game in a rematch from two seasons prior against Our Lady of the Cedars.

But alas, TB throws in a swerve when on the way to the game it turns out that Summer has become ill.

Yes indeed, in deciding to pull from reality Batty decides to reach 15 years into the past and equate Summer with the greatest basketball player ever by recreating the famous “Flu Game” from the 1997 NBA Finals where a violently ill Michael Jordan dominated and hit a legendary shot in the closing moments.

In the closing seconds, Summer takes a hard foul and it’s up to her to sink the free throws.

She takes the shot. Tension builds…

But of course, she did it! The Lady Goats are your new state champions!

One teeny-tiny problem though: this is not how basketball works. There’s no such thing as a “walk off free throw” as there would still be some time on the clock and the other team would have been able to either inbound or rebound (assuming Summer misses the second shot) and try to heave it for a miracle if there was enough time to do that. The game isn’t going to end then and there just because Summer hit a free throw even if it was effectively over. And the worst part? Batty knows this because there’s a strip prior to this where Les admonishes Bull about how there are no walk off free throws. So Batty is disregarding a basic rule of the sport that he himself acknowledged some weeks prior just for nonsensical drama.

If this is what he wanted to do, why do the free throws in the first place? Why not just have Summer hit a buzzer beater? This is not hard and yet he makes it more difficult than it needs to be by not taking five seconds to think about if what he’s writing actually makes any sense.

Anyway, having coached Summer to a championship and rehabbed her knee, Bull does one more solid and presents her with a highlight reel of her high school play that she can send off to colleges. A nice enough gesture although with Summer being such a highly regarded player wouldn’t she have been scouted and approached by recruiters long before this point anyway?

In April, the two tracks of high school that Batty has been working with finally come together when Summer shows up to save Cody from getting pounded by Wedgeman. Much like every high school generation has its loser male geek duo and its vapid popular girl so too must it have its loutish bully and Wedgeman is the current one in the line that goes back to Bull and Stoneironmarblehead Morton. And just like the vapid popular girl, it’s diminishing returns in terms of his characterization i.e. it’s nonexistant beyond “is a bully.”

Cody, of course, falls in love with her and can’t help but see Summer as Wonder Woman who I assume is also Tom Batiuk’s own waifu.

Thus starts a rather nonsensical storyline for the next few weeks where Cody decides to send an anonymous text to Summer declaring his love for her and, can you believe it, she sends an anonymous text back! How Cody would have her number to even do this I have no idea. Owen, though, spends the whole thing acting dismissive and when she fails to show up for a promised date at Montoni’s (of course) the ruse is revealed. See, it was actually Owen sending those texts to Cody the entire time because he was also in love with Summer and he wanted to I guess disappoint Cody so he’d have her all to himself? I don’t know, none of it makes sense.

But Cody is undeterred and decides he’s just going to tell Summer how he feels in person. However, he sees her talking to Chad and decides to slink away in disappointment even though she’d turned down Chad’s request for a date.

Of course there’s one final twist as someone sends Cody an anonymous text declaring how much they like him. Because of Owen’s stunt Cody dismisses it oh ho it turns out it was a real girl who really does like him. This is of course just an ending stinger and is never again followed up on.

Truthfully, that’s really about it for Summer’s importance during the waning days of her time in high school. The next big storyline is Roberta’s protest over a gay couple being allowed to attend the prom and Summer does seem to be the instigator in starting a counter demonstration against it.

But aside from that she otherwise has nothing to do with the story which is mostly about Nate giving a big speech about how there will be no discrimination at his school. Then Becky’s father tells his wife to shut up and that’s effectively the end of Roberta Blackburn’s time as an antagonist in the strip. The most notable thing about the storyline — besides the milquetoast way that Batty presents his stance — is the biggest unsolved mystery in Funky Winkerbean — who was behind the castle?

During the prom there’s a couple of strips where a person — of who only an arm can be seen — thanks Nate for what he did for “me and students like me” while declaring that they’re not ready to come out just yet. All while Nate looks like he couldn’t care less. Seriously, why does he look so bored?

So who is Nate talking to? We can really only use process of elimination to narrow it down to a few options. Given that the character is hidden that would obviously imply it’s a known character, otherwise why hide their identity? Of the seniors, the only notable male from this generation is Cory who for reasons of “marries and later has kids with a woman” doesn’t fit; also the person looks shorter which implies it’s probably a girl.

Given the light skin that also rules out Keisha. It probably can’t be Rana given later developments that would make her being gay, although not impossible, very unlikely. So you’re left with three options: Summer, Maddie and Jinx.

Summer did very briefly date a boy early in Act III but at this point that seems like an abberation. But on the other hand, the sporty short-haired tomboy also being a lesbian seems to be such a trite stereotype that it might even give Batty second thoughts. Maddie is (supposed to be) the eccentric girl who marches to her own beat but she’s also effectively a non-character.

Jinx was there for the start of this story and is the one who announced that Nate and his wife were voted prom king and queen. Based on that I’d say there’s a reasonable chance it could be her, you know clumsy hinting from Batty and all. But who knows?

Maybe later strips can be read in a way to make you look back on this and think it was Summer or Maddie. Maybe they’re all gay. Or maybe that hand poking out from the castle wasn’t a real character and was just the representation of gay teenagers which seems like the kind of cop out Batty would do. But unless someone ever asks him directly or he does another Untold Tales (fat chance) we’ll never know.

We can speculate until we’re blue in the face but seeing as we’re likely never getting an answer we may as well just move on. In the final few weeks of school Summer and Keisha receive invitations get evaluated by, where else, Kent State. Things go well and they both receive athletic scholarships thus putting a bow on the last lingering bit of their high school storylines.

And with that done it’s now time for them to die graduate.

Which is immediately followed up by yet another cancer tape.

Just where will Summer’s heart take her? That’s for next time in what will be, for a long time, Summer’s last hurrah.

Because by the middle of next year Summer’s appearances are going to dwindle drastically. She will continue to pop up for the odd appearance or week once or twice a year post-2012 but once Batty shipped her off to Kent State he was also effectively putting her into semi-exile as his interest shifts more and more to comic books, Hollywood and characters like Darin, Pete and the yet-to-be-introduced Mason Jarr(e) and in the exciting world of elderly geekery, there’s neither time nor place for a jock who doesn’t fawn over the latest MCU flicks and Star Wars movies.

Beethoven’s Fifth

The Batty Blog has been slow lately, but there’s something to talk about this week.

In addition to Funky Winkerbean, Crankshaft, John Darling and the thankfully never-published Dick and Jane, we now learn that Tom Batiuk tried foisting a fifth comic strip onto the world. Meet Rusty:

When you were at Roger Bollen’s house, did you tell him were planning to do this?!

Tom Batiuk confirms what you’re already thinking:

Basically a hipper Yogi Bear, a cartoon that was long in the review mirror by that point.

Clearly Yogi’s hipness was only updated from 1961 to 1973, since one of the three example strips we’re shown was a fondue joke.

I’ll let Batiuk tell you the rest of the story as only he can:

I’d only been doing Funky for a few months when Bob Votjko showed up at our apartment wanting some advice on his work and wanting to know how to get syndicated. I was barely started myself at that point so I don’t know how much help I was (none),

Through Batton Thomas, Tom Batiuk has told us at great length how he went to a cartoonist’s home, wanting some advice on his work and how to get syndicated. And now he’s received the same visit, and he’s being all self-deprecating about it? Did Batiuk fail to recognize the role reversal from his own life, just a few months ago?

“Oh, I’m sure I was no help, even though I did the exact same thing, and could have easily passed along all the information I collected from much more accomplished cartoonists than myself.” He’s so quick to play the self-deprecating card that he doesn’t notice when it makes him look like an asshole.

We didn’t have any luck syndicating it, although it did prove providential in a couple of ways down the road.

“We were unlucky, but we were lucky.”

Its strong ecological bent probably wouldn’t fly in today’s political environment, but nevertheless it holds up rather nicely. 

“It didn’t age well, but it aged well.”

But just because we couldn’t get it in the papers, doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it. 

This sentence seems like another instant self-contradiction, but it’s actually completely meaningless. Being in the papers and being enjoyable have nothing to do with each other.

There are comic strips in the newspaper that you can enjoy (Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Peanuts). There are comic strips in the newspaper that you can’t enjoy (most of them these days, especially the Funkyverse, except for the perverse enjoyment we get from it). There are comic strips not in the newspaper that you can enjoy (Penny Arcade, dozens of other good webcomics). And finally, there are comic strips not in the newspaper that you can’t enjoy (because many talented creators never got the exposure they needed to reach you).

I’m going to roll it out day by day just like you would have seen it had it appeared in your daily newspaper.

In 17 days, we’ve gotten three strips that don’t appear to be in any kind of chronological order, or look like an introduction to the comic strip. So Lord knows what he’s even trying to say here.