Mr. Finkle….LORD HAVE MERCY.
So Batton Thomas’ wife is just Cathy? No cute rearranging of syllables? No inversion of letters. Just Cathy. Fine.
I hate it.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate Batton since I began to blog. There are 547 published blog posts on this site I have posted under my name. If the word hate replaced each letter of each word of those 547 blog posts, it would not equal ONE ONE-BILLIONTH of the hate I feel for Batton as I type this. For Batton. HATE. HATE.
I do not hate Tom Batiuk, no. Tom Batiuk is a real life human, with real thoughts and real feelings and a real family. He has enjoyed hot, fresh pizza. He has seen the beauty of fall leaves. He has felt pain. He has made others smile. I can lay no irredeemable crime against humanity at his feet. I cannot hate him. Pity him, yes, but not hate.
But Batton is a fictional device. Batton is a narcissistic conceit. Batton is made of thoughtless, heartless computer goo and transmitted through wires and radio waves. He’s not a real life person. And I HATE him. Like I would hate the melanoma growing from an ugly tattoo on the back of a stranger.
This week is miserable. Almost makes me nostalgic for last week, when we got to watch uncanny traced photo people converse about the unnecessary renovations they were doing to an abandoned doghouse.
Abandoned? Indeed. For Homer the dog was last seen August 6, 2010. Wherein E fed him chocolate cake. And I guess we can surmise that the elderly dog died. Because we never see him again.
Yes, Cranky, as opposed to those things you ignorant git. Unless vermin contain caffeine or theobromine, or cat poop is laced with the methylxanthines that block adenosine receptors.
In truth, this last appearance of Homer is shocking, and not because of the dog murder. It’s because Homer had already disappeared for two whole years before this. He hadn’t been seen since taking stock of Grandma Rose’s chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, in July 2008.
I don’t know how often the old dog showed up in the 90’s. But in the 2000’s he was very much on the back burner. Heck, he wasn’t even on the stove. He was in a coffee can of grease kept in a cupboard above the stove.
He was allowed in the house on Christmas Day 2007.
He slept through fireworks on July 4, 2006.
Cranky took him on a walk to piss on Lillian’s saplings in March of 2006.
He briefly escaped being chained up to a flimsy doorless doghouse in the dead of winter in January 2006. Wonder if Tom got some hatemail for this one.
On September 27, 2005, he goes comatose with boredom.
In June of 2005 Homer gets his last proper full week arc, where we learn that his ‘boy’ doesn’t care for him and can’t even remember his name.
21 years ago Crankshaft enslaved his elderly dog and forced him to shovel snow. The GoComics coloring monkeys decided the sight was so horrific it turned Pam’s hair white.
October 2, 2004, we got a lovely little wordless strip. No notes here.
August 12, 2004, the Murdoch/Crankshaft household was kind enough to make sure Homer wasn’t Toto’ed in a twister.
July 25, 2004, Homer is let in the house to get his treat ration, and Mindy proves she’s Pam’s daughter by asking the classic Pam question.
May 30, 2004. Ayers draws an adorable pupper cowering behind his flimsy doghouse.
This strip displays something I wish Ayers and Batiuk had consciously cultivated, especially in their later years: put kids and pets in the damn background of strips! I’ve talked at length how the consistency of the physical locations in the Funkyverse give it real tangibility. I wish we had that same consistency with the people living in those locations.
We wouldn’t be asking ‘Where’s Wally Jr.?” or ‘Wait, who the f**k is Pickles?’ or ‘Does Mitch even live with the Murdochs anymore?’ if they had been placed in the background or foreground where appropriate. I will say Ayers was better at this with Pickles up through the early aughts, where the cat is often drawn just standing around in the yard while Ed yammers about his brand new combine harvester. But there’s a million million yard strips where he could have doodled ol Homer to remind us that the dog still exists.
May 4, 2004 is the earliest GoComics strip I could find with Homer.
Homer isn’t in the first four Crankshaft books, so they must have got him after, maybe sometime in the early to mid 90’s if Mindy’s age in this strip from Strike Four! is anything to go by.
In Roses in December, Homer has his Lassie moment, sort of.
And this brings up that Homer is actually Homer II. Named, (presumably) for Ed’s childhood dog. Long Dead Homer was mentioned long before Homer II was introduced.
Poor Homer II, named for a long dead and better loved dog. Neglected, forgotten, dismissed. He wasn’t even Ed Crankshaft’s favorite pet.
Son of Stuck Funky 