To tide you over while we wait for Tuesday’s strip to go live, I offer an “appetizer” of sorts: a new Tom Batiuk interview in which he discusses the Starbuck Jones project.
Batiuk’s All-Star Team Brings “Funky Winkerbean’s” Starbuck Jones To Life
28 thoughts on “Tuesdays with Tom Batiuk”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
Hey, at least the strips are reproduced vertically so you can read the damn things this time!
“I’ve decided that once the second round of covers is completed, I’m going to find a venue to auction them off with all of the proceeds going to the Lisa’s Legacy Fund for Cancer Research and Education which has been established with University Hospitals here in Cleveland.”
OF COURSE it ends with Lisa’s Legacy. Wouldn’t want anything going to a charity that actually has a connection with soldiers, like the Wounded Warriors Project. Lisa Lisa Lisa!
What the ??? Who the hell wrote this joke? Ann Coulter? I really hope that Tom Batiuk isn’t about to pull a Dennis Miller here and do a 180 to right wing politics!!!
Or is this some desperate bid to pander to ultra-right wing xenophobic readership? Well you’re too late for that Tommy! Pluggers already has that demographic entrenched!!!
“… but I also wanted to do a homefront story about what it was like for the parents.”
Douche!
What I ascertained from that delightful interview was the fact that the “SJ” arc is nowhere near over yet. Plus he gave away the ending, too.
And in today’s strip, Les wants to commit suicide because Ken Casey ordered a fancy-shmancy coffee instead of a cup of Montoni’s swill. Batom’s sneering contempt for anything non-mid-central-Ohioian-centric is showing yet again. He’s as nice as apple pie during those interviews but the real TB is just a seething cauldron of bitterness and anger, you know?
Thelma will be my favorite character ever if she takes Les at his word.
Yeah, Thelma, get him his hemlock and you can be Executive Producer.
So, a reference to the drink that killed Socrates. Tom Batiuk really thinks pretty highly of this Les guy. I’m surprised no one expressed ignorance–“Hemlock? Is that one of those imported beers?”–so Les could feel even more superior to everyone.
“Oh, waaaah! The only liked my first draft–they didn’t love it! Oh, no one has ever suffered as much as I have!”
Les just keeps getting more and more hateable.
Les’ delusions of grandeur would be worth it if he went the way of Socrates.
It’s actually pretty impressive how which each new storyline, Les becomes less and less likable. You’d think eventually things would hit bottom, but apparently not.
IMO this Ken guy seems pretty cool. He’s seems to have a good attitude, he obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously and he’s using the perks of his job to order ridiculous drinks because, well, that’s just how Ken Casey rolls. Yet in Batom’s deeply disturbed mind Les, the whimpering obnoxious dick who regularly hallucinates a cat that mocks him, is the hero here. I mean who would YOU rather hang out with? The freewheeling Ken Casey or the simpering putz who goes back to his luxury suite and whines about the book he wrote about his dead wife? No contest.
Flummoxicated: While I’m not normally one to burst out laughing upon reading the name of a charitable cause, I couldn’t help it when I got to that part of the interview. To me her legacy will always be that of a trailbalzing female comic strip character who pushed the limits of insufferability to previously unknown heights (depths?). And the death thing, I guess.
Oh good God.
From the interview we have this.
‘Well this is a spoiler if people want to stop reading.
She’ll just miss it. I didn’t know what I was going to do and how this was all going to play out but I was a guest at Comic-Con last year and while I was there the idea occurred to me. She’s going to have a few near misses at Comic-Con and going to come away empty-handed. It will turn out that John the comic shop owner found it there and he takes her back home and he takes her to Tony Isabella’s Garage Con. I don’t know if you follow Tony’s blog, but he holds these garage cons where he sells off stacks of old comic books. She’s going to go there and find the comic in Tony’s garage.’
So she is given something. Again. From what I can tell from this, John is the one who finds it, not Holly.
And he goes on to talk about the people impacted by the war. When so far the war has been about a minor character who just comes and goes and the excuse for a woman to go around looking for a comic.
Since I can’t edit my comment.
Tom Batiuk, if you want to write about the war or anything, fine. But please remember that so far the total impact has been one man who barely appears in this anymore, one little girl that has been completely forgotten, one man who decided to go back to Afghanistan for no good reason, and a guy who is there just as an excuse to get him out of the comic and have Holly looking for comic books. That’s it.
Goody. A woman handed something for free so Batiuk can diss Comic-Con for not worshiping the greatness of a depressing book about unlikeable people, Batiuk radiating contempt for the outside world because it isn’t a Anglo-dominated suburb of Cleveland AND Les being a whining yemakhsmoinik because he doesn’t have creative control. It’s a perfect storm of Batiukian hatefulness.
It’s funny because Ken Casey—who should have been named Ken Basie, for frak’s sake—is jonesing for Starbucks.
Pretty obvious that Batiuk’s completely forgotten that Thelma and Ken aren’t used to being around Les, so they’re not used to his passive-aggressive self-abuse being passed off as droll humor. Instead, he’s just said something that would come off to them as incredibly insulting.
The guy never raises one objection with anyone, and yet apparently they’re supposed to understand the torment he’s going through now that would justify his wanting to kill himself. And they’re supposed to sympathize, when it’s them he’s talking about. He wants to kill himself because they’re so awful.
So I bet Batiuk doesn’t realize how much of a dick he’s making Les out to be in this strip, and how unpleasant and galling Thelma and Ken would find him. That may be one of the worst things about Funky Winkerbean, in fact, that Les can be such an obvious insulting prick to people who don’t have to take his abuse, and they cheerfully accept it or fail to acknowledge it. He never gets called on his crap.
And if there’s ever a time and place where someone would be telling Les to get the fuck over himself, this would be it.
“I’ve decided that once the second round of covers is completed, I’m going to find a venue to auction them off with all of the proceeds going to the Lisa’s Legacy Fund for Cancer Research and Education which has been established with University Hospitals here in Cleveland.”
Not like you would want to donate to some cause for an equally horrible disease that is not so widespread and that is horribly underfunded for research. No, give it to something where there is more than ample money available so the money can go to deserving executives.
@Saturnino, “No, give it to something where there is more than ample money available so the money can go to deserving executives.”
It’s not for the execs, he’s doing for the greater glory of TB.
In my first comment today I called TB a douche, that was a mistake. It should have been self aggrandizing douche.
By the way, if he’s going to wrap up the storyline at Comic-Con, then we have another round of unbelievable expenses coming. Batiuk went as a guest and probably had his hotel paid for (sound familiar?) but SDCC is a pretty pricey way to spend a few days getting crushed by a crowd of cosplayers.
I don’t think I can say anything about today’s strip that has not already be said (kudos everyone), so I’ll just note that in his interview with CBR, TB refers to Crankshaft character Jeff Murdoch as Jeff Crankshaft. No mention of Les Williams, Funky Summers-Budd, Harry Eliminator, though…
Yo – while you’re at it make it a double.
The sad thing here is that there actually the germ of a real story buried in this mess. On the one side you have Les and this book he wrote about the death of this first wife. It was a massive event to deal with and indeed to write about it shows some courage. (Yes I am saying that) – Which would explain if properly done why he has so much trouble writing it. It is important to him that Lisa’s memory and her life story be told and told accurately – and true and well to quote Hemingway that of course you would freeze.
So you have the Author who has written this very personal memoir – and you have Hollywood that Is looking as this as something to fill the 8-10 pm slot on a Tuesday night as their disease of the week movie. There’s bit possibility of conflict there for sure and in the hands of a more skilled writer this could be a very interesting arc with all sorts of hard questions being raised – art/entertainment/product and their relationship to each other. Especially in a massive commercial enterprise like film – even for cable.
Alas as this is Tom Batiulk we’ve got none of this. Lisa’s Story is never really talked about as well Lisa’s Story – it’s all been about Les. What a great Writer he is, what a work of art the screen play is, it’s all been LES LES LES all the time. Lisa isn’t really in the picture here (that she really wasn’t much of a character when alive is another problem here) – it’s been Les’s book about Lisa that has mattered, not Lisa so Les’ reactions to the changes Hollywood wants come off as whiny and self centered and just utterly hateful. If He could get past his own hurt pride and egotism (hard yes) and point out this was not doing the job of telling Lisa’s story then it would work better.
But pigs don’t fly and Les is always been about Les.
@billytheskink: Those alternative, matronymic names are refreshing. They stand, not in line, nor in the main, but in stark contrast to the usual roles of women in FW: to stand mute upon pedestals (Dead St. Lisa) or as beneficiaries of mansplaining (all other women).
No comments at the bottom of the article, but there is an ad for dealing with major depressive disorder. Hard to believe that’s merely a coincidence.
And if there’s ever a time and place where someone would be telling Les to get the fuck over himself, this would be it.
If Funky didn’t give Les that richly deserved shot to the jaw after getting a simpering ‘yes you did’ to his ‘I screwed up’, Les is never going to receive his comeuppance. We should just make our peace with this ugly fact right now.
By the way, i never noticed it before, but in regards this week’s Latino fever: Comics Kingdom has an “En Espanol”” page, and guess which strip can’t even be bothered to provide a Spanish version?
@bad wolf – I can imagine some poor translator throwing his hands into the air. “This isn’t even good English! I’ve never seen sentences constructed this way, or words so badly misused! How am I supposed to translate this into Spanish?”
Chug, chug, chug!!!
Now it is clear to me, TB is doing “Saving Mr. Banks,” except he is doing it poorly.
So in order to sell ‘Lisa’s Story: The Movie” in latino markets, they’ve given them an adopted son named Miguel? So I guess they’ll give Miguel all the best scenes. They can have Less kill himself after Lisa’s cancer comes back, and it is the heroic Miguel who stays with Lisa through the rest of her cancer ordeal and is with her at the end. And then Miguel raises little sister Summer. He grows up to become the Spanish teacher at Westview. Hey its an improvement! I like this Miguel idea!