Once again, Tom Batiuk goes with “tell, don’t show” and graces us with a wall of text about a (fictional, in-universe) character we’ve never even seen and care nothing about. In a strip well-known for having stupid character names, The Amazing Mister Sponge is really up there in the top ten. Were I a super-villain (and I’m not saying I’m not), if one of my henchmen called out, “Hey boss, the Amazing Mister Sponge is after us!” why, I’d probably collapse from laughter and be unable to launch my scheme. So maybe he does have a super-power. I imagine it loses its effectiveness the second or third time, though, and starts being annoying. “Why can’t one of the good heroes try and stop me? This is embarrassing…”
It really makes me curious about how Mr. Batiuk decides on a storyline, what factors come to play that cause him to deliver…this. Don’t you love how the episode ends on a cliff-hanger, the idea being that we’re all on pins and needles to know what Pete’s scheme is? In reality, we know it’s going to be a crashing bore, except “crashing” implies something happening. If this is Tom Batiuk’s depiction of the pressures of being a cartoonist, there’s a much better solution than wasting space: retire. Sure, you can spin your wheels until the glorious 50th, but here’s a cold hard truth. No one is going to buy The Complete Funky Winkerbean: 2010-2015. No one.
I guess one thing is that Mr. Batiuk seems to have lost any enthusiasm for drawing. That Starbuck Jones face on the wall, for example, is a terrible drawing. If that’s an example of Pete’s artwork, no wonder we’ve never seen this Sponge-Head.
As for the “real” characters depicted here, Darin is a bland smiling blank–the kind of image you’d see if TV stations still used “test patterns.” And Pete has clearly been rejected from The Muppet Show for “looking too lifeless.”
Son of Stuck Funky 
When you can only draw one panel because you have too much dialogue to squeeze into a smaller panel, you’re doing something wrong.
If they want a whole new direction, why are they keeping Pete? The best he can come up with for an archenemy for the Sponge is Mister Centipede? IT should be something like Acid Lad, something that sponge powers would be useless against. I seriously suspect Batiuk is just pulling all this directly from his childhood doodles, without stopping for a second to think if it makes the lease bit of sense, or is at all engaging or interesting.
Well, if Pete wants “dark” I know who he ought to call for ideas. And if Lynn Johnston happens to be busy, BanTom is probably free. Pretty ballsy of him to do a single-paneler featuring the widest word balloon I’ve ever seen, on a Wednesday no less, and make the gag a cliffhanger. I realize this probably makes sense to him while he’s all tripped-out on one of his wild comic book fantasies, but to the rest of us it’s just incomprehensible jibber-jabber from the mind of a madman.
“Hi, Tom? This is Ed Itor over at the Syndicate. Listen, we want you to take FW in a darker grittier direction. Hello???”
(Sound of phone hitting ground, gleeful squeals in background).
And speaking of stupid things, you ever notice that Boy Lisa almost never gets any arcs of his own? He’s always in the background or sharing his arcs with others, every single time. Even when they start out about Darin (like the Frankie arc) they always veer off on a tangent. Time hasn’t been kind to the Act II generation.
THANK YOU for finally saying what needs to be said.
Of course, the vast majority of people from Lorain County and Medina County haven’t bothered to read Funky Winkerbean for well over 30 years, so no one from Batom®’s inner circle will tell him this obvious truth. They all still view him as this great cartoonist who made it into national syndication and as a hometown hero… obviously confusing Batom® with someone else from Cleveland who was far more successful, made a lasting impression on the medium, and knew precisely when he needed to hang it up: Bill Watterson.
If you’re a hundred times smarter and stronger than a normal person, wouldn’t you be able to pick a better arch-nemesis than “The Amazing Mr. Sponge”?
What I don’t understand about the Mopey Pete character, is that Batiuk portrays him as a pathetic loser who can barely handle his day-to-day responsibilities, yet he has Batiuk’s dream career. He has Durrwood looking down his nose at him all the time, when at least Pete has a career and has escaped Westview. And is not wasting an MBA working in a pizza joint while living above it. Pete was a Les replacement for nerdy kid getting picked on in high school back in Act II, I guess, but unlike Les, who the Westview gods keep smiling upon, Pete keeps getting shat upon. Batiuk knows that Mr. Sponge is a ludicrous idea for a comic book hero, but insists its a viable thing in this universe. Just like Starbuck Jones. I have clearly thought too much about this: Pete’s a clown and Durrwoods is a douche.
I have a strong feeling that tomorrow’s strip will be Les working on The Last Leaf, and Pete won’t be shown again for another year, despite today’s riveting cliffhanger. That would be pretty much the epitome of Batiuk’s writing style lately.
Like all of the other books are doing”. That is not an excuse for your (or Pete’s) drek, Tom. I’m saying this just in case you’re trying to do that reader-bashing stuff you always do.
One. Lynn Johnston isn’t busy because her Les Moore-quality ‘treasuries’ have done nothing but stir up apathy. Two, whatever Pete was about to so would clearly have been a stupid man’s idea of something dark and edgy. Three, maybe they do know back home that Tom’s stuff stinks on ice but they’d rather keep him busy churning out garbage than inflicting himself on the community.
That crappy doodle of Starbuck Jones may be THE FIRST TIME that Batom® has ever drawn said fake comic book character. He’s always designated that responsibility to actual comic book artists with a modicum of talent (such as Joe Stanton).
Even if he wanted to pull a 9 Chickweed Lane and waste 15 months on a stupid storyline to build up this mythology for Starbuck that he’s beaten over our head ad nauseam, he clearly can’t DRAW it, let alone WRITE it.
@Nathan Orbal: Which means that he’d have to get Stanton’s partner to write it for him. Hmmm. This is the exact scenario that made him decide to kill off John Darling My Father Who Was Murdered: the terrible possibility that a new artist AND writer would do better with his creations than he ever could.
@Paul Jones: And if you’ve read Dick Tracy over the past two weeks (especially this past Sunday), you saw one of the truly unexpected twists in a major storyline, and a shocking heel-face turn. It’s easy to see why Mike Curtis is one of the best writers in the business.
“When you can only draw one panel because you have too much dialogue to squeeze into a smaller panel, you’re doing something wrong.”
And the dialogue is STILL not done, it turns out…
If Pete’s ellipsis is any indication.
The Amazing Mister Sponge is the kind of comic that even Seanbaby would look at and say “Nah, too easy”.
Yeah, we get it. TAMS is supposed to be intentionally ridiculous, an exaggeration or parody like Fearless Fosdick or SuperCaptainCoolMan or most any comic-within-a-comic. While those comics-within-a-comic are treated as either in-universe cultural touchstones or obvious parodies of specific comics or genres, TAMS seems to exist to simply be kind of ridiculous both in-universe and in reality. I suppose it also exists to give Creepy Pete something to have writers block for after DC presumably told TB to stop pretending that Pete wrote Superman books, I’m not convinced that’s much better.
I’m no cartoonist, but I do love to draw and doodle and often keep recurring characters and themes throughout my sketch books. Back in college, I doodled a half-baked comic book parody called “Sean Descourt: ICBM Wrestler”. It was about a US military agent who was dropped onto launched ballistic missiles and disassembled them in mid-air. His arch nemesis was the creatively named “Crazy Soviet”, a bearded man with bloodshot eyes and an AK-47 (when he wasn’t flying a MiG-15).
So what was the point? Mostly to spoof, for my own amusement, comic and movie tropes about performing impossible feats while in freefall. I’m not sure that’s any better than Mister Sponge, but I am sure I never got paid to show it to people.
@Nathan Obral: That’s putting it mildly. Granted, her brother’s response is to channel Rusty Venture and tell her to get out of there before the late Mrs Flattop starts to stink but Sprocket did do something beneficial….
@Nathan Obral: I did not know Watterson was from Cleveland. I always had him pegged for a New England kind of guy judging from the architecture and topography of his artwork.
Today, I can’t stop focusing on that mug in the desk and wondering about it. Why does Mopey Pete have a WHS mug on his desk? Do people really cling to high school memorabilia long after they’ve graduated and skipped town? Wouldn’t the statute of limitations on that be 20, tops?
I didn’t spend my whole childhood in one town or even attending one high school, so I’m looking at this from an outsider’s perspective. Is this something common in Ohio and elsewhere?
it does seem rather churlish of the Author to snipe about making a strip dark when his own strip if it is known for anything is known for cancer stories.
Also Pete’s explanation of why the Centipede is called the Centipede makes not one wit of sense – honestly if someone is 100 times stronger and smarter than a human being – a multi-legged bug (It’s not an insect but I don’t have the time to look up what it is) is not the first thing that comes to mind.
@Jimmy – actually, as we saw a couple of years ago, people in Westview have their high school yearbooks close at hand, decades after graduation.
Mopey Pete? Or Ziggy with a bad toupee? You make the call!
^Ziggy must be his much-shorter twin brother.
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