SoSfDavidO here, ready for another snark! And holy cow, what a revelation today! From the look of today’s strip, it appears the publishers of the fine piece of literature that is the Adventures of Mr. Sponge and Son are after money. Notdoing the story of his adventures proud but money! And they’re willing to temporarily kill off a minor, easily replacable character to do it!
17 thoughts on “Sans Comic”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
Oh, I see. These are supposed to be shots fired at for Dennis O’Neil and co. for the death of Jason Todd.
Oh, brother. If we all got over it, why can’t Batiuk get over it? It’s not like he hasn’t had major characters of his own die brutal, painful deaths before. And another thing: unlike them, Jason Todd actually came back. And he still comes back. Constantly. So what’s the problem?
Even his fantasies about the “writing business” are populated by insensitive artist-ignoring greedy parasites. Maybe he just thinks it’s how editors really are in real life because he’s never had to deal with one, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it have made more sense of the old Batom Comics editor was a cool guy who let the writers go wild? Does Tom Ban really hate the “writing business” so much that he just can’t let it go even once? Not even in a fantasy sequence about his own made-up comic company? Man, that’s some grudge he’s got there.
All this because someone took him aside and tried to explain that the comics business IS a business. Rather than admit that yes, the purpose of a comic strip is to be sort of a shill for a newspaper, Batiuk bores and irritates us with nonsense like this.
Ugh. This makes “Holly is given comic books” look like The Godfather. Maybe that’s Batiuk’s strategy: lower the bar so much so that “my dear in headlights” looks like great writing, by comparison.
Batom® apparently hates the writing business so much, he refuses to do any writing for his own comic strip.
Foolish editor! Doesn’t he know you don’t kill off characters for petty reasons like money? You kill them off for petty reasons like public adulation and award nominations!
This reminds me of when in August 2008 Batiuk did a series of strips where Pete got a job with DC to d a Superman story. To think of a story, Pete imagined he was Jerry Siegel coming up with the idea of Superman. There was so much potential, especially since that same month (was the 75th anniversary that year) there was renewed focus on the fact that at least part of Siegel’s inspiration when creating Superman may have also been driven by the fact that Siegel’s father was killed when their family clothing store was robbed a year before Siegel created the character. Does Batiuk choose to do a flashback to something interesting like that? NO. What do we get instead? Pete daydreaming he is a young Jerry Siegel laying on his bed in his room on a hot summer evening rambling endlessly about how he has writer’s block anbd can’t come with an idea. Yep.
From the wikipedia page:
“Comics historians Gerard Jones and Brad Meltzer believe Siegel may have been inspired to create Superman because of the death of his father, Mitchell Siegel, an immigrant who owned a clothing store on Cleveland’s near east side. He died during a robbery in 1932, a year before Superman was created. Although Siegel never mentioned the death of his father in interviews, “It had to have an effect,” argues Jones. “There’s a connection there: the loss of a dad as a source for Superman.” Meltzer states: “Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world’s greatest hero.”
@captaincab–good call! i had not even heard about some of that.
It amazes me what Batiuk chooses to focus on. Superheroes as a reflection of the immigrant/Jewish experience in America? Creators’ rights? The legal battles of Jack Kirby vs Marvel or Siegel & Shuster vs DC? Nope, it’s Seduction of the Innocent, Why they call them “Funnies”, and cheap theatrics. Not exactly Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay or Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, here.
Oh dear God, Tommy boy is making me wish he would just bring back the Lord of Lateness and Mopey Pete’s man-boobs back.
Oh noes – Commercial success! Evil Boss is being Evil! Money!!!! AHHH!!!!
Seriously is this his piss take on comic books or is he just annoyed that Calvin and Hobbes and the Garfield books outsell his?
Evil, avaricious, non-comic book loving, naughty editor guy is so evil, avaricious, non-comic book loving, and naughty that even his own greed-saturated mustache can’t stand to be on his Bushka-esque face and thus has fled in panel one… oops! It’s back in panel 3!
captaincab: It’s ALWAYS either “writer’s block” or “the industry is horrible and demeaning”, every single time. No one “likes” writing and it’s next to impossible to make a living at it without being subjected to constant humiliation. This from a guy who’s had a comic strip running for over forty years, two “spin-off” strips and a bunch of paperback collections. He CHOSE to “write” these idiotic stories instead of sticking to goofy jokes and yet he complains about it incessantly.
Epicus Doomus: Yep, nailed it. It’s really just a retread of the Les Hollywood-is-evil spiel.
I remember Charles Schulz commenting in an interview years ago regarding his opinion about Bill Watterson’s staunch refusal to make any kind of commericalized or consumer goods related money off Calvin and Hobbes (which while admirable, unfortunately also made it easier for bootleggers to create those trash magnet, Calvin-peeing bumper stickers which arew to this day still occasionally adorned by every troglodite in a Walmart parking lot with a pick-up or a fake sports car). While Schulz respected Watterson’s stance, he disagreed obviously since Peanuts was commericalized with tons of toys, specials and tie in items. Whether you agree with him or not though, Schulz made a good point, I can’t remember his exact quote but he said he didn’t understand why Watterson refused to have ANY items related to C&H since as Schulz put it ‘Comics by their very nature are commerical.’
Obviously we were never going to see Funky mainstream merchandise but I guess the point to take away from what Schulz said is that yes, comics are art but they also lend themselves to commericalism at least on some level. But unlike Watterson who used his stance against commericalism to help preserve the integrity of C&H, Batiuk’s stance against it just makes Funky Winkerbean’s writing and quality even WORSE than what it would be if it was lightened up a bit more and paints him as a petty, bitter man. Batiuk doesn’t seem to realize that side stories like this COULD be fun but he just ruins them because he has an axe to endlessly grind which in my opinion only hampers his already very lacking imagination and causes him to miss great opportunities (points again to the Jerry Siegel/Pete series from 2008 that was ripe for an interesting story).
Oh, and obviously I’m not saying Batiuk just needs to lighten up stories to make them more interesting (which is one of his biggest crutch defenses he falls back on, ‘Comics can’t be funny all the time!!! That’s not what real life is like!!! blah blah). Like the Jerry Siegel/Pete storyline I cited, the murder of Siegel’s father was a tragic, real life event and you’d think that would be excellent material for a black and white comics flashback in the strip. But nope, let’s just change lanes back to writers block and Lord of the Late stuff.
@captaincab
Great Charles Schultz quote. I agree with him, comics are inherently commercial. Nothing wrong with that, unless you are peddling crap, like batom does these days.
Mark my words: when Les & Cayla fly off to Hong Kong to see “The Last Leaf” get published I GUARANTEE they’ll mess it all up on him somehow. “The Last Loaf”, “The Least Laffs”…you’ll see. I mean it’s already written (I guess) so a writer’s block arc is out, thus it HAS to be “publishing industry bad”. It’s all he knows.
It’s especially disturbing that it’s even that way in his own fantasies, like in this arc. The world of Batom Comics is a blank slate. He’s free to run with it in any direction he wants, it’s all his own creation. Yet he falls back on his old standby tropes, again. So it’s not that he writes bad stories, it’s that he writes the SAME bad stories over and over again.