Many thanks to Comic Book Harriet for her recent hosting of the Ongoing Mess. As usual, her posts were more interesting than the strip before us.
As for the strip before us, a cursory glance at today’s strip left me really puzzled. I thought, How in the heck could Crazy Harry be close to Butter Brinkel, someone who had probably died before he was born? Is this like his Tarzan fixation, where his obsession with the character led to said character coloring his world? Just because he owns all the DVDs? And how could he afford to fly out to Los Angeles?
A more careful reading then revealed that this was Cliff Anger, and not Crazy Harry. Frankly, this strip is too worthless to inspire careful readings, so I was a bit put off.
Then there’s the word “kemosabe.” I’m of the generation who associates the term with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, being Tonto’s term for the Ranger. A quick search says that it means something like “faithful companion,” which is how I always took it. The fact that it’s an odd word, not likely to used in common parlance, leads me to believe we’re going to get some kind of awful wordplay down the road. Oh…joy.
(Unless Batiuk is going to pick up on the Urban Legend that “kemosabe” means “horse’s ass,” but I don’t see how he can get Les to Los Angeles in time….)
Son of Stuck Funky 
So, they talked about Butter Brinkley last night,
but she has to take Cliff to lunch to ask if they were close. What did they talk about last night? I wonder if she was alone at the beach house with Cliff!
I think the main reason Batiuk does these Hollywood strips is so he can showcase that restaurant, for some odd reason. I remember him bragging about it in his blog. Maybe he thinks featuring it will lead them to hang up his strip on their walls or something.
Oh, and also apparently that restaurant closed in 1980 and the building is currently vacant.
Fun Fact: If you say the word “research” to Tom Batiuk, he shrinks back and hisses like Christopher Lee
Good Lord! Batiuk needs to keep his eye on the ball. He’s not minding the store!
Yeah, was think the same thing when I saw today’s strip. The Brown Derby’s been gone for years.
Batty has a weird sense of time, and not in an interesting way as does Vonnegut. Batty just does whatever dumb thing needed to shoehorn in whatever bit of nostalgia currently has his attention. Nothing is ever developed….just lots of odd words arranged in strange patterns.
So, how old is Cliff Anger, exactly? This would make him around 140.
My thoughts exactly. Cliff can’t possibly have been pals with an old actor from the 1920s, it’s impossible. And why is Cliff f*cking Anger the world’s sole link to “the olden days”? I figured that maybe Butter Brickhouse would end up being some Crankshaft character’s great grandfather or something, but this, as usual, is absurd.
Butter Brickle becomes Butter Brinkel and “worked with” becomes “kemosabe”.
Never change, TB… no matter how much we want you to.
“Kemosabe”? Christ, he’s going to worm Lisa into this with that awkward setup, isn’t he?
Anyway, so Cindy is setting up a second documentary that again will be nothing but an interview with Cliff. Thank goodness for her he can remember all these things after seventy years and is willing to blab about them. At least this time she appears to be doing some homework before she starts rolling a camera (which will be handheld by Jessica, no doubt).
Still, an Emmy-winning documentary about a subject is unlikely to be limited to mild, unverified recollections of an extremely elderly friend of the subject. I’ll bet Cindy will be shown doing no other background work on this despite the fact that Cliff might easily be flat out lying to her. Batiuk’s got to use that space to shoehorn Lisa into this!
Another documentary featuring the memories of a guy who spent sixty-plus years as a total recluse. Suddenly Cliff is the default “old guy”, even if it makes no sense whatsoever.
And not just sixty years, either. Sixty subsequent years as a recluse! So you have these two great friends and one gets blacklisted because he’s a suspected Communist and the other guy goes to jail for murder. So Cindy will naturally try to rehabilitate their images and will do it only by interviewing one of them on the fly.
Calling Batiuk’s method “half-assed” is an insult to anyone who’s done a half-assed job at anything.
What’s happening here is that Batiuk has decided that characters can just stop aging at some point. It’s why Ed Crankshaft is still functionally in his late sixties despite being damned near ninety. It’s why Summer is always going to be a college sophomore. It’s especially why people can meet in what’s now a parking garage and talk about an acquaintance that was active decades before either of them were born.
It’s why Ed Crankshaft is still functionally in his late sixties despite being damned near ninety.
He’s a WWII veteran. He’s not damned near ninety. He’s well past it.
People who turned 17 in 1945 would be turning 91 this year.
Keep in mind as well that *child stars* in silent-era films would all be close to or older than 100 now. The adults in those films would’ve been drawing Social Security fifty years ago.
And a typical TomBa Ohio-linked non-connection. Per Wikipedia:
“There is a non-related chain of steakhouse restaurants first founded in 1941 in Akron, Ohio, and franchised in 1962. This chain was founded by Ted and Gus Girves, and the full name of these restaurants is “Girves Brown Derby”. As of 2019, five of the Girves chain are still in business. A former Girves Brown Derby restaurant in the past has offered Hollywood-style food.”
Girves still has a few restaurants open. They were quite popular back when I was growing up. One of these restaurants is in Medina, near where Batty lives.
Dang, if this old coot is 90, he’s still would’ve been born in 1929, so his first acting job was in the late 1940s, after the war. No way he knows anything about the old, silent days of movies. You just can’t fix stupid.
Who cares about all that. Batty is bored and wants to indulge his nostalgia fetish. There are tons of stories he could tell that are relevant to today, but instead he just rambles on incoherently about the past. Just call him Grampa Simpson.
Cliff said in the flashback to the Congressional hearings that he was a deckhand on a ship to Murmansk in 1940. The youngest Cliff can be is 95, born in 1924. He could have worked with Brinkel as a child about 1932 (like Jackie Coogan with Chaplin in The Kid), but don’t count on this being the case. Let’s watch for the upcoming references that will establish that
Cliff is 110 or 115 years old.
Next month Cindy will do a documentary on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and we’ll find out that Cliff was John Wilkes Booth’s understudy.
I’m hoping for a Sunday strip that takes place aboard a tramp steamer. You know Batty is anxious to use those words again.
Maybe this was already posted here, but I totally missed it.
Batty being interviewed last fall on a local station:
Feel bad for Batty, the hosts of this show really suck. The fake exaggerated emotions….funny they could barely say Funky Winkerbean…they don’t read it. Batty had to plug KSU too.