Why the hell must Haystack Hair “sidebar” with Darin when the dude was standing right there?!? Check out Jessica’s narrowed-eyed, conspiratorial posture in panel one: with her left hand hooking the crook of dopey Darin’s arm, and her right palm downward, fingers spread in the “keep this on the low” gesture. Always with the dollar signs in her eyes, this Jessica: recall her (short-lived) giddiness over the dough that Darin would make off auctioning those Phil Holt Batom covers. At least Jessica is looking out for their child’s future…unlike Darin, who without so much as consulting Jessica decreed that all that Phil Holt money should go to the Lisa’s Legacy fund (which I’m only hyperlinking here because they finally fixed it so the URL doesn’t redirect and give you a dire-sounding certificate error).
Check Yo Self
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Let’s send Skyler to college now, so we can forget about him until he’s self-supporting! That’s what my ideel, Fearless FosLes, did with his daughter!”
Shouldn’t you start Skyler on a more reasonable educational track, like obedience school?
Once again, Batiuk is turning this strip into Fantasy Land, where all his terrible characters are rewarded for doing nothing.
What pisses me off more than characters getting gold bars, The Mona Lisa and the Hope Diamond delivered to them as commonly as one might get delivered a pizza is the dumbassed super-lazy return to status quo by the author who never *REMEMBERS* he bestowed that stuff on them in the first place. So they characters have to push a reset button and somehow go back to being poors so they can express genuine surprise over their next undeserved windfall…
In the last THREE years of Funkyverse time:
1. Jess created a world famous award-winning documentary
2. Darrin created a pizza ordering app for Montoni’s
3. Pete rebooted some dumb long-forgotten comic book into the best-selling award winning comic of the year (and he subsequently got fired for discussing advance plot details and complaining about his bosses to his boyfriend on the phone within plain earshot of his entire office)
4. Darrin gets crony hired to storyboard the biggest comic book movie in the history of forever, which made Avengers look like Ishtar. His total drawing experience until this point is the doodles he did in 10th grade study hall.
5. Pete gets crony hired to rewrite the script for the biggest comic book movie in the history of forever. Instead of thanking Christ for this one-in-a-million opportunity and working hard, Pete spends most of his time lazing about and complaining about deadlines and his bosses
6. Because storyboarding isn’t really a full-time job that could sustain him, Darrin gets tasked to design all the toys, figurines and other merch for the biggest comic book movie in the history of forever, and presumably keeps the royalties for every toy sold.
7. Darrin runs into a once famous but long forgotten golden age comic book artist doing kiddie sketches at a toddler’s birthday party for minimum wage. He is of course totally bitter because he worked in the romantic golden age when comic artists made pennies on the dollar and now it’s a trillion dollar industry. He sees a kindred spirit in “fellow artist” Darrin, whose total art experience is storyboarding a movie and the doodles he did in 10th grade study hall.
7a. The old bitter comics artist dies, and bequeaths Darrin his collection of vintage work, which is easily worth high six figures. Darrin donates them for auction at the Lisa’s Legacy whatever (no doubt keeping a 15% commission for himself). Old Bitter Comics Artist sees this from the afterlife and becomes more bitter since he didn’t have to live out his twilight years unknown, dirt poor and eating cat food if only he got his artwork appraised.
8. Bald Millionaire Comics Geek wants to start a new comics publishing house to bring all the old school, *real* comics back, which means when comics didn’t give a damn about “diversity” and people could advertise cigarettes and aphrodisiacs on the back page, I guess. Bald Millionaire has to break the bank to make Darrin+Pete even think about leaving the Hollywood gravy train which conservatively means somewhere in the $500-750k range in total annual compensation?
Long story short, THEY CAN ALREADY AFFORD TO SEND THAT BRAT WHO NEVER AGES TO COLLEGE, EVEN WITH SKYROCKETING TUITION
Uh yeah, sure Jessica. Like I wrote yesterday, amazing comic book-related windfalls just fall from the sky in the Batiukiverse. It’s obviously for Ruby, as only “old” comic book art has any worth in Batiuk’s magical comic book fantasy land. Sigh.
It may well be, Epicus, but that scenario would mean Battyuk forgetting that, when Ruby was introduced at the gallery show, she told Mindy that she had no vintage original art on display there, just commissioned redrawings. Certainly TB wouldn’t blatantly ignore a piece of continuity like that!
Of course, because there’s no reason for Kitch Swoon (wtf) to come in and say that she has a check for “one of your artists” when she can simply come in and say that she has a check for Ruby. She was purposefully vague because the sequence, such as it is, requires that Jessica (notice how it’s her and not Darin screwing up here. This is no coincidence) misunderstand who the check was for. It’s a hallmark of bad writing.
You could teach a class on writing using nothing but Batiuk’s excesses and bad habits as negative examples.
I’ve also often thought Durwood had the physique of a sidebar.
Don’t you mean “crowbar”?
I’d go with “rebar,” because then he could be encased in concrete.
We could actually send Skylar to college! Because there is just no way we could possibly afford it without me getting some kind of extremely desirable job as a cinematographer on a major production or anything. But that’s just a pipe dream.
No, remember, Jessica gave her dream career to be with her family! Even though she does none of either.
Wow, over on Crankshaft, he is covering a real event that is taking place in Batty’s home town oh Medina, Ohio.
Maybe he is hoping for an award from the mayor.
“So tell us, Kitch Mybutt… tell us who is getting the check!”
“Not yet. I’m going to stand here with Mister Hagglestein. We’re pretending to talk.”
(Next day…)
“Kitch Mybutt! What brings! I can’t believe you’re here to give a check to one of our artists!”
(Day after that…)
“I’m so glad that you, Kitch Mybutt, the famous gallery owner, came here to Atomix Komix headquarters to give one of our artists a check!”
(After a week or two of this idiocy…)
“I, Kitch Mybutt, have a check for one of your artists! It’s for ten smackers!”
“Ten dollars?”
“Yessiree Bob!”
“That’s… not a lot of money at all.”
“I’m from the nineteen forties. That’s a lot of money! Think of all the gas rationing coupons you can buy with that! Well, toodle loo!”
“Sidebar, Darin… I just heard the gallery owner say-”
Yeah, he was standing right next to you when she said it, stupid. Next time just say “as you know,” it would genuinely be an improvement for the exposition in this dumb strip.
No one toots his own horn quite like BatHack does. The pregnancy arc, Lisa’s Story, John Darling…you’d think these were monumental moments in popular culture history given the way he carries on and on about them. I do notice he doesn’t do a whole lot of gloating over the last thirteen years, though.
So, thing I did not know about the Death of John Darling’s daughter’s Father, John Darling, who Died, until I read a semi-encyclopedic history of comic strips.
If you have a Comics Kingdom subscription you’ve maybe noticed one of the vintage strips, Big Ben Bolt. It’s a boxing-and-adventure strip written by Elliot “Not Just Al Capp’s Brother” Caplin. (Caplin also created the romance soap The Heart of Juliet Jones). But, as will happen, the time came to wind the strip up. So for its last adventure — and you’d best look away if you don’t want spoilers for a 1978 boxing-and-adventure comic strip — Ben Bolt had some changes of fortune.
In honor of his long career as an athlete and tireless work for education and for children, in the last week of the strip Ben Bolt received the Nobel Peace Prize. And in the last half-week of the strip, was assassinated. Apparently many newspapers, caught off-guard, just pulled the strip three days early and let the comics page run with weird gaps rather than that.
So anyway I was startled to learn that John Darling was not the first title character whose murder ended a comic strip.
Also on a personal note, I was annoyed by the ending of John Darling because I knew the strip was ending. But for some reason I was away from newspapers its last couple days. By the time I got back, the papers had been recycled and nobody was talking about it, so I had to learn how the strip ended years later, on the street. I think Batiuk’s blog might be the first time I’ve seen the actual final daily. Which, since the discovery of The Murderer, has become weirder than it originally was.
1. Who the hell would assassinate a boxer?
2. Why was Darling’s murder so impossible to solve when there was at least one witness?
Yes, he does talk about his strip a lot is doesn’t he? And, among his many annoying traits I find his overweening sense of self importance to be the most annoying. Contributions to the Western Cannon this ain’t Tom. Even in your field your strip has the odd rep of being the strip that kills characters off. Again Krazy Kat or Pogo or Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes this ain’t.
What I enjoyed about that post was where he tried to dance around that fact that John Darling was failing and losing newspapers. He says he killed JD so no one could use him, I think it was some petty nonsense and the syndicate rightly wasn’t interested in the property anyway (and could have kept the property if they wanted, simply by not running the murder comic).
Amazing . You can almost hear the sad trombone when tomorrow or the next day we find out that the huge check from the gallery in the middle of utterly nowhere Ohio is going to what’s her face in the beret.
Still the news for Jess and Boy Lisa isn’t all bad. Realizing they won’t be able to fob the kid off to college once Lisa’s mother the one what raised him dies, they decide to sell Sklyar to a laboratory for medical experiments. It’s for the best really.
Just in time for Duh-ren and Messica to start applying for Skylab’s scholarships and college loans, the following question will be added to the FAFSA form:
Did you, at any point, come into a windfall of money and decide to donate it to a sketchy “charity” rather than saving for your child’s education? (NOTE: if you answer “yes” to this question, you are ineligible for scholarships and subsidized loans.)