“Give me some stock tips” is kind of an abrupt shift from “tell me about my wife and our love life”. And honestly, given that the concept of a store that sells comics practically shut down his brain, I find it really hard to believe that Young Harry would know what stocks are, let alone think to ask about them.
I also think that selection of companies is an odd one to tell someone in 1980 to invest in, given that Google was founded in 1998, Yahoo in 1994, and Twitter in 2006. But the joke is supposed to be “those don’t sound like company names” (although some of the Fortune 500 companies in 1980 were Textron, Bendix, National Intergroup, Unisys, Teledyne, and GenCorp, which I don’t think sound any less weird to someone not familiar with them).
“Let me tell you about your fabulous future where you marry a girl and get to work in a comic store when you’re old! Also, change your life and don’t do what I did.” seems extremely contradictory to me. Honestly, if he skipped school more, then he’d possibly never work for the postal service and could’ve lived the dream of working part-time at a comic store much much earlier.
I wonder if Old Harry paid for this meal with his credit card, or cash from the 2020s.
Grandpa Me Says Invest In Grandpa Google
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
Hey, remember when Harry was worried about causing some kind of time anomaly?
Of course Harry is now actively attempting to create a time anomaly, but I’m sure TomBa would quote Emerson at you about that – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
“Foolish” is doing an awful lot of work there.
“Also, as you can see, future skulls get absolutely huge compared to you pinheads from 1980, so invest heavily in the megahats/megaskulls industry”
“Well, kid, if you will have stayed in school, everything I have been going go have said here in the past could have made sense!”
“You make sense? That will have been a first for either of us if it had happened!”
“Create a daily comic strip. The job security is unparalleled, and you only work for four or five days a year!”
There is no accountability at all. You can even mail in the wrong strips and they will get published…see this week’s Crankshaft for example.
We’ll know if Young Crazy took Old Crazy’s advice if Old Crazy comes back to the future to find everyone talking about “Aunt Alta Vista” instead of “Grandpa Google”.
Brilliant… Yeah, asshole, don’t bother to tell your younger self about no-brainer companies that he already would be familiar with in 1980 like Nike, Boeing, Coca-Cola, etc…
Or General Electric…
Or Apple Computers. Which was well established by 1980, and had its IPO later that year. One share for $22 in December 1980 would have split 5 times into 224 shares, each worth $170 as of this morning. Or $38,080 total.
Yes, that would be the correct answer. He could have even ripped off the Forrest Gump “Fruit Company” joke.
He could have folded the joke twice, first making the fruit company joke, then making a Forrest Gump already did it joke.
Then a third joke of young Harry not knowing who Forrest Gump is.
Hell, this whole arc should be just old Harry listing off basics of modern life that weren’t even science fiction in 1980. “Google? Twitter? Yahoo? Cell Phone? Tablet? Apps? Debit card? GPS? The Internet? Drones? Wi-Fi? Cryptocurrency? Legalized Marijuana?”
Or Microsoft, which went public in 1986, but was around before then and was well-known among anyone with an interest in computers.
$1000 in Microsoft at its IPO would be worth a little less than 4 million today.
I’ve actually gone through this whole IF ONLY thing in the past. Back when my grandfather died in the early 90s, he left me and my brothers a nice amount of money. Not huge, mind you, but certainly nice. My father, the executor of his estate, invested it in a mutual fund that got killed by the Asian crash in 1998 several years later. So when the fund matured ten years later, I had made a paltry 30% return. If I had instead invested it in Cisco, ten years later I would’ve had about 15 million dollars.
BTW, investing in Yahoo would’ve killed you in the 2001 bubble burst. So Batiuk doesn’t get that right. He could have done Cisco and had Young Crazy think he meant Crisco.
Of course, Cisco got crushed in that bubble as well, but if you got off at the right time… man.
Old Crazy to Young Crazy:
‘I’ll prove to you I’m from the future. Empire Strikes Back is opening next month right? ‘ ‘Funky and I are going to camp out at the theater to be first in line to get tickets!!
Old Crazy:
‘Well, Darth Vader turns out to be Luke’s father! You can clean up making bets with your friends’
Young Crazy:
“No way! That would be the stupidest plot twist ever! You must think I’m an idiot to believe that! 🙂
“Well, yeah, I do think you’re an idiot, but that’s beside the point.”
Alternate version: “Hah, is it a stupider plot twist than Leia turning out to be Luke’s sister? Because that’s what the NEXT sequel will reveal!”
“Yeah, right. Next you’re gonna tell me C-3PO is Luke’s brother.”
“Actually…”
Good question about how Future Harry is going to pay for lunch. Maybe he won’t pay. Maybe he’s planning a dine-and-dash that will go awry. He’ll be arrested in front of Montoni’s, screaming “I’m from THE FUTURE!”, while Young Harry runs away. Future Harry lives out his days in a straitjacket in a mental hospital, raving softly and hoarsely about “magic helmet” and “comic book store” until one day there’s nothing but silence from his padded cell.
A guy can dream.
It is an ethical problem. Any check he writes will bounce, and he’s going to give his 2022 Driver’s License if they ask for ID. His credit card would go through the cruncher since they didn’t have POS terminals in 1980. But the date problem again. When I ran a till in the 80s I was always supposed to check the expiration date of a CC before crunching it. If he tries to pay with cash, it will not look real with modern bills with the oversize off-center portraits. If he somehow has pre-1998 bills they will look OK unless someone bothers to look at the series date.
There is a whole sub-genre of time-travel fiction built around the idea that you can go into the past, but nothing you do can actually change anything. The high end of this sub-genre includes stories like “a man goes into the past to kill Hitler, but instead accidentally saves him and kills the great statesman and peacemaker who had been destined to govern Germany.” The low end of the sub-genre is presented here for your consideration.
This story needs to pick a lane. Crazy spent all that time worrying about causing “time anomalies”, and now he’s causing them left and right. The story thinks it addressed that point when Harry safely talked to his younger self and nothing happened, but now he’s telling himself things that would radically change his own future/past.
This is what happens when the writer’s only storytelling concern is finding reasons to talk about comic books. Oh, and setting up cheap irony that Alanis Morissette would find lame.
This is wearisome.
Monotonous, isn’t it?
Montonious.
Well, with the news that Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter for $43 billion, at least today’s strip is timely.
“I wonder if Old Harry paid for this meal with his credit card, or cash from the 2020s.”
Like Harry has ever picked up a check in his life.
There’s a lot of heavy lifting that the reader needs to do to parse the second panel. Hatty asks for stock tips and gets them, then responds with dismissive disdain and a visible scowl. A befuddled “who? what?” would have worked. A response of “I haven’t heard of any of those!” would have matched the facial pose at least, even though the angered expression still would have been unwarranted. Instead it’s an angry “aw nevermind” as a response to an honest answer to the question he asked.
But hey, at least we get to this now, and it does express what other posters here and CK said earlier in the week. Sure, most humans would lead off to talk about future events in order to amass wealth, and he did get to that eventually, but there are much more important things to address. Like comic books, and stores which sell comic books.
Oh, there are even more problems than that.
1. It violates the whole “not causing time anomalies” thing Harry is supposed to be concerned about.
2. It’s too flippant. Harry has just given himself information that could make him insanely wealthy, and young Harry just disregards it. See also #1.
3. Older Harry doesn’t bother clarifying, even though younger Harry’s confusion is perfectly understandable.
This is another one of Tom Batiuk’s piss-poor hack writing tropes: someone doesn’t tell someone something of life-altering importance, because they got interrupted for a second. When you’re telling your younger self what stocks to buy to make yourself insanely wealthy, and they don’t quite understand you the first time, it’s OK to repeat yourself. See also #1 and #2. And what I said earlier about “irony so lame Alanis Morrissette would reject it.”
4. Yahoo, Google and Twitter won’t even exist until 1995, 1998, and 2006. Apple or Nike would have been a better stock suggestion, since they exist in 1980 but haven’t exploded yet. And any person who was randomly sucked back in time could think of them on the spot.
5. If you ask any Westview resident what to invest your money in, what would they tell you? COMIC BOOKS! Comic books made Chester Hagglemore a zillionaire, and are the solution to every financial problem in Westview. And it just slips Harry’s mind. Even though Harry spent half the week talking about comic books, And, younger Harry was concerned about them being thrown out. This implies that he already has an awareness of future collectible value, and a desire to preserve it. Older Harry even said he had to “sell” his!
Leave it to Tom Batiuk to NOT talk about comic books the one time he really should have.
The weekly Flash book report on the Funkyblog has an interesting comment, that ties into what I said yesterday about Tom Batiuk being full of shit about his relationship with other cartoonists.
this issue marks the editorial debut of Mike W Barr as editor of the Flash. Mike and I probably started reading The Flash at about the same time in our Ohio tot-hood. So the kids have now fully taken over the clubhouse.
DC and Marvel both refused to hire Tom Batiuk. So I don’t know where he gets off saying “the kids (plural) have the taken over the clubhouse” just because they hired someone else from his hometown. Someone he’s obviously never met and doesn’t know anything about. Mike Barr’s wiki page says he’s not even the same age as Batiuk. So they weren’t “reading the Flash at the same time”, unless Batiuk was 14 and Barr was 7, which is just creepy.
As with the Charles Schulz letter, look how hard Batiuk is trying to create the impression of a relationship there is no evidence of. And that Batiuk himself somehow wields influence over how comic books are created. He’s basically saying “this man is my age, from my hometown, and involved with The Flash, so he is obviously Creating Comic Books Correctly™.” Pathetic.
Given that Batty was so specific about Harry landing on April 15, 1980, I thought for a moment that his investment advice to his younger self would be to buy Chrysler bonds, and do it quickly–the government’s going to guarantee a $1.5 billion dollar loan to the company on May 10, and at that point the bonds are going to jump from junk to blue-chip value.
Then I realized that would require Batty to have done some research. Nah. Ain’t gonna happen.
I keep imagining Young Crazy Harry raising a Star Wars blaster from under the table and shooting Old Crazy Harry.
Young Crazy Harry: It was a boring conversation anyway.
Harry shot first.
Oh, Batty, you wild man. Slow down. You’re going way too fast. I can barely keep up. There’s just too much going on here.
What writer could take a compelling premise like time travel (or dreams) and then write about a character traveling back in time to do all kinds of wondrous things like… endlessly talking to themselves? *Frustrated sigh*
Blah Blah Blah Batty Boo, that’s who.
I have a feeling Batty talks to himself. A lot.
Batty: Who deserves all kinds of accolades and awards? Who has two thumbs and is one of the greatest comic strip creators of all time? THIS GUY!