Are we STILL on this? More on Ruby's retirement Here in today's strip Batton butts right in Again, he does NOT work here Who asked him to speak? Batton's questioning A reflection of TB? Is the strip's end near? Or is this resolve? Tom writing his thoughts in strip Eff-ing ponderous A warning haiku The link above has cussing That's NSFW! With Dinkle, Linda And others who fake retire Do we believe this? We probably should Not like TB gave Ruby Anything worthwhile Chester looks depressed I mean, he's just despondent In his sad jacket
by billytheskink | November 15, 2022 · 10:30 pm
Re-haiku-ment
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Tagged as arcs where nothing happens, Atomik Komix, author avatar, Batton, Batton Thomas, boredom personified, Chester, comic books, comics, Complete Worthless Ass, curmudgeonly oldsters, depression, drafting table, endless tedium, enraging hair strands, glasses, gradient voids, gray ashen landscape, hatchet face, impending doom, jaunty scarves, Mindy, not how the world works, not how things work, not the way the world works, oddly muted squiggly lines, Old dying people, one of those arcs that just never seems to end, really dumb questions, retirement, scarf, seldom-seen characters wearing hats, squiggly lines, squiggly lines used to denote texture, stupid, the inevitable ravages of age, the ravages of age, things that never end, why?, windows
Son of Stuck Funky 
Sigh. So, of course, Ruby doesn’t really WANT to retire, it’s just that the forces of The Universe are forcing her hand…literally. So it’s not a happy time for Ruby, but one full of fear, uncertainty, and dread. At best, she’ll barely scrape by for the next thirty or forty grim years, occasionally dropping by AK HQ to wryly reminisce about everything she didn’t do there, and at worst she’ll die penniless and alone, until her desiccated corpse is finally discovered by the mailman. So she’s screwed either way, not that it even matters. This is what I love about FW, that relentlessly downtrodden tone. Those who just sail past FW on the comics page (or, like most of America, ignore it entirely) probably think FW is a lite n’ breezy bit of silly fluff, good for a mild chuckle here and there. But those folks are mistaken, as FW is as bleak, dark and grim as a doom metal band’s rehearsal space. It’s some seriously sick shit.
She doesn’t want to retire? She’s conflicted? Quick, somebody push that red Reset button on her cap. Make her forget about retiring before Batiuk forgets about this storyline!
Chuck Ayers gets it
When all else with the strip sucks
At least there’s Jazz Hands
I keep expecting Bob Fosse to show up.
Pity he wouldn’t be able to say “It’s showtime.” In this strip it’s become “Tell, don’t show.”
This strip displays FW’s toxic flaw: Nobody is ever responsible for their actions (as long as they’re parroting Batiuk’s values).
How many other FW characters have gotten a “farewell” arc during Act III? There was Susan, but that’s tenuous now. I doubt Khan will ever return, and I wouldn’t bet on seeing Buck again, not after the way his last arc ended. There are a few more characters he just stopped using, like Owen and Cody, but they never got a “goodbye” arc to themselves. So if he really does dump Ruby, it’d only be the third character kiss-off in Act III history. Am I forgetting someone here? I’m not counting Bull, as that was a death arc, which is kind of different, although I suppose that was a kiss-off arc as well.
Hey! Phil the Forecaster got an entire weeklong farewell back in 2017.
You know, despite the fact that he was a John Darling character and I think his only Act III appearance was a brief cameo for a single strip three years earlier during the ‘Jess makes a documentary that she doesn’t finish.’ arc.
No matter what may be happening in FW. No matter how strange. Nothing has topped Phil the Forecaster getting an entire week…
I thought Jessica Darling Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered actually did finish her documentary, only to say that she never planned on doing anything silly like releasing it or showing it to another human being. (Or am I just assuming it went that way because that would be the stupidest way that plot could go?)
“And you’re one of them”? That’s horrible.
Reminds me of an old story some longtime college football coach told back in the 90s (and no, I don’t remember which coach this was)…
It was a Monday morning in late November and this coach had just finished the final game of his season and was in his office doing some end-of-season paperwork and getting ready to hit the recruiting trail. The Athletic Director walks in and congratulates him on making it through a season full of ups and downs — He noted there were a couple of really good wins on the schedule, a couple of regrettable losses, the team was young, talented and had a lot of fan-exciting potential, but his freshman-heavy team was also error-prone and lacking on-field discipline… But overall he was mostly optimistic about the future direction of the program…
…After the AD spent a good half-hour recapping the season, he ended his lecture with “…So suffice to say, we’re going to be making some changes in this department.” as he walked out, thanking the coach for his hard work… The coach went back to his paperwork and prospect scouting reports and it was about 45 minutes later when it finally came to him — “HEY WAIT A MINUTE HERE — **I’M** THE ONLY PERSON IN THIS GODDAMNED DEPARTMENT!!”
The best thing about Phil the Forecaster retirement week for me (I was blogging that week) was writing a joke about how the dumb gag that Phil’s forecasts were always wrong was only surpassed in trendiness and hacky-ness during the late 1970s in which John Darling emerged only by jokes about Billy Carter… and then browsing through some early John Darling strips looking for anything interesting with Phil in it that I could use and actually finding a strip with a joke about Billy Carter in short order! Which, of course, I used.
Oooof, that one vanished down the ol’ memory hole. It always amazes me how instantly forgettable so many FW story arcs are.
Batton Thomas acts like she’s doing the worst possible thing. Maybe he’s terrified that she’s setting a good example for him and the rest of the bull pen.
Oh, Ruby. In your youth, you were relentlessly harassed by pathetic virgins. In your golden years, you were upstaged by an exhumed corpse. In your dotage, you were ignored. But now, by retiring, you’ve finally received the attention you always craved. Well played. Now go away, and drag Thatton Biomass away with you, please.
I can’t help it, I just think it’s going to be so beautiful seeing Ruby Lith take over the music director spot at Westview.
Batton Thomas, gripped by the hand of terror. I supposed this reflects Batiuk’s own attitude.
Batiuk’s attitude is understandable, though. If he retires, his reputation is “70’s era cartoonist best known for destroying his own work by channeling minor humor into lame award-chasing.”
He’s gotta keep going in hopes that the ship will right itself. Not that he will right it, it will just do all that by itself, somehow.
You know, the worst of it is: I think he’s not even hoping that the ship will right itself, because he doesn’t realize that at this point it looks like the hulk of the Costa Concordia, slowly rotting as it lies on its side, half submerged, putting on a pathetic display for gawking tourists on the coast of Italy.
He thinks the problem is that he hasn’t been properly recognized. He thinks that if he just keeps forging ahead, trying anything and everything, throwing in racism and sexism and trans people and what have you, someday his groundbreaking genius will be recognized with awards. You know, like one of those Hollywood stars who somehow never won an Oscar, but eventually gets a Lifetime Achievement Award when everyone realizes how brilliant their body of work has been, and how unfairly overlooked.
You’re definitely right that he realizes that as soon as he retires, he’ll be forgotten. I bet he’s tired — we can tell he is by the lack of interest and effort in recent years — but he just can’t give up the one thing that makes him special.
You know, the worst of it is: I think he’s not even hoping that the ship will right itself, because he doesn’t realize that at this point it looks like the hulk of the Costa Concordia, slowly rotting as it lies on its side, half submerged, putting on a pathetic display for gawking tourists on the coast of Italy.
He thinks the problem is that he hasn’t been properly recognized. He thinks that if he just keeps forging ahead, trying anything and everything, throwing in racism and sexism and trans people and what have you, someday his groundbreaking genius will be recognized with awards. You know, like one of those Hollywood stars who somehow never won an Oscar, but eventually gets a Lifetime Achievement Award when everyone realizes how brilliant their body of work has been, and how unfairly overlooked.
You’re definitely right that he realizes that as soon as he retires, he’ll be forgotten. I bet he’s tired — we can tell he is by the lack of interest and effort in recent years — but he just can’t give up the one thing that makes him special.
What’s striking to me is that Funky Winkerbean has retained its reputation for being Funky Cancercancer, even though this hasn’t been the case for several years now. It’s become mostly Mary Sue wish fulfillment, but its bad reputation hasn’t adjusted with it. Even the current Twitter roll calls it “depressingly bleak” and “a nuclear apocalypse where everyone is incinerated.” This blog aside, it’s become too irrelevant to even make fun of. Even Comics Curmudgeon rarely talks about it anymore.
I’ve said this before, but more and more his strips dip into unsnarkable territory. Often the only things I can think to contribute here are reactions to other posters, not comments on the strip itself.
The primary quality that makes something snarkable is the gulf between what it thinks it is and what it actually is. Hackwork that knows it’s hackwork isn’t snarkable. Amateurs who cheerfully accept that they’re amateurs aren’t snarkable. Silly, ridiculous work that embraces its ridiculousness isn’t snarkable. Professional work executed professionally isn’t snarkable.
The problem with snarking these particular strips is that it’s not even clear what Puff Batty’s aiming for. What is he trying to do? What is he trying to say? It’s hard to critique the gulf between his perception and the actual reality when I don’t even know what his perception is.
“noahabbadi” above is me. The ways of WordPress are sometimes capricious.
Batiuk aims for awards (by blindfolding himself and shooting an arrow randomly) but what he really seems to be doing these days is avoiding any and all criticism. Batiuk seems to have high level of loathing for any criticism at all, even the most minor. So he blands it out to avoid even that. As you note, if you have no content you really can’t be critiqued. And you can then bask in your friend’s five star reviews on Amazon.
Funky Winkerbean isn’t snark-proof, but it’s very snark-resistant. Individual strips are often bland, inoffensive, and look like perfectly workable parts of a larger story. You have to really followthe comic strip to understand why it’s so terrible.
Have you ever seen one of those “without context” YouTube videos? Somebody takes an innocuous TV show or movie, and shows a collection of clips that sound filthy out of context. To mock Funky Winkerbean, in the same way you’d have to put it IN context.
Like that bird feeder story; it’s touching, until you know Lisa has been dead for 24 years. Only then does it become horrible.
Actually, I did find that arc rather snarkable in certain ways, even without the ghastly knowledge that Lisa’s been dead nearly a quarter century. Among other obvious questions: Les never ever once spotted the neighbor’s face?
But yes, it’s very easy to snark on the totality of the FW canon, especially Act III, and it adds a snarkable element even when a given day’s strip is one of the Unsnarkables™️.
Slack-jawed Batton Thomas in profile with “tombatiuk.com/books” written underneath.
*chef’s kiss*
“Wow, I can buy even more stories like this? Let’s go to that U.R.L. right a-way!”
As the news of Ruby’s imminent retirement continues to send shock waves through an office consisting of two elderly comic book creators, one elderly comic strip creator, one middle-aged comic book publisher, two thirtysomething (?) comic book creators and one creator’s comic book colorist girlfriend, may I just step up for a second and ask…what, precisely, is Ms. Lith retiring from?
If I have her life story correct, she spent a couple of decades as a Golden/Silver Age comics artist, then stepped down either due to a lack of work or maybe familial obligations (do we know if she even has family?). Then, out of the blue, she pops up at the Dobbs Gallery and is hired to draw for AK until, possibly for some undisclosed health issue, this week. It’s not as though she’s a factory worker who’s been on the line for 35 years. She draws two monthly or semi-monthly books and could–assuming it’s not a serious ailement–easily reduce her workload to occasional covers (Atomik’s specialty) or signing autographs and doing sketches at conventions (which one would think she, Flash, and Phil would have doing for years anyway) to supplement her Social Security.
I never would have imagined that “How Aging Comics Creators Earn a Living” was a topic to add to the List of Things Batiuk Seems to Know Nothing About, but there you go.
Let’s not forget as was stated here a few days ago – with the 50th Year Reunion for the A1 class having just occurred, that make that class no younger than 68, which makes Darrin and Pete no younger than 50.
We learned January 2021 that she has a daughter, (presumably now grown) Amber Lith, who serves as art inspiration for Wayback Wendy.
It’s interesting that Amber shares her surname, since Ruby worked as Ruby Lith before she was married, and is now divorced. So for whatever reason Amber rejected her father’s family name.
Probably for the sake of a pun.
Ruby, on the other hand, proudly carries the family name of her father, Copro Lith.
This strip is absolutely jam packed with shit fossils.
Here and I always assumed Lith was either Ruby’s married name or work pseudonym, as she long ago cut herself off from her money-obsessed family, The Tuesdays, and their bourgeois restaurant chain.
Note to Bronze Age comic book geeks: this would also work if Ms. Lith was in fact Ruby Tuesday of the Headmen, with her organic computer noggin stuck on “nonagenarian lady.” Flash is Jerry Morgan, The Late Phil Holt is Chondu the Mystic, and body-obsessed Batton Thomas is Arthur Nagan.
Yes, J.J. And what’s not generally known is that she was the groupie about whom the Stones song “Ruby Tuesday” was written. Mick honored her renouncing of the family’s name and fortune with the line, “Who could hang a name on you?”
In return, Ruby honored Mick by taking a name based on the Greek word lithos, or “stone.”
That’s Ruby Thursday, not Ruby Tuesday.
I stopped reading comics during Steve Gerber’s *Musical Minds* run in *The Defenders,* which featured the Headmen. Much later, in an “Essential” black-and-white collection I finished the sequence, mindful that a good friend felt that Gerber was the Grant Morrison of the 1970s.
I couldn’t see it. Chondu’s consciousness goes into a fawn, and Dr. Tania Belinsky performs surgery to restore Kyle Richmond’s brain to his body, and nobody remembers Chondu’s brain. Meanwhile, in his absence, Dr. Nagan’s performed cosmetic surgery on his teammate’s body, without his permission, and Droopy Jerry Morgan is appalled…
Well, what can you expect from a man who thought that Shanna the She-Devil was almost as pretty as the Man-Thing?
Of course, Gerber is also the man who gave the Valkyrie a friend named Elena, who would be her guide to life in 1970s New York. She was in two issues and then never mentioned again. As Val brought her to Dr. Strange’s sanctum sanctorum, my guess is that she opened the wrong door and wound up in a dimension where she and her infant child either became sovereigns or sacrifices to appease the wrath of the Half-Mindless Ones!
“You can’t be the walrus if they want you to be the system,” goes the “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man.”
Like the secretary who fell into the Xerox machine, Chester should be beside himself. His business depends on using famous, or at least notorious, Silver Age writers and artists. He clearly has a readership which expects “more of the same, just like it was seventy years ago, thankyouverymuch.” There aren’t many of those Silver Age creators left alive (giving Flash Philistine the benefit of the doubt here), and now he’s losing one. What if the others follow her into oblivion? Where will he find replacements? Will he lose his primary market and have to develop new talents for a new readership? Welcome to “Crisis on Infinite Repetitions!”
He clearly has a readership which expects “more of the same, just like it was seventy years ago, thankyouverymuch.”
That sums up Batty’s view of how comics should be written. It would be even better if he could also buy them from a spinner rack at his local drugstore.
If Atomik Komix did just reprint all their past issues and call them new, would anyone even notice?
If they reprinted them with blank pages, the reviews would be ecstatic and Chester would save on ink costs.
There is a brisk market for blank books with interesting covers; at least they seem to sell well at the art shops and gift shops I visit. Since AK is apparently a cover-only enterprise, why not exploit this?
Oh, wait. I know. Because if you’re gonna buy a blank book with a comic cover, you’d want a classic DC or Marvel cover, not some incoherent dreck featuring a static layout and a derivative, dullsville character you never heard of, topped off with a hectoring word balloon.
Coming next week: Pete asks the AK staff for blood samples to mix in with the printing ink a la Kiss in the 1970s, but the books have to be recalled after lethal amounts of warfarin are found on the pages.
Lucky for Chester, his new artist is standing right there. And already acting like he works there.
Given the titles he has featured in his “Cover Me” blog posts, I wonder what titles he is reading currently. He does include a few independent covers, but he rarely comments on the story content, but with rare exceptions, it’s hard to know if he’s actually reading the stories,
“so it’s hard to know”
Note to self: Proofread edited text before sending.
In transit today, wasn’t going to comment but I have to billytheskink’s poem. Amazing work, bts. You are a master wordsmith (capital W, wordsmith!) Hats off to you.
*have to a ACKNOWLEDGE billytheskink’s poem
…and stop typing on my iPhone.
I think she’s an author avatar today. He probably doesn’t want to do this any more but he also doesn’t know what to do with his time if he’s not churning out his ordure.
You know that is a common problem and it could make for an interesting strip. I’m about 10 years away from retirement age.
I have good financial discipline and so I am prepared on that front, but what would I do with my time?
You lost Bats at “could make for an interesting strip.”
You’re right. There are countless interesting angles for writing about a character’s retirement.
1. Your angle, Rusty — what do you do with yourself? Without your professional identity, who are you?
2. Regrets — about what your career could have been, about paths not taken, perhaps about retiring too late, so you’re too old to do some of the things you wanted to do when you retired.
3. Financial worries. Will you need to work part-time? Will your lifestyle change? If it does, is that bad? Maybe you’d be happy to downsize as you get older.
4. Children. More time to spend with kids or grandkids (or spouse, but I don’t think Ruby’s married). Is that good or bad? Maybe you’ll get on their nerves. Relationships will change.
5. Embracing your age. Perhaps you take your place as an elder, mentoring younger people. You reappraise your life; you mentally integrate your wins and your losses into a coherent life story as you face aging and eventual mortality.
OR… you could take the coward’s way out and have a character retire and then continue doing exactly what they were doing all along, as Batty did with Dinkle. He never had to face any of these changes.
Once again, no real change. No real challenges. No real conflict. None of the ingredients that make stories interesting.
I wish you were writing this strip.
By the way, my preliminary thoughts on this.
I am considering teaching part time at our local university so that I can mentor young engineers. I may also work as a consultant.
If that doesn’t work out, then I will get a job at our local Italian market. They are always looking for pizza and pasta makers.
Read comic strips on the Internet and make snarky comments about them?
Nah, that sounds like an incredible waste of time.
1. GOD DAMN IT BATTON THOMAS YOU DON’T EVEN **KNOW** RUBY, YOU DON’T WORK AT AK AND I KNOW YOU SURE AS HELL AREN’T READING COMIC BOOKS GEARED FOR EIGHT-YEAR-OLD GIRLS SO WHAT IN FUCK’S NAME ARE YOU GETTING SO WORKED UP ABOUT??!
2. AND EVEN THOUGH IT’S ABSOLUTELY NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, WHAT’S SO HORRIBLE ABOUT AN 87-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WHO WANTS TO START DOING SOMETHING ELSE IN LIFE?
My first Haiku attempt since grade school:
Who writes this dreck?
Is anybody reading?
No one laughs out loud.
We read it all here.
And each day get a chuckle,
When we see the comments.
CBH is right.
Laughs Batuik didn’t intend,
And I stand in line.
In home of Basho
Read SoSF daily
Haiku? From snark, art