Now that we’ve cut the power to his mic and had security drag Les Moore from the stage before he could read the second chapter of Lisa’s Story aloud, we can move on with our awards presentation.
From Michelangelo carving himself lowering the body of Christ from the cross,
To Velazquez painting himself painting the King of Spain,
To Geoff Johns and Sterling Gates writing the entire DC office staff being attacked by Superboy Prime in Adventure Comics #508;
The number of artists that have inserted themselves into a masterpiece is too many to count.
Eventually Funky Winkerbean would become another such masterpiece, with the inclusion of Batton Thomas.
Batton brought something unique to a strip that lacked an adequate author mouthpiece. Each year doubled his appearance times, until by 2022, he had finally earned himself that long awaited award.
Your nominees for,
The Golden T-Square for Most Insufferable Batton Thomas.
1.) Work Ethic
…
2.) The Man Who Would Be King’s
…
3.) Muted Protest
…
4.) NOW It’s Personal
…
5.) Lampshades Made From Strawmen
…
6.) Puffed Batty
…
7.) Meta Mope
…
8.) None Shall Come After
And the winner of The Golden T-Square is…
NOW It’s Personal
To hand out the award we have a very special guest. Someone near and dear to Batton’s heart. On stage to hog the limelight again is Les Moore,
But wait! Who is that? Is that Ayck Chaers?! CUT THE FEED! CUT THE CAMERAS! CUT THE MICS!
Now listen here you ungrateful hack! I’ve kept my peace long enough but this?! You gettin’ a GOLDEN T-SQUARE!? You an’ yer precious ‘Last Leaf.’ Well, this here sonny boy is the LAST STRAW!!!
You know they hand out those to REAL CARTOONISTS? You know, the folks who actually draw. Not people who signed their name, and ONLY their name, to someone else’s pencils day after day for more’an 30 blasted years! I kept my damn mouth shut when you pranced around getting a dagnabbned Pulitzer for ‘cartooning’ when all you were doin’ was tracing over my hard work with yer little black pens! You didn’t even let me sign my damned name until you begged me outta retirement? “You got Crankcase.” You said. “You like Crankcase better anyway, Ayck!”
Well damn right I liked Crankcase better! Had some real humor and art in that Crankcase! And now look what you’ve done with it! You got that Danvis clown copy-pasting and zeroxing all my best stuff so he can rack in a cheap paycheck. Any damn kindergartner can paste stickers to a board, Batty Boy! You’re being HAD! Meanwhile you made me redraw that damned pregnancy storyline over and over and over again!
But naw! I wouldn’t draw your asinine Jetsons future for you, so now I’m chopped liver! Well you tell that wretched scab Bohn Jyrne he did a real bang-up job scribbling out those puppet mouthed go-go boot, poncho, mop heads, you chose to end fifty years of your life on.
Now hand me that T-Square, Batton! You know it’s rightfully mine! And I got a place real special I wanna stick it! Bend over!
(Many thanks to Rusty Shackelford for the Chuck Ayers scenario.)
Son of Stuck Funky 
In a magnificent display of his humility, Batton Thomas humbly declines to accept any award. It is his belief that it would reflect badly on the purity of his self-effacing nature and detract from his incredibly modest goal of being ignored and mistreated by the harsh, crass commercialism of a business dominated by intolerable egomaniacs. He will instead let his work speak for itself, if it can get a word in edgewise.
That is wit drier than the Sahara, WT. I would ask if you stole this…but I think I know better by now.
Thanks! I didn’t even check the thesaurus.
I’m two-for two. “Climate damage” really got under my skin. Typical Batiuk squirminess, pretending to “take a stand”, but making it totally meaningless at the same time.
“Hmmm. I’d love to do a climate change arc, but I don’t want anyone to think I’m taking sides on THAT hornet nest. What to do, what to do? HEY! I’ve GOT it! I’ll call it “climate damage” instead! I mean, everyone hates damage, right? And that way, I’d be talking about damage that already exists, not speculative change!”.
It was all so wishy-washy. But yeah, Batton Thomas…now there’s a character no one will miss. Flash, Phil and Batton were like the Dinkle of later Act III, the arcs that no guest host wanted to get. I used to dread getting a two week Atomik Komix arc. Remember “The Elementals”? Ugh.
The guy writes himself into his own strip and the character is a complete crashing bore who no one could possibly like or enjoy on any level whatsoever. His imagination is limited in ways I cannot comprehend or codify.
Yeah, I never got the point of the Batton Thomas character. A blatant author insert that never really did anything or display any characteristics beyond passive, bland, self-effacement. And he was drawn as a wimpy blob. Was this Batdick’s attempt to make readers think he wasn’t really the affirmation-starved dork he seemed to be?
It’s bizarre. The guy decides to write “himself” into his long-running comic strip that no one cares about, but only as an annoying and pretty much useless background character, like Klabichnik or Boy Lisa. I guess he figured that giving himself a starring role would have been too self-aggrandizing or something. He was more or less introduced to the strip as “the guy no one’s ever heard of”, which does seem awfully self-effacing in a contrived sort of way.
Almost everything in Funky Winkerbeanwas already a self-insertion in some way.
Funky is the witty, put-upon common man Batiuk thinks he is. Les is the Hollywood-conquering literary superstar and leading man Batiuk thinks he should be. Pete and Darrin are the highly paid, world-renowned comic book creators Batiuk thinks he deserves to be. Chester is the financially unlimited comic book purist Batiuk dreams he was. DSH John is the comic book-obsessed idler Batiuk wants to be. Phil Holt and Flash Freename are the real-life legends Batiuk wishes would hang out with him and agree with his dumb comic book options.
Even Dinkle has become Tom Batiuk’s id. Dinkle’s “world’s greatest” act seems to reflect Batiuk’s very high opinion of himself, which Batiuk normally feels compelled to hide under a veneer of phony humility.
All the plots are about things that are deeply important to Batiuk, but nobody else on Earth cares about: nursing 50-year-old high school grudges, how his dead wife is to be perceived (even though every one else is being quite respectful), and how much he’s suffered because of that. And of course, the sanctity of Silver Age comic books, how important they are to the world, and how to make them correctly.
Don’t forget “how to enjoy them correctly.” There’s a right way to do everything, which just happens to be Tom Batiuk’s way.
You’re right that everyone slowly morphed into an author avatar. It’s the opposite of what I would have expected.
I would have expected that someone in their early-mid 20s would be more self-centered, and their first attempts at character development would have tended to be author inserts of a sort, just because young people are self-centered and inexperienced at life.
I would also have expected that just the act of writing for these characters for 50 years would tend to make them more and more distinct.
The opposite happened. They all started out with very distinct personalities and all ended up as one bland Batiuk Slurry consisting of men who were Batiuk avatars and women who were vague shadows whose single purpose was to support the Batiuk avatars.
I’ve said this before, but it’s rare that an artist’s later work is less skilled and less mature than their earlier work. Yet here we are.
“I’ve said this before, but it’s rare that an artist’s later work is less skilled and less mature than their earlier work. Yet here we are.”
Not to speak ill of the dead, but Terry Goodkind would like a word. (Not that his early work was terribly mature.)
I would say many artist’s careers follow a curve. If they get in a situation where they’ve basically earned ‘tenure,’ anything they produce will be consumed by about the same number of people, then a lot of them get lazy. Or their editors get lazy. Or both.
I chalk Batiuk’s regression up to the disappearance of editorial oversight after his last editor died in 2007. They let him turn Funky Winkerbeaninto a glurge-y soap opera in Act II, but still protected the strip from his worst traits. By Act III it was The Lisa And Comic Books Show With Batton Thomas.
Comics are for reading! For enjoying! Unless you can sell them for a crapton of cash, in which case… cha-ching!
“I’ve said this before, but it’s rare that an artist’s later work is less skilled and less mature than their earlier work. Yet here we are.”
I’d say the concept of Flanderization argues against this. Most writers do get worse as they just run out of ideas.
I’d say that’s what happened here, all the characters just devolved into caricatures defined by their jobs. Les is a writer with a dead, dead job. Half the other characters have no personality besides “comics.”
Gourd, another “where did this even come from?!” Tom thing.
“Yeah, we put a treadmill in here, and now this old man comes in from nowhere, runs on it all day, sweating everywhere! He’s PLEWBING, man! He always ends his thing with a happy “IT SMELLS LIKE A HIGH SCHOOL BOY’S GYM LOCKER IN HERE!” Because all he talks about is his high school. Then he sighs ‘Lisa,’ while looking at a book he wrote. Sweat covered book. I mean–I hope that’s sweat covering it.
“What do you mean, throw him out?! That would be normal!”
Batiuk really missed a golden opportunity by not killing Batton off. Now hear me out here. It’d have to have been a really dumb and undignified death, like he fell into the pulping machine at the comic book factory and was turned into seven hundred copies of “Wayback Wendy”, but there was a printing defect so they had to be destroyed. Something like that would have sufficed.
Then everyone would briefly mourn him, sort of, but here’s the twist: his ghost is still hanging around Atomik Komix, in ghost form. He can see and hear everything, but they can’t see or hear him. He’d constantly be trying to give the gang helpful, sound advice and tips, but it’d all fall on deaf ears. Over the course of many years, Batton would get more and more depressed. Oh, and they’d all always forget his name too, and he’d always get all angry about it.
And that would have been the gag. Ol’ mopey ghost Batton, as useless and forgotten as ever. It would have been hilarious, WAY funnier than Lisa’s or Bull’s or Phil’s or Coach Stropp’s or Mary Sue Sweetwater’s deaths. OK, maybe not Phil’s, but still.
“Batton Thomas fell into the pulping machine, and this comic book was printed on his remains.”
“Oh! That’s horrible!”
“Yeah! It’s not even gem mint anymore!”
“Can we clean his remains out of the press? We’ve got a delivery schedule to meet!”
“Don’t worry, we can blame the delay on climate damage!”
Next day, at Montoni’s:
“The pepperoni tastes better today!”
Funky nods, smirking. He throws the bones into the pig sty.
“Montoni’s pepperoni pizza! Now with quarter-inch-from-reality meat by-products!”
Wasn’t this guy still turning out daily (and Sunday?) strips of Robert Lansing and “3 o’clock High”? How did he have so much time to spend at the frenetic home of AC?
Based on the quality of Batiuk’s ”writing” and how much padding his ”plots” have and the fact that he had outsourced the actual drawing, I would assume he didn’t have to spend much more than a week’s work for a year’s worth of strips.
And Batton being the author avatar, I’m not surprised that he has quite a lot of free time to hang around at the AK office.
Obviously, he had a long morrow.
Just ask Rory Gilmore.
The Frenetic Schedule:
“WE NEED TO GET THIS COVER OUT IN 3 MONTHS!”
“What about the actual comic?”
(shrugs, walks away) “Comic book covers…have COMICS inside them now?! The kids today with their Fleabays! I should check MyFace and TalkTok!”
Sorry for the momentary use of human English. Of course I meant the legendary AK—Atomic Komix (Excelsior, True Believers!)
Batton Thomas is a character I have a special disdain for, I think it was my turn at the author’s wheel for his first 20 appearances (and then another 500 after that). That’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one. I covered so so so much Batton Thomas, a character who provided so so so little to talk about.
A lot of the anger I direct at this strip is intended to be comically over-the-top. This strip deserves the anger it incites and then some, of course, but what we do here is supposed to be fun… what a terrible thing it would be if we were as joyless as the strip we covered. But a few things truly broke me over the years, leaving me nothing but angry, and Batton was one of them. Batton’s incessant parroting of TB’s idiotic re-terming of “climate change” was bad enough, tying it to COMIC BOOK DISTRIBUTION of all things, as he does in our winning panel, just thoroughly and completely pissed me off. And, of course, we would wind up learning that the strip was ending just a week after that Batton story arc started, so I wound up associating Batton quite strongly with that unfortunate news.
Most of the time, though, Batton just left me searching desperately for something, anything, to talk about (I once resorted to photoshopping him into my own likeness out of desperation). Such a pointless character: he had nothing to say that other characters had not already said, had no traits outside of sad-sackery, had no real relationship with any of the characters he appeared with, he made no impact on the strip whatsoever. He was nothing personified, or he would be if it wasn’t a gross misuse of the word “personified” to say so. Just a terrible character on a fundamental level, his ultimate moment in this strip was probably when he held DSH hostage at Komix Korner for a whole week to revel in bombastic idiocy about being inspired by The Flash #123… and never once actually mentioning how the comic inspired him or what it inspired him to do. Nothing. Batton was nothing.
What you’re saying is, Batton Tomas was about as useful as Tom Batiuk at an editorial conference.
Good ol’ Batton Thomas…Yes, Sir!
Good ol’ Batton Thomas…
How I hate him!
The Flash #123 is most famous for having the first two incarnations of the Flash meet each other, setting the stage for the parallel-universe cavalanche that would lead DC and other comics into world-crossing shenanigans and most recently has seen pop culture embrace the idea of “multiverses” to allow for both crossovers and alternate-timeline shenanigans aplenty.
No idea how that reflects on 50 years of comics about high schoolers turning into annoying old men.
Yeah, Batton seemed to follow you, like how BC used to always end up with Dinkle arcs. I always had a special dread over the Atomik Komix arcs, especially after Flash and Phil became regulars. Guest host roulette, (bad) luck of the draw. But Batton was a tough assignment, as he never actually “did” anything. The ennui just dripped from the page whenever he showed up.
Climate damage finally becoming a problem because it affects HIM reminds us that Batiuk is always going to be that self-absorbed little snot who can’t see past his own nose. It didn’t used to bother him because someone else would have to clean it up or be messed up by it but now that he’s in the crosshairs, it’s personal…the jerk.
And why is he mad? Because it delayed the delivery of his precious comic books. So add “shallow” and “juvenile” on top of all that.
Exactly! This whole strip has turned into a selfish reflection of Batty himself. His likes, his needs, his interests. And climate damage is such a dumb way to say this, but Batty cannot use the common term for this as he his is always trying to look smart and clever with his word salad—which has a lot of cheap filler, like a Luigi’s salad (90% low grade mozzarella).
Ugh. It’s even worse that THAT. Because the ‘it got personal’ strip came AFTER all that song and dance about not having tomorrows or futures.
Batton made a big show about how SERIOUS and CRUCIAL he thought climate damage was. He pretended like it bothered him. Like he really really thought something needs to be done NOW.
But then complains that he can’t get his resource gobbling and ultimately useless books shipped to him on time. Showing that he is unwilling to take a critical look at his own lifestyle to see if he is one of the wanton consumers making world ecology unsustainable.
When Walt Kelly said “We have met the enemy and he is us”, that’s what he was talking about. That would sail over Batiuk’s fat head.
Woo hoo, a mention from CBH! This day is looking up!
I voted with the majority here, though there were some strong contenders. For some reason, the grey sweatshirt/draped towel combo makes me irrationally enraged (beyond the purely rational rage that any normal person would feel looking at mopey, fake-self-effacing Batton Thomas).
The scenario you wrote up, CBH, was so satisfying that it soothed the rage and made all be right with the world. Aaaah. Go get ’em, Ayck Chaers!
As much as I loathed the “damit climage just got personal” strip, I had to go with “work ethic,” because it so captures the way Batiuk/Batton erases the thin line between ignorance and arrogance. For the sake of some allegedly clever wordplay (notice I said “allegedly”), he depicts his latest author avatar as being ignorant of his own business. If anything, “comic shop proprietor” is an occupation where “sit around all day reading comic books” is an important part of the job description (actually, “be familiar with the product” is a key part of small retail in general). How’s DSH supposed to recommend “books” to customers who don’t know what they want? How’s he supposed to find the specific volume when someone wants “that Flash comic where such-and-such happened”? BY SITTING AROUND READING COMIC BOOKS, that’s how!! You can’t tell me a comic strip professional like Batiuk/Batton doesn’t know this. But… who cares; he came up with some wordplay he thinks is clever. Pencil it, ship it off to Chuck, time for milk and cookies and another victory lap…
As someone who spent years managing a Music/Video store, you’d be amazed by the amount of people wh–
No. You would not be amazed by the amount of people who would ask “Do you have that song? It’s on the radio? It’s a song about love?” and get FURIOUS over the idea that, No, I do not spend my entire time off listening to the tripe you love. YOU have heard it enough to buy it, but you don’t know anything about it? You think I transcribe every lyric that you can’t remember?
(I actually did get praise from Lechmere when I called and said “I don’t know who this ‘Alanis Morrisette’ is, but I need a case of her singles TOMORROW!”)
I also got people so mad that I didn’t know what every store in the mall had in stock. “But you WORK here!” Yeah, but I don’t live here. What’s in your neighbor’s fridge? BUT YOU LIVE NEXT DOOR
As my grandfather used to say. “Batton Thomas is as useless as tits on a boar hog.” Or he certainly would have said that if he had to read this drivel.
I do find the way that Batton managed to insert himself into the “Awesome Atomik Authors’ Arena” (or whatever title TomBa has given the creator’s “bullpen” in his mind) to be curious. He’s not on staff nor was any suggestion made to have him join. He just hangs out and uses the tredmill. It’s pretty obvious from this that he’s never worked in an office environment and never bothered to figure out what goes on in one.
To put it mildly, no company in 2023 would let randos wander in and use their equipment like that. At the absolute minimum, the place would have employee badges controlling access to the office and parts within. AK is begging to have all their art and intellectual property stolen. To say nothing of the comic book “enthusiasts” who would root through their trash looking for scoops to post to the Internet. Or the many priceless collectibles they keep lying around in plain view.
It’s beyond idiotic, and it’s all in service of Tom Batiuk’s precious ‘bullpen’ which never really existed anyway.
Batton Thomas seems to be the result of Batiuk issuing himself a challenge: “Can I make a more loathsome character than Les Moore?”
I think the sole purpose of Batton Thomas was that, since Batiuk created his own versions of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, he needed a version of himself to hang with them. There’s no way a comic book “bullpen” would exist in his world without him having a central role.
Today’s Crankshaft is abysmal looking. Even for being almost completely stolen. The colors are completely off. And Cranky himself in the background looks like he was colored in with the spraycan tool from MS paint.
I tried to make a free account to reference the date of the original strip. But the comment is currently shadow banned. I can’t see it when I’m logged out. Maybe because I’m new…
MAYBE BECAUSE THEY HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE!!!!!
Holy moly… Crankshaft is heading into end-times Apartment 3G territory, isn’t it?
It’s certainly teetering close to the edge with the recycled art and bad coloring.
The art is still coherent from panel to panel, though. And today’s joke is half recycled, but I’d still put in the okay to acceptable camp. If it were colored decently it wouldn’t stand out as especially worse than anything else we’ve gotten the last couple years.
But that coloring tho.
I’ll grant that the colors of the interior and exterior of Lillian’s house are not consistent with the strip from a couple years ago. But they’re consistent within the strip. Even the coloring on Crankshaft’s jacket could be explained as light reflections on the edges of his (presumably wool) red jacket.
Lillian’s face looks lighter when she’s near the window — that’s actually surprisingly realistic, even though it may have been unintentional. And the curtains presumably have a white liner; I have a set of white-lined curtains in my own house.
No snark, just curiosity — since the colors are consistent within the strip, what is actually wrong with the coloring?
This strip also exhibits one of Tom Batiuk’s worst writing traits: jokes that only work if the dialogue is as unrealistic and ambiguous as possible.
Someone reporting an actual emergency would get to the point.
And 911 operators don’t have time to hear Lillian’s stupid joke. The mere mention of the name “Ed Crankshaft” should be enough to get a bomb squad on site.
And if a police officer saw a man climbing on his roof with a flamethrower, I think they’d have a valid argument for shooting him dead.
I was “Didn’t he do the reverse-countdown joke before?”
This same “countdown to joke you know is coming” was done by a much better strip Sally Forth over a year ago. He “recycled” someones else’s concept. I’m no CBH, so I’m not able to provide proof.
Wow, this takes “mail it in” to entirely new levels. Your imagined Ayers rant is even more appropriate.
I’m not a color theorist, but the three main colors inside, the curtain the wall and Lillian’s shirt are all pastel, yet clashing. Those three colors seem chosen at complete random. Makes the strip look like a moldy Easter egg to me. Lillian’s skin tone is much too dark inside. Like she’s got high blood pressure.
Outside, the ladder is the same color as the house, white, which isn’t the color of Crankshaft’s house, anyway. it makes it look like the strip is half colored.
As for Crankshaft’s jacket, the red color not going all the way to the edges is consistent all the way around, even in places where highlights wouldn’t make any sense. Highlights usually aren’t a thing in weekday Cranky coloring anyway. The color also bleeds onto the flamethrower on his back. When you zoom in you can REALLY tell. The red was just slapped on in two seconds. With a paint can or airbrush too.
I’m guessing the colorist was having trouble with the flood fill tool.
I took a stab first at fixing Cranky to be in the normal Crankshaft style.
Then I scribbled in some highlights to show about where they might be if they were deliberately put in.
In both cases, the ladder and the fence and the house really should all be different colors. Fence white, house pale yellow, and ladder brown. But if the artists can’t be assed…I’m not giving it a quarter ass.
Not to KEEP HARPING ABOUT THIS.
Yesterday Cranky’s coat was flat and red as a sheet of construction paper, the ladder was brown, and the house was yellow.
Makes me wonder if that’s why Davis era Cranky stuff has such dark black lines, so the flood fill doesn’t get confused.
Okay, I can really see it in closeup.
And the curtain tieback should be green, even if the lining is white.
I wasn’t actually arguing that the coloring was good, just that it was about average, not particularly worse than the usual (that’d be DSHJ’s flesh-colored hair from a few days back). I think we’re both right: It’s half-assed, it’s a mess, and it’s about average for the strip.
I could swear TB says he colors the strip, but I may have been thinking of FW. This is about the level of not-giving-a-damn that I’d expect from Puffy, though. In any case, whether he colors it or not, he’s responsible for overseeing it and making sure it’s okay before it’s sent to the syndicate and he cashes his paycheck.
We all know looking over his work, even glancing at it once it’s done, is anathema to the man. And this is the result.
Batiuk may have colored in his very earliest days, but he’s had a number of colorists since then. Different people handle the weekdays versus the Sundays. This goes back to the old days when only the Sunday’s were colored.
https://d2rights.blogspot.com/2017/02/how-comic-strips-use-color-study-in.html
During the early days of Act II coloring was handled by Lee Loughridge from 1998 then Matt Hollingsworth in 2004. Alex Sinclaire did coloring on Sundays for Lisa’s Story, and Rob Ro was the normal Sunday colorist the last several years, which is why he gets Funky Felt-tip nods on the comics covers.
A recently as Burchett’s tenure, Batik claimed he was still inking.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/the-secret-sauce-batmans-in-the-house/
I stand in line at your archival knowledge! Makes sense that Rob Ro was the Sunday colorist for a while, because there were actually some very nicely colored Sunday strips for a long run there.
I wonder who it was, though, that was making Rachel a blonde for a while, only on Sundays? Or perhaps she’s a natural blonde with some kind of a wig kink that she enjoys every day except the Lord’s Day.
Thanks for falling down an arting rabbit hole with me! 😀
My artsy fartsy game crew girls include some super talented artists. So I get called on to critique art quite a bit and suggest tweaks.
My actual skills at drawing/painting ect are high school level. I’m not good, just probably better than dragging a truck driver off the street and demanding he draw a crime scene.
Sort of a ‘those who can’t, teach’ thing.
ComicBookHarriet shared a podcast of a Chuck Ayers interview with me not too long ago. Chuck discussed the creation process of Funky Winkerbean including the digital colorization.
I thought it was interesting and answered quite a few questions.
I voted for the winner more than once, but I had to throw at least one vote at ‘Meta Mope’. There’s something about Batton’s pose that irks the hell out of me.
It’s like Batton is trying to strike a pose like some historical figure in a classic painting or sculpture. Something like “Plato Pontificates” or “Lincoln Lectures”.
Let’s call this one “Batton Blathers”. A statue of Batton in this pose is just begging to be made and be placed in a park for the pigeons. A pigeon potty.
Case in point, here’s a frieze from the Rotunda of the United States Capitol titled ‘Landing of the Pilgrims’.
Your mean kinda like
“No more hot chocolate? Climate damage will be the death of me yet!”
Sweet! Exactly what I meant.
Horrifying.
The best part about creating the image was decapitating Batton Thomas.
Heh heh! Deathie! 💀
Completely off the current topic (but triggered by the discussion of the poor inking in Crankshaft) – Does anyone have a theory concerning the total absence of “Flash Fridays” on Batiuk’s blog since October 7?
Well we know it can’t be because Batiuk has gotten tired of the Flash OR because he’s run out of Flash comics to talk about OR because he’s busy feuding on Twitter.
I’m gonna guess he’s been busier than usual the last couple months. He was ending his strip, and thus getting asked to do a circuit of puff interviews, it was the holidays, and he’s had a few live appearances since then too. Right now he’s gearing up for Ohioana.
When he does those Flash Fridays, he actually breaks down the issue, doesn’t he? A little more effort than just spamming John Darling, and random comic covers.
Not quite. He doesn’t “break down the issue,” he simply gives a long-winded and boring summary in the style of a 3rd grader recounting a movie plot: And then Flash did this, and then Flash did that, and then there was a asplosion, and then Flash fighted the bad guy, and Flash winned!
No analysis of what made the issue great (or not).
I attempted to post a link of a podcast to @Duck of Death
T’ank ye verrry muuuch!