Happy Memorial Day! Banana Jr. 6000 here again. I really don’t want to make Komix Korner posts a regular feature here, but Tom Batiuk has just dumped two more ridiculous declarations about Lisa that warrant a response.
I took Lisa’s story in to (editor Jay Kennedy) and King (Feature Syndicate), and the same measures that we had used to support my work in the past were undertaken without a hiccup. Okay, there was a hiccup.
Ugh. Batiuk loves his pointless stream-of-consciousness. This babble defeats the story. It reveals the previous 25 words to be a waste of the reader’s time. Just write “I submitted Lisa’s story to King, but there was a problem.” Sheesh.
It was a summer afternoon, and I was in our sunroom typing up some scripts when I got a call from Jay sounding more concerned than I ever recall him being.
Ugh. Batiuk loves his pointless details. “It was a summer afternoon. I just had the cheese salad at Luigi’s, while three birds flew past the window. Then my wife Cathy and I had to go to the bank because her middle initial was wrong on the 1099 tax form. While we were there, three people dressed as Teletubbies tried to rob the bank with flamethrowers, but they got caught. Later that night, we went to see baroque music at Oberlin College, where I saw a mask I decided to use in Lisa’s Story.”
He’s way too wordy, but he’s also less descriptive than Bob Uecker’s broadcast partner in Major League:
He was growing uneasy about the backlash that Lisa’s death was going to cause with readers—and by extension newspaper editors.
How was Lisa’s death news to Jay Kennedy? Batiuk said he “previewed the entirety of the story with Jay” and that things seemed to be progressing normally. Why is he uneasy now when he already knew Lisa was going to die? What changed? Did the “entirety of Lisa’s story” not include that detail? (As we just saw, Batiuk is a such a poor writer there’s a small chance that’s true.)
He said that people cared so much about Lisa that there would be a powerful outcry, and I pointed out that it was their caring about Lisa that would make the story resonate..
That’s an obvious pile of cow byproducts. We’ll soon see how big that pile is.
Even though much of Lisa’s story was already finished, he wanted me to make a secondary character be the one with cancer and the one who dies.
How was that supposed to work? Lisa was the one who had the cancer! Is it contagious now? Actually, don’t answer that. If there’s anyplace where cancer can suddenly become contagious when it’s convenient to insulate Les and Lisa from anything unpleasant, it’s the Funkyverse.
I asked him if he was familiar with the trope of the crew members on Star Trek who wore the red shirts.
Ugh. Batiuk loves his pointless lectures about the obvious. Everybody knows what a red shirt is. We all saw Galaxy Quest, where it’s a plot point. Or Boomerang, where Eddie Murphy explained it to Halle Berry. These were both 90s movies.
However, since there was no investment in the characters, they were meaningless deaths that never caused anyone to care.
By that definition, Lisa herself was the ultimate red shirt. Despite ostensibly being a main character, Lisa’s job was to die so Les could become a writer and have something to mope about for 15 years. By transforming Lisa into Ally McBeal in late Act II, Tom Batiuk excised anything that was ever interesting about her. She was a prop for other people’s stories, like so many other Funkyverse characters were.
I told Jay I wasn’t going to put a red shirt on one of the strip’s supporting characters.
But he did do that. He did give a secondary character cancer. Two of them, actually: Holly Budd Winkerbean and Marianne Winters. Tom Batiuk has no problem using red shirts; he just uses them to enable Lisa and Les instead of lamely killing them off. Holly’s cancer led her to schedule a Washington D.C. trip for Lisa to hijack, and Marianne’s cancer let her win an Oscar for Les to hijack.
It was a totally human and understandable hiccup, but a hiccup nonetheless.
“He’s wrong, because I said so.”
It was the late fall of 2006
And this is where the story completely falls apart. What else happened in the fall of 2006? Take a moment and think about it. I’ll give you a hint: it involves someone in a red shirt.
It’s Aldo Kelrast! The greatest comic strip character of this millennium. Or at least the one that had the most mainstream impact.
That was Aldo’s first appearance, on July 5, 2006. By October he was getting coverage from CNN, had merchandise, a MySpace page, and tribute videos on YouTube. Some of which you can still watch 16 years later.
How the hell is this not central to Tom Batiuk’s story? He wants us to believe he brought a main character death to his editor at the height of Aldomania, and the editor’s response wasn’t “Holy cow, get right on that! Is there any way you can kill two characters?”
Why did Aldo’s death make such an impact when Lisa’s didn’t? Yes, Aldo was narmy as hell, just like Masky McDeath was. But there was something real about him, maybe even a little sympathetic. Let’s look at some moments you will never, ever see in Funky Winkerbean:
The character’s friends doing something useful to try and solve their problem.
Characters asking themselves if their own actions may have contributed to a tragedy. (Les Moore, please pick up line one.)
And the ultimate irony… Aldo was a redshirt. You know, one of these characters Tom Batiuk refused to use. While unwittingly building his entire mythos around one.
However, since there was no investment in the characters, they were meaningless deaths that never caused anyone to care. I told Jay I wasn’t going to put a red shirt on one of the strip’s supporting characters.
Aldo only appeared in one story, died in it, and yet his death wasn’t meaningless. It did cause people to care. Despite being a “red shirt” for Batiuk to sniff at, Aldo’s story had emotional weight to it, and is much better remembered than Lisa’s. Don’t take my word for it; Tom will tell you himself:
Promoting the (Lisa’s Story) book a year after the story arc’s run in the papers, was a bit of an uphill slog because, by the time the book came out, the heat of the story arc had pretty much dissipated, which was a shame because the book deserved a wider audience.
A year? That’s only one month more than Tom’s usual lead time to publish the damned strips! Where does he get off blaming his poor sales on Penguin Books? (I think; the blog post is so badly written I’m not sure if the book went to the imprint of Penguin Books or if it was switched to another, unnamed one.) The Bloom County, Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes, and Peanuts books I have weren’t a month removed from the newspaper. They’re still enjoyable in 2023, and will be for decades to come, because they’re good stories. That Lisa’s Story didn’t join them is a failure of the content, not the book publishing schedule.
Batiuk inadvertently made a damning admission: Lisa’s legend was so weak it didn’t survive the printing process. And, he ignores the fact he had almost perfect conditions to tell her story. The lamest soap opera comic strip, Mary Worth, had an unexpected smash hit with the death of a one-off character. Funky Winkerbean was on deck with a more meaningful character death, that was years in the making, for a better-regarded comic strip at the time.
Batiuk’s inability to write a genuine emotional story instead of cheap shocks – and his pointless adherence to The Rules of Cartooning – failed him again. Lisa’s Story was a grunge album that flopped right after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” left the pop charts.
You can see the entire Aldo Kelrast story here. It ran for 16 consecutive weeks, from July 5 to October 21 of 2006.
Son of Stuck Funky 
My first thought on reading this was “Tom Tom reads other comic strips?” I’ve never seen any besides “Sophomore Shenanigans” or “Freshman Fuckwits” or whatever Doorknob and Droop Dog wrote. Because OTHER strips aren’t done by (sighs deeply, raises hand to beret-draped forehead dramatically) artistes like him.
But then I read about the press coverage, and yeah, he knew. And stamped his widdle feet because of it. Where’s Tom’s Pulitzer?! Every human in the Western World knew about the “Death” of Superman, and I suppose he liked that because comic BOOK, not comic STRIP. Ego punch! Tom whine, blame bad sales on anyone but himself!
And yet that guitarist was the one named “Tom Petty.”
I was wrong. I can’t find it, but didn’t Bats in the Attic do that semi-mandatory CK strip honoring the 100th birthday (c. 11/26/2022 I think) of Charles Schulz? I think it was about “Charlie Brown Xmas snow” with the smugly smirking Moores. Because it was about Les!
Did anyone see the 10/10/2010 strip, for Breast Cancer Awareness Week? Most strips were so lame, like Blondie just coloring the whole strip pink. The only 1 I remember is–yes–Prince Valiant. “As a rare pink sunrise lights Camelot”, knights ride off to destiny.
You know what 90% of the results for “king features breast cancer strip” are? Oh guess.
The Moores watch Charlie Brown was way back on Dec 16, 2007.
it was the smugging Murdoch’s actually, as the Schultz birthday story ran in Crankshaft that day since in Funky we were smack dab in the middle of TimeMop’s infodump revelations. Couldn’t distract from the series time travel story there, put “tribute” strip in the gag-a-day series.
Batiuk’s lame punchline effort to play along was particularly hilarious when even FBOFW’s purgatory status was lifted enough for Lynn to draw up a special tribute strip for the occasion. Likely fueled by her having a close relationship with Schultz, so there was a bond there (and that makes me wonder how many other writers Batiuk might’ve met. Since there in the same state, wonder if there’s any chance he and Watterson ever ran into each other.)
Thank you for the Dinosaur Comics link, yesterday. Appreciate it. 👍
There’s no connection between Dinosaur Comics and Pokey the Penguin, besides further proof that a strip’s quality is dependent on the writing, not the art. A lot of people don’t get Pokey, mainly because there’s nothing to get. If you like Dadaism and the Theater of the Absurd, give it a try. But you need to read at least a dozen in a row before it gets funny. But not all at once; it,s been around 25 years and there are 800 strips that take about 30 seconds to read. Al at once, and your brain will get hit by a flying boxing glove *BIF*
https://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/
My Tom Petty story: I went to University of Florida in Gainesville, where he was an absolute legend. He grew up in the town, continued to live there while being a rock star, and most of the Heartbreakers were also locals. In 1991 or 1992, he had a live concert at the school’s basketball arena that sold out instantly.
Uniquely, it was broadcast live on the radio. Petty must have made this happen somehow: he was very much a “screw the record company and Ticketmaster” guy, and was all about bringing his music to his fans.
So my friends and I got to sit around my apartment and listen to a live Tom Petty concert. He referenced it once during the show: “For all of you listening at home: none of us have any pants on.”
I work at UF. Lived in Hogtown since 1985. Have a musician friend in Belgium who can’t believe who has musical roots around here.
Not to mention my favorite (well, of the two that I know of) video tribute to Aldo:
My sister and I were both obsessed with the Aldo storyline – spent the summer texting each other about the latest developments every morning. Reading through those Aldo strips again, I take your point about it at least having the basic elements of storytelling – even if it is filled with “radio” lines like “Ah, tuna casserole. I am a good cook, if I do say so myself.” The art is…well, it has a lot of good frames that work well out of context (e.g., “Sheesh!”
Anyhow, I haven’t thought of poor Aldo in a while – great comparison.
Oh yeah, Aldo was, and still is much more popular than Lisa. I was reading both strips back in the day and I don’t recall all the love for Lisa.
Mary Worth had much better writing than FW.
But hey, Tom just has to rewrite history to appease his ego.
Yep, the Aldo storyline had strongly drawn personalities, conflict (both internal conflict and interpersonal conflict), and a plot that moved along, and in a realistic way.
Even though, as you say, the dialogue was stilted, the stalker who commits suicide is not as rare as one would like. Björk had to deal with a horrific one, and Eminem had a huge hit with “Stan,” a story about one. So the premise was realistic and people’s reactions to the stalking and the suicide were pretty realistic, too. And that includes the funeral, which people didn’t use as an excuse to list the deceased’s catalogue of wrongs dating back to the Nixon administration.
The Bull funeral was baffling. If Les still hadn’t forgiven Bull, why go to his funeral at all? Why not stay home and smirk, “The sumbitch got what was coming to him”?
For all its narm, the Aldo story was actually well done. Much better than Tom Batiuk’s terrible attempts at drama.
As for Les, you said it yourself: Bull’s funeral was an opportunity for Les to catalogue all the ways he’d been wronged. That Bull did many kind things for Les in adulthood, or that he was a successful and well-respected man who deserved to be treated with dignity, does not enter Les’ thought process. Or Tom Batiuk’s.
And Batiuk wonders why Les – his own avatar – is so widely despised.
Obviously, we have done Batty a disservice. This latest post, taken in combination with a previous one about how King strongarmed newspapers into running the teen pregnancy story by threatening legal action, proves he has a much greater imagination than we realized.
Yeah, I wondered about that too. Newspapers can, and often do, decline to run strips they find offensive. Pogo even had a mechanism for this. And it’s happened to Crankshaft. One small newspaper in Wisconsin refused to print a rape joke. Did Batty threaten to sue them too?
There was other stuff in these two posts that could only happen on Planet Batiuk.
First, great post as usual, BJr6K. I wouldn’t mind a bit if you did make Komix Thoughts posts a regular feature. There’s just so much to work with there. So much babble. So much incoherence. So many baffling grammar, spelling, and punctuation decisions. Commas in, particular seem, to defeat him.
I do hold blog posts to a lower standard than published comics, with only a few sentences at most, that were written a full year in advance. But still, why is it that English errors are extremely rare in the posts on this blog and so very common on Tom’s blog? Errors are even rare in the comments, and I don’t hold comments to any standard other than basic coherence.
I guess the obvious answer is: IT’S CALLED WRITING. No need to be concerned with grammar, punctuation, or spelling when you are a PULITZER-NOMINATED AUTHORRRRR.
You gotta love this writing. From the May 26 Comix Thoughts: [King Features arranged to have Penguin Putnam’s Perigee imprint publish Lisa’s Story and Tom was excited to work with them…]
This is a strange tic of his. “I did X! Well, actually I didn’t do X…” Most of us probably use this construction from time to time, but he uses it constantly. Weird.
He contradicted himself in the middle of being unclear. This was the confusing bit I mentioned:
King Features began to seek a publisher for the work. They found one at Penguin Putnam under their Perigee imprint. At the time I was certainly excited to have this material in a collection from a prestigious publisher and was eager to work with them on it. Didn’t happen. The book was put together with zero input from me. Allow me to immediately contradict myself. I did write a very brief foreword, but, other than that, I never had any contact at all with the publisher, the editor, or the art director.
It sounds like “didn’t happen” means “Penguin didn’t agree to publish the book.” But when you read the whole thing, I think he means Penguin did publish the book but just didn’t involve him. He was eager to work with them on it but didn’t get to. It’s a misplaced modifier.
Which is another accidental admission of Batiuk’s misplaced priorities: he claims to care about being with a “prestigious publisher”, but it quickly gives way to his need to be involved in the process.
His “zero input from me” comment is baffling. The content is the Lisa story, which is his finished and previously published (as daily strips) product. He wrote the introduction to the book. Is he griping because they didn’t let him design the cover, lay out the pages, or supervise the print run?
It reveals his need to oversee everything. He can’t just get a publisher and write a foreword (not that he can do that anyway). No, must have complete control and veto power over every aspect of production, like Les did for Lisa’s Story. And of course, the covers must be to his satisfaction (which came up in both his recent book posts).
The thing is, though, that some people both have and *deserve* that kind of creative control. Bill Watterson springs to mind. He did C&H 100% his way, and he was the final arbiter of everything about how the strip looked, and how the books looked. (And everything else about the property, too.)
In his case, of course, it was completely earned, and made for a reading experience that still holds up — and will for decades (maybe centuries!) to come.
Now, did Watterson — like Batiuk — need to oversee everything, and have complete control? Yeah. That’s just part of his personality, I’m guessing … at least when it comes to his work. I don’t think he was rude or snarky about it, but he made it pretty clear that things were going to be done his way.
But did Watterson then back it up with brilliant work? You better believe it.
Some art forms lend themselves to being tightly controlled. Stand-up comedy is one of those; stand-ups tend to be bad improvisers, because they’re used to dictating every part of their show. Improv requires teamwork, and embracing ideas you might not like.
There’s nothing wrong with that in principle. Other newspaper cartoonists, like Watterson, were known to be very controlling of their own work. But they could state their reasons for it. Watterson was protective of his strip’s message, and wouldn’t allow it to be used in ways that violated that. Berke Breathed had been an editorial cartoonist, and fired for it, so he wasn’t in a mood to dial back his political content.
Maybe Batiuk has a good reason to be this controlling over his work… but he’s never told us what it is. Again, he’s just like Les. Les must “protect Lisa” at all times without ever saying what that means, or there ever being anything she needs protection from.
I’ve never really understood the acclaim TB got from breast cancer orgs and advocates. Lisa’s Story did, I guess, raise awareness, and it came at a time when breast cancer was a hot topic.
Maybe I’m confusing the timeline, since I wasn’t a FW reader then. Did the bulk of the acclaim come after the first part of Lisa’s Story? I could understand that.
But every treated cancer patient lives in dread of recurrence. The idea that your remission was fake, that it was all a mixup, the doctors are incompetent, lazy, and wrong, and “The Other Shoe” will drop at any time — that’s the stuff of nightmares, the fever dreams people push out of their minds when they wake up at 3 in the morning with a racing heart, soaked in sweat.
It deserves rotten tomatoes thrown from the peanut gallery, not a standing ovation.
My memory may be foggy, but I just don’t remember all the outcry and I was reading Batty’s hometown newspaper The Plain Dealer at the time. I just don’t recall all the outrage. A fart in an elevator would generate more response than his strip.
I do remember people complaining about how dreary and depressing the strip was, but that is it.
And I bet the Mary Worth books sold more. Heck, on my birthday this year I received two Mary Worth books with one featuring the Aldo Kelrast story.
Your memory is not foggy. Lisa’s Story was not a hot topic of discussion. It had no impact on the world outside at all. At ALL.
Looking at the coverage of the time? Even within the sphere of comics obsessives. Lisa’s Story seems to have kinda been noticed as, y’know, a thing that was happening … but it was not widely hailed.
And the ‘acclaim’ from breast cancer orgs and advocates? It all seems to have been pro forma. It’s the sort of ‘acclaim’ that if you write about certain topics in sincere manner, no matter how awful the writing, you can always find someone who will give you a nice blurb. Nobody from a mental health advocacy group, for instance, is gonna say for the record, “Joe Bloggs wrote a really dull book about living with mental illness. Yeesh. Avoid this turkey.” Instead, it will be “Joe Bloggs’ insightful chronicle of navigating the mental health system offers guidance, solace, humour and — most importantly — hope for an unfairly marginalized community.”
Of course, that sort of praise is not really written for the work of Joe Bloggs; it’s designed to encourage the NEXT person to write something. The subtext: “See? Write about this topic! It needs more publicity! And if you write something, ANYTHING, on this topic, it will get praise! Like this! Promise! And hey, maybe one day, someone will actually write something on this topic that’s actually good! That’s our goal! And when that day comes, we’ll give it sincere praise! But until then, we’ll be here, encouraging people to write further about this topic by writing blurbs for anything and everything people are already writing about it!”
You remind me of a review Radclyffe Hall’s *Well of Loneliness* received in 1928, which declared:
“It is a brave book to have written, but let us hope it inspires someone to write a better one.”
Virginia Woolf, who was active in the battle against the censorship of Hall’s novel, described it as a “meritorious dull book.”
Decades later, Vera Brittain (famous for her *Testament* books) wrote a study of the legal woes of *The Well of Loneliness* and a reviewer said that Hall had written “a nauseating novel.”
“Time, time, see what’s become of me…”
I think Lisa’s Story is absolutely toxic to cancer sufferers. Except as an example of how NOT to deal with it. Ditto for his Alzheimer’s books. Which brings up something I’ve wanted to talk about: this cover.
Here’s my question: what’s happening in this scene? Lucy, the Alzheimer’s sufferer, is being returned home by Ed Crankshaft and an unknown woman, who appears to be Lisa if she lived to age 50. Lucy appears to still be confused. Lillian, her supposed caregiver, is in the foreground with a big smile on her face.
This doesn’t look like a happy scene! It looks like Lucy wandered off and had to be wrangled by Ed and a stranger! Why wasn’t Lillian, her supposes caregiver, out looking for her? What was she waiting at home for? They’re not carrying groceries, or anything that implies this was a planned trip. This is awful!
It gets worse when you consider the backstory. Lillian drove Lucy to this condition, and is far more concerned with salving her conscience than actually taking care of Lucy. Ed is 102 years old and has his own problems with inappropriate syntax and behavior, which become very unfunny in this context.
https://tombatiuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Behind-the-Books-extra. png
Is it just me, or is the hair on “Lisa” on that cover out of scale? It’s as if she’s wearing a football helmet of hair.
She’s planning to take a drive on Nobottom Road, perhaps?
I believe the woman on the cover is Pm, sans the oversized Elton John glasses she has been wearing in recent years. Her hairstyle used to appear that way.
I wonder if my brother knew about this book when he was caring for our Dad, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. At the very least, he might have gotten a laugh or two about how hamfisted and misguided the book was.
What was this book anyway? A collection of strips? I don’t understand the purpose of this book.
Wouldn’t caregivers be looking for genuine books offering practical advice? Wouldn’t caregivers be looking for books that can explain what is happening to their loved ones and what they’re going through? Would caregivers want a book making light of their loved one’s affliction? I remember reading Crankshaft comic strips that featured Lucy’s Alzheimer’s, but mostly it was Lillian making jokes at Lucy’s expense.
Lillian: You wouldn’t believe the dumb thing Lucy did today. (smirk)
I think you nailed it about Lisa’s Story. Is Batiuk cashing in on the grief and hardship of others going through difficult times?
Batiuk: Sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. Have you ever read my book Lisa’s Story? It’s an inspirational book for people going through cancer treatments. You may as well laugh while you’re suffering from the side effects of chemotherapy. Chemo-Sabe. Get it? (smirk)
I don’t think Batiuk is *that* cynical. I just think he saw a small pond he could be the big fish of. Nobody else was writing comic strip collections for horrible illnesses, so he was eager to present himself as the top provider in that category.
Whoa! I’m harder on TB than Banana Jr. 6000? Who ever expected that? Marking this down on my calendar.
Batiuk is the only fish in that pond, isn’t he? What other major comic strip has profited from books covering illness and other health related issues?
‘The Doonesbury Diabetes Collection’?
Nope.
The Mary Worth book, ‘So, You’re Having Quadruple Bypass Heart Surgery’?
Nope.
The For Better or For Worse guide, ‘What to Do When Your Teen is Planning an Abortion’?
Nope.
The Andy Capp handbook for alcoholics, ‘Twelve Steps Toward Sobriety’?
Nope.
The Pearls Before Swine inspirational book, ‘Erectile Dysfunction: A Crisis in the Bedroom’?
Nope.
‘The Pluggers Covid Collection’?
Nope.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t think of any.
I think it’s because other comic strip creators have something Batiuk seems to lack. It’s called scruples. In my opinion, Batiuk filled a niche that didn’t need to be filled. Worse, he builds himself up as some kind of comic strip genius because he was the first one to go where nobody else wanted to go. He’s a sleazy opportunist. One step above a snake oil salesman.
“Sleazy opportunist” sounds about right. TB doesn’t want money; he wants praise. But he’s just as unethical about how he tries to get it.
The woman on the cover is indeed Pm.
Crankshaft did a big week-long story arc when she changed to her current hairstyle, I recall. Her occasionally-appearing sister Chris had some seriously big hair too, a curly mop that looked like she took it off of Weird Al Yankovic.
That doesn’t look anything like Pmm. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just the art style is a little… inconsistent.
The artwork was detailed and polished up to an unnecessary point for that book cover, I think that is why the characters look inconsistent with what we would expect to see in the strip itself. Nevertheless, I can guarantee that is Pm on that cover and on the cover of the Alzheimer’s book.
Here’s her inflatable football helmet hair on full display during the Kent State story arc in 2000, though this was after she got glasses.
And here’s Pam in a very early Crankshaft strip about Ed’s, uh… vaccine skepticism? She was much simpler in appearance than in later strips, much less on that book cover, but still that same mushroom cloud hair.
You know what would have been useful? A book with useful information, in comic form. It’s a tried-and-true method of reaching people who are uncomfortable with reading for whatever reason, or who find the subject matter intimidating.
For example, a chapter where Lisa goes through chemo. In accessible language, her doctor explains the purpose and how many treatments she’ll likely need. She also talks about possible side effects and how to handle them. Then we see Lisa going to treatments, talking about how nervous and sad she is. Les reassures her. She talks to others in the waiting room who have had experience and they share tips. When she goes home afterwards, we see her using some of their tips on handling side effects and emotional fallout. Etc.
Many years ago, there was a running comic in the NYC subway about “Julio and Marisol,” aka “Julio y Marisol,” because it also ran in Spanish. It was about AIDS prevention. The two young lovers talked about love and practicalities. “Why do you want me to use protection? Don’t you trust me, Marisol? If you loved me you wouldn’t be asking for this,” that sort of thing. It became a sort of cult item, and straphangers waited eagerly for the next installment. And it was effective, too.
What a wasted opportunity for what became “The Story of Les, the Greatest Husband Ever.”
It’s a great idea. If only Tom Batiuk had some interest in producing comic books….
… or actually helping breast cancer patients instead of beating his own breast about how groundbreaking he is…
Absolutely, I agree. It would have been much better if Batiuk had created a series of comic strips with useful information on breast cancer. Batiuk’s unwillingness to perform adequate research would have scotched that idea, though.
Besides, in his mind, he was already writing a saga for the ages. Let Schulz and Watterson, marvel at the presence of a true comic strip genius. Make way, Batiuk coming through.
Query for Anyone: Has Batiuk ever done any side projects separate from his comic strips? Artwork such as paintings? Written a book on the history of comic books? Written books like biographies, mysteries or other non-Funkyverse genres? I think we can safely rule out children’s books.
See, that’s exactly it. That’s why I think it’s generally good for a writer to ask themselves, “Is this piece of writing any good? Is it fit for purpose? Could I make it better?” It’s not about beating yourself up, it’s about the iterative process of slowly improving with every attempt.
I’m pretty certain “”Is this piece of writing any good? Is it fit for purpose? Could I make it better?” are questions that have simply never entered Tom Batiuk’s mind, at least not since around the middle of Act II, and it shows.
But what bothers me is seeing Lisa’s Story touted as useful, as some kind of help for breast cancer patients. Imagine buying it for that purpose — imagine how puzzled (at first) you’d be at the story of a bunch of random arrested-development cases in some fictional town, and then how angry (in the end) you’d be at the whole bait-and-switch, and the lengthy, ghastly death of Lisa.
Breast cancer patients need this like a distal metastasis.
There’s a place for what Batiuk *thinks* he’s doing: a book about the emotional challenges of living with cancer, rather than an instructional guide for treatment.
The problem that Lisa’s Story has zero emotional weight. It’s almost entirely about glorifying Les. And enabling him to become a super writer-y writer, without him undergoing any kind of personal growth. And winning the awards Batiuk wants so badly to give him
self. And jamming comic books into the story on Sundays (and no other days). And the mope-smirk-cheap shock pattern this world runs on.Julio and Marisol were very real to me on the No. 7 line. Thanks for the memories, as Bob Hope would have said.
(Ridiculous bit of trivia: when the V-2s fell on London in 1944, the cockneys called them “Bob Hopes,” because it was best to “bob down and hope for the best.”)
“Julio y Marisol”! I picked up what little Spanish I know from reading those placards during my commute.
It feels easy to go after Batiuk’s blogs sometimes, and in general I err on calling his statements total lies, as pompous as they can and are often are (I’m never going to forget his comments on 60s Batman and Snoopy’s brothers in particular). Does make me wonder where he thinks the outcry/empathy came from; maybe it’s the personal letters the more reserved readers give to him and him only, or otherwise attempt to linger in comment threads that aren’t regular’d by the snark crowd (as GoComics seems to have attracted).
If anything, we could probably call Lisa a Mauve Shirt than a red one, if only for her strong development and presence that lead up to her death. In particular the stories featuring her had that habit of dwelling more on other characters in equal or imbalanced levels, capturing their reactions and how it affects them (though as Becky’s transformation into Lefty shows, could’ve been worse). Though of course I haven’t reviewed the archives as well as others, the closest she got to center-stage is lawyering up for DCH John, and even then she was in the center of a courtroom drama determined to prove “comics are for EVERYONE DAMMIT!”
Will note in particular that the SOSF Twitter is handy for occasionally retweeting what seems to be more earnest Funky fans, with one of the most recent ones proclaiming Lisa’s Story as done with “legitimate soul and heartbreak”, in contrast to the thread it was in talking about Natalie Portman’s character in the last Thor movie facing a similar story. It is one of those things that makes me wish we could get greater public consciousness surveys, get a better handle of how defined his legacy will be.
Also i feel a little ashamed I wasn’t fully aware of the Aldo saga. I’ve seen it but never quite ingrained it into my mind from a failure to keep up with MW in general. Really should look into that.
I’m quite pleased to have updates on that nutty blog of his. Normally, it’s so incredibly boring that I forget it exists, so it’s good to know what he has pinging around in that sincere, pointy old head. I enjoy his sad tales of endless comic strip syndicate persecution and the like.
I’ve been playing with the Niece/Nephews for three days straight. So MUCH LOVE to BJ6K for whipping this up. I will NEVER turn down a nostalgic trip down Aldomania lane.
Banana Jr., one thing I love about you is that you see things so differently. I don’t always agree, but I always respect and enjoy your perspective. It makes me sit and have a good hard think.
For example. You point out that Batiuk starts with, “It was a summer afternoon, and I was in our sunroom typing up some scripts when I got a call from Jay sounding more concerned than I ever recall him being.” And you lambast him for his pointless details. I laugh…then have an OH SHIT moment when I remember my dumb story the last post with the barn washtub of documents.
So here’s a question? What is the difference between pointless details and setting the scene? Is it bad when I go off on dumb tangents? Am I being a bad writer when I throw in details that don’t further the immediate point because I feel like they add flavor? And I am more than willing to hear it if you think the answer is ‘yes’.
It’s like when Ducky snarks about starting dialogue in a Crankshaft strip with ‘So,’ to indicate it is part of a continuing conversation. A million million times, I’ve started a paragraph in a post with the word, ‘So,’ and then agonized over those two little letter because I’ve got a Grim Reaper squeaky toy looming in the back of my mind.
I’m not feeling attacked or anything, I just wanna get all Socratic with these writing bits. Because I feel like if we do we’re all gonna come away with wisdom.
Now I feel bad, because the last thing I want to do is make any one here doubt their own skills. Everyone who comments here is talented and fun to read. The posts are brief and on-topic, and almost always have a point to make, a new insight to share, or some entertaining tangent. I could really thumbs-up all of them.
What is the difference between pointless details and setting the scene?
You said the magic word – pointless. I’ve never found your scene-setting pointless, because you’re using the space to tell us a little about yourself and give some perspective to your view on the Funkyverse – things we don’t already know, and which inform your commentary. They tell us why stories don’t work in your mind.
Batiuk does it for completely self-serving reasons. Usually, to show off his middlebrow-ness, or what a super-writery writer he is. He uses details to *conceal* himself and his perspective on his life’s work, rather than share them.
Beyond that, I defer to Y. Knott’s comments below. If you think it belongs, leave it in. Tom Batiuk is just so demonstrably wrong in this area.
And to be honest, “in the sunroom typing up scripts” wasn’t the most egregious example of pointless details. That passage isn’t bothersome by itself. It’s that he does this constantly. His blog post had a much better example of pointless details, which I wanted to use, but it was too wordy for even an example:
Jay and I were having dinner at a favorite vegetarian restaurant of mine on a rainy evening in New York City. It was the late fall of 2006, and I had flown to the city to present the completed Lisa’s Story material, the model sheets depicting the older look of my characters, as well as the forthcoming book from the KSU Press, all of which I planned to discuss with Jay and the others at the syndicate offices the next day. That night, however, Jay and I talked about other things. It was there that I learned that Jay had threatened legal action against a Sunday comics section printer/packager when they at first refused to print a Sunday strip of mine dealing with teen suicide. We also talked about Jay’s education (he studied art in college), his book (Jay was a recognized authority on underground comics), my career (no comment), and the meaning and purpose of art (he recommended reading Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word). We finally got around to a serious discussion of where to find bootleg CDs and the best pizza in the city (according to Jay it was St. Marks Place and Stromboli’s). It was an enjoyable evening and left me looking forward to many more down the line. That trip to New York would be the last time I would ever see Jay. He died in early 2007 in a swimming accident while on vacation in Costa Rica.
Ugh. This also shows off three more bad qualities of Batiuk’s writing: first, skipping over the things you actually want to hear more about. “My career” is the kind of thing authors should talk about in their blogs and forewords. And how was suing a newspaper into running a comic strip going to work, when he had a stated goal of not offending newspaper editors?
Which leads to #2: the story badly contradicting itself. He says “which I planned to discuss with Jay and the others at the syndicate offices the next day” but also “that (dinner) was the last time I would ever see Jay (because) he died in early 2007.” So he went to New York, had dinner with Jay, and *didn’t* see him in the office the day after? Why not? That needs explanation. Especially in light of what became writing offense #3:
Batiuk’s approach to drama. In lieu of explaining why he apparently didn’t meet Kennedy at the office, he lists all these things he and Jay Kennedy did and talked about AND THEN HE DIED. This is the same fetishizing of death relics that gave us three of Act III’s worst conceits: the Lisa tapes, Bull’s football helmet, and Becky sticking her stump in your face in every single shot. And now he’s doing it about a real person. Ugggggh.
As for the “so” thing; yes, it’s an annoying Batiukian tic, but it can be used correctly. Don’t beat yourself into not using it, just like you shouldn’t beat yourself into not ending a sentence with a preposition. (There are perfectly good reasons to do so.) Honestly, “so” doesn’t even bother me: it’s a way of signaling “this is a recap” in dialog. It’s a cousin of the much-maligned “as you know,” but at least it’s brief and feels natural, and daily comic strips require you to recap sometimes. The bigger problem is that there’s rarely anything going on that needs recapping. It’s Batiuk’s mechanism for re-using the situation as the setup to a bad punch line.
I wrote a long-winded response that got jammed in the spamtrap, as usual (the WordPress filter has a grudge against me), but re: “So”:
There are SO many ways to use it appropriately. It can be a recap/summary (“… and that’s what happened to the other redshirts. So don’t wear a red shirt.”). It can be used to express hesitation, confusion, or wonder (“So… I’ve been thinking about our relationship.” “So that’s all I have to do? Enter a ChatGPT prompt, and it writes the story by itself?”)
It can even be used to start a story, to create an informal feel. BUT it isn’t appropriate as a filler word, which adds nothing, in a context like a comic strip where every word needs to pull weight. At least 90% of the time it could be omitted from TB’s strips. (Most of the time the whole strip should have been recast, as many here point out frequently.)
My longer response said the same thing, but it bears repeating: CBH, your writing (and that of your fellow bloggers and commenters) is excellent. It flaunts your personality and passions and that is exactly what a blog post should do.
So should you question your use of “so”? Yes. Writers should always interrogate their own writing, so that it continues to improve. They should ask themselves if there might be a better, more elegant, more expressive way to communicate. And then they should do what they think works best, and if that happens to be using “So,” then they should use it confidently and with abandon.
Agreed, BJr6K!
But I feel I must share Batiuk’s final line, which you (tastefully) omitted:
He never got to see the success of Lisa’s Story that he helped to bring about, and that thought as well as the loss of his friendship always makes me sad.
This seems to sum up why Batiuk is such a dreadful writer — it’s because he’s a such a dreadfully self-obsessed narcissist. A person died … and the biggest tragedy to Tom is that the person couldn’t live long enough to see Tom’s (imagined) success. That’s the tragedy.
Oh, also the loss of the friendship. Yeah, that too. They could have sat around and talked about how successful Tom is! That would have been great. Welp, won’t happen now. So it goes.
I mean, even in a tribute to someone else, Tom manages to make it All About Himself.
Make of this what you will: http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2007/04/jay-kennedy-memorial.html
That’s a nice tribute and i do like the sentiment behind TB’s post as well, if not the stylistic flourishes. I have to wonder about Jay Kennedy! It is a sad story i looked up that he had recently lost his own wife, and then died relatively young in an accident. He sounds like perhaps the last of the ‘old school’ types who did it out of love of the art and craft. That he is largely remembered for starting “6 Chix” is, well, at least he had good intentions.
There are also mentions of Brendan Burford (don’t waste any time smooching the butt of the incoming editor, Mike) who evidently took over for him, whose rise very closely corresponds to the decline of the newspaper comics at Comics Kingdom. And apres lui le deluge.
Burford himself according to Grandpa Google has divorced Rina Piccolo and moved on into becoming an NYC real estate agent. I guess ‘loving comics’ has its limits.
I just read the Wikipedia entry on Jay Kennedy. Sounds like a really interesting guy with very broad, expansive tastes. I wonder why none of that rubbed off on Bats. I don’t recall TB ever mentioning any underground, indie, or alternative comics at all. Not even a glancing reference to seminal creators like R. Crumb or Mœbius, or influential publications like Heavy Metal or Raw. Surely he was exposed to some of these by his fellow students or during his time at high schools, and then, perhaps, by Jay Kennedy.
Has anyone ever seen him give a nod to non-tights’n’capes comics? Or even edge cases, like Watchmen?
Batiuk should have a lot of opinions about Watchmen, because it was a death blow to his precious Silver Age of Comic Books. (Technically Bronze Age, but Batiuk’s examples of approved comic books well into the 1980s, even though his tastes are decidedly Silver Age.)
And, Watchmen the was birth of comic books as a viable adult medium, a status it still holds today. Which you’d think Batiuk would be in favor of, as much as he campaigns for the acceptability of comic books. But all his stories of 60-year-old men declaring “comic books shaped who I am” were about nothing but kiddie comics.
As far as I know, he’s never mentioned Watchmen. My guess is that he silently hates it, like he did 1960s TV Batman.
This is gonna serve as a general reply to all you guys’ amazing comments.
First of all, BJ6K, don’t ever feel bad about making someone momentarily doubt their own skills when you point out a trope or style you don’t like. Like Ducky says, “writers should always interrogate their own writing.” I’ve fallen down the bloviating nonsense trap before, in my juvenile stuff, and comments like yours have pulled me back.
I agree with Y. Knott, it isn’t what Batiuk does, it’s how he does it. The man misuses or overuses every writing tool. The world salad paragraph posted is a case in point! Gerard already dug into it’s many many many crippling issues. But I feel like the spirit of the story is solid.
Batiuk wanted to describe his relationship with Jay Kennedy to us. Kennedy defended him back in the 90’s, but Batiuk didn’t know about until a decade later, and during that conversation they really connected.
Even the details about bootleg CDs and pizza are supposed to let us know that the conversation wasn’t all serious business, but was eclectic and covered common interests. It could have been the start of a great friendship, but was cut short by Jay’s tragic death. A fine enough sentiment. A good moment to try to bring to life.
But all the information in the story is out of order. It’s a first draft that made it to print.
I disagree with SP (GASP) I don’t think that revealing Jay’s imminent demise at the beginning was the way to fix this. Jay’s death is the heart wrenching twist. A little editing could have made us enjoy the conversation for what it was, with Jay’s death as the rug pull.
But I totally agree with SP that the story, as written, doesn’t have the structure and charm to hold your attention to the gut-punchline. Paul Harvey: News and Comments, this is not.
Last of all. You all said some very nice things about my writing and I will treasure them. I’m secretly hoarding all those compliments in my greedy dragon hoard. I am simultaneously pretending like I don’t notice any of it because my parents instilled in me the crippling fear of excessive praise, excessive ego, and letting other people pick up the check for dinner.
A gut-punchline, if that’s what a writer is going for, should be a short sharp shock.
One way to do it: The description of the fun and the personal connection made at the dinner, and the happy anticipation of a long working relationship . A paragraph break. Then:
“I never saw Jay again. That summer, he drowned while swimming in Costa Rica. He was 50.”
CBH, you’re great. Period. I’ll once again cite one of my favorite aphorisms, from a great Sy Oliver song: “‘Tain’t what ya do, it’s the way that ya do it.”
You can try hard — don’t mean a thing. Take it easy, breezy — then your jive will swing.
This gets at one of the reasons why Batiuk’s writing is often terrible and yours never is. He’s trying too hard. He writes to impress, not express. It doesn’t feel that it comes from the heart, which is a flaw when you’re writing about personal things that affect you deeply. I never feel that when you write about your life. Your stories about your family are quite moving and touching. And your farm-life stories are vivid and evocative.
Tics like using “So” to start a sentence are only a problem in a few circumstances. First, if they do rise to the level of tics, they become annoying and call attention to themselves. Second, they are inappropriate in a comic strip unless they add to the meaning therein.
Comic strips are much like headlines. They shouldn’t contain any words that don’t pull their weight. The writing should be concise, and the writer should put in the work to edit and edit and edit until it is. The result of hours or days of editing, for a headline writer or cartoonist, should feel natural, never forced, as if the idea popped into the writer’s head fully formed.
Batiuk fails on both fronts. His writing is far too prolix for a cartoon and it doesn’t flow naturally. It feels “written,” in a bad way.
CBH, your style is natural and perfectly expresses who you are, which is exactly what writing should do. Your syntax is perfect and clear, unlike Batiuk’s, which is consistently tortured, muddled, and confusing. (For the record, I’m not a strict grammarian. Grammar is there to help make writing clear. If a writer makes a stylistic choice to disregard grammar, I don’t mind, as long as the result communicates clearly. Batiuk clearly has not made a conscious choice to use an ungrammatical style, and the result is near-unreadable prose.)
As far as descriptiveness in writing, I’m with BJr6K. If it adds to the meaning, then it’s welcome. If it just adds to the word count, it should be cut. Often, the more details, the more meaning. Example: “My mother’s favorite dress was red” vs “My mother’s favorite dress was a threadbare red gingham with boxy straps and ruffles on every hem, seemingly designed for a buxom young square-dancer; it hung loosely on my mother’s lanky, stooped frame.”
After having it recommended to me at least half a dozen times, I’ve finally started reading “Gormenghast” by Mervyn Peake. Coming from a jag of reading short stories by Graham Greene, a parsimonious writer, the stylistic difference near gave me whiplash. To call Peake’s prose “Rococo” is almost an understatement. But it works because he is constructing a world full of insane, pointless, ornate rituals, a world that madly turns upon itself recursively. The style emphasizes that and brings the reader fully into it.
I could hold forth — okay, bloviate — on this topic till WordPress pops up a dialog box saying, “GET A BLOG!” In conclusion, write in a style appropriate to the medium, write to express yourself and not to impress your readers, and write so that your meaning can be understood, and you are gold.
CBH, you are solid GOLD.
He writes to impress, not express.
So much this. Tom Batiuk doesn’t want to write: he wants to be a writer. Same thing with comic books, really. I’ve posted this video before, but it is such a perfect description of how the man pictures himself:
Same author, different book:
Give *Mr. Pye* a try after you’re done with Titus Groan and his world.
I found it quite charming.
CBH,
Your writing style is fine. There’s a world of difference between your use of descriptive introductions and anecdotes in your writing and Batiuk’s reality-challenged laundry list bloviating. The “dinner discussion” that BJr6000 quotes is a great example of his word salad, a list of disjointed topics lacking any context.
1. The threatened legal action against a Sunday comics section printer/packager when they at first refused to print the teen suicide Sunday strip. Many newspapers had their Sunday color comics printed by an outside contractor. Is he saying that a subcontracting printer wanted veto power over the content? Details please.
2. Jay’s education. “He studied art in college” is vague. What was his medium? Or was his course of study the history and criticism of art?
3. His book (Jay was a recognized authority on underground comics). Is Batiuk talking about “The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide”? That area of expertise is very different from genre criticism.
4. My career (no comment). I won’t go there either.
5. The meaning and purpose of art (he recommended reading Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word). A widely panned book about art criticism by an author who was averse to modern abstract art. What prompted this recommendation?
6. We finally got around to a serious discussion of where to find bootleg CDs. Really? Ironic coming from a person known for zealously protecting his ownership of his work product.
7. The best pizza in the city (Stromboli’s). Reasons?
The threatened legal action against a Sunday comics section printer/packager when they at first refused to print the teen suicide Sunday strip.
Serious question: was Batiuk demanding a kill fee? Because that’s what a kill fee actually is: when a publication pays for contract writing, and then decides not to publish it for whatever reason.
What stuck out to me was him mentioning that it was a vegetarian restaurant. The message to me was: my tastes are elevated as compared to meat eaters. Why not mention the type of vegetarian food they serve? It just seemed odd to me.
And why mention it at all? Oh wait, it’s his favorite vegetarian restaurant, so the message is: I’m a big shot who travels often to NYC for business.
He is very easily impressed with himself, isn’t he? And he thinks his readers are just as easy to impress.
The whole world is full of people who travel to other cities, large and small, for business. He’s not showing us how worldly he is because he came to NYC for business; he’s actually showing how provincial he is to think that makes him sophisticated.
Am I being a bad writer when I throw in details that don’t further the immediate point because I feel like they add flavor?
A good writer can describe a room, and it’s wonderful.
A good musician can play an ordinary chromatic progression, and make it heavenly.
A good actor can get a laugh on “Hello”. Or break your heart with a simple “Goodbye”.
Batiuk’s writing is bad because it doesn’t give us a real sense of time, place or emotion … it’s just padding. But your writing *does* give us senses of time, place and emotion.
So … (see what I did there?) if you think you’ve written a sentence that captures a moment, or a place, or a vibe? Leave it in.
If that makes your style a little ornate and rococo? So be it.
I loved this description about writing skills.
Here is a way to know if you are a good writer: do your readers clamor for more? Banana Jr. 6000 and ComicBookHarriet as well as others meet that criteria. That changes what many could perceive as writing errors into personal style.
Take Mr. Batiuk’s trip to NY and his visit with his editor. To correct that post, all Tom has to do is make his point at the beginning: “This was the last time I saw Jay.” Then the post is readable. It’s the same in conversation. How many of us get trapped with someone telling a long winded story? Inside your head, you are screaming: Get to the point! Is their a point? I am dying here.
I hope I made my point.
Leroy?
Thanks, Leroy. But don’t put your mop away, ’cause it’s happened again.
I don’t suppose WordPress has any useful features like a commenter whitelist?
This gif elegantly sums up my entire experience here, and no doubt yours as well. I feel honored. I shall treasure it. 😍
I’ve been hunting for a whitelist. But really, what did you expect when your email is literally lolspam@spamyspamspam? 😉
You know what? You might be right. Maybe my email is somehow triggering the spamtrap. I think I’ll change my WordPress login and see if that helps.
Done. New login address with no mention of špäm. Still got stuck in the torso chute. Sigh.
After all that blathering, and after my long time-out in the WordPress Naughty Box (for what sin I know not), I can summarize much more succinctly by saying:
If your words add to the feel, the style, the emotion, or the meaning of what you’re writing, then they are not excess words — provided, of course, that you’re writing in a medium (like a novel or a blog post) that allows longform writing.
Of course, in a headline or a comic strip or a one-liner or a road sign, everything that isn’t a building block has to go.
To take the example already used above, here’s TB:
Now let’s remove some of the words. Not even rewrite, just remove words.
Did we really lose anything? What did the “no hiccups — wait, yes hiccups” and the description of the summer afternoon really add to the story? Perhaps some of you disagree. Reasonable people can disagree on these things. I personally feel like they only served as speedbumps to the narrative progression.
In conclusion — I mean SO — if you can strike words without losing anything important, then strike them.
Honestly, I don’t inherently have a problem with the general “no hiccups – wait, yes hiccups” form, except that Batiuk wrote it in a contradictory way. The way he phrases it, it sounds like he’s saying the measures were taken IN THAT INSTANCE without a hiccup, except for the hiccup. Specifying that these were the measures they had used IN THE PAST that hadn’t resulted in any hiccups, but that DID cause one NOW, would serve whatever purpose Batiuk had without being amateurishly ambiguous.
“I took Lisa’s story in to King, and the same measures that we had used to support my work in the past without a hiccup were again undertaken. Okay, this time there was a hiccup.”
I mean, I’m not gonna pretend I’m any kind of writer myself, but that seems a lot clearer, with minimal changes to Batiuk’s own words. (I suppose there is a certain degree of irony, in that this is the story of “why Tom doesn’t have an editor”, while also aptly demonstrating why he really should have one…)
On “So”:
There’s a 1940s strip in the vintage section of CK called Secret Agent X-9. Apparently, he was named that at birth, as that’s all anyone calls him. The author’s tic is that the first panel of every strip has to give the full name of the current villain. “The Little Corporal” was always called that, not just “The Corporal.” Now the bad guy is “Alex, the Great,” always with the comma. I would’ve switched to “Alex” a couple of months ago. I’m surprised that guy even got a writing job!
And that writer’s name was…Dashiell Hammett.
Yes. The Maltese Falcon dude. Invented an entire genre of fiction. Hopefully, Sam Spade survived The Burnings.
One of *Secret Agent X-9’s* earliest adventures was called “You’re the Top!,” pitting him against a villain known as “the Top,” who did not later battle Barry Allen.
(Yes, Mr. Thomas, the Top debuted in *Flash* #122, the issue before “Flash of Two Worlds”; however, Hammett was probably thinking of the Cole Porter song from *Anything Goes.* in which “you’re the purple light/of a summer night in Spain,” among other things.)
The strip later became *Secret Agent Corrigan,* and Corrigan acquired a first name, which was “Phil.” (“Jim” is for the Spectre, who, as Jim Corrigan, like Jessica’s father, John Darling, was murdered.)
Hammett’s most prolific character — two novels and more than two dozen short stories — is also unnamed: he’s the Continental Op. Hammett planned to give him a name but found that he’d made it through his first two appearances without one and thought that worked even better. (One evening after a good meal at Luchow’s — a celebrated New York restaurant which no longer, alas, exists — Hammett confessed to Ellery Queen that the Op was based on a friend named Jimmy Wright, prompting Joe Gores later to write a novella about Daniel Kearny and Associates in which Mr. Wright lends a hand with an investigation.)
Did you know that there are two other adaptations of *The Maltese Falcon* besides the 1941 one with Humphrey Bogart? There’s “The Maltese Falcon” from 1931 (now known as “Dangerous Female”) with Ricardo Cortez as Spade and “Satan Meta Lady” from 1936 with Warren William as a renamed Ted Shane and the McGuffin not the Falcon but a horn.
The 1931 version is pre-Code and is quite raunchy. Spade makes Ruth Wonderly (not Brigid O’Shaughnessy) strip while looking for a missing thousand-dollar bill, and when Iva Archer meets Miss Wonderly, she asks: “Who’s that dame in my kimono?”
Best of all, when Spade shakes Miss Wonderly down for money, after he leaves, she turns away and takes another and much thicker roll of bills out of her stockings.
The 1936 version has its admirers, but I can’t say I’m one of them, despite a great fondness for William and Bette Davis, who has the Brigid role.
Time to return to Philip Kerr and Bernie Gunther, in which we keep hearing of an insurance man named Walthier Neff, but not of Phyllis Dietrichson (or Mrs. Nirdlinger), and forget about double indemnity…
Anon Sparrow, there is literally no other page where I could read that and not think “Someone’s been spending time with Grandpa Google!” But on here…Yeah, I think “this person knows a lot of cool stuff that I don’t.” Good Gourd, I love this place!
Quote I saw on Hammett’s birthday: “Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice.”
THAT’S called writing.
As to the opposite, today’s CS. Here’s my GC comment that we can all see get deleted! Because it’s SO OFFENSIVE:
“What? He gets 15 minute shipping online Monday–but the POST OFFICE delayed it? Does Mr ‘Where’s My Pulitzer’ even think about what he writes?”
Also–he really did call it “Grandpa Google” right? How long does he think it’s existed? Since Butter Brinkle?
BTS:
Thank you for your kind words. I do think that I know a lot of cool stuff and enjoy passing it along.
I will confess that I do turn to Grandpa Google (what a pusillanimous phrase!) to verify things before I post, though, and it puzzles me when people with greater computer skills than me don’t.
My favorite example is a blogger who couldn’t understand how Harry Lime could appear in a radio show after the events of the “Third Man” movie. A simple trip to the search engine would have revealed that Harry Lime led many lives and that the radio show concerned itself with his career prior to the fateful trip to Vienna after World War II.
Well, as an EC story put it, “even the sun has its spots…”
The intro to that radio show went, iirc, *BANG!* “That was the shot that killed Harry Lime. How do I know? Because my name is Harry Lime.” It was a heck of a hook.
There’s a new Komix Thoughts post. He actually says this:
See, the thing is that after Lisa died, I didn’t want to spend a long time in the strip mourning her.
Krankenschaaften: Once again I ask why this person is given full control over finances in addition to being allowed to freely purchase flamethrowers and tons of other volatile chemicals which would put any normal person on a terrorism watchlist.
Krankenschaaften 2: It’s been a REALLY REALLY long time since I’ve done it, but I didn’t even know you could use a personal check for online payments anymore?? And it’s not like this is some major emergency; just call the bank and then call Bean’s End Customer Service to straighten it all out.
Krankenschaaften 3. There just isn’t enough consistently going on in Krankenschaaften for me to really sink my teeth into. God help me, but I need the Funkyverse back, even if it’s in updated reruns like FBOFW…
In Shaft it looks like Crazy Harry is back at the post office and up to his old tricks, like when he helped Funky commit insurance fraud after Montoni’s burned down.
And the day before, he was expecting 15-minute delivery. Of something he paid for with a check.
Oh, for fork’s steak, the self-aggrandizement, self-deception tour just keeps rolling on thru.
The latest Match to Dumpster is about the time jump. Buckle up:
“Didn’t want to spend a long time in the strip mourning her.”
K.
He didn’t have to lean on the mourning. Most parents of young children, if they lose their spouse or partner, simply have to pull up their pants and soldier on, no matter how shattered they are. They have a responsibility to be sane and productive, for their kid/s. That’s a much more interesting story (soldiering on) than 10 years of nonstop grief, Miss Havisham-style.
Anyway, this one is worth checking out — perhaps even for ED, dare I say? — if only for the insane illustrations that were done for the “relaunch.” I don’t know who did them, but it surely wasn’t John Byrne. The only maybe recognizable characters are Bull and Maddie. The rest — well, if I showed these illustrations to any one of you, I don’t think you’d ever dream they were of the FW crew.
I’m not gonna link. Just go to tombatiuk dot com and click on “Match to Flame 200.”
Byrne definitely did the model sheets shown at the bottom of that post, and confirmed this relatively recently on his own fan message board. Whether he is responsible for the more polished and ridiculous-looking artwork I’m not 100% sure, but it was brought up in that same thread and he never denies drawing it. I expect he did, though perhaps he didn’t color it.
By the way… while I doubt he checks in on us very often, John Byrne has visited SOSF on multiple occasions.
No surprise he wasn’t impressed by the community here. Though we are civil there probably is a bit more bite than some would approve of with critiques veering towards what some would call “hatedom” or seeing the worst-case scenario with Batiuk’s intentions. And the fact we’ve been critical of Byrne’s art as well probably doesn’t help either.
It’s things like this that do make me wonder how a greater broad perspective on the series can be surveyed. Still makes me wonder what would happen if someone got a youtube video essay about the strip out there and see what sort of viral reception it gets.
Let’s also keep in mind that we’re talking about John Byrne here. When Jim Shooter* was fired as Editor-in-Chief at Marvel, Byrne held a party at his house where he burned Shooter in effigy. (Because Shooter, as EiC, insisted on story changes like killing Jean Grey, as Shooter felt that a hero shouldn’t murder billions of sentient beings and then walk away without consequence.)
(Also, Byrne is LEGENDARY for holding a grudge. After leaving X-Men in 1981, the next (and so far only ) time he and writer Chris Claremont would work on a comic together again was a Justice League story in 2007. And they allegedly never spoke to each other directly once while making it.)
*(As has been mentioned before, Mitchell Knox – aka The Weirdo Collector Who Had The Gun That Murdered John Darling Who Was Murdered – had a life story that was clearly based on Jim Shooter’s, and for no apparent reason whatsoever; it’s not like his past as a teenager writing comics factored into that story. I can’t help but feel Byrne’s hand in that…)
Ah, yes, let’s skip over the mourning, and get right to Les… still mourning. For the next TWENTY-TWO YEARS. Even as he gets remarried. Yep, that’s a mentally healthy dude there. Sure glad you skipped over that boring part there, Tom. Wouldn’t want to bog down the story with silly things like character development.
I think the new cast picture was by Byrne, although it looks like it wasn’t inked in a traditional manner and was painted with an airbrush or something? The coloring wasn’t Byrne, I’m sure, but I can see that it might have been his pencils underneath it.
(Also, the frames of Les’ glasses are crooked. The top of the frames aren’t along the same line. It’s easier to see if you enlarge the picture, but it’s kind of hard to not notice once you see it…)
Shoutouts to today’s BatBlog as “Match to Flame 200″‘s newest book copy-and-paste discusses the great “””passing the torch””” of Act 3 by showcasing the artwork John Byrne drew up for his artist-reference/syndicate press kit. It’s a tired subject to critique Batiuk’s ideas that it was best to skip the mourning process and the general failure to follow the youngest Westview generation, but it is nevertheless interesting to look at the art as you don’t see it spread often. “The Funky Kids are Coming!” it says, trying to sell the strip’s new era like a hip, cool relaunch as if we’d be getting Archie antics out of this cast plastered on the front (with Maddie coming right at us on a skateboard)… and then the flier opens and “Along With Their Parents” is stamped proudly, trojan-horsing this hip new era full of stories about getting fat, cancer diagnosis, dementia teasing and seeing everyone die around you. That’ll attract the new crowd for sur.e
Also the small infographics that show the “trios” of generations alongside the rough illustrations is worth a comment. Les is called “the former leader of the out crowds”, yet another dang of him on a pedestal out of all the OG cast, the smug dork (how many very casual paper readers thought he was actually named Funky, I wonder?). Meanwhile Funky is mentioned/remembered as being a franchise manager, with “several” locations beyond Westview and the NYC money sink. There’s like no reference to any of that in-story that I recall, still feels like Batiuk was willingly forgetful and/or fueled by the drama potential of the Great Recession to make Monotoni’s business take a nosedive until we got to the point that he figured their hometown restaurant closing and selling everything but the snow tires. Just got infatuated with “struggling small business” and making it all suffer, couldn’t even decide if Tony died or not.
It’s late, but as a Trekkie, I must speak up! Pick any “redshirt” – anyone at all – and you’ll come to find that they have infinitely more characterization, humanity, and overall worth than anyone in the Funkyverse.
Which in turn was part of the premise of John Scalzi’s extremely enjoyable novel [i]Redshirts[/i] – a show brings on some rando because they have plot relevant knowledge, but they must have had lives in which to acquire that knowledge – so he starts by meeting up with some of those characters destined for redshirt-ism and goes on getting more and more fun and smart from there.
That’s the thing about the Kelrast saga: people weren’t passive lumps moaning about having to decide things.