Starts with unnecessary/awkward “so”: NO
Starts with a question: YES
Question serves no purpose: NO, that exposition had to be done one way or another for this particular strip
Crankshaft is absent from his own strip: NO
FW characters appear: NO
Comics are mentioned: NO
Lisa is mentioned: NO, the dam still holds. Pray it does not crack
Crankshaft is an unpleasant sadist: YES
Crankshaft does things that would get him sued/arrested/shot IRL: YES
Overall, more NOs than YESes, so not one of the worst, although it’s not funny and doesn’t make much sense if you look into it. (The bus heaters are found not to be working, but Crankshaft implies he never turned them on. Punchline would have been improved if he’d said, “Really? I wouldn’t know. I never turn them on. (etc.)” Also, doesn’t he get cold himself on the unheated bus? But I’ll give Batiuk a pass, since gag-a-day strips don’t really need to make sense for more than the 3 seconds it takes to read them.
As far as the heaters, I assumed the intent was that Ed sabotaged them so that they wouldn’t work, which is even worse. (But in character of being a huge a-hole.) If it was just a case of him not turning them on, they wouldn’t fail an inspection.
If the whole joke is that Ed just doesn’t turn them on, then the inspector is worse at his job than Ed.
Starts with unnecessary/awkward “so”
Starts with a question
Question serves no purpose
Crankshaft is absent from his own strip
FW characters appear
Comics are mentioned
Lisa is mentioned
Crankshaft is an unpleasant sadist
Crankshaft does things that would get him sued/arrested/shot IRL
Challenge accepted.
It would have been even funnier if he’d said “These things have heaters?! NOBODY TELLS ME SQUAT!!!!”
Oh, gooood, 7 days of bus inspection jokes.
I had to read Sunday’s twice. The–let’s call it a joke as it appears in the last panel–is that they’re happy the school year ends. Yes. One would think. Why bring it up? They don’t know that’s happening? At least the “Lena Hyena makes inedible foodstuffs” joke was minimal.
Why are they inspecting at the end of the year, and not during it? Oh, maybe Tom rented a car and they checked it for dents when he brought it back from OhioCon or whatever, and thinks that how everything works.
What was that week of “no one wants to ride the bus!” about? On the first day, Mary Marzipan and Crank exchange a look that screams “ED! They have finally caught up with our life of crime! I TOLD you not to smuggle heroin under the seats!” And then we never found out why. I mean, outside of the path of death Crank has left behind him.
On Weds, there was a look of relief exchanged, reinforcing that something, anything was about to happen, and they escaped it. Ed sighed “WHEW! Since ’45 those Mossad guys been after me!” No. Never explained why that week of no kids riding happened. “It’s called wri–SQUIRREL!” (Tom runs off)
“ED! They have finally caught up with our life of crime! I TOLD you not to smuggle heroin under the seats!”
I wish this would happen. Or anything at all would happen. These people are just so boring. There’s no reason to care about them, they never do anything, and nothing ever happens to them. And when it does, it’s immediately thrown away, like Mary’s PTSD.
Even Crankshaft himself doesn’t do much more than make puns and be a sociopath. And the story cuts away from any conflict he might cause. “Look! I’m driving away from that mom trying to catch me!” Then the next day they’re sitting around the break room doing nothing again.
The “nobody wants to ride the bus any more” joke may resonate with anyone who has had to drive past an elementary school at the end of a school day and deal with the 3 block long queue of cars waiting to pick up their kids. That’s definitely one of the lesser objectionable Crankshaft arcs.
As for issues with the comments, it was all I could do to keep up with the comments on SoSF. There’s no way I’m going down the rabbit hole of GC. I’ve given up on Komics Kingdom altogether, since they locked down their free service. There’s nothing on there that I feel like is worth paying money to read, and if anything notable happens in one of the strips, Josh will talk about it.
“If the kids get cold, I just bring my flamethrower. No one’s ever complained… a second time.”
It’s funny because Krankenschaaften in real life would have gotten the public schools system sued into insolvency from outraged parents…
Now SoSF is snarking on the “moderation policies” of a certain web site. 😂
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF STUCK FUNKY!!!
Do the Comics Kingdom next!
I’m still gutted that they deleted all comment history.
And I must say, some of their trigger words were insane. Like “stroke” or “organ” in any context whatsoever, even sentences like “Smoking increases stroke risk” or “Dinkle plays the organ.”
Bored Panda is a great site, but they’re crazy about censoring everything. They had an entry of jokes based on Medieval warfare that had paintings of people with blood-gushing axe wounds in their head (and, being Medieval art, with bored facial expressions that said “Oh, God, again? Mondays, right?”) and changed every “killed” to “[un-alived]”. If you’re that sensitive, why are you reading anything online?
Fear of legal action is one thing. Fear of getting firebombed is just part of the distemper of the Trumpocene.
Losing that comment history was sad. My comments are still there in Disqus, but they’re no longer linked to any comic strips. What was the strip I was commenting on about? What did the person to whom I was replying post? 🤷♀️
I still don’t really understand how replacing a commenting platform made the community any less toxic. Is OpenWeb a moderation tool as well as a commenting platform? Does OpenWeb supply the moderators?
Was the Comics Kingdom going for a scorched earth effect? Blow the whole thing up and start over?
I still get upset every time I read that OpenWeb notice. That platform is not superior to Disqus in any way.
NEWS AROUND THE KINGDOM: UPGRADES! UPGRADES! UPGRADES! DOWNGRADES! DOWNGRADES! DOWNGRADES!
😡🤬😡
User participation is often the best part of communities like this. Throwing it out en masse was a horrible, horrible business decision. (Something that CK seems to do a lot.) I appreciate that old posts here include contemporary reactions to each day’s strip, and context for it all. It makes SoSF more useful as an archive. And I think this is one of the best archives that exists, for any topic.
I’m not sure which was the worst business decision. Changing the commenting platform or raising the annual subscription rate by 50%.
How many readers have fled to ArcaMax, the Seattle Times and the Washington Post for their Kings Features comics? All those page views and mouse clicks gone. A business shouldn’t expect to be able to massively raise their prices when the quality of their service has declined. It’s bad business.
The Comics Kingdom’s decision makers should be banned from making business decisions anywhere. What would they do if they became the brand manager of a fast-food restaurant? Permanently close all the pickup windows and double the prices?
SoSF has the best archive I’ve ever seen for a social media site. What other comic website maintains a synopsis page? SoSF is the best online community I’ve ever been a part of. The only moderation I read about here is an overly touchy spam filter.
Agreed 1000%, BJr6K. That’s one of several reasons I stopped posting at CC. Nothing whatsoever against Josh and his site — I’m sure that’s how I found this place, and he’s given me many a laugh over the years. But he expunges his comments sections after a certain amount of time, and I just don’t understand why. I do realize that spam starts to accumulate on older posts, but there are several ways around that, including just closing the comments after a few days or some respectable period of time. (I also struggle with unthreaded comments; even USENET had threaded comments back in the pre-Web era. I don’t know why every site doesn’t have them now. But I digress….)
I missed the final week of Funky Winkerbean on the Comics Curmudgeon due to the Christmas/New Year holidays. I knew there was an archive so I figured I could read the comments at a later date when I had a caught up. I was so disappointed to discover the “archive” was only the blog without the comments. Not cool, Josh.
Why expunge the comments? I thought digital storage was cheap.
bwoeh, can you tell me how you found your Disqus comments, unmoored — un-Moore-d — as they were from CK? I tried to find them in my account, and no dice. I’d be so happy to find them again!
I log into my Disqus account on ArcaMax to upvote comments.
After you log into Disqus on ArcaMax, if you look at the top of the comments on the right there is a pull-down menu to the right of your name. The first selection is “Your Profile”. Clicking on it will take you to your Disqus profile.
My final Disqus comments on Funky Winkerbean appear to be from 09/18/2022. I can infer it was sometime during the Mitchell Knox arc.
Clicking “View in discussion” under the comment takes you somewhere in the Comics Kingdom website but there is no discussion. The place for the comic tells me I’ve exceeded my monthly max of free comics. Could the Funky Winkerbean comic strip still be on their servers somewhere? 🤞
Comics Kingdom, free those archives!
BWOEH,
Have I misunderstood you?
You payed a subscription of $29.95 for a year to use CK? And then CK only let you see so many comic strips for a month? WoW! ( I have noticed that using ‘WoW.’ with just a period doesn’t express my level of surprise, so WoW!) I did not think I could hate CK any more, but now I do.
bwoeh: The Funky archives are still on the CK servers, although only going back to October 5 1998. (They also still have the “Funky Winkerbean Vintage” archive, but those use the dates they were posted to CK, not the original date of the comic. It only seems to be about five years’ worth of those.)
(I don’t know that there’s anything that links to the archives anywhere on the site, but entering the URL manually works. Now if only I could figure out how to download all the strips without going through them one by one…)
(Amusingly, the last “vintage” strip is dated January 11 2023. Took ’em a week and a half to realize they weren’t supposed to still upload them, I guess?)
@sorialpromise
Negative Ghost rider. I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. On April first 2022, I signed up for the Comic Kingdom’s April Fool’s Day sale for a one-month free trial. I didn’t cancel during the free trial, so on May first 2022 they billed my credit card on file $19.99 for a one-year subscription (05/01/2022 – 04/30/2023). On April 7th of this year, they sent an email notice that I would be billed $29.99 on 5/1/2023 for an annual subscription renewal. Sometime during my annual subscription, the Comics Kingdom upped their annual subscription price from $19.99 to $29.99.
I cancelled my CK account on April 30th 2023. Essentially, including the trial period, I received 13 months for $19.99.
There was never a limit on how many CK titles I could read. I think at one time I had 60 CK titles in my favorites but that was padding my list with a lot of crap to get my money’s worth.
@Green Luthor says all of Batiuk’s strips are still on the Comics Kingdom servers. I suspect I can no longer view the Funky Winkerbean strip I mentioned to @Duck of Death from 09/18/2022 because I’m no longer a CK premium subscriber. I think I’m only permitted to view one week into the archives. It’s also possible I’ve exceeded my monthly max of comics. Whatever arbitrary number that is.
09/18/2022 was the last time I used Disqus to comment on a Funky Winkerbean strip. That is why I used it as an example. The Comics Kingdom migrated to the craptacular OpenWeb platform near the end of November 2022.
You should hate the Comics Kingdom because they’re a horribly run company and they also might be holding the Funky Winkerbean archive hostage. Wouldn’t you like to see “Funky Winkerbean Classic” on GoComics? I would.
Sorry for the confusion. *phew* I hope that clears everything up. 😁
Clear, and copasetic, my dear. As regards GC, they seem to be a mature run organization. I like the freedom to go back as far as they have archives, and read comics. Almost all of my favorites are on GC.
You know I have the grandkids from Thursday through Sunday. They are 5 and 4. They call me Pop. I showed them my baby picture, and of course I have theirs. Someone gave them the idea that baby Pop is so much cuter than their baby pictures. There was even a song. I don’t know where they got that idea, but there is constant arguing about whose side is right and who is the cutest. As an unbiased observer, I must say that baby Pop is way cuter.
@Green Luthor
You can view the Funky Winkerbean strips if you manually type in the URL? Can anyone view the strip or do they need a Comics Kingdom subscription?
I wonder if a computer programmer could write a program or script to pull each day’s comic one after another. Do we have anyone here willing to write one? Would there be legal ramifications if caught?
@bwoeh: I don’t know if it’ll work for someone without a subscription, but it’s worth a try if anyone wants to test it. (Just don’t everyone go storming the place so they notice they left the archives there?)
Today’s blog is Comic Book Harriet mocking the Crankshaft discussion on GoComics. The GoComics moderator there seemingly deletes comments willy-nilly for no reason.
In the last strip, the community CBH is referring to is SoSF. Are you a nerd or a boomer?
Hitorque is certainly a nerd! I saw him in the flesh during the group chat and he’s not old enough to be a boomer!
Regarding Comics Curmudgeon, I’ve got nothing but love and respect for that place. I do wish the comments sections were preserved, and comments threads would be nice, but the place as a whole is great.
I’ve seen some people rib that all the comments are just people trying to out-Josh Josh, but with the Comment of the Week thing it’s obvious that that is exactly the comment culture he’s wanting to cultivate.
It makes his site a one stop shop for snark on the entire day’s offering of strips, since even if Josh isn’t going to cover Mark Trail that day, someone in the comments will.
This place is a dissecting table, and some people don’t have the patience for that or the interest. CC is a celebrity roast, and some people tire of that and would rather watch a dissection. It’s all up to taste if you want one, or the other, or both.
Agreed. Actually, this happens on virtually all blogs over time — commenters take on the “voice” of the host. I don’t think it’s conscious. I think it’s unconscious mirroring, plus the slow attrition of those who aren’t in tune with that “voice.”
That’s one of many reasons why it’s so wonderful that this site has rotating hosts. It promotes a wide variety of writing styles and topics.
But I’m with you. I can’t bash the CC. It was my gateway drug to comics snark, and it’s still a daily read for me.
I read Josh’s Comics Curmudgeon blog every day, but reading the entire comment section sequentially top-to-bottom is usually just too much. I tend to look for the Batiuk related comments by utilizing search strings such as; “fw”, “funky”, “batiuk”, “cs”, “crank”, and “shaft.” I also search for “kingd” to see if anyone has tossed a hand grenade in the direction of the Comics Kingdom.
Like Duck, I dislike the linear arrangement of the comment section. A comment numbered 150 can be referring back to comment number 12. You can go down a rabbit hole and find it difficult to get back to the comment where you started. Many commenters have been there for quite a while which seems to result in far too many inside jokes. Recently, one person called another commenter’s wife a “prostitute” and received no reaction. Hello!
Finally, I don’t understand how Josh judges what comments to include on his COTW page. I read a load of comments in the CC discussion a lot funnier than the ones he nominates. What does he do? Pick from the first dozen comments each day?
———————————-
While we’re discussing other comic strip blogs I’d like to point out The Daily Trail. Many readers criticize Mark Trail for abandoning the James Allen’s style. I’m really not much of a soap opera comic strip fan because I usually find them plodding and dull. Mark Trail has grown on me, mostly because of the blog. To me, the comic strip has a certain goofy charm.
The blogger “georgekatkins” will criticize Jules Rivera when she deserves it, but has no problem complimenting her when credit is due. George will critique the artwork when it is lacking, but will often state when he likes the composition of certain panel or the technique Jules utilized.
Cheers
@bwoeh
Funny you should mention The Daily Trail, as we had just added it–along with a few other comic blogs–to the ‘other links’ section.
JJ O’Malley has set a longevity record at GC. His comment has stayed up for 20 hours. The troglodyte post attacking JJ has been removed.
There is some superlative detective work on GC by our own wonderful Be Ware of Eve Hill. Top notch work.
Considering how relatively anodyne my critique of today’s laughfest was, I’m surprised it didn’t arouse more ire.
Your opponents (in the loosest meaning of the term) aren’t exactly balls of fire. They get offended while defending Crankshaft. I hate to think what would have happened if FW was on GC. Those people could not have hung on Comic Kingdom. It always surprises me that people go ballistic on something as mindless as Crankshaft. But I guess to each their own.
And yet, they don’t defend it. If someone wants to argue that Tom Batiuk is a talented writer, I’m willing to listen. I just don’t see it, and I see a ton of evidence to the contrary. The hostility to non-believers is instinctual, like who they are as a person is under attack. And this is the hill they want to die on? Do people really get angry about defending the honor of fucking Crankshaft? After awhile, I can only conclude that these people aren’t very intelligent.
BJ6000,
For my own education, I read the comments for the last 10 days of Get Fuzzy and for Calvin and Hobbes. GF had no insults toward other posters. C&H kept it together until yesterday when they intentionally brought politics into the comments. They had 76 comments! It started out hot, but respectful. But around comment 40, the personal attacks started. It was not pretty. Neither author was mentioned on either strip during those 10 days. I attribute that to the high level of innovation exercised by both creators.
I don’t understand it, either. On numerous occasions, I’ve asked them why the negative comments bother them. No replies.
Were they really complaining about snarky comments during the week of Ed’s toilet turmoil? It’s so unfortunate someone ruined their enjoyment reading about Ed sitting on the crapper. Perhaps there was something relatable to them there. Do they really want everyone to know? Snark Critic: /b> I also lament times when there is insufficient reading material in the bathroom. I truly get what Ed is saying here. When I have trouble going, it’s nice to have something to read to pass the time. Right on, brother.
I’m guessing they don’t like any form of negativity in their “happy place.” It sure would be nice if someone confirmed.
Our entire society has a severe communication problem. I know that’s practically a cliche, but it’s true in the most literal way. We’ve somehow developed a combination of inflexibility, false authority, self-righteousness, and hostility towards the tiniest difference of ideas. To say nothing of how much malinformation exists, and how little that concerns anyone.
It’s trendy to blame the nature of online interaction for all this. But I think that’s more the symptom than the disease. And it’s a cheap, easy thing to blame, instead of facing the actual problem.
There was a golden era of online communication, when there was a sort of IQ barrier to getting online. The dumbest people — say, the bottom quartile or even decile — weren’t able to figure it out, and so relatively smart people dominated everywhere. Some of them were horrible assholes, sure, or reprehensible scumbags, but those types were usually driven into their own corners.
Today, everyone is online. And the result is, as always, noise drives out signal. Bad drives out good. Decades ago, I used to spend waaaaay too much time on USENET and later on a few select blogs. Now I rarely work up the give-a-damn to contribute anywhere. You certainly can’t have a real conversation of any kind in most places, irrespective of their political or social bent. It’s all so tiresome.
That’s why I cherish this place. People can talk without being flamed or intentionally, disingenuously misconstrued. I disagree with some comments, but who cares? I don’t feel the urge to flame anyone. We don’t all have to agree on everything. Diversity of opinion makes life interesting and sharpens our own thinking, if we let it.
When his comments are allowed to stay up, J.J. O’Malley can easily obtain the featured Crankshaft comment of the day. Despite the flaggers working to have his comments deleted, J.J. had a few featured comments last week.
J.J. O’Malley is one of the few remaining diehard snarkers on the Comics Kingdom. A most prolific commenter who seemingly leaves a comment in every comic discussion I read. Not all of them are snark. He gives credit when it is due.
I feel bad about no longer upvoting J.J. O’Malley’s CK comments, but I would have to log into OpenWeb to upvote. I don’t want to clue in the hosts that they’re still sending the daily email of my favorite Comics Kingdom comics.
Yes, believe it or not, more than one month after cancelling my Comics Kingdom account, I’m still receiving the daily email of my CK favorites? A perk reserved for premium subscribers. The CK runs a really tight ship over there. Don’t they? /s 😂
————————-
If the troglodyte was as antagonistic as their comment history indicates, they’d have posted a whole lot more than ten comments over the past year. A person with that much bile would be unable to refrain from commenting more often. It had to be an alternate sock puppet account.
What they’re doing on Crankshaft is the commenting equivalent of ding-dong ditch. They post their comments from an alternate account, run away and don’t respond to any replies. How childish.
BWOEH,
1. My hat is off to you for your research on that guy from GC. May you continue in your free email acquisition over CK subscription.
2. This is just my opinion, but I think CK is far inferior to GC. Why would CK care if I wanted to read the last 3 years of Mary Worth? It can’t be due to a financial loss. GC does it all the time, and they stay in business. Then heaven forbid that I might want to read 10 individual strips daily. Aren’t I punished enough by choosing to read Rex Morgan MD, and Judge Parker? Must CK pile on?
3. The FBI could do a lot worse than hiring you to find the criminals on the Top 10 Most Wanted List. Within a year, every street in the USA would be safe to walk down at midnight.
♥️💖❤️🫂🌺💐🌹
1.) I sometimes feel bad about receiving those emails for free, but I counterbalance those feelings with the realization the Comics Kingdom is stealing from everyone they charge $29.99 a year.
2.) The CK is inferior to GC in almost every conceivable way. It’s a joke that they claim to be “your premier source for comics.” I was totally flabbergasted when they sent an email saying they were going to renew my subscription at $29.99. A $10 increase! I thought it was a typo.
$29.99? As Will Smith likes to say, “Oh, hell no!”
3.) Thanks, but it’s not that big a deal. I’ve been commenting on comic strips for a while now. I’ve learned a lot of things from other readers.
BWOEH,
A famous quote that applies to you:
“You have been, and always shall be,
My friend.”
@sorialpromise
Didn’t Spock die after he said that?
OOPS! We will keep that quote out of context.
Just wanted to say thanks for the kind words, BWoEH. Don’t worry about CK upvotes. For the most part I’ve been able to get along fine in their comments sections (although it would be nice if I could refer to detective Plainclothes Tracy by his given name). And yes, I’m even been known to compliment Batiuk when something appeals to me. I’ve been reading comics far too long to not note what I like.
You know, back in the olden days, I never would have permitted discussing a different comment section, or bringing business from such a comment section into this forum. But that was then, and this is now. No brigading, though, and I don’t want any of those old CK or new GC weirdos showing up here doing their shtick either. Just speaking for myself, I always looked down my nose at the old CK comment section, and I assume the GC site is no better.
Ha! The cuffs are off now BOI!
Notice though, that I was mostly criticizing the overaggressive moderation of the OTHER SITES themselves. In a corporate sense. I think both snarkers and defenders should be able to peacefully coexist.
If we’re discussing other comments sections, IMO CK went too far in the other direction. It got cruel and awful to anyone who dared disagree.
I want conversations to REMAIN. That is the most important thing to me. To not try and airbrush out what I don’t like to make the world the pretty picture I imagine in my head.
If someone wants to come in here and debate the ethics of criticism, or try to define the line where snark becomes toxic, I would want to let them. And I wouldn’t go deleting that debate unless something absolutely heinous was said, or unless a commenter specifically told me they wanted their comment deleted.
A short list of hard and fast rules. That’s the ticket.
No personal attacks.
That includes Tom/Chuck/Davis/Byrne.
No politics.
Don’t cross ‘the line’.
At this point I feel like we’ve even tossed ‘stay on topic’. Or else I wouldn’t be able to shitpost cow pics.
Yeah, we’re a little looser with “stay on topic” these days, but everything else you listed is spot on. The topic used to be the daily strip, but we ain’t got one of those no more. Except for Crankshaft, which never counts. In fact, I commend everyone for not going too far off the deep end… even you, CBH!
I was one of the first GC commenters on the very first CS, and the one after me was–
Well, I’d read here about “the only commenter we ever banned,” and I read that SOSF thread just to make sure I never did that, and…
Yeah. It was “Bats and Ayers doing it with SECKES!!” guy.
I just sat there thinking “Ayers quit. Update your stupidity.”
I think he turned up a few more times those first few days. Possibly he poisoned the well for everyone else.
I confess I almost always enjoyed DSSS’s comments on CK. That’s because I like irreverence and, up to a point, deranged trolling. And because somehow the already extremely absurd scenario of Batiuk/Ayers slashfic became even more absurd when it was repeated (almost literally) ad nauseam.
(If anyone remembers David Lynch’s strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World,” that’s what DSSS’s comments sort of reminded me of. The same thing again and again, until it became absurd, and then again and again until it sort of lost its absurdity.)
But having said all that — I think it was right to ban him here. His schtick is so repetitious, and just completely wrong for the tone of this place. Provocation DSSS can do. Reading the room, not so much.
Oh, and I also viewed the comments as a sharp stick in the eye of CK’s censorbot. A sentence like “Hemorrhagic stroke can lead to organ failure” would send your comment to forever-purgatory, but DSSS could basically write graphic gay pørñ all the live-long day and the censorbot couldn’t have cared less. I thought that in itself was funny.
When “He Whose Name is Forbidden Here” started commenting on GoComics, I figured they weren’t going to be there very long. Out of curiosity I bookmarked their profile page and checked on them daily. They lasted sixteen days. They were banned from commenting for constantly insulting Canadians on For Better or For Worse.
Although they were well-versed in Funky Winkerbean history and had amusing comments during the Disqus era, I was never fond of how they responded to positive comments with attacks, such as “Cool story, bro.” This person sometimes lacked a decency filter.
Whenever I returned from a break from commenting on FW, this person was usually the first to welcome me back. An all-day commenter who would react to my comment no matter how late it was posted. I appreciated those things.
Yes, there was a certain hazing element to some of DSSS’s comments. Overall, for good and ill, I’d describe him as “juvenile.” Come to think of it, how do we know it was a “him”? (Though it’s typically men that have the hostile obsession with other men being gay, it’s typically women that write slashfic. I guess we’ll never know.)
@The Duck of Death
This person’s first (previous?) Disqus account was named “Penday Joe” (Pendejo), and the avatar was Mr. T’s face. I guess that’s why I always assumed they were male. When the “Penday Joe” account was permanently banned, they returned almost immediately as DSSS with the Miley Cyrus avatar. I could tell from the tone of their comments it was the same person. Perhaps they are non-binary? 🤔🤭
As you said, we’ll never know. If we asked them point blank, I expect the response would be some kind of smart-ass deflection.
I remember someone in the FW discussion bristling at being referred to as a woman. I think it was @Justifiable.
The crazy thing is that, while I don’t usually even think about the gender of commenters unless gender is the topic being discussed, I had SUCH a strong impression that Justifiable was a woman. And I don’t really have mental pictures of commenters in my head, but for Justifiable I pictured a woman in her 60s with tight grey curls and a pugnacious face, striding out of a co-op grocery with a public radio logo-ed canvas bag containing kale, tempeh, chickpeas and a “boycott Israeli brands” flyer, while yelling at a passer-by that they’re walking their dog incorrectly.
Takes all kinds. Justifiable was one I disagreed with a lot. He could be pretty obnoxious and in-your-face.
I was still sorry to see him go. He always had something lively to contribute. I had the impression that he was a Hollywood insider of some kind. Maybe an employee of Pink Films, heh…
@The Duck of Death
@Justifiable was too much of a mansplainer to be a woman.
😂
The two of us had an awful kerfuffle about that stupid Hershey Barr FW strip, but we parted as friends. I last saw him here on SoSF. He left the Comics Kingdom because his account was hacked.
constantly insulting Canadians
What? Over what? I don’t like Nickelback myself, but I’m not gonna hate on a whole country over that.
Re: Justifiable and the “Hershey Barr” kerfuffle: Ah yes, I remember it well.
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip I posted above gets at the problem.
I personally didn’t find it racist, nor did I find “Bubu Zayla” racist. (Dumb and unfunny, certainly.) But people can have different opinions, and that’s fine. However, especially with TB, one should remember Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In this case, you could substitute “cluelessness” or “lack of attention” for stupidity. I simply don’t believe that TB was trying to sneak racist messages into his strips. Yes, he should have realized that there could be sensitivity around that kind of language, but he has a habit of overlooking quality control.
Since we can’t know what he was thinking — more likely, not thinking — why not assume the most charitable interpretation?
Alas, “the benefit of the doubt” in modern internet culture is as dead as the 1200 baud modem.
@Bill the Splut I have come around to the conclusion that we were all kinda wrong about Nickelback.
@Bill the Splut
This person disliked For Better or For Worse because they thought, like FunkyWinkerbean, the comic strip was misery porn. Their profile page lists only these two titles under “Comics I Follow”.
It’s hard to remember the insults because it was more than five months ago and most of their comments were deleted by the moderator. They often used Lynn Johnston’s artistic quirks to ridicule Canadians.
For example: Do all Canadians laugh with their tongues sticking out?
Do all Canadians have muppet mouth?
Is it Winter all year long in Canada?
BOXCAR!
etc.
When confronted by other people in the discussion, this person resorted to name calling and more insults.
I’m not a fan of Nickleback, but I don’t understand why they’re singled out as bad. My main experience with Nickleback was seeing them on TV during the closing ceremonies of the Vancouver winter olympics back in 2010. I can’t name a song title of theirs offhand. There was one about a camera. Right?
Cheers
There were a few other bannings, but the whos and whys aren’t important. And it’s almost never over one thing. We gave everyone a fair and honest shake before resorting to banning. Like I always said, there’s an undefined line, and when you think that maybe you crossed it, you probably did.
Hey, wait a minute…am I Ed? AM I ED!?!?
(yes)
CBH thanks for the repeated LOLs – I’ve gone back and read this a half a dozen times today.
There’s a new ridiculous “Komix Thoughts” post, this one about Dinkle:
“This is the final book in the series (that collected) the strips dealing with (Dinkle)… the strips that ended the book had a sense of finality about them. Everything runs its course, and there were real life events such as the 2008 economic crash… All in all, it was a remarkable run for the character who had come to define the strip in the first half of its run.”
Oh, fuck you, Tom. Stop trying to act like you retired Dinkle in 2008, because we all know you didn’t. And, in 2021 you made a huge show about that Rose Parade entry that didn’t even acknowledge your involvement (and didn’t invite you back the next year).
It like he’s trying to explain away the end of the Dinkle books, by acting like that was also the end of the Dinkle strips. He’s so egotistical he can’t admit that the publisher simply declined to print any more.
This is what got me. He doesn’t mention when the book was published, but Grandpa Google informs me it was Jan. 1, 2004. That’s about 20 years ago, for those of you keeping score.
Adding the rest of the sentence that you quoted:
Everything runs its course, and there were real life events such as the 2008 economic crash, the growing decline in newspaper readership, and a looming pandemic on the horizon that would alter the school market dramatically.
Covid-19, “looming.” That’s one of the reasons, along with an economic crisis that would happen 4 years in the future, why no Dinkle paperback collections were published after 2004.
Sure, Tom. Makes total sense.
Wow, I actually trusted him when he said 2008. Good catch. How did this man not get into politics? He’s got the perfect skill set: egomania, phony folksiness, talking without saying anything, and being 100% committed to his own ridiculous version of reality.
Totally ludicrous. He deliberately ruined the Dinkle character when he aged him ten years, forced him into retirement, replaced him as band director, and turned him into a lovable old coot. There aren’t any more Dinkle books because everything that made him a “fun” character was stripped away except the nostalgia, and it left Batiuk with nothing to write about. No one wants a collection of Dinkle strips featuring him cackling over thirty year old gags and following Becky around.
And we haven’t even mentioned Dinkle’s deafness. Which would have been a great thing to do with him in Act III. Character whose entire life revolves around music suddenly loses access to it.
But like so many other Funky Winkerbean plot twists, Batiuk threw it out because it required him to write beyond his meager ability. Hell, this was the second time he did punted on this story. Becky was an 18-year-old Julliard entrant who lost years of work, practice, commitment, and a purpose in life. But she barely cared about missing a limb, or getting any restitution, much less the emotional trauma of such an event. Then Batiuk turned her into Dinkle Jr. off-panel, despite not having any of the qualities that made Dinkle a good character.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Ha ha, best Crankshaft arc ever! FWIW, I’m not a nerd, rather I am an overage dweeb.
HUZZAH! [applauds wildly] HUZZAH! [jumps to feet] BRAVO! [jumps onto chair] BRAVISSIMO!!
Meanwhile, today’s Crankshaft Scorecard:
Starts with unnecessary/awkward “so”: NO
Starts with a question: YES
Question serves no purpose: NO, that exposition had to be done one way or another for this particular strip
Crankshaft is absent from his own strip: NO
FW characters appear: NO
Comics are mentioned: NO
Lisa is mentioned: NO, the dam still holds. Pray it does not crack
Crankshaft is an unpleasant sadist: YES
Crankshaft does things that would get him sued/arrested/shot IRL: YES
Overall, more NOs than YESes, so not one of the worst, although it’s not funny and doesn’t make much sense if you look into it. (The bus heaters are found not to be working, but Crankshaft implies he never turned them on. Punchline would have been improved if he’d said, “Really? I wouldn’t know. I never turn them on. (etc.)” Also, doesn’t he get cold himself on the unheated bus? But I’ll give Batiuk a pass, since gag-a-day strips don’t really need to make sense for more than the 3 seconds it takes to read them.
As far as the heaters, I assumed the intent was that Ed sabotaged them so that they wouldn’t work, which is even worse. (But in character of being a huge a-hole.) If it was just a case of him not turning them on, they wouldn’t fail an inspection.
If the whole joke is that Ed just doesn’t turn them on, then the inspector is worse at his job than Ed.
Starts with unnecessary/awkward “so”
Starts with a question
Question serves no purpose
Crankshaft is absent from his own strip
FW characters appear
Comics are mentioned
Lisa is mentioned
Crankshaft is an unpleasant sadist
Crankshaft does things that would get him sued/arrested/shot IRL
Challenge accepted.
It would have been even funnier if he’d said “These things have heaters?! NOBODY TELLS ME SQUAT!!!!”
Oh, gooood, 7 days of bus inspection jokes.
I had to read Sunday’s twice. The–let’s call it a joke as it appears in the last panel–is that they’re happy the school year ends. Yes. One would think. Why bring it up? They don’t know that’s happening? At least the “Lena Hyena makes inedible foodstuffs” joke was minimal.
Why are they inspecting at the end of the year, and not during it? Oh, maybe Tom rented a car and they checked it for dents when he brought it back from OhioCon or whatever, and thinks that how everything works.
What was that week of “no one wants to ride the bus!” about? On the first day, Mary Marzipan and Crank exchange a look that screams “ED! They have finally caught up with our life of crime! I TOLD you not to smuggle heroin under the seats!” And then we never found out why. I mean, outside of the path of death Crank has left behind him.
On Weds, there was a look of relief exchanged, reinforcing that something, anything was about to happen, and they escaped it. Ed sighed “WHEW! Since ’45 those Mossad guys been after me!” No. Never explained why that week of no kids riding happened. “It’s called wri–SQUIRREL!” (Tom runs off)
“ED! They have finally caught up with our life of crime! I TOLD you not to smuggle heroin under the seats!”
I wish this would happen. Or anything at all would happen. These people are just so boring. There’s no reason to care about them, they never do anything, and nothing ever happens to them. And when it does, it’s immediately thrown away, like Mary’s PTSD.
Even Crankshaft himself doesn’t do much more than make puns and be a sociopath. And the story cuts away from any conflict he might cause. “Look! I’m driving away from that mom trying to catch me!” Then the next day they’re sitting around the break room doing nothing again.
The “nobody wants to ride the bus any more” joke may resonate with anyone who has had to drive past an elementary school at the end of a school day and deal with the 3 block long queue of cars waiting to pick up their kids. That’s definitely one of the lesser objectionable Crankshaft arcs.
As for issues with the comments, it was all I could do to keep up with the comments on SoSF. There’s no way I’m going down the rabbit hole of GC. I’ve given up on Komics Kingdom altogether, since they locked down their free service. There’s nothing on there that I feel like is worth paying money to read, and if anything notable happens in one of the strips, Josh will talk about it.
“If the kids get cold, I just bring my flamethrower. No one’s ever complained… a second time.”
It’s funny because Krankenschaaften in real life would have gotten the public schools system sued into insolvency from outraged parents…
Now SoSF is snarking on the “moderation policies” of a certain web site. 😂
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF STUCK FUNKY!!!
Do the Comics Kingdom next!
I’m still gutted that they deleted all comment history.
And I must say, some of their trigger words were insane. Like “stroke” or “organ” in any context whatsoever, even sentences like “Smoking increases stroke risk” or “Dinkle plays the organ.”
Bored Panda is a great site, but they’re crazy about censoring everything. They had an entry of jokes based on Medieval warfare that had paintings of people with blood-gushing axe wounds in their head (and, being Medieval art, with bored facial expressions that said “Oh, God, again? Mondays, right?”) and changed every “killed” to “[un-alived]”. If you’re that sensitive, why are you reading anything online?
Fear of legal action is one thing. Fear of getting firebombed is just part of the distemper of the Trumpocene.
Losing that comment history was sad. My comments are still there in Disqus, but they’re no longer linked to any comic strips. What was the strip I was commenting on about? What did the person to whom I was replying post? 🤷♀️
I still don’t really understand how replacing a commenting platform made the community any less toxic. Is OpenWeb a moderation tool as well as a commenting platform? Does OpenWeb supply the moderators?
Was the Comics Kingdom going for a scorched earth effect? Blow the whole thing up and start over?
I still get upset every time I read that OpenWeb notice. That platform is not superior to Disqus in any way.
NEWS AROUND THE KINGDOM:
UPGRADES! UPGRADES! UPGRADES!DOWNGRADES! DOWNGRADES! DOWNGRADES!😡🤬😡
User participation is often the best part of communities like this. Throwing it out en masse was a horrible, horrible business decision. (Something that CK seems to do a lot.) I appreciate that old posts here include contemporary reactions to each day’s strip, and context for it all. It makes SoSF more useful as an archive. And I think this is one of the best archives that exists, for any topic.
I’m not sure which was the worst business decision. Changing the commenting platform or raising the annual subscription rate by 50%.
How many readers have fled to ArcaMax, the Seattle Times and the Washington Post for their Kings Features comics? All those page views and mouse clicks gone. A business shouldn’t expect to be able to massively raise their prices when the quality of their service has declined. It’s bad business.
The Comics Kingdom’s decision makers should be banned from making business decisions anywhere. What would they do if they became the brand manager of a fast-food restaurant? Permanently close all the pickup windows and double the prices?
SoSF has the best archive I’ve ever seen for a social media site. What other comic website maintains a synopsis page? SoSF is the best online community I’ve ever been a part of. The only moderation I read about here is an overly touchy spam filter.
Agreed 1000%, BJr6K. That’s one of several reasons I stopped posting at CC. Nothing whatsoever against Josh and his site — I’m sure that’s how I found this place, and he’s given me many a laugh over the years. But he expunges his comments sections after a certain amount of time, and I just don’t understand why. I do realize that spam starts to accumulate on older posts, but there are several ways around that, including just closing the comments after a few days or some respectable period of time. (I also struggle with unthreaded comments; even USENET had threaded comments back in the pre-Web era. I don’t know why every site doesn’t have them now. But I digress….)
I missed the final week of Funky Winkerbean on the Comics Curmudgeon due to the Christmas/New Year holidays. I knew there was an archive so I figured I could read the comments at a later date when I had a caught up. I was so disappointed to discover the “archive” was only the blog without the comments. Not cool, Josh.
Why expunge the comments? I thought digital storage was cheap.
bwoeh, can you tell me how you found your Disqus comments, unmoored — un-Moore-d — as they were from CK? I tried to find them in my account, and no dice. I’d be so happy to find them again!
I log into my Disqus account on ArcaMax to upvote comments.
After you log into Disqus on ArcaMax, if you look at the top of the comments on the right there is a pull-down menu to the right of your name. The first selection is “Your Profile”. Clicking on it will take you to your Disqus profile.
My final Disqus comments on Funky Winkerbean appear to be from 09/18/2022. I can infer it was sometime during the Mitchell Knox arc.
Clicking “View in discussion” under the comment takes you somewhere in the Comics Kingdom website but there is no discussion. The place for the comic tells me I’ve exceeded my monthly max of free comics. Could the Funky Winkerbean
comicstrip still be on their servers somewhere? 🤞Comics Kingdom, free those archives!
BWOEH,
Have I misunderstood you?
You payed a subscription of $29.95 for a year to use CK? And then CK only let you see so many comic strips for a month? WoW! ( I have noticed that using ‘WoW.’ with just a period doesn’t express my level of surprise, so WoW!) I did not think I could hate CK any more, but now I do.
bwoeh: The Funky archives are still on the CK servers, although only going back to October 5 1998. (They also still have the “Funky Winkerbean Vintage” archive, but those use the dates they were posted to CK, not the original date of the comic. It only seems to be about five years’ worth of those.)
(I don’t know that there’s anything that links to the archives anywhere on the site, but entering the URL manually works. Now if only I could figure out how to download all the strips without going through them one by one…)
(Amusingly, the last “vintage” strip is dated January 11 2023. Took ’em a week and a half to realize they weren’t supposed to still upload them, I guess?)
@sorialpromise
Negative Ghost rider. I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. On April first 2022, I signed up for the Comic Kingdom’s April Fool’s Day sale for a one-month free trial. I didn’t cancel during the free trial, so on May first 2022 they billed my credit card on file $19.99 for a one-year subscription (05/01/2022 – 04/30/2023). On April 7th of this year, they sent an email notice that I would be billed $29.99 on 5/1/2023 for an annual subscription renewal. Sometime during my annual subscription, the Comics Kingdom upped their annual subscription price from $19.99 to $29.99.
I cancelled my CK account on April 30th 2023. Essentially, including the trial period, I received 13 months for $19.99.
There was never a limit on how many CK titles I could read. I think at one time I had 60 CK titles in my favorites but that was padding my list with a lot of crap to get my money’s worth.
@Green Luthor says all of Batiuk’s strips are still on the Comics Kingdom servers. I suspect I can no longer view the Funky Winkerbean strip I mentioned to @Duck of Death from 09/18/2022 because I’m no longer a CK premium subscriber. I think I’m only permitted to view one week into the archives. It’s also possible I’ve exceeded my monthly max of comics. Whatever arbitrary number that is.
09/18/2022 was the last time I used Disqus to comment on a Funky Winkerbean strip. That is why I used it as an example. The Comics Kingdom migrated to the craptacular OpenWeb platform near the end of November 2022.
You should hate the Comics Kingdom because they’re a horribly run company and they also might be holding the Funky Winkerbean archive hostage. Wouldn’t you like to see “Funky Winkerbean Classic” on GoComics? I would.
Sorry for the confusion. *phew* I hope that clears everything up. 😁
Clear, and copasetic, my dear. As regards GC, they seem to be a mature run organization. I like the freedom to go back as far as they have archives, and read comics. Almost all of my favorites are on GC.
You know I have the grandkids from Thursday through Sunday. They are 5 and 4. They call me Pop. I showed them my baby picture, and of course I have theirs. Someone gave them the idea that baby Pop is so much cuter than their baby pictures. There was even a song. I don’t know where they got that idea, but there is constant arguing about whose side is right and who is the cutest. As an unbiased observer, I must say that baby Pop is way cuter.
@Green Luthor
You can view the Funky Winkerbean strips if you manually type in the URL? Can anyone view the strip or do they need a Comics Kingdom subscription?
I wonder if a computer programmer could write a program or script to pull each day’s comic one after another. Do we have anyone here willing to write one? Would there be legal ramifications if caught?
@bwoeh: I don’t know if it’ll work for someone without a subscription, but it’s worth a try if anyone wants to test it. (Just don’t everyone go storming the place so they notice they left the archives there?)
https://comicskingdom.com/funky-winkerbean
Did I miss something?
Today’s blog is Comic Book Harriet mocking the Crankshaft discussion on GoComics. The GoComics moderator there seemingly deletes comments willy-nilly for no reason.
In the last strip, the community CBH is referring to is SoSF. Are you a nerd or a boomer?
Hitorque is certainly a nerd! I saw him in the flesh during the group chat and he’s not old enough to be a boomer!
Regarding Comics Curmudgeon, I’ve got nothing but love and respect for that place. I do wish the comments sections were preserved, and comments threads would be nice, but the place as a whole is great.
I’ve seen some people rib that all the comments are just people trying to out-Josh Josh, but with the Comment of the Week thing it’s obvious that that is exactly the comment culture he’s wanting to cultivate.
It makes his site a one stop shop for snark on the entire day’s offering of strips, since even if Josh isn’t going to cover Mark Trail that day, someone in the comments will.
This place is a dissecting table, and some people don’t have the patience for that or the interest. CC is a celebrity roast, and some people tire of that and would rather watch a dissection. It’s all up to taste if you want one, or the other, or both.
Agreed. Actually, this happens on virtually all blogs over time — commenters take on the “voice” of the host. I don’t think it’s conscious. I think it’s unconscious mirroring, plus the slow attrition of those who aren’t in tune with that “voice.”
That’s one of many reasons why it’s so wonderful that this site has rotating hosts. It promotes a wide variety of writing styles and topics.
But I’m with you. I can’t bash the CC. It was my gateway drug to comics snark, and it’s still a daily read for me.
I read Josh’s Comics Curmudgeon blog every day, but reading the entire comment section sequentially top-to-bottom is usually just too much. I tend to look for the Batiuk related comments by utilizing search strings such as; “fw”, “funky”, “batiuk”, “cs”, “crank”, and “shaft.” I also search for “kingd” to see if anyone has tossed a hand grenade in the direction of the Comics Kingdom.
Like Duck, I dislike the linear arrangement of the comment section. A comment numbered 150 can be referring back to comment number 12. You can go down a rabbit hole and find it difficult to get back to the comment where you started. Many commenters have been there for quite a while which seems to result in far too many inside jokes. Recently, one person called another commenter’s wife a “prostitute” and received no reaction. Hello!
Finally, I don’t understand how Josh judges what comments to include on his COTW page. I read a load of comments in the CC discussion a lot funnier than the ones he nominates. What does he do? Pick from the first dozen comments each day?
———————————-
While we’re discussing other comic strip blogs I’d like to point out The Daily Trail. Many readers criticize Mark Trail for abandoning the James Allen’s style. I’m really not much of a soap opera comic strip fan because I usually find them plodding and dull. Mark Trail has grown on me, mostly because of the blog. To me, the comic strip has a certain goofy charm.
The blogger “georgekatkins” will criticize Jules Rivera when she deserves it, but has no problem complimenting her when credit is due. George will critique the artwork when it is lacking, but will often state when he likes the composition of certain panel or the technique Jules utilized.
Cheers
@bwoeh
Funny you should mention The Daily Trail, as we had just added it–along with a few other comic blogs–to the ‘other links’ section.
JJ O’Malley has set a longevity record at GC. His comment has stayed up for 20 hours. The troglodyte post attacking JJ has been removed.
There is some superlative detective work on GC by our own wonderful Be Ware of Eve Hill. Top notch work.
Considering how relatively anodyne my critique of today’s laughfest was, I’m surprised it didn’t arouse more ire.
Your opponents (in the loosest meaning of the term) aren’t exactly balls of fire. They get offended while defending Crankshaft. I hate to think what would have happened if FW was on GC. Those people could not have hung on Comic Kingdom. It always surprises me that people go ballistic on something as mindless as Crankshaft. But I guess to each their own.
And yet, they don’t defend it. If someone wants to argue that Tom Batiuk is a talented writer, I’m willing to listen. I just don’t see it, and I see a ton of evidence to the contrary. The hostility to non-believers is instinctual, like who they are as a person is under attack. And this is the hill they want to die on? Do people really get angry about defending the honor of fucking Crankshaft? After awhile, I can only conclude that these people aren’t very intelligent.
BJ6000,
For my own education, I read the comments for the last 10 days of Get Fuzzy and for Calvin and Hobbes. GF had no insults toward other posters. C&H kept it together until yesterday when they intentionally brought politics into the comments. They had 76 comments! It started out hot, but respectful. But around comment 40, the personal attacks started. It was not pretty. Neither author was mentioned on either strip during those 10 days. I attribute that to the high level of innovation exercised by both creators.
I don’t understand it, either. On numerous occasions, I’ve asked them why the negative comments bother them. No replies.
Were they really complaining about snarky comments during the week of Ed’s toilet turmoil? It’s so unfortunate someone ruined their enjoyment reading about Ed sitting on the crapper. Perhaps there was something relatable to them there. Do they really want everyone to know?
Snark Critic: /b> I also lament times when there is insufficient reading material in the bathroom. I truly get what Ed is saying here. When I have trouble going, it’s nice to have something to read to pass the time. Right on, brother.
I’m guessing they don’t like any form of negativity in their “happy place.” It sure would be nice if someone confirmed.
Our entire society has a severe communication problem. I know that’s practically a cliche, but it’s true in the most literal way. We’ve somehow developed a combination of inflexibility, false authority, self-righteousness, and hostility towards the tiniest difference of ideas. To say nothing of how much malinformation exists, and how little that concerns anyone.
It’s trendy to blame the nature of online interaction for all this. But I think that’s more the symptom than the disease. And it’s a cheap, easy thing to blame, instead of facing the actual problem.
There was a golden era of online communication, when there was a sort of IQ barrier to getting online. The dumbest people — say, the bottom quartile or even decile — weren’t able to figure it out, and so relatively smart people dominated everywhere. Some of them were horrible assholes, sure, or reprehensible scumbags, but those types were usually driven into their own corners.
Today, everyone is online. And the result is, as always, noise drives out signal. Bad drives out good. Decades ago, I used to spend waaaaay too much time on USENET and later on a few select blogs. Now I rarely work up the give-a-damn to contribute anywhere. You certainly can’t have a real conversation of any kind in most places, irrespective of their political or social bent. It’s all so tiresome.
That’s why I cherish this place. People can talk without being flamed or intentionally, disingenuously misconstrued. I disagree with some comments, but who cares? I don’t feel the urge to flame anyone. We don’t all have to agree on everything. Diversity of opinion makes life interesting and sharpens our own thinking, if we let it.
When his comments are allowed to stay up, J.J. O’Malley can easily obtain the featured Crankshaft comment of the day. Despite the flaggers working to have his comments deleted, J.J. had a few featured comments last week.
J.J. O’Malley is one of the few remaining diehard snarkers on the Comics Kingdom. A most prolific commenter who seemingly leaves a comment in every comic discussion I read. Not all of them are snark. He gives credit when it is due.
I feel bad about no longer upvoting J.J. O’Malley’s CK comments, but I would have to log into OpenWeb to upvote. I don’t want to clue in the hosts that they’re still sending the daily email of my favorite Comics Kingdom comics.
Yes, believe it or not, more than one month after cancelling my Comics Kingdom account, I’m still receiving the daily email of my CK favorites? A perk reserved for premium subscribers. The CK runs a really tight ship over there. Don’t they? /s 😂
————————-
If the troglodyte was as antagonistic as their comment history indicates, they’d have posted a whole lot more than ten comments over the past year. A person with that much bile would be unable to refrain from commenting more often. It had to be an alternate sock puppet account.
What they’re doing on Crankshaft is the commenting equivalent of ding-dong ditch. They post their comments from an alternate account, run away and don’t respond to any replies. How childish.
BWOEH,
1. My hat is off to you for your research on that guy from GC. May you continue in your free email acquisition over CK subscription.
2. This is just my opinion, but I think CK is far inferior to GC. Why would CK care if I wanted to read the last 3 years of Mary Worth? It can’t be due to a financial loss. GC does it all the time, and they stay in business. Then heaven forbid that I might want to read 10 individual strips daily. Aren’t I punished enough by choosing to read Rex Morgan MD, and Judge Parker? Must CK pile on?
3. The FBI could do a lot worse than hiring you to find the criminals on the Top 10 Most Wanted List. Within a year, every street in the USA would be safe to walk down at midnight.
♥️💖❤️🫂🌺💐🌹
1.) I sometimes feel bad about receiving those emails for free, but I counterbalance those feelings with the realization the Comics Kingdom is stealing from everyone they charge $29.99 a year.
2.) The CK is inferior to GC in almost every conceivable way. It’s a joke that they claim to be “your premier source for comics.” I was totally flabbergasted when they sent an email saying they were going to renew my subscription at $29.99. A $10 increase! I thought it was a typo.
$29.99? As Will Smith likes to say, “Oh, hell no!”
3.) Thanks, but it’s not that big a deal. I’ve been commenting on comic strips for a while now. I’ve learned a lot of things from other readers.
BWOEH,
A famous quote that applies to you:
“You have been, and always shall be,
My friend.”
@sorialpromise
Didn’t Spock die after he said that?
OOPS! We will keep that quote out of context.
Just wanted to say thanks for the kind words, BWoEH. Don’t worry about CK upvotes. For the most part I’ve been able to get along fine in their comments sections (although it would be nice if I could refer to detective Plainclothes Tracy by his given name). And yes, I’m even been known to compliment Batiuk when something appeals to me. I’ve been reading comics far too long to not note what I like.
You know, back in the olden days, I never would have permitted discussing a different comment section, or bringing business from such a comment section into this forum. But that was then, and this is now. No brigading, though, and I don’t want any of those old CK or new GC weirdos showing up here doing their shtick either. Just speaking for myself, I always looked down my nose at the old CK comment section, and I assume the GC site is no better.
Ha! The cuffs are off now BOI!
Notice though, that I was mostly criticizing the overaggressive moderation of the OTHER SITES themselves. In a corporate sense. I think both snarkers and defenders should be able to peacefully coexist.
If we’re discussing other comments sections, IMO CK went too far in the other direction. It got cruel and awful to anyone who dared disagree.
I want conversations to REMAIN. That is the most important thing to me. To not try and airbrush out what I don’t like to make the world the pretty picture I imagine in my head.
If someone wants to come in here and debate the ethics of criticism, or try to define the line where snark becomes toxic, I would want to let them. And I wouldn’t go deleting that debate unless something absolutely heinous was said, or unless a commenter specifically told me they wanted their comment deleted.
A short list of hard and fast rules. That’s the ticket.
No personal attacks.
That includes Tom/Chuck/Davis/Byrne.
No politics.
Don’t cross ‘the line’.
At this point I feel like we’ve even tossed ‘stay on topic’. Or else I wouldn’t be able to shitpost cow pics.
Yeah, we’re a little looser with “stay on topic” these days, but everything else you listed is spot on. The topic used to be the daily strip, but we ain’t got one of those no more. Except for Crankshaft, which never counts. In fact, I commend everyone for not going too far off the deep end… even you, CBH!
I was one of the first GC commenters on the very first CS, and the one after me was–
Well, I’d read here about “the only commenter we ever banned,” and I read that SOSF thread just to make sure I never did that, and…
Yeah. It was “Bats and Ayers doing it with SECKES!!” guy.
I just sat there thinking “Ayers quit. Update your stupidity.”
I think he turned up a few more times those first few days. Possibly he poisoned the well for everyone else.
I confess I almost always enjoyed DSSS’s comments on CK. That’s because I like irreverence and, up to a point, deranged trolling. And because somehow the already extremely absurd scenario of Batiuk/Ayers slashfic became even more absurd when it was repeated (almost literally) ad nauseam.
(If anyone remembers David Lynch’s strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World,” that’s what DSSS’s comments sort of reminded me of. The same thing again and again, until it became absurd, and then again and again until it sort of lost its absurdity.)
But having said all that — I think it was right to ban him here. His schtick is so repetitious, and just completely wrong for the tone of this place. Provocation DSSS can do. Reading the room, not so much.
Oh, and I also viewed the comments as a sharp stick in the eye of CK’s censorbot. A sentence like “Hemorrhagic stroke can lead to organ failure” would send your comment to forever-purgatory, but DSSS could basically write graphic gay pørñ all the live-long day and the censorbot couldn’t have cared less. I thought that in itself was funny.
When “He Whose Name is Forbidden Here” started commenting on GoComics, I figured they weren’t going to be there very long. Out of curiosity I bookmarked their profile page and checked on them daily. They lasted sixteen days. They were banned from commenting for constantly insulting Canadians on For Better or For Worse.
Although they were well-versed in Funky Winkerbean history and had amusing comments during the Disqus era, I was never fond of how they responded to positive comments with attacks, such as “Cool story, bro.” This person sometimes lacked a decency filter.
Whenever I returned from a break from commenting on FW, this person was usually the first to welcome me back. An all-day commenter who would react to my comment no matter how late it was posted. I appreciated those things.
Yes, there was a certain hazing element to some of DSSS’s comments. Overall, for good and ill, I’d describe him as “juvenile.” Come to think of it, how do we know it was a “him”? (Though it’s typically men that have the hostile obsession with other men being gay, it’s typically women that write slashfic. I guess we’ll never know.)
@The Duck of Death
This person’s first (previous?) Disqus account was named “Penday Joe” (Pendejo), and the avatar was Mr. T’s face. I guess that’s why I always assumed they were male. When the “Penday Joe” account was permanently banned, they returned almost immediately as DSSS with the Miley Cyrus avatar. I could tell from the tone of their comments it was the same person. Perhaps they are non-binary? 🤔🤭
As you said, we’ll never know. If we asked them point blank, I expect the response would be some kind of smart-ass deflection.
I remember someone in the FW discussion bristling at being referred to as a woman. I think it was @Justifiable.
The crazy thing is that, while I don’t usually even think about the gender of commenters unless gender is the topic being discussed, I had SUCH a strong impression that Justifiable was a woman. And I don’t really have mental pictures of commenters in my head, but for Justifiable I pictured a woman in her 60s with tight grey curls and a pugnacious face, striding out of a co-op grocery with a public radio logo-ed canvas bag containing kale, tempeh, chickpeas and a “boycott Israeli brands” flyer, while yelling at a passer-by that they’re walking their dog incorrectly.
Takes all kinds. Justifiable was one I disagreed with a lot. He could be pretty obnoxious and in-your-face.
I was still sorry to see him go. He always had something lively to contribute. I had the impression that he was a Hollywood insider of some kind. Maybe an employee of Pink Films, heh…
@The Duck of Death
@Justifiable was too much of a mansplainer to be a woman.
😂
The two of us had an awful kerfuffle about that stupid Hershey Barr FW strip, but we parted as friends. I last saw him here on SoSF. He left the Comics Kingdom because his account was hacked.
constantly insulting Canadians
What? Over what? I don’t like Nickelback myself, but I’m not gonna hate on a whole country over that.
Re: Justifiable and the “Hershey Barr” kerfuffle: Ah yes, I remember it well.
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip I posted above gets at the problem.
I personally didn’t find it racist, nor did I find “Bubu Zayla” racist. (Dumb and unfunny, certainly.) But people can have different opinions, and that’s fine. However, especially with TB, one should remember Hanlon’s Razor:
In this case, you could substitute “cluelessness” or “lack of attention” for stupidity. I simply don’t believe that TB was trying to sneak racist messages into his strips. Yes, he should have realized that there could be sensitivity around that kind of language, but he has a habit of overlooking quality control.
Since we can’t know what he was thinking — more likely, not thinking — why not assume the most charitable interpretation?
Alas, “the benefit of the doubt” in modern internet culture is as dead as the 1200 baud modem.
@Bill the Splut I have come around to the conclusion that we were all kinda wrong about Nickelback.
@Bill the Splut
This person disliked For Better or For Worse because they thought, like FunkyWinkerbean, the comic strip was misery porn. Their profile page lists only these two titles under “Comics I Follow”.
It’s hard to remember the insults because it was more than five months ago and most of their comments were deleted by the moderator. They often used Lynn Johnston’s artistic quirks to ridicule Canadians.
For example:
Do all Canadians laugh with their tongues sticking out?
Do all Canadians have muppet mouth?
Is it Winter all year long in Canada?
BOXCAR!
etc.
When confronted by other people in the discussion, this person resorted to name calling and more insults.
I’m not a fan of Nickleback, but I don’t understand why they’re singled out as bad. My main experience with Nickleback was seeing them on TV during the closing ceremonies of the Vancouver winter olympics back in 2010. I can’t name a song title of theirs offhand. There was one about a camera. Right?
Cheers
There were a few other bannings, but the whos and whys aren’t important. And it’s almost never over one thing. We gave everyone a fair and honest shake before resorting to banning. Like I always said, there’s an undefined line, and when you think that maybe you crossed it, you probably did.
Hey, wait a minute…am I Ed? AM I ED!?!?
(yes)
CBH thanks for the repeated LOLs – I’ve gone back and read this a half a dozen times today.
There’s a new ridiculous “Komix Thoughts” post, this one about Dinkle:
“This is the final book in the series (that collected) the strips dealing with (Dinkle)… the strips that ended the book had a sense of finality about them. Everything runs its course, and there were real life events such as the 2008 economic crash… All in all, it was a remarkable run for the character who had come to define the strip in the first half of its run.”
Oh, fuck you, Tom. Stop trying to act like you retired Dinkle in 2008, because we all know you didn’t. And, in 2021 you made a huge show about that Rose Parade entry that didn’t even acknowledge your involvement (and didn’t invite you back the next year).
It like he’s trying to explain away the end of the Dinkle books, by acting like that was also the end of the Dinkle strips. He’s so egotistical he can’t admit that the publisher simply declined to print any more.
This is what got me. He doesn’t mention when the book was published, but Grandpa Google informs me it was Jan. 1, 2004. That’s about 20 years ago, for those of you keeping score.
Adding the rest of the sentence that you quoted:
Covid-19, “looming.” That’s one of the reasons, along with an economic crisis that would happen 4 years in the future, why no Dinkle paperback collections were published after 2004.
Sure, Tom. Makes total sense.
Wow, I actually trusted him when he said 2008. Good catch. How did this man not get into politics? He’s got the perfect skill set: egomania, phony folksiness, talking without saying anything, and being 100% committed to his own ridiculous version of reality.
Totally ludicrous. He deliberately ruined the Dinkle character when he aged him ten years, forced him into retirement, replaced him as band director, and turned him into a lovable old coot. There aren’t any more Dinkle books because everything that made him a “fun” character was stripped away except the nostalgia, and it left Batiuk with nothing to write about. No one wants a collection of Dinkle strips featuring him cackling over thirty year old gags and following Becky around.
And we haven’t even mentioned Dinkle’s deafness. Which would have been a great thing to do with him in Act III. Character whose entire life revolves around music suddenly loses access to it.
But like so many other Funky Winkerbean plot twists, Batiuk threw it out because it required him to write beyond his meager ability. Hell, this was the second time he did punted on this story. Becky was an 18-year-old Julliard entrant who lost years of work, practice, commitment, and a purpose in life. But she barely cared about missing a limb, or getting any restitution, much less the emotional trauma of such an event. Then Batiuk turned her into Dinkle Jr. off-panel, despite not having any of the qualities that made Dinkle a good character.
What. A. Hack.