Back to the Future

63 thoughts on “Back to the Future”

1. And so the cream of the crop of John’s history begins; not merely being a dubious example of a typical comic book affectionato and a mouthpiece for the author’s opinions on the medium, but as the corner of a “hip”, “topical” soap opera triangle arc about POWs and scrambled families.

   It’s probably telling about the Funkyverse’s inability to keep people informed about the “deep” continuity without our community’s cynical recaps, but this being the first time I heard the history of adoptive daughter Rana’s origins certainly informs us a fair bit. No doubt she could’ve had an arc about her past and personal grappling with discovering the first adoptive father who she helped save the life of was still alive, but it’s all left aside for the adults to mope over a gravestone for 10 minutes while Wally is left to tie his own bootstraps and follow two snarking teen losers for a timeframe beyond when they would reasonably be in school. No doubt a victim of the strip failing to keep up with the new generations without there being the “comics comics comics” hook, but as said here, does show some selective obliviousness about the long-term nuances of involving the ex-high school strip in matters of foreign wars and immigration (something lasting all the way to 2020, of course)

   1. My first reaction, too. She’s feeding that Muslim kid pork chops and she’s proud?!

      1. Meant to reply to bad wolf. Sorry Becky

         1. Ahhh yeah! That’s my Gabby! Pumping up those comment numbers like a champ!

            1. I’ve worked in media industries and academics since the early 70s. Definitely know how to boost ratings statistics 🙂
               Some years ago a couple were part of the Nielsen tv monitoring panel. They both worked, but left the tv on to keep their dog happy. I used to tell my students that was the year Lassie finished first in the ratings

         2. You get an upvote here too then!

2. “Pork chops! Dig in, Rana!” Haram indeed!

   I dunno, as an adoptee i didn’t mind my past being completely rewritten myself, but cross-cultural situations are tricky. And adoption as a child vs an infant would make it more likely to want to retain cultural connection. IIRC Rana ends up going full hajib and talking about rediscovering her roots towards the end so perhaps it all came back around?

   1. My first reaction too. You’re making this poor Muslim orphan eat pork chops!?

      1. And go to Dinkle’s “Jazz Messiah.” Both Rana and Adeela were in that crowd shot.

   2. I agree, bad wolf, I think kids given up for adoption at birth, or taken away from bad parents, are a whole different thing than a kid orphaned or a kid adopted by a step-mother or step-father.

      In the first case the parent has either willingly given up parental status, or lost it through negligence.

      I think adoptive parents are real parents, step-parents are real parents, but they shouldn’t erase dead parents.

      A friend of mine, her mother had a step-father. The father had died when the kids, all five of them, were very young. When the mother remarried, her new husband asked for the blessing of her first husband’s parents. Not because they had any claim on the mother, but because the kids he would now be raising were their dead son’s children. He raised and loved those kids like any dad would, but he didn’t change their last names, and they made sure those kids kept close with their grandparents too.

      Becky and Wally KNEW Rana’s parents, however briefly. It’s not like they didn’t have anything about them to pass on to her.

      1. My step-grandfather is the reason I hate Lisa’s Story so much. He married my grandmother in about 1952, raised my father as his own son, stayed with her until she died in 1986, then he lived until 2002. We never called him anything other than “grandpa.” He’d earned that level of respect.

         When he was about 85, he had some condition that medication would help, but eventually the medication would build up in his body and kill him. He opted to take the medicine as long as possible, and then decline it and go into hospice once it did more harm than good.

         All of his friends and relations came from all corners of the country to see him one last time before he died. He was in good spirits and had all his mental acuity. I’d met him before, but I was struck by how happy he made everyone. He was just infectious. And remembered so many stories about people.

         I wish Tom Batiuk could have met him, because I wish he could seen what dying with dignity looks like. What “letting nature take its course” looks like, and why people do it. What a man worth remembering looks like. I would say “what a hero looks like”, but my grandpa wouldn’t stand for such flattery (even though he had military awards for meritorious service). He formed a lot of my opinions about how to live well, and how to die well. And Lisa did the exact opposite of it all.

         1. Your grandpa sounds like an awesome guy, BJ6K . I’m glad you have someone like that to be proud of, who modeled a healthy relationship with life and death.

            I recently learned that a friend of mine, has just made the decision to stop chemo and transition to hospice care. He’s been battling stage 4 Ewing Sarcoma for 10 (TEN) years. When he was first diagnosed, his youngest child was less than a year old.

            He fought tooth and nail for those ten years, to give even his youngest child as much time as possible. He’s had experimental radiation treatment, so many different kinds of chemo, radical surgery where they cut him open from hip to sternum and cut tumors out.

            It wasn’t easy on his family. His fight for time sent him to New York for months, where he was separated from his kids. It was hell on his body. But he lived more than 10 years with a cancer with a five year survival rate of 15%.

            Here’s a link to his blog post explaining his decision. The major quote I want to point out is this:

            “The chemotherapy I have been taking was really wearing my body down. I was getting very tired and ended up in the hospital multiple times for infections. The adverse side effects of the chemotherapy have began to out weigh the effects on the tumors.

            So, after my latest stay at the hospital, we decided to stop this chemotherapy treatment. Unfortunately, the doctors do not have any other ideas for me. I have tried all the things they can recommend. So we are leaving it up to Heavenly Father. We are hoping that the cancer will grow slowly and the tumors will grow in places that do not effect vital organs. It was a tough decision, but being in the hospital every few weeks was not how we wanted to live. We are focusing now on quality of life instead of quantity of life. We are hoping to make many good memories as a family. To help with this, we have transitioned to Hospice care. I don’t need many of their services right now, but we thought we would get things in place so when I did not help with day to day routines, we would have something in place. One of the services that Hospice provides is a social worker that can talk with the kids and see how they are coping. We want to make sure the kids feel loved and supported and have someone they can share their feelings with. They need to understand that they will have a lot of emotions and how to handle those emotions in a beneficial way. )

            (They are VERY Mormon, just FYI.)

            https://wedigdoug.blogspot.com/

            1. Your friend is also a great counterexample of why Lisa’s Story is so vile. Your friend chooses to practice his faith, spend time with his family, take steps to help them cope with his death, and write a blog that could be helpful to others. Lisa had no interest in anything but herself, and her shitty co-dependent marriage.

      2. As an adopted person, I found the whole Boy Lisa saga to be really irksome, then sickeningly cloying, then kind of offensive. He trivialized Boy Lisa’s search for his birth parents, but it wasn’t outrageously egregious or anything (although it was mind-bendingly tedious). Then, when he actually “met” Lisa, it was mostly just repellent. But later, after Boy Lisa’s sad-sack return to Act III, BatYam slowly but surely marginalized Boy Lisa’s actual parents, the Fairgoods, to a cruel and unusual degree. That whole thing with philandering Fred stroking out on the toilet while Ann lamented her loveless sham of a marriage was just so weird and unnecessary. Next thing you know, Boy Lisa was running around referring to Lisa as “mom”. It really rubbed me the wrong way, and it got worse as it trudged along.

         The funniest thing about it, though, was how it was immediately obvious that Boy Lisa was the baby Lisa gave up during the teen pregnancy mega-arc, like painfully, glaringly obvious. But you had to wait MONTHS for it to play out. Then it did, and it was just painful to watch. That was possibly the least suspenseful story ever written.

         1. Batty brought in so much unnecessary (and unrealistic) misery in those years. The intoxicating smell of that Pulitzer really drove him nuts. He was desperately searching for new ways to bring in more misery in the hopes that he would finally win that prize.

            Shortly thereafter I stopped reading, it was just too much. Honestly, I wish newspapers would have dropped the strip then and there.

            1. He always talks a big game about doing stories that would push peoples buttons, but if a few newspapers had actually dropped the strip, i bet he would have backed way the F off his maudlin-go-round.

               He mistook being accepted for being edgy for no one cared about daily strips anymore. Much like the CCA, it had been gone for years before anyone even noticed it.

            2. Tom Batiuk is a non-wrestling example of “X-Pac Heat.” People didn’t dislike him because he’s too edgy; people disliked him because they wanted him to go away and be replaced with a better cartoonist. And the louder the boos got, the more he leaned into his failing gimmick.

            3. For some reason, I found this story The Writer’s Almanac sent me today amusing:
               “Josephine Winslow Johnson…sat down at her attic table and began to write what became Now in November, a book about an isolated farm family driven into poverty by the Depression. Johnson was at home at the farm one day in 1935 when a reporter called to tell her that she had won the Pulitzer Prize. She was 24 years old.”
               Well, YEAH, but did she found a Utopia with only a few Burnings? Bet there weren’t even ROBOTS. Or scraggly Byrne eyebrows.

         2. Yeah, Darin is calling Lisa “mom” and she’s calling him “son.” While they’re both ignoring the people who raised Darin, and the now-7-year-old daughter Lisa is supposed to be raising now. On top of everything else Batiuk did to the Fairgoods, who seemed like decent and happy people. Absolutely appalling.

            1. Remember, right after discovering that Lisa was his birth mother, Boy Lisa fled Westview and lived a Big City MBA lifestyle for ten-plus years. Then he comes back in shame, and suddenly it’s “mom” this and “sis” that. Asking Les if they could crash there was especially odd, as his parents lived right there, and would have happily put him and Jessica up. Or so one would assume.

         3. I could be mistaken, but I think it had been outright stated right from the initial teen pregnancy story that Boy Lisa was Lisa’s son. She was talking about how she was giving up the baby for adoption after the birth, and then we saw the Fairgoods adopting a child in, like, the same day’s comic. (Or something like that.)

            Basically, Batiuk was treating as a big mystery something that he had revealed years earlier, so it would only be a surprise to anyone who hadn’t been paying attention. (Which would probably be everyone, actually.)

            1. You are correct, Green Luthor. Darin being Lisa’s Bio-Son was never intended as a mystery for the audience. So the suspense of the envelope opening was if Darin would get that paper ripped and read before Lisa croaked.

            2. I didn’t hate Darin’s hesitance to open the envelope once he got it. I can understand an adopted child going through a round of “do I really want to know this?” before unsealing it. I’ve seen some real-life stories about adopted children who set out to find their real parents. Most of these stories aren’t pretty.

               Of course Batiuk can only have him sputter meaningless words for six panels, because he’s blind to actual drama even when he inadvertently creates it.

3. Also darn, those smirks in the Thanksgiving strip; Act 2’s shift from what I call the “classic FW look-at-the-fourth-wall-and-grimace” at the punchline to “modern FW haha-smirk-at-how-quirky-our-jokes/customs-are” at their “punchlines” really is one of those things that gave the 3rd act the insufferably smug edge it’s often known for (often from the lips of Les, as it happens), the point where it stops showing off a weird world to kicks to acting like they have the funniest dad jokes (a term that probably could apply to a lot of the wordplay humor the strip goes into over the years, tbh)

4. OK, so I do hate that strip where Funky shows up in New York to put Les on a plane… not because of the strip itself but because we got 15 years of Act III where Les never once returned the favor all while bumming free rides to the airport himself on several occasions.

   Granted, the fact that I am minutes away from driving to the very same airport where Les got that call from beyond the grave back in 2011 is coloring my opinion a bit here (anyone offering a free ride?). If anyone named Les gets paged this afternoon, I’m picking up the white courtesy phone. I’ve got some questions for “Lisa”.

   1. The TSA line was short today, so I’ve decided to join the burgeoning field of Funky Winkerbean tourism!

      

      Here’s where Les boarded the flight that Lisa ultimately delayed via another phone call from Hades. There is no Gate 44J at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, but the terminal in the background is pretty clearly based on terminal C, where most domestic flights via United leave (Cleveland and Houston are both United hubs).

      

      And look what is mere yards away from gate C44!

      

      Did Les sit in one of these chairs? Only Tom Batiuk knows for sure…

   2. I’m with you. This scene isn’t touching; it’s like watching a shakedown. If anything heartwarming ever is going on around Les Moore, it’s because he bullied everyone else into it. And Les is the only who ever benefits from kindness; he’s never seen showing any to others. In fact he’s downright abusive to everyone else.

      Look at him pointlessly sitting in the rain, theatrically feeling sorry for himself the minute Funky drives up. I wish this really was New York City, so some locals would tell him to get his shit together and stop blocking the bus stop, asshole.

      Les reminds me of Jerry Smith, as described by Rick Sanchez:

      Les is a predator, all right. He bullied Funky into driving 400 miles to rescue him from his own incompetence. Apparently Les was so fragile and/or useless that wiring him some cash wasn’t good enough. Or it wasn’t what Lisa wanted.

5. Wait, Becky, the kid can’t wear a clip on tie? They’re so easy to put on he can do it with one hand. It’s not like he’s going to testify before Congress—or the school—about raising the school levy

6. There are so many things wrong with the way Rana was handled that it hides the horrible and stupid way Wally Junior was handled. A case could be made for Everyone’s Favorite Merchant Of Death taking her in to at least try to raise her as an Afghani child. Even if he was purposely vague about how he was related to her, he’d be a more viable foster parent than a comic-obsessed kafir and his amputee wife.

   1. Rana, Khan, Adeela, Malcolm, Logan, Cayla, and many others are all just diversity props. They all exist because Batiuk thought he could nag someone into giving him an award if he acknowledged non-white people exist. He never put an ounce of thought into these characters or their cultures. Much less considered the complex feelings their backstories would give them.

      1. I don’t want to raise a fuss but you take a look at the demographics of Medina, Ohio and you tell me whether TB a) experiences diversity constantly and thinks about it deeply or b) sees it in other media and uses it as a prop for self-aggrandizement.

         Again i put most of it down to the Boomer outlook.

      2. I know I’ve said this before but I absolutely despise Batiuk’s “They’re just like us!” unconscious racism and classism. There’s just something so arrogant about making every character — from an Afghan warlord to an orphaned Muslim adoptee to a Juilliard-accepted amputee to a single black mother marrying a white man — an exact mental and ideological clone of a wealthy, middlebrow, suburban white male PBS viewer.

         Tom, some of these people might well have radically different views, experiences, cultures, values, and even morals from what you assume is the default belief system for human beings (ie, yours). Guess what? That is part of life. I’m sure you talk a good game about “diversity,” but what I suspect that means is: I don’t care what color or gender or religion someone is, just as long as they think exactly like me.

         And yes, you can tell that, as much as he harps on the glories of New York (by which he means the touristy parts of Manhattan), he knows exactly Jack J. Shit about the city or what it’s like to be a New Yorker. Cloistered suburbanite to the core. And that’s part of life, too — some people are cloistered suburbanites, and they’re just as valid as any other human being on earth. Stop being such a poseur and pseud, Tom, and just own it. Own who you are.

         1. Which is sort of why it’s pants on head stupid for him to do or be more than the author of an Archie clone. The Very Special Things he thinks he’s there for collapse because being a sheltered old man in a gated community IS his nation.

            1. Well he is surrounded by comic books. They inform his worldview.

            2. That’s the best phrasing of it i’ve heard yet, lol

         2. Well said Duck! I know some practicing Muslims can guarantee that they have very different views from Batty. For a recent example, do a search on Hamtramck Michigan. This once Polish working-class neighborhood ( which I have visited often) is now predominantly Muslim and so is the city council.

            My mother’s rabbi was surprisingly an admirer of Pope John Paul II. Why? Because apparently while he was a priest in Poland after WWII, he showed respect for the Jewish orphans. One Christian family was able to hide their neighbor’s son. The family got deported and died in the camps. The Christian family wanted to formally adopt the son and raise him as a Christian. Their priest. Carol Wojtyla ( John Paul II) refused saying that he was Jewish and therefore the family should try to find any remaining relatives to raise him, if they could not, then he would perform the conversion. The family located relatives in the U.S. and the boy was sent to live with them.

            Sorry for the long winded story, just to say that Batty’s crappy story is written to feed his ego and pump up his beliefs with no respect to reality. There exist Muslim charities to place orphans so that they can be raised Muslim.

            1. I was thinking, this story reminded me of the “Indian Adoption Program,” where Native American children (many of whom weren’t orphans) were shipped off to white families to be raised Christian. It similarly ignores the role of extended families; even if Rana’s parents were killed, she’d probably have uncles, cousins, or grandparents who’d have a stake in the child’s future and would fight to find them local families, or adopt her themselves. “Unconscious racism and classism” is the perfect description of it all.

         3. I remember reading something telling that would make no sense to him. Some fellow observed that there’s a reflex to “they are just like us” that most people don’t see: “We are just like them.”

            1. Yeah, Rana turned into Cindy Summers overnight, didn’t she? That’s one hell of an adaptation for someone forcibly taken from a completely different culture, language, and value system. The Borg doesn’t assimilate people that fast. Or that thoroughly.

7. Stuck in an oven? Good thing you’re not a step-mom. 🙂

   1. Bah ha ha!

   2. Good thing she’s not Sylvia Plath.

      1. Or even worse: Assia Wevill!

   3. Good thing I’m not a little old lady with a house made of candy.

8. June 20 Crankshaft: Must be based on a trip Batty took in June 2022. Will Masone commit a fox paw on the airplane a la Ed?

   Fox paw is how Ohioans say faux pas.

9. In today’s Crankshaft: Yet another timewasting strip about what’s going to happen. With all the rules all his editors gave him, didn’t anyone tell him that in a cartoon it’s better to start in media res? (Unless, of course, the leadup is the whole point, in which case the leadup is in itself the res.)

   Plot: Masonnee Jarree is about to leave the house to take a plane to Centerville. That’s it. That’s the plot.

   But it does provide an opportunity to show Cindy, who for some reason isn’t coming along, even though that would provide an ideal opportunity to drag Westviewians into the strip.

   What tickled me today is that Massoonnee’s front door opens onto the beach. Right onto the flat sands. He’s not even on a dune. The waves probably batter the front door every time it’s windy.

   And I guess the back door, if there is one, opens to the street?

   Maybe, after the Great, All-Engulfing, Entirely Forgotten L.A. Conflagration of a couple years ago, the new codes specify that front doors should open directly onto the beach, so that in case there’s a fire, the occupants can run directly into the ocean and wait it out there, standing neck-deep.

   1. “Hi, I’m Mason Canopic Jar, star of such History Channel documentaries as ‘The War of 1812: Totally All Aliens!’ and ‘In Search of Hitler’s Other Testicle’! And you are…?”
      “Your wife.”
      “Oh right, sorry, but you’ve had so many 50th high school reunions. Are you 68? Or 30? Now you’re drawn like you’re 20. Stop Benjamin Buttoning on me! Also, I have it on my—PINEapple phone! AHH-HAHAA, I crack me up!”
      CINDY: “I shall now force a smile that generally is made by a baby with mild gas discomfort!” (smiles) “Also, we’re super rich Hollywood stars, why does our house look like it’s from Elyria, Ohio in 1972?”
      “But we have a view of the beach!”
      “YES! LAKE ERIE in 1972!”
      “I meant…PIGEON!”
      (both laugh hysterically)

   2. Well she did provide a sort of smirk at the end. Or was the bile pushed to the tip of her tongue?

10. Today, in Crankshaft… Look, I know it’s just a comic strip, and it doesn’t pay to pick too hard at it. It’s not so much that it doesn’t make sense that bothers me. It’s that it establishes a world that’s trying to be 1/4 inch from reality, then veers into total absurdity without a single sliver of explanation. It doesn’t even adhere to its own world-building, not even over the span of a week.

    Today, Screwtop Canister is standing on what appears to be a long empty walkway, apparently an airport pickup queue. No cars there either, just Crankshaft’s bus. Crankshaft pulls up and tells Screwtop that Max und Moritz asked him to pick Mason up and he was running late so he came right after his school run. Mason happily gets on the bus.

    But — Mason is supposed to be one of the biggest action stars in the world! Analogous to someone like Tom Cruise, I’d think. Nobody mobbed him as he waited alone at the airport? He got into an empty school bus with someone he doesn’t really even know, who he met once? He didn’t have a limo waiting at the airport?

    1. This is where Plot No Jutsu meets Pants-On-Head Stupidity.

    2. I looked it up on Google: 209 miles each way from Centerville to Cleveland. TB must live in a mighty generous school district, to let their drivers use their 6-mpg school bus for 400+ mile personal jaunts. No wonder the voters are up in arms about school tax levies.

       At both ArcaMax and GoComics, the few folks who still read “Crankshaft” unironically have been reduced to saying “you can’t expect it to be like reality, it’s a comic strip.” This of course misses the point that even comic strip reality has to be self-consistent and believable. TB’s “reality” is whatever popped into his brain this morning and got scribbled down before he headed off to the “Flash” admiration society meeting.

       Oh, and one guy at ArcaMax was reduced to calling me a “moron” yesterday. I consider that a compliment, given the source. It does amaze me that some people seem to hate-read the comments.

       1. some people seem to hate-read the comments.

          Well, if they hate the comments so much, they should stop reading them.

       2. That’s exactly it. I’ll accept whatever reality the cartoonist gives me, but it has to be reality for the characters as well. Possums and alligators living in the Okefenokee swamp can talk? A skunk is sexy and a mole is a pastor? I believe it! I believe all of it! In fact, I love it! Just be consistent! And if you have to break your reality, explain in-universe why it’s happening!

          Mark this down as another lesson Bats should have learned from reading 8,674 comic books 112,455 times. Example: Bruce Wayne has been established as fabulously wealthy. If he flies commercial instead of in his own plane, it will be explained. Perhaps he is afraid his plane is bugged. If he does something insane like travel from the airport in a distant acquaintance’s empty school bus instead of being picked up in a chauffered stretch limo, that will be explained too. Perhaps he is trying to learn more about school buses. Perhaps he is desperate because his limo driver went to the other airport and no other drivers are available at any price. Regardless of the contrivance, anything that contradicts the expected behavior of the characters will be remarked on and explained somehow.

          1. Though the explanation for Batman flying commercial could just be “Bob Haney wrote this, and Bob Haney has no f***s to give”.

             

             (Seriously, though, those Bob Haney Brave and the Bold stories were great; Haney cared so little for continuity that DC declared those issues to be on “Earth-B”, but he knew how to deliver an entertaining story.)

             1. Well, I obviously don’t know enough Batman lore to speak on the topic, so I humbly shut up at this point, with apologies to Tom Batiuk.

                HOWEVER…. you did say there were entertaining stories involved. Batiuk once could deliver these pretty reliably, but he forgot how. Gosh darn that Pulitzer nomination.

             2. Honestly, I was just using that as an excuse to post a picture of Batman taking a commercial flight (with Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter) in full costume, because you can never have enough of that.

                Ordinarily, you’re right: if you’re going to have Batman not use a private jet, you really need to have an explanation. It’s just that the explanation in this case is “because Bob Haney”, and that’s good enough for me.

             3. For those who are wondering, Green Luthor’s example is from*Brave and the Bold* #132. The fellow sitting next to the Batman is Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter, who would go on to mentor the Vic Sage Question.

                If memory serves me correctly, the *Brave and the Bold* world is more properly known as “Alternate Earth-B” (B as in Bob Haney, Murray Boltinoff and, I think, E. Nelson Bridwell).

          2. I may have said this Roger Ebert quote before, but that just means I’m saying it again:
             “When anything can happen, who cares what happens?”

             “Hi, I’m Mason Jar Jar, but not that one, the cool one. The star of such unbelievable fantasy movies as ‘I Ate a Bigfoot, the Sequel: I Ate Bigfoot’s Mom: The SEX-quel!’ and “A Uwe Boll Video Game Movie That Didn’t Suck!’ I’m waiting for limo to pick me up at some cheesy rust belt Ohio airport that hasn’t seen a plane bigger than a cropduster in decades–Wait…a school bus?!”
             (MASON throws script on the floor)
             “That’s it, I’m done. I can’t believe I’m reading for this! I’m up to star in Morbius 2!””

          3. Heck, Shoe is more realistic and it features talking birds!

       3. Hey, at least no one suggested you chow down on fishhooks.

          1. There seem to be 2 kinds of GC commenters:
             “Lighten up! It’s just a comic strip!”
             And:
             “DIE IN A WAY HIMMLER WOULD FIND EXCESSIVE!!!!!!!!”
             And not many in between.

11. Tom Batiuk: Climate Damage! It’s damaging the climate! We are plunging headlong into a global extinction, a mass grave for all living things! Repent, I say, REPENT!

    Also Tom Batiuk: Isn’t it cute to drive an empty school bus to the airport, and drive it back with only one passenger? Tee-hee, that crazy, lovable Crankshaft, amirite?

12. From the Comics Curmudgeon website, a comment that bears repeating:

    Where’s Rocky? (June 21st, 2023 at 8:22 a.m.):
    My local dead tree newspaper has already cancelled Crankshaft, after replacing FW with it at the end of last year, so I have no idea what is going on with the strip these days. Sure, I could check it out on GoComics but I could also put a sharp stick in my eye if I was that type of person.

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