Independence Day went as well for me as can be expected. I woke up July 5th with the same number of fingers and toes I had on July 3rd, and even managed to keep both eyebrows! With the flags and the food and the explosions and the travelling across state lines to avoid taxes, I was patriotic to the max.
Batiuk’s done his share of flag waving over the years, with his cast carrying a healthy dose of veterans and military. Whether this springs from a genuine respect for US Armed Forces personnel, or is pandering is a debate for another day.
In May 2008, Batty uses Memorial Day as an excuse to remind his readers that YES he still hasn’t explained Wally’s abscence, and YES Wally is not here. But the bumper sticker dangles the bait that he is MIA rather than absolutely confirmed KIA. Dumb, pointless, bait.
Becky has appeared on and off just about every month of Act III so far, but the last few months her appearances were all about the band. No kids, and no John.
DSH doesn’t show up again until July. When Kevin Brown also makes his Act III debut, sporting the kind of bushy lip broom that would make Tom Selleck jealous. I can only assume the 70’s pornstache was added to make sure that no readers or meddling litigious busybodies mistake him for a child.
It’s August 2008 before we get our next proper John adjacent arc. Does it involve his wife? His kids? HA HA NO.
DSH is sitting at the Montoni’s coffee counter with Crazy Harry and they’re gonna talk about comic books. We might as well be back in 1995 staring at a Horse Ass Head. Except we have to look at DSH’s disgusting bald spot, like he’s a tonsured monk dedicated to the Holy Order of the Spinning Rack. Maybe he should go back to the ponytail.
Writer’s block, the bane of every writer’s existence. I know it is a real thing, because I’ve had it at least a dozen times…today. But when I get it I don’t usually go on on stupid flights of fancy imagining a crappy Hourman ripoff hijacking my brain, until I have a stupid flight of fancy that knocks me out of it. I just watch YouTube until the guilt becomes too agonizing.
But Pete Roberts (still Roberts BTW) is haunted by The Lord of The Late!
So in the middle of the day, without informing his wife, DSH decides to kidnap Mopey Pete and drive him to the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland. Which, yeah, if Westview is some kind of amalgamation of Elyria/Medina/Akron would be only about an hour trip depending on traffic. Fair enough.
Ha ha! What a crazy sign. It is certainly not based in reality at all. HA!
I hopped onto Google Street View and digitally walked up and down Kimberly Avenue. There are views going all the way back to 2007, and it’s been updated many times. The neighborhood was looking pretty rough fifteen years ago, but has since cleaned up some. Interesting to click through and watch abandoned houses turn into empty grass lots. Buildings thinning out faster than DSH’s hair.
Ooooh boy, you nitters ready for a sepia-toned imagined flashback where Mopey Pete pretends he’s a earlier comics creator!? ARE YOU READY?!!!
This is a decent rendering of Jerry Siegel’s old house. And Mopey Jerry is lounging on his bed, (with his shoes on!) reading Detective Dan, a very early comic book Siegel and Schuster used as an inspiration when laying out their Superman pitch.
What follows here is a classic biopic-style retelling of the past, complete with omitting details/romanticising everything, and streamlining events. Much of it is based on Siegel’s own retelling of the creation he wrote for the 45th anniversary of Superman’s first issue.
First, Batiuk dates the summer night of brainstorming to 1933, when Siegel puts it in 1934, or 1931, or 1932, he gave multiple years in different tellings or interviews. Second Batiuk has this be the an idea out of the blue, but this night wasn’t the true naissance moment. Siegel and his high school buddy Schuster had been playing around with the idea of a ‘superman’ for a while. In their pulp sci-fi magazine printed in January 1933, they wrote and illustrated the story The Reign of the Superman, wherein a bald vagrant is given extraordinary powers through science and uses them for evil.
Later, after reading some Detective Dan comics, they tried out a hero character named The Superman. This hero wasn’t an alien and got his powers through science. They wrote and drew an entire comic book and shopped it to the publishers of Detective Dan, but the book wasn’t published. Joe Schuster burned almost the entire book, save the cover, and a early sketch for a different cover.
Why? Some stories have it be frustration. Others tell a darker tale of Siegel soliciting other artists to work with.
This strip is the dumbest in the entire arc. And it makes me so darn mad. Batiuk always has characters come up with ideas via random free-association. Like this is the highest form of artistic inspiration. Can this happen? Yes. But ignoring that the best ideas can come from a long, thoughtful analysis shows why Batiuk wasn’t able to push his own art very far.
It’s the amateur mindset that doesn’t want to break down stories, characters, concepts, and ideas into a process to follow. He’d probably say that it isn’t necessary, when in reality he doesn’t do it because it’s hard. He wants to drive the car without understanding what’s under the hood. He understands you sometimes have to force thing without fairy dust bullshit. But he doesn’t trust that editors, spreadsheets, and rules can help you.
I’m not complaining about Siegel’s story, really. I’ve had nights similar to what he described. I had one night where, after binging an anime, I joked to my roommate about, “What if Thomas the Tank Engine during the Zombie Apocalypse?”
By the next morning I was ranting at her about how my brain had coughed up about three seasons worth of a very detailed monster living-train steampunk epic, all based on Platonic Philosophy and the Allegory of the Cave. This stuff happens. What bothers me is pretending like this is the ‘correct’ way to create art.
Siegel did say in many of his versions of this that he got up and wrote multiple times that night, and came up with the baby launched from a doomed planet aspect. The typescript bubbles are pulled directly from the first page of Action Comics #1.
Very early the next morning, I didn’t bother to eat. I ran all the way, twelve blocks, to Joe’s apartment where he lived with his family.
Joe read the script. Instant approval. He loved the new “SUPERMAN” format. Like me, he, too, was bespectacled and inhibited.
Filled with high inspiration, Joe sat down at his drawing board and began making pencil sketches. Joe and I discussed the appearance of Clark Kent and Superman. I suggested to Joe that he place the symbol “S” within a triangle on the chest of the Superman costume.
Jerry Siegel, 1983
This strip is maybe inaccurate, because according to some versions of the tale this cover had already been rejected, and the comic book it was made for burned. Who knows? Due to Siegel’s mutiple versions of the tale, every website I checked had a slightly different version.
What matters is that Mopey Pete has been suitably inspired.
If the accurate, “Plz no take pipes.” sign didn’t already tip you off, yes this whole arc was based on a trip Batiuk took to visit The Superman House.
Back in January BCC (before car crash) I was fortunate to be able to visit the Glenville neighborhood in Cleveland and the actual house where Jerry Siegel was living when he created Superman. Thanks to a knowledgeable guide and a generous owner, I actually was able to stand in the bedroom where Jerry, on a hot and sleepless summer night in 1933, created not only an icon for the ages, but an entire genre as well.
Out of that visit came a story involving Pete Roberts, the resident comic book writer in the Funky and the current resident in the apartment above Montoni’s. In the story, Pete visit’s the former Siegel residence and we find that the house still has some magic to share. I took a ton of reference photo’s the day I was there, so when you see the house in the strip, it’s the real deal. In fact, along with this blog, I’ll also post some pictures of the house in the archive section. Although DC Comics is celebrating the 70th anniversary of Superman this summer, my story celebrates Superman’s actual birth five years earlier.
The story kicks off August 11th and runs consecutively through the dailies and Sundays. I even got to create my own supervillan, and we get to visit him in the lair of the Lord of Late (gee, for a moment there, I felt like Stan Lee) in the August 17th Sunday.
Tom Batiuk, ‘Jerry Siegel’s House’ August 4, 2008
At the time, Joe Siegel’s house was in the local news a bit, as the author, Brad Meltzer, had spearheaded efforts to repair it. Though the old owners, who’d lived there for decades, declined to sell, they did agree that Siegel and Schuster Society would have first right to if it ever did sell.
Ohio, comics, local news….no suprise Tom was all over this one.
Son of Stuck Funky 
PAUL JONES:
Fun fact: Shuster has relatives north of the border. FRANK Shuster was one half of a comedy duo who used to be quite the thing back in the day. He’s how we connect to Big Blue: something his cousin in Ahia did.
GREEN LUTHOR
Joe Shuster was actually born in Toronto; his family moved to Cleveland when he was about 10.
Some people even think that the inspiration for the Daily Planet was the Toronto Globe and Mail.
More Shuster stuff: Wayne & Shuster (Johnny Wayne & Frank Shuster) made more Ed Sullivan appearances than any other act.
Frank Shuster’s daughter Rosie was an original writer on SNL — her then-husband was Lorne Michaels.
PAUL JONES:
Also, this is the basis for all of the wrong-headed arcs about BIG BUSINESS crushing the creative man that turn into a whiny defense of plagiarism. Batom Comics went kablooie because they dared to use the legal argument “But you have so much money already….can’t you just let us plagiarize Spider-Man Send-up so we can make money too?” in a court of law.
BANANA JR. 6000: That arc was horrible. Batom Comics absolutely deserved to get sued out of business. They’re also pretty incompetent if they couldn’t even come up with their own legally distinct knock-off characters, something that’s rampant in the comic book world. And these are the good guys. These are the people who are making comic books “correctly.”
Which is rather telling, isn’t it? Ah, well. We are dealing with a man so stupid, he doesn’t understand a metaphor made to make something sound more important than it actually is. Remember…..Stan Lee wanted to write The Great American Novel but could only pay the bills writing about long underwear characters. Even though he was a showman, he knew that on a lot of levels, his line of work was and is deeply silly…thus, the sarcastic comment about an imaginary bullpen that sailed over the head of a dumb son of a gun from Ohio.
BILL THE SPLUT:
I’m surprised that this didn’t turn out to be “And then John Byrne saved the Superman’s day! Draw me strips, John! I have one last week that will be SO GOOD”
Also, why are we all ID’d as [1]?
Truman Capote: “I’m Number One! I’M NUMBER ONE!”
Peter Falk: “You look more like Number Two to me!”
(This [1] doesn’t care if you didn’t get the reference)
“Murder by Death,” one of only two movies to feature both Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness.
(The other is “The Ladykillers.”)
I’ve got no idea what is up with the [1] thing, I’m trying to figure it out, but I’m very computer dumb for a millenial.
BANANA JR. 6000:
It seems to be pretty widespread: https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/commenter-names-have-disappeared-from-wordpress-blogs/
COMIC BOOK HARRIET:
Thanks anonymous stranger! I’ll keep an eye on the situation and see when a fix happens.
Everyone, unless you want your comment to be anon, please put your normal user name in the body of your comment.
BANANA Jr. 6000
Thanks to a knowledgeable guide and a generous owner, I actually was able to stand in the bedroom where Jerry, on a hot and sleepless summer night in 1933, created not only an icon for the ages, but an entire genre as well.
Can you imagine being the owner of that house? It’s already getting a ton of unwanted attention, because some random pop culture figure once lived there. Then you get a phone call from a guy who wants to tour the place. Then he shows up and he’s 61 years old. And he wants to stand in the bedroom. Good lord, this is appalling! In other fandoms, this kind of person gets called a “jocksniffer” or “starfucker.”
And another thing: did anything relevant to the history of Superman actually happen in this house? Or was it just a place one of the creators lived? This story fits perfectly with the Funkyverse’s obsession with trivial death relics. Marveling at the drawing table where Superman came to life is one thing; standing in the co-creator’s bedroom and lying in his bed is just creepy.
Remember, kids: being obsessed with comic books doesn’t damage your intellectual or social growth in any way. Nope. Definitely not. (BJ6K)
Congrats for your The Comics Curmudgeon COTW honorable mention.
The mixed marriages in Pluggers have always kind of bothered me. The kangaroo is married to the bear. The hen is married to the dog, etc. Have we ever witnessed their mutant hybrid offspring?
I guess I’m just a speciesist.
Thanks. I’m glad you share my antipathy towards Pluggers. And yes, it is odd that there’s no mixed-species children. Apparently, when a kangaroo and a bear mate, the offspring are one or the other. I have some dark theories about why that is.
BILLYTHESKINK
A nice reminder that Pete went from writing for Marvel to writing for DC to writing a tremendously successful Mr. Sponge story arc at Mega Comics to writing the script for at least two hit Starbuck Jones movies to…
Chester’s Atomik Komix vanity project. Sometimes folks in the Batiukverse get punished for their success (poor Funky), but just as often they punish themselves for their success like Pete did. What a weird recurring theme.
BANANA JR. 6000: I dunno, Chester pays such outlandish salaries Pete might actually be making more money than he did from Marvel, DC, Mega Comics, and Hollywood combined. Plus the convenience and lower cost of living in his hometown; Batiuk assigning him a hot girlfriend despite his complete lack of positive traits; and that he gets to Make Comic Books Correctly. The last of which is the most important value in the Funkyverse.
That’s fair, I am applying real world logic to the Batiukverse after all. Much like Les’ blue-and-orange morality over “protecting” Lisa and her story, Pete’s professional pride in his endeavors for Atomik Komix is similarly misplaced for most real world people but clearly meant to be celebrated in-universe.
Yes, we know that Chester apparently offered him a very nice salary, he may well be making more money than he ever has in his life. But we also know that Chester makes him work in a decrepit and previously abandoned building in downtown Cleveland where the utilities often cut out and where there isn’t even a restroom on the floor he has to work on (in a building OWNED by his employer). He used to daydream about the horrors of working in the Batom Comics bullpen… only to both take a job where he has to work in the same bullpen with the two guys he and Durwood used to imagine themselves as being, regularly taking Brady Wentworth-like guff from those two now-nonagenarians despite being depicted in-universe as being far more successful and influential in comics than either one, taking both his own work and their creations to great success.
What’s worse is that TB set up several ways to depict that professional indignity all being worth the grief, and then pretty much NEVER showed us any of them in action. We were left to infer it all.
– Despite his success at his heralded prior employers, Pete was regularly seen as frustrated with his superiors, anxious, stressed, and overworked. Did that change at Atomik Komix? I suppose it kind of did, but it isn’t something Pete or anyone else ever talks about.
– At Atomik Komix Pete got to work with both comics legends he revered as well as his best friend/coattail rider and his girlfriend/fiancé. That’s a great reason to put up with the mess of a work environment at AK and the trouble of establishing your own creations in a stagnant industry, actually. TB all but never seems to imply that Pete is happy about this.
– Even the money, the explicitly-stated thing that enticed Pete to Atomik Komix, never comes into play. Pete is never shown doing anything with the money, heck the engagement “ring” he gave to Mindy is sadder than the ring Wally didn’t spend his military back pay on. And Wally eventually bought Rachel a real ring on a Montoni’s salary.
As I recall, the key element in Pete’s decision to go with Atomik is that the creators own their characters instead of the publisher. That way Pete can get the dozens of dollars for licensing “Inedible Bulk” diapers. [BChasm]
Yeah, because ownership rights minutiae are so relatable. Todd In The Shadows has a great line about Liz Phair, that really applies to Tom Batiuk and his endless publishing stories:
“Show biz satires are the last refuge of the creatively spent. Way too much of the time, they come from people who’ve used up all their ideas, except what’s right in front of their noses. And it just devolves into a tedious display of score-settling and inside jokes no one can relate to. It’s an exercise for people who’ve been in the industry too long, and need to take a long step away.”
Batiuk has needed to take a step away for over 30 years.
GREEN LUTHOR
So Pete was the top creator at Marvel, but was lured away by DC letting him write Superman. Hm, I wonder where I heard that before? Oh, right, that’s what happened with John Byrne. (Too bad Batiuk hadn’t created Mitchell Knox at that point, or else he could have been the reason Pete wanted to leave Marvel. Just, y’know, for completeness’ sake.)
The clock to the right of the Lord of the Late says “Brant Parker”, of B.C. and Wizard of Id, and the one below the word balloon says “Mell Lazarus”, of Momma and Miss Peach. Behind the logo is “_nac _aboy” (no idea who that is, honestly), and the one on the right MIGHT be “Kurt Busiek” (it looks like Ku_ Bus_), the comic book writer (Astro City, Thunderbolts, Marvels, etc.).
(I, uh… might have gotten a hold of higher-resolution copies of most of the strips from the old King archive? It’s complicated.)
Mac Raboy, perhaps? He drew some beautiful early *Captain Marvel Jr.* stories but had a lot of problems with the Deadline Doom.
He went on to draw the Sunday *Flash Gordon* strip,
Oh, okay, yeah, that’s probably it. Stupid me, I was assuming the names would have been more or less centered on the plaques (or the plaques centered on the clocks), which would require several more letters under the logo. (Guess they went to the same place that made the signage for the Santa Royale Community College.)
WILL
“Lourdes?” “Genuflect?” Is Mopey Pete Catholic? I didn’t think religion existed in the batiukverse except for St Spire’s Generic Church and of course the one true religion of Comic Books.
As usual, a fantastic deep dive from the esteemed CBH. Unfortunately, my loathing for Popey Meat and his worship of Seagull and Shoestring, or whatever Batiuk’s calling them this week, is so deep that I can barely stand to read the strips, let alone comment on them.
CBH, you nailed it when you talked about TB’s infatuation with the “bolt from the blue” theory of creativity. I’m more of the Thomas Edison school: Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. But if you believe that good work depends on a visit from the Muses, you have an excuse if your work is poor. It’s not your fault! You were sitting there, waiting, and those lazy-ass Muses never showed up! What’s a guy to do?
Anyway, on to today’s Crankshaft, the second strip about Lillian and birdsongs. Lillian can identify all the birdsongs on a relaxation tape, and recognizes that certain birds would never be in the same climate zone. I’m no birder, but I can tell you that all kinds of weird birds end up passing through NYC on their migrations, or because storms blow them out of their way. I once found a stunned plover lying on the street on Madison Ave.
Not only that, but we have escapees. There is a permanent feral flock of monk parrots (native to South America) in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. They visit my bird feeder sometimes in the winter, making an unholy racket. So Lillian is full of it.
And there’s no joke.
— The Duck of Death
be ware of eve hill
I’m number [1]! I’m number [1]!
We are all [1].
There used to be Siegel and Shuster Superman exhibit in the baggage claim area of Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Does anyone know if it is still there? Is it a permanent display? I last saw it in 2015(ish).
It’s curious how Superman was originally similar to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars. JC was stronger and faster than the native Barsoomians. He was able to make prodigious leaps, etc.
Over time it’s like DC insisted that Superman absolutely had to be the most powerful character in all ComicBookDom.
Rival Comic Company: We created a superhero who has powers just like Superman’s.
DC: Oh, yeah?! Well, Superman can fly now.
Rival Comic Company: Our guy can fly now too.
DC: Hmmmph! Superman now has heat vision and ice breath!
Rival Comic Company: Thanks. Now our guy has those too.
DC: Grrrr! Superman has the memory wipe kiss.
Rival Comic Company: Well… now you’re just being silly.
Good news! The Superman exhibit is still there in Cleveland Hopkins airport.
You’re reminding me of Grant Morrison’s Quiz in *Doom Patrol,* who had every super-power you couldn’t think of.
Like creating escape-proof spirit jars, for instance…
Super-breath is a killer and always will be.
Super-breath is a killer and always will be.
But what about Super-ventriloquism? Or the ability to build perfectly human robots in instants? The ability to give your character any random, ass-pulled power to keep you from easily writing your way out of the corner you’ve painted yourself into?
That last power? No wonder Tom loves Superman.
How could I have forgotten the ability to turn coal into diamond, which can also work in reverse, as when Superman turned an alien diamond being into coal? When honorary member (or mascot) Snapper Carr asked how he did that, the Man of Steel replied:
“I simply rubbed him the wrong way.”
That was in *JLA* #9. It wasn’t until #97 that it was explained, after a fashion: Superman was joking around with Snapper.
Green Arrow was not amused.
Someone was not amused by Snapper Carr?! “That’s Bizarro” says panel 3 Crankshaft snap! snap!
Jerry Seigel was vocal about his admiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs, and freely admitting to using his work for ideas. So you’re spot on noticing the John Carter connection.
Many, many years ago, my Dad bought a book titled The Great Comic Heroes by Jules Feiffer. The book featured the origins of several golden age superheroes. Below is one of the pages on Superman. Very similar to the one you posted above.
I read A Princess of Mars for school around the same time as the aforementioned book. I noticed the similarity between the characters, and I have remembered it ever since.
It’s pretty cool of Seigel to openly acknowledged Burroughs as an influence.
Feifer’s book really set off the golden age nostalgia for the many who had no real access to those comics
Think how many people it introduced to Will Eisner’s *Spirit.*
*Sigh!* Leroy, I hate to ask again, but can you jam that mop up in there?
— The Duck of Death
It appears as if the [1] issue has cleared up. YaY!
Traveling down Kimberly Avenue via Google Street view is quite interesting. I got a kick out of 10720 Kimberly Avenue. The “Ivy House”.
—————————————-
Sorry, I can’t resist.
Who are you?
The new number [2].
Who is number [1]?
You are number [6].
I am not a number! I am a free man!
Ha ha ha ha!
I got that reference!
If the Internet had existed in 1966, The Prisoner would have had one hell of an online fan community. It’s a lot like a modern prestige drama, like you’d get from Netflix or Apple TV. It’s a big mind screw that doesn’t explain very much, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
You could probably put the original version out there now, and it would find a fan base. I doubt many people have even heard of it. Well worth a watch, despite being 55 years old now. It stars (and was largely created by) Patrick McGoohan, better known to modern audiences as the villain Longshanks in Braveheart.
McGoohan also holds the record for most appearances (4) as a killer on “Columbo”: “By Dawn’s Early Light,” “Identity Crisis” (beat you to it, DC!), “Agenda for Murder” and “Ashes to Ashes.”
Stephen King anachronistically uses “The Prisoner” in *Hearts in Atlantis* (which takes place in 1966, a year before the series aired).
Rewatching the series again after almost forty years, what leapt out was how many familiar British actors passed through the seventeen episodes: as a fan of the Ian Carmichael “Lord Peter Wimsey” series, I got an especial kick out of seeing Inspector Charles Parker (Mark Eden) and his eventual wife Lady Mary (Rachel Herbert) in different episodes.
Be seeing y0u, for it’s all for six and six for two and free for all!
My cousin visited Portmeirion last fall while he was in the UK and sent me back a “Number 6” badge replica from the series complete with an image of a penny-farthing bicycle. Maybe it will be part of a Halloween costume one day.
The Prisoner is highly rated on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. We’ve been watching episodes on Freevee (Amazon). Mr. bwoeh has seen them all before, but they’re new to me. I really enjoy the rovers.
I’m not familiar with Patrick McGoohan’s work beyond a few roles. He played the warden in Escape From Alcatraz and appeared in Ice Station Zebra.
Apparently, there was a remake of The Prisoner on AMC in 2009 starring Jim Caviezel as 6. Mr. bwoeh says he has it on tape. Tape?
Uh, if we’re going to talk about The Prisoner, then I’m going to talk about the great episode of ReBoot that was one long homage to the show. Pretty ballsy to do in 1997, for a bunch of kids who definitely weren’t going to get the reference. But the emotion of the conflict makes it watchable even if you’ve never seen a cult british TV show.
There’s also a four-part limited series from DC by Dean Motter, which was collected as *Shattered Visage* (title from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”).
I found it terribly disappointing. Maybe I’d just come to see Leo McKern, the greatest of all Number Twos, as Horace Rumpole of the Bailey.
By the way, if you watch the ur-“Cabaret” (1955’s “I Am a Camera”), look for a young Patrick McGoohan as a “Swedish Water Therapist.” The “Columbo” completist in me feels it obligatory to mention that “I Am a Camera” features Laurence Harvey (who’ll be a killer in “The Most Dangerous Match”) and Julie Harris (who’ll make the killer glad to be caught in “Any Old Port in a Storm”).
Shelley had the skylark, Keats had the nightingale, but Williams had the sparrow!
One of my favorite shows of all time. Loved it when they spoofed this show on The Simpsons.
“The Prisoner” was great, but to me Patrick McGoohan will always be Dr. Syn in Disney’s 1963 TV tale “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.” Man, what a theme song! I’d go into greater detail about what it meant to me, but I’d have to include a flashback of five-year-old me sitting on the front porch, having milk and cookies while reading the Gold Key comic book adaptation.
FWIW, the AMC network (or was it TNT?) had a rebooted and updated “The Prisoner” miniseries like 12-14 years ago, and it wasn’t bad…
1. It’s funny because if anything, Batiuk’s storylines have pushed my interest farther away from the world of comics… He thinks he’s been showing us the best parts of fandom over the years on his blog and in the Funkyverse when it has been quite the opposite.
2. MEANWHILE, in Krankenschaaften — Lillian is clearly auditioning for the role of that ornithologist/know-it-all old lady at the diner for a future remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”… It’s the role she was born to play.
“Back in your gilded cage, Lillian McKenzie…”
Re: Today’s Crankshaft
Of course, Lillian knows all about birds. She IS an old hen. Her hair even resembles a white hen. Did the artists draw her hair that way on purpose? Buk buk buk.
Separated at birth?
How can anyone massage that scrawny chicken neck without wringing it?
I hear that Lillian is the grandmother of a certain Kids in the Hall character.
Another one is saying “Wring her neck? I’m crushing, CRUSHING HER HEAD!”
Classic Kids in the Hall skits. In case folks don’t know what you’re referring to.
“Choking a chicken” is very important in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film “Rope.” (His first in color, and his first with James Stewart.)
It’s been a while since I watched Rope. Wasn’t that the movie Hitchcock filmed in long takes, made to look like one continuous shot? The movie was based on the play.
That’s the one, BWOEH, and I give you full marks for remembering the fact that it was based on a play (also called *Rope,* the work of Patrick Hamilton) as well as its use of the continuous take approach.
Treat yourself to a MacGuffin for breakfast, and leave the Egg McMuffins to others.
Other fun facts about “Rope”:
It owes something to the Loeb and Leopold case, which has inspired two other fine films, “Compulsion” and “Swoon”;
It’s the first of two Hitchcock films featuring Farley Granger (the other is “Strangers on a Train”);
It offers a fine part for John Dall, who will be even better two years later as Bart Tare in 1950’s “Gun Crazy” (in one of his last movies, “Spartacus,” Dall will appear with John Gavin, who also worked with Hitchcock, in “Psycho”); and
It praises the use of James Mason as a villain, and Mason will be a memorable villain for Hitchcock more than a decade later in “North by Northwest.”
Thank you for another meaningful and well researched post.
As far as the eureka bullshittery regarding the aegis of Superman, I can’t fault TB too much about it that much. The reason for it being, as he’s made clear all too often, is that those dumb moments are how he arrives at his inspirations, so, of course, that’s how he’ll portray anyone else arriving at the same destination. Meanwhile, showing the passage of time through arduous work and rework doesn’t necessarily make for the most gripping of exposition; and really, who needs that when the expectation of the audience is to keep things (relatively) snappy and (relatively) humorous. He gets to write his dumb strip, people who only come to the newspaper comic page to do nothing more than smirk at newspaper comics get to smirk at the dumb newspaper comic, and everyone moves on. I get it.
What I take umbrage with is him putting Pete in as a reincarnation of Siegel through the flashback panels. It’s an unnecessary backhanded insult. Siegel actually made something of significance. Siegel made Superman, TB. You made Funky Winkerbean. There’s no equivalence there. None.
If I can quote–
Sometimes I’m alone
Sometimes I’m not
Sometimes I’m alone
Hello?
Crankshaft 7/8: Wait, this isn’t a joke. Digital electronics which forms the basis of our digital world, got its name due to using binary digits as the basis for representing information in a digital system. Digits were first used to name the units in a base 10 counting system and comes from the Latin word for finger “digitus”
Italian uses “il dito” for finger and “ le dita” for fingers. It is typical for Latin origin words to change gender when going from singular to plural. (Masculine to feminine). Eggs does this too: uovo (egg) becomes uova (eggs).
“Wait, this isn’t a joke.” Of course not, it’s Crankshaft. Comics don’t have to be funny! It’s called writing! Buy Lisa’s Story!
What the hell is Ed getting a dozen checks for, that adds up to 8 dollars total? If the setup was something like Ed collecting gardening club or bowling dues, and everyone wrote checks because of course they did, this joke would have been OK. As is, it’s extremely contrived. And it’s extremely lazy, because it would have been easy to fit into Ed’s usual activities.
Maybe they’re actually royalty checks he received from manga publishers in Japan. Over there “Crankshaft” is known as “Ther Super Terrific Grouchy Bus Driver” and is a very popular character, but the checks only amount to a few cents each. He’ll probably aggravate the arthritis in his fingers trying to sign all those checks and then he won’t be able to count anymore.
royalty checks he received from manga publishers in Japan
You’re a genius.
animefilter.com. Have fun, kids.
I don’t think BatYam even gets the “bolt from the blue” thing right. He depicts MoPete/Jerry Siegel awake, looking for a solution to a specific writing problem, and getting one by random association. That’s not how the Muse has ever visited me, or anyone I know. When the Muse visits in the middle of the night, she does so from the twilight between awake and dreaming, and inspires frantic to WRITE THIS or DRAW THIS with no explanation of why. It’s only later, after groggily setting it down on paper (or screen, or whatever), that the writer or artist realizes this is what he/she’s been looking for… and that many long nights of hard work are now ahead.
Oh, and in unrelated news, I got an email from my (former) publisher the other day. The original contract’s run out, sales were (in her words) “less than stellar” (in other words, like ninety-nine-and-some-number-of-nines percent of all new novels published), and so the’s returning the rights to the book to me. They are now flying across the internets, soon to emerge from my computer with a squishy sound and lie on the floor quivering. Oh well, it was fun.
As Paul Jones commented, “Stan Lee wanted to write The Great American Novel but could only pay the bills writing about long underwear characters.” That’s how it works in the real world. I spent ten years writing a book that made one-tenth as much money as a string of short “project management war stories” to fill the space between the ads on a website. You either write for an audience for the purpose of making money (don’t kid yourself; Stephen King spends a lot of time thinking about what his readers might want to read), or you write for yourself and accept no compromise to your artistic “vision,” in which case you’d better have a day job. Batty wants to have it both ways, and that is not the real world.
“They are now flying across the internets, soon to emerge from my computer with a squishy sound and lie on the floor quivering.”
O.O