Hey folks, it’s another The Komix Thoughts post post! Seems our ol’ pal Tom visited lovely Lake Erie recently, and graced his regular blog readers with a whole slew of delightfully Batiukesque pictures of various things. Fans of his uniquely mundane photography work need to check that out right now.
He also included this humdinger of an observation, which is just too good to not share.
“I’ve always been attracted by the Chautauqua commitment to the idea of lifelong learning, but I never followed the thought any further than that.”
Only one man could have penned a sentence that incongruous and baffling. While interested in the concept of “lifelong learning”, he never really went anywhere with it, which negates the entire point of lifelong learning in the first place. It’s almost zen-like in its own warped, demented way. Thank God for The Komix Thoughts, as shit like this really merits being preserved and archived.
Son of Stuck Funky 
“(Paraphrase) I have always liked lifetime learning in others, but not for me personally.”
How does one live to be 75 years old, meet the most intriguing people in the world, and never used an ounce of curiosity?
Why just look at the people associated with SOSF. To my knowledge none are famous, but I could have a meal with any of you and be amazed how quickly time flew by.
But not TB.
At first glance, it seems like an innocuous sentence, but when you stop to think about it, it gets really weird. It’s like saying “I have always been intrigued by the idea of purchasing ingredients and preparing my own food, but then I just ordered something”.
And the photos are magnificent. Just like with his writing, BatYam’s photography is totally unique. No one can make the dull and mundane seem even more dull and mundane quite like he can. Sidewalks, golf carts, chairs, people aimlessly milling about…he never fails to capture the most boring aspects of, well, everything.
I wonder if Chuck Ayres checks in on the Komix Thoughts from time to time just to look at the photos and say “oh, thank goodness I don’t have to use THAT for reference anymore”.
Some people are just plain bad photographers. They have no eye for it, no sense of symmetry, composition, or balance at all. BatHam isn’t like that. The photos themselves are fine, it’s the subjects of the photos that fascinate me so much lately. Everywhere he goes, he seems to capture the most mundane details of wherever he is, to an uncanny degree. No one takes a shot of the exterior of a boring, ordinary building quite like Tom does. If you took his photos and showed them to someone without context, they’d have absolutely no idea what they were looking at, and nothing would stand out as being visually interesting. He has a real gift for it.
The photos themselves are fine
This one begs to differ:
Good Lord, Tom, FOCUS!
Also: CROP!
I would say “pick a better background too”, but I don’t want to overwhelm the man.
Yes, for an artist, the composition sucks. Same with the Hotel photo. This is a beautiful old building and he takes a side shot that doesn’t show any of the building’s details.
My Dad was a terrible photographer. We have so many vacation albums of blurry, badly framed photos of nothing in particular. After he died and my mom started going on trips with her friends, she turned out to be a great photographer. I’ve used some of her cell phone photos of Alaska, Hawaii, and the Grand Canyon as my desktop wallpaper. People asked me where I got them, like they think I bought them in the Microsoft store. They’re that good. I enjoy telling people they’re just my mom’s vacation snaps. I wish she’d taken all the childhood vacation photos in my life.
Chuck can still be found at Lock 15 in Akron. He does the label artwork for their microbrews and beer taps.
“I have always been intrigued by the idea of purchasing ingredients and preparing my own food, but then I just ordered something”
In the context of satire, that sentence works. Like…I could see it starting off a Dave Barry column.
If it’s not satire, then it only really works if the writer has a really stupidly hectic life or, IDK, no arms.
This lack of real curiosity and fixation on the dullest and least interesting things explains so much about the man. It’s why we get the recurring image of Pam Murdoch baffled by the word salad her dad dishes out: she literally cannot be stirred to figure out what Crankshaft is trying to say.
CS, 8/14:
I hate this strip with every fiber of my being.
At least it has disaster potential. Please tell me Batiuk is trying to win a Pulitzer for his take on the Ukraine war.
Satisfied that after 35 years he finally was able to use his most clever pun yet, Batty sat back in his chair and ran the imaginary bases in his mind. “Ahh, Pulitzer,” he sighed. “One day you will be mine…”
Ugh, you’re right. Maybe today’s strip WAS his entire take on the Ukraine war.
Hating this strip should be used as a CAPTCHA test. If you don’t hate it, you must be a robot.
Does Tom not know that “Troika” is a real word in English? Does he not care? I’m gonna go with “he doesn’t care.”
Worse, we’re now reduced to scraping the barrel for also-ran shower-thought puns from several decades ago:
perestroika: A program of political and economic reform carried out in the Soviet Union in the 1980s under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Oof, perestroika references were so stale even 35 years ago that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze was lampshading that fact.
I guess we should be glad the correspondent’s name isn’t Gladys Nost or something…
I thought it would work better as “Perez Troika,” like Perez Hilton. Which also would have made the joke *less* outdated.
Mikhail Gorbachev died August 30, 2022. Considering Batiuk’ s brag of a near one-year writing backlog, this could have been some kind of salute to Gorbachev.
That’s highly unlikely as there’s no little tribute mentioning Gorbachev’s name in any of the three panels. I’m 99.99999% sure the timing of this “Paris Troika”
comicstrip is attributable to sheer coincidence.What could have been a tribute has turned out to be a tone-deaf strip offending many of his readers. Business as usual for Batiuk.
How do we even know this is a take on the current events? Maybe it’s a recycled strip from 30 years ago? This dumb joke would have worked better then. When more people even remembered what perestroika was, and could tell you the difference between Gorbachev and The Grouch.
There’s kind of a bitter irony to perestroika – it meant “restructuring” or “reform”. And it contributed to the Soviet Union dramatically restructuring itself only a couple years later. And some think this whole Ukraine invasion is an attempt to rebuild that old lost structure.
Lakeside is a beautiful historic community on the shores of Lake Erie. It is a dry community established by the Methodist church and is one of the few remaining Chautauqua communities in the U.S.
There are many historic buildings and houses from the 1800’s/ early 1900’s. It really is a trip back in time.
Leave it to Tom to focus on minutia and miss the point entirely.
The mention of Lakeside being a dry community reminds me of one of the neighboring Akron suburbs near where I grew up. Tallmadge, Ohio, finally lifted a ban on alcohol several decades after prohibition ended.
Before the ban was lifted, you could tell where the city limits were due to the presence of restaurants and drive-thrus selling alcohol.
What finally made them lift the ban was most likely the presence of a slew of alcohol serving strip clubs near the city limits on Tallmadge Avenue, a road bearing the city’s name. After the ban was lifted, those clubs seemed to go out of business.
This bit of trivia even made Ripley’s Believe it or Not!
Ohio seems to have had a complicated history with prohibition. I went to grad school at Ohio U in Appalachian southeast Ohio. A nearby town was Chauncey, but it was pronounced “Chancy” to identify feds who didn’t belong there
Interesting. There are many small towns in Ohio that have weird pronunciations by the locals. I wonder if this was for a similar reason.
I do know it was common for the local mafia to have property way out in the country where they grew grapes and made wine and spirits to be transported back to the city.
A few are still wineries today.
The county just south of Athens, OH, Meigs County was the center of the marijuana growing industry in that part of the country
Those clubs were still there in the late 1980’s when I started attending The University of Akron. I always wondered why they were there since it was otherwise a nice blue collar neighborhood. In Cleveland these places were restricted to certain areas/ streets…near the airport and back alley streets downtown.
Nowadays I only go down that way to go to the Italian market.
Fascinating history indeed.
My dad was from Lubbock, Texas and went to Texas Tech University. The liquor laws in Lubbock were so bizarre and complicated they made lawyers openly weep. If you wanted to buy a beer, it’s a coin flip whether you could or not at any given time.
Unless you went to “the strip”. Which was a row of about 20 barn-sized liquor stores inside a neighboring county, about 20 miles outside of town. It looked like an upscale Whiteclay, Nebraska. And boy howdy, you do not want to look like Whiteclay, Nebraska. Both places have since cleaned up their act, though.
Utah had some pretty messed liquor laws too. My husband, some friends and I were on our first skip trip to Park City in the late 1990s. On our first evening in town we walked up Main Street to take in the sights. We stopped in a bar on the way back down the hill to the hotel. This bar couldn’t even serve us a soft drink without a bar membership or a sponsor. A woman sitting at the bar, a complete stranger, laughed and volunteered to sponsor us. Utahns didn’t seem to take the law seriously.
Over the last two decades the laws have been less strict. As Utahns like to say, the Zion Curtain has fallen.
Park City was a nice quiet town until Robert Redford ruined with his film festival.
We visited Salt Lake City this summer. I’d never been there before and I’d expected, if not a totally dry county, at least a very severe, Mormon-influenced attitude toward alcohol. But there were liquor-serving establishments all over. The only distinctive law seemed to be that if the place was classified as a “bar,” no one under 21 could go in. We went into one and we were promptly and diligently carded just about the moment we walked in, and our IDs photographed. (NB: We’re both around 60.)
However, places classed as “restaurants” were open to all. We went to a nice brewpub, where there was a strong focus on the large bar serving their own and other local brews, but it was classed as a “restaurant.” And we were not carded.
@The Duck of Death
That’s weird. Was that brewpub allowed to sell any hard liquor or wine?
Yep, it was a full bar.
This picture struck me:
How few autographs must Tom Batiuk sign, to put this kind of effort into each one?
Also, the filename of this photo is 2022/12/New-Years.jpg, which suggests it was taken long before this event. Even though the text says “Needless to say, signing copies of Vol. 12 for them was gratifying as well.”
And to tie it all together, here’s a photo of the crowd:
I guess I didn’t need to sleuth so hard, because the text says “best wishes for the new year” when it’s mid-August.
And I’d just like to express the thought that there is no possible way any independent observer would conclude that those are supposed to be two drawings of the same man’s face at different ages.
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, matches.
That’s an autograph??? I thought it was just a poorly-taped banner of some kind. He does that for each book? His hand must have been aching after doing all, uh, nine of those.
And I didn’t even notice how he’s still wishing people a happy new year in August. Larry David would be LIVID. These blog posts of his not only don’t provide any insight into the enigmatic BatYam, they actually obscure the truth even more.
That’s actually a good question. It doesn’t have his signature on it anywhere. But it’s clearly the latest Funky Winkerbean book, open to the interior title page, where you’d normally place an autograph. Which just raises more questions. Does he pre-draw the doodles, and then sign each copy as someone approaches him?
We’ve often wondered what the business model is for these books. And, why they’re expensive hardbound copies and not the mass-produced soft covers every other comic strip appears in. I think it’s because Batiuk buys 90% of the books himself, and schleps them at events like this. Which is fine if you’re self-published. But the author of three allegedly mainstream comic strips, that have appeared in most American newspapers for 10-50 years each, shouldn’t need such DIY tactics.
It’s part of the printing process. I have a Funky Winkerbean compilation from the 1980’s with similar ACT I Funky profile accompanying “personal message”. Batiuk was not in the bookstore that day.
He sure did invite a lot of empty chairs.
“Where are my Winkerheads at?!”
It’s not so much that he’s even a “bad” photographer, it’s that he’s barely a photographer at all. He sees something, has a fleeting thought, “oh neat,” then points the camera/phone in that direction and shoots.
There’s no intentionality in any of his photos. There’s no sense of what he is trying to say or what he’s trying to show us. I know these aren’t necessarily meant to be “art” photos but a person with an artist’s eye will automatically attend to composition and always shoot with some intent, remembering that you need to illuminate an aspect of your subject that is interesting, meaningful, or beautiful.
TB’s photos do none of that. They basically say: This exists. Or: I was here.
PS: The crowd shot is hilarious. Looks like he took it just before he triumphantly strode up the aisle to address the waiting throng.
That’s what makes them so fascinating. No one else takes pictures like this. If you took his photos and displayed them in some sort of gallery without context, no one would know what to think. Is it some kind of weird post-modern commentary on society and etc., or is it just a particularly weird brand of ineptitude? He really needs to put together a coffee table book or something. I could see hipsters really getting into this stuff.
Tom might be trying to make a joke with that “lifelong learning” comment, though honestly who can even tell when he’s joking or not anymore?
(Ryan North did a Dinosaur Comics with the characters saying things like “I’ve spent too much time learning about the Sunken Cost Fallacy to stop now” and “I know everything there is to know about the Dunning-Kruger Effect”. Batiuk’s comment sounds like it could be attempting something akin to that, though, of course, if that is the case it fails miserably.)
(Or he could just be that lacking in self-awareness, I’m certainly not ruling that one out, either.)
Yes, it’s clear he has learned little in his long life. But when you already think you hold all the correct opinions on everything, then there is no need or desire to learn anything else.
This is what makes it so fascinating. Was it a deliberate joke? Or did he fall ass backwards into it? There’s just no way to tell.
“The setting of the Lakeside Community on the shore of Lake Erie was as lovely a bucolic and relaxing environment as you could want. A perfect anodyne to my usual conerns about whether my tech was going to function properly or not (it didn’t, but the backup did).”
Along with the typo “conerns,” it appears that Tom malapropped “anodyne” for “antidote.” It’s hard to tell if this is genius-level trolling of us beady-eyed nitpickers or if he gives even less of a shit about about spelling and word choice as he does about quality photography.
I wonder if he’s using voice recognition, because this is the kind of mistake it makes.
Good Lord, TB with tech problems at the front of the room — that has got to be the Seventh Circle of Hell. Fumbling with a PowerPoint that won’t open on a Mac…getting the “tech guy” up there…that’s torture even if you are looking forward to the speaker. And yet, is anyone surprised to learn that it happened?
By the way, that has gotten a LOT easier the last few years. In the 2000s, I used to do work presentations where I had to lug this huge projector around. Now all you need to do is plug a tiny dongle into your laptop, which the conference room will provide without even needing to install any software.
Very true – I handled the tech for the very last 35mm slide lecture ever given at the Hirshhorn Museum – 2010! And yet people still have trouble. Since I work in media preservation it’s always a little embarrassing when the Electronic Media Group of all people have tech issues at the annual conference…
But problems with your dongle at Chautauqua is so Batiukian that it’s almost hard to believe.
I don’t know whether to make the “Batiuk insists on using very old technology” joke or the “Batiuk still fails at tech when it’s stupidly easy now” joke.
If you have problems with your dongle at Chautauqua, you’re not alone. Once-daily Batuikraquin from AstraZeneca can help. Side effects may include being out of touch, thinking names such as Paris Troika and Amicus Breefs are the acme of humor, a compulsion to read comic books and chase awards and thoughts of Dead St. Lisa. Ask your local comic shop owner if Batuikraquin is right for you.
Truly, The Komix Thoughts blog has become the place to go to see Tom at his finest. Looking at the assemblage of lumpenphotos, awkwardly expressed half-thoughts, Flash covers, old cartoon strips, and cut-and-paste copies of Complete Funky Winkerbean intros, Tom obviously labours to craft this content for hours — two, maybe even three of them! Every single week, mostly!
Compared to the twenty-three minutes a week spent writing Crankshaft, it’s clear where Tom’s heart lies.
It really is spectacular. It’s a pileup of arrogance, ineptitude, banality, and self-delusion.
It’s a completely unique style that no one else could ever even hope to replicate. He’s just plain wired differently than everyone else is. He could find the tedious lining in any boring cloud.
I see little difference between Tom Batiuk and notorious internet creators like David Gonterman and Chris Chandler. (And, since we’re on the subject, Brooke McEldowney.) They’re all tedious bores who use their comic strip to indulge their love of children’s media, and settle scores they should have outgrown decades ago. And all they think they’re “quirky” when they’re really just egomaniacs.
Batiuk only differs in that he was once functional enough to sell a comic strip set in a high school. And did it well enough to get a permanent grandfather clause into the industry. Oh, and he’s not a pervert like the other three are.
Kudos to Y.Knott for another brilliant parody.
And yes BJ6K, at least we can say that Batiuk isn’t a pervert.
And I’m not sure what Chris Chandler YOU’RE referring to.
I know only one Chris Chandler involved in making comics and TB is a far cry from THAT level of mommy issues.
Yeah, that’s the Chris Chandler I meant.
He tried something beyond his natural capacity and it messed him up.
BJr6:
Alec Guinness, in a brown bathrobe: “Daveykins Gonterman. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard of in a long time. Of course I know him. Because he’s not me, crimeny, why would I want to be him?!”
Is he still around? My nobody website had a comments page about him, the Internet’s Most Dangerous Cartoonist (self-described) like 20+ years ago, where he’d never find it. It wasn’t that he was a hack. I mean, he WAS, but that was the old internet, and nobody knew what they were doing. It’s that he’s that most dangerous type of individual, the Moron Who’s Convinced He’s A Genius. (Hey, remember the World War Twos? How much longer would that have horrifically lasted without Mustache Boy deciding he should run the war? Battles of Kursk, the Bulge, yeah galaxy brain shit there)
Davey was the Dunngingest of Krugers. He’d viciously rip new ones to Deviant Artists that drew shitty Sonic the Hedgehog fanfics that looked exactly like his. He was a pompous ass with an ego bigger than Jupiter. Sorta like…hmm, the guy’s name escapes me, Tim Butt or something.
Then one day, he said “I’m on new brain meds! I’ve never felt this good!”
And he was gone.
I feel bad now. It wasn’t his fault he was born low-income in a country where medicine is for the rich. And then–he was happy, and probably a bit embarrassed about his early work.
Tom has never been embarrassed about anything. Except that the machine gun wasn’t cardboard.
I feel bad about Davey. Tom–No, I do not. One of them gained awareness and did something about their life. Another is sure that their Pulitzer, like their Best Actress Oscar, is currently in the mail.
No, he’s no pervert, that much is clear. Few if any other comic strip writers have deftly sidestepped that whole “sex” thing quite like BatHam has. In fact, sex as depicted or discussed in FW might make for a dandy deep dive. No, really. Like, remember that one arc where Cayla demanded sex from Les, and he depicted it by showing the outside of the house? We all knew the deal. Anything more graphic than that would have been too repulsive for public consumption.
Then again, perhaps not. One unique thing about Batiuk re: settling scores is the way he used his strip to settle scores AGAINST HIS OWN CREATIONS, like Bull, Funky, Harry, and everyone not named Les. He had other agonies in store for that guy. But creating a comic strip character that you yourself hate, then exacting revenge against that character, over and over and over again, who else DOES that?
Bill: Long ago I enjoyed a website called Portal of Evil. Which was ostensibly a curated collection of weird websites, but was mostly a place to point and laugh at the silly people. That’s where I encountered Gonterman, Chris Chan, and many others who have thankfully fallen from memory.
ED: Yes, sex in Westview would be a fantastic deep dive. But I would extend it to include basic love and marriage, which are treated with just as awkwardly as sex is. These couples have supposedly been married for 30 years, but hold hands distantly like they just met a middle-school dance. And are just now learning basic facts about each other.
Luann would be an interesting comparison to Funky Winkerbean in this regard.
First, are we sure he doesn’t have an amputee fetish? Only his browser history knows for sure.
Second, I nominate the “before the playground is closed” remark (thankfully I’ve forgotten the exact wording) as absolutely the least sexy foreplay-talk in history. You’d get more erotic banter from hookers who work under bridges.
Yeah, “the playground” definitely ranks up there as one of the grossest things Batiuk has written. That, and the Lisa Tape where she advised “the other woman” what to do when Les calls out Lisa’s name during sex. Just… repulsive.
And Cayla just sat there and listened to it! Instead of being disgusted by this dead woman’s declaration of her intent to interfere with her marriage. And Cayla should be even more disgusted at Les for making her watch it. That’s a red flag the size of Kansas – even without discussing the content of that message. Which were instructions on how the “new love” should properly subjugate herself to Lisa.
It’s almost like some kind of BDSM/cuckolding/humiliation kink. Except that they’re not role-playing. These are instructions to Cayla on how she needs to manage her life. It is one of the most revolting things I’ve ever seen.
When Gaunt, Grey Dying Lisa™️ smugly announced, “When he calls out my name in a very intimate moment — and trust me, he will –”
… just the most unspeakably repulsive and ghastly thing I think I’ve ever read. First, it forces you to think of Les crying out in that very intimate moment, and that is a thought that shrivels the will to live. Nope, just nope. Nope.
Second, the next scene should have shown, cartoon-like, a dust-cloud silhouette of Cayla running and a Cayla-shaped hole in the wall. But Cayla is a cardboard cutout for Diversity Points so naturally she doesn’t react the way an actual human would.
Consider that Les is TB’s primary avatar, and weep. In between trips to the bathroom to hurl, that is.
When Gaunt, Grey Dying Lisa™️ smugly announced, “When he calls out my name in a very intimate moment — and trust me, he will –”
What an incredibly arrogant thing for Lisa to say. She was in no position to know that. That should have been the straw that broke Cayla’s, even after all the other screaming red flags didn’t.
The real problem is, of course, Tom Batiuk’s inability to manage a story. Every character knows where the story is going at all times. Even when they’re things the character shouldn’t know, or would react negatively to. Hell, it presupposes Les’ remarriage, another thing Lisa is in no position to know. Some widows just don’t remarry. My mom didn’t. Hell, Batiuk himself didn’t! But all his characters’ lives are predestined. Lisa was going to die. Les was going to remarry. And Les’ new wife was going to join this death cult.
Who can turn the world off with his style
Every day’s a nothing day
Maybe he’s lazy, or just senile
Well it’s you Tom, though you don’t know it
Keep hoping for that Pulitzer – they won’t bestow it
Editors are gone, you’ve got your freedom
Turn the comments off so you can’t read ’em
You’re destined never to enthrall
You’ll never gain respect at all
(Meow!)
You’ve got spunk!
Just like Cindy when she made it afterall at Buddyblog
I guess no one else has the heart to comment on today’s Crankshite (8/16), and I can see why: It starts with Crankshaft displaying a rictus grin, and Pmm doing her incredibly, horribly tired, tiresome, overplayed, space-wasting, brain-dead boilerplate schtick:
“Dad, why are you grinning?”
Dad, what are you doing?
Dad, why are you under the covers looking at pictures of amputees?
Dad, how old are you, 105 or 100 years?
Dad, am I your real daughter?
Dad, did you have a torrid affair with Lisa?
Dad, is Boy Lisa really your son?
Dad, why are you writing an angry manifesto?
Dad, where are you going with that chainsaw?
Dad, what do you mean you’re sick of me asking what you’re doing 80 times a day?
“Dad, why are you smiling?”
“Oh, i just am.”
Pam would remember this moment with sickening clarity months later when Lillian’s dismembered remains were discovered in the trunk of a car at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
Luann: Where everyone talks about sex, yet never has it. People sneak out of bedroom windows, and people think they had sex, but they didn’t.
9 Dickweed: Where everyone talks about sex, and that’s all they do. When do these people find time to eat anything but each other?
Battyverse: No one talks about sex, and no one has it. I’m straining to think of a family that had more than one kid, ever. And the couple probably cut a hole in the sheet to do it.
Gimli: “The Shining Twins still count as one!”
Allegedly, Donna sired four from Harry. I would say “don’t forget” normally, but it appears that TB did as well, so, who knows.
Banana Jr. 6000: Or that disturbing Dinkle-Harriet 50th anniversary arc, or the way Linda always looked at Bull with mildly bemused disdain. The Cayla-Les one really stands out, though, implying as it did that Les and Cayla dated for YEARS before doing the sinful deed. It was all so bewildering and unnecessary.
E.D.:
But creating a comic strip character that you yourself hate, then exacting revenge against that character, over and over and over again, who else DOES that?
Well, there is…Whatshername? Crank’s bus station lady, Lila maybe? Apparently her crimes against humanity are bad coffee and worse brownies. Hey, you cheap losers, maybe go to Dunkin and buy some coffee and donuts?
And there is One Big Happy, with…Miz Liza, Miz Leeza? The readers have never been given a reason to dislike her, but boy does Detori love hating his own creation. She’s drawn like the Alien, but even Giger would say “WHOA! Too much vagina dentata, dude!”
Both guys: Did some old lady make you mad 40 years ago in a grocery line, but you’ll never give it up until death?
You must be fun people to live with.
MIZ AVIS! The Xenomorph is named Miz Avis. So…maybe Detorie also had a bad experience renting a car.