Two minor news items from the Funkyverse:
Tom Batiuk is writing a foreword for a Prince Valiant collection. The blog post “Workin’ Tonight” confirms this, and that it’s made him too busy to write any other blog posts right now. Hey, he wrote seven comic strips for July 2024, *and* a book foreword, all this week. How does he keep up this blistering pace?
Batiuk is a very strange choice for this honor. In July 2022, Funky Winkerbean had story a that depicted real-life Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster as an art thief, got Gray Morrow’s name wrong, and conspicuously omitted Foster’s successor John Cullen Murphy. It also ignored Prince Valiant’s real-life succession process, which would have worked much better than the dumb fictional story he wrote for Phil Holt and himself. I thought the whole thing bordered on libel, but I guess it didn’t offend the current Prince Valiant braintrust.
(UPDATE: Batiuk’s blog post specifically said “upcoming collection from Fantagraphics.” Which suggests the regular collections of Prince Valiant which the company publishes. This page at Amazon lists them all, and lists writers of forewords, afterwords, and introductions as co-authors. Few people are credited as such. These included Brian M. Kane (multiple times), Mark Schultz (twice), Dan Nadel, P. Craig Russell, Thomas Yeates, Tim Truman, and Roger Stern. Kane is a comics historian. Most of the other men are artists or illustrators. Batiuk seems even less worthy of this honor than it appeared at first.)
In other news, Tom Batiuk knows what cropping a photo is. The Saturday Crankshaft includes a pun on Pam cropping some photos, which proves he’s heard of the concept. It’s an interesting admission, considering we just talked about Batiuk’s own photos, which are badly in need of cropping. Here’s an example:
Batiuk’s raw photo is on the left. On the right is my cropped version. I removed those obnoxious bicycle tires at the bottom right, and some of those ugly golf carts. But this photo doesn’t need to be cropped so much as it needs to be re-taken entirely. Move two steps to the left, white balance, zoom in, and focus. Then it would look like this:
It’s much better, don’t you think?
This isn’t the first time Batiuk has used an artistic term as a joke without understanding it.
What’s Les Moore’s motivation? Buddy, we’ve been asking that question for years.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Yeah, that “Prince Valiant” slander was pretty damn low. And “Gary” Morrow — yeah, what a superfan. 🙄
Anyway, the whole thing just feels like the sourest of sour grapes. It reminds me of his oft-told tale of how Marvel told him they couldn’t use him because of the hated Comics Code. They sent him away, he says, because his portfolio contained forbidden content like vampires and such.
Does he actually still believe this? Does he not understand they were trying to let him down gently? If he’d shown up with some gory pre-Code “Vault of Horror”-type pages — and if they’d been scripted with the skill of Al Feldstein and drawn with the skill of Johnny Craig or Joe Orlando or Wally Wood — do you think they would have turned him away?
A portfolio is just an indicator of your capabilities. It’s not intended to be used by the person who’s evaluating it; the idea is that if they think you have talent, they will give you assignments that fit their needs.
Something tells me he still believes that he would have gotten the job — and would have immediately been assigned to write “Spider-Man,” as he’d expected — if not for those darn boogeymen he drew.
He probably also believes that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, and his dog Shep was actually “sent to live on a farm” when he got old and sick. Poor dude. I guess, despite more than half a century of successful comic strip writing, he still needs to cling to those illusions.
Does he actually still believe this?
I think he absolutely does. He can’t wrap his brain around the fact that DC and Marvel simply didn’t need him. He’s invented this elaborate mythology to explain away his failure, to a world that’s not even asking about it. He’s addicted to copium. He’s also too elitist to apply anywhere else, and too lazy to publish his own comic books independently.
Sometimes he comes across as 1957 Tom bragging how “The other kids dared me to eat an earthworm, so I ate like 10! Then they all ran away, screaming and puking, because they couldn’t appreciate my ART! Just like Marvel did! When I included the photo of me eating earthworms.”
Huh. The version I read had Tom claim that he met with Roy Thomas, who allegedly claimed that Tom’s work was as good as anyone working there, but that he needed someone who could do BETTER. (Which sounds just as made up, of course, or Thomas was just trying to let him down easy.)
Then again, Batiuk giving multiple inconsistent explanations for something doesn’t sound off-brand, so… yeah, I can believe he tells both (and probably other) versions, depending on what he “remembers” at any given time.
It’s Batiuk complete inability to say “I applied to work at Marvel and DC, but it didn’t work out.” Sometimes we don’t get what we want in life, but what we get instead sometimes ends up being better for us. And I daresay being a newspaper cartoonist worked out pretty well for the man. And simply just doesn’t care. Nor does he have a drop of appreciation for his career, or for the people who supported him, or for the fans he used to have before he alienated them all.
He’s kind of a real-life Elly Patterson. No matter how good he has it, he has to find the dark cloud in every silver lining.
Have you read Richard A. Lupoff’s *Comic Book Killer*? Your comment makes me think that in a life-and-death situation that Tom Batiuk would save Roy Thomas for his tactful rejection and let the blunt person at DC die. (“As Les told Lisa, it’s all right for you to go…and, believe me, it’s all right for you to go now…”)
Your Grease:
Thank you for including Johnny Craig in your triumvirate of EC artists rather than Jack Davis or Graham Ingels.
I may never understand “Star Light, Star Bright,” but I venerate the man who wrote and drew it.
Jay Taycee forever and all through the house!
Batiuk understands nothing. He believes his insights (such as they are) are so astonishing that, naturally, the filthy masses glean nothing from them.
For a while now, I consider him an utterly terrible person who deserves no success at all.
I think the fact that no other strips celebrated FW’s 50th anniversary says a lot. Not even Tom Armstrong made a nod to it in Marvin.
But then again, here he is writing a foreword for a Prince Valiant collection? Why? Why, why, why? A random 50 year old at McDonalds would be just as suitable for the task. But no, they ask TB to do it… and if anyone bothers to try to find a connection, they’ll find the Phil Holt arc and the misspelled name and everything else, won’t they?
I fully agree with you but yet here he is, again. Yet again with having a plum just handed to him. Just because. It is sickening.
Surprised Watterson wasn’t asked to do it as he often said that strip was an inspiration to him with its beautiful artwork and it motivated him to improve his skills.
Maybe Watterson turned them down so they went to the next Ohio based cartoonist.
I updated the OP to include some insight about who has previously written forewords/afterwords/introductions for the series of PV books. Amazingly, it makes Batiuk look even less qualified for this role.
On a side note, I also updated the OP to make the improved version of Batiuk’s photo look less stretched. I don’t know what happened there. (The same thing happened to one of my arcade game screenshots in an earlier post.) But it was hypocritical of me to criticize Batiuk’s photography while my example of a better version had an obvious aspect ratio problem.
Fair enough. Thanks for the update!
What do you want to bet that his introduction contains a paragraph like the following:
“When I was writing Lisa’s Story, I reflected on how Hal Foster’s use of language and dialogue pushed the story forward by making it more relatable to the reader’s emotions. Thanks to his work, I was nominated for a Pilitzer Prize.”
What a strange screen grab in that “Komix Thoughts” post.
I’d like to point out that it is labeled “Micky-Fantasia”.
“Back to regular blogging next week”…if he hadn’t said that, would ANYONE have noticed? He thinks THAT’S “regular blogging”? He is so consumed by writing a book foreword that he can’t throw together another John Darling post?
Such an odd, confusing man. Sometimes, I try to convince myself that it’s all just some weird performance art-like charade he’s playing, but I don’t think it is. I really believe he’s everything we assumed he always was, plus a whole lot less.
No! NO. This time he’s gone TOO FAR! Prince Valiant is a classic masterpiece that deserves to remain untouched by such arrogant, bitter hands. I’m actually very angry.
It’s going to hurt reading his being an oblivious twat who doesn’t understand what the point of Prince Valiant is. This is because it hurts watching him not understand why The House Of Ideas and its Distinguished Competition don’t need a moron who doesn’t understand the questions “If this is true, what else is true?” and “What does this person want?”
This need to stick to his misapprehensions so he doesn’t have to face being as dumb as crap is also why he pisses all over Evil Hollywood. They wanted to ‘ruin’ the Crankshaft series by giving the character a buried heart of gold when he insisted on his being a bitter old idiot who blames the world for his being an arrogant and selfish dipshit and he tanked something that could have made him a name to be reckoned with. Thus, Les sweating rivets protecting the purity of HIS story about his standing around like a shivering pillar of shit watching his wife die.
That’s it EXACTLY. It took me a while to arrive at this conclusion independently, although I know others here had long ago figured it out.
The whole schtick with Les and the Lisa Movie — the aborted first try, the insensitive Hollywood types doing it the “wrong” way — that was just an analog for his experience dipping his toe into show biz with the aborted “Crankshaft” movie.
No wonder it didn’t make any sense! No wonder there was never any explanation of what Les was “protecting” Lisa from — it was TB’s own pouting about Crankshaft, wearing a Les/Lisa skin suit.
And the second go-round, where the huge movie star comes to his craphole local pizzeria to literally beg him to do the movie again, fighting Les’ pouty reluctance every step of the way — that was childish wish-fulfillment. “Th-they’ll be sorry. They’ll be back! They’re gonna come begging me to do a Crankshaft movie, this time the right way, but I’ll show ’em! I’ll — I’ll show ’em all! *sob!*”
What it boils down to is: Control freaks gonna control, freakishly. I’m sure he was just impossible to deal with, and thus died the Crankshaft movie, a piece of undeserved good luck worthy of Les himself. And like Les, TB never recognized his own good fortune, or the potential contributions of people who might have a different skill set, who might have artistic talent of their own to add to the mix. But unlike Les, he didn’t get a second chance.
The Crankshaft movie saga — there’s a story I would pay money to read. But of course, it would have to be told by a neutral party, not someone who will aggrandize himself while insisting that no one knows better than he does how to make a movie.
Movie projects fail to materialize for a lot of stupid, banal reasons. So I’m willing to give Batiuk the benefit of the doubt on that. However, he seemed to take it very personally. And he used Funky Winkerbean to vent a lot of bitterness towards Hollywood about it, to the point of burning all of Los Angeles to the ground. Then he gave himself an Oscar for existing.
As for why the Crankshaft movie never happened: I think the FW story gives it away. It talks at length about a “shopping agreement”, where someone pays for the temporary rights to something, so they can pitch the movie they want to make from it. The Batiuk blog also said that George Kennedy (from the Naked Gun movies) was trying to make the Crankshaft movie happen. There were even photos of him in Hollywood effects makeup as Ed. Which is extremely cool. (No snark here; it’s got to be an awesome feeling to see a recognizable actor all suited up to play a character you created.)
But the nature of shopping agreements suggests that most of them never become movies. They’re sales pitches to studios, to make a movie they weren’t originally planning to make. Crankshaft had a relevant actor behind it, but I suspect that’s not rare either. I bet every name in IMDB has a passion project they’re trying to badger someone into making. Few have the star power to make them happen. And when they do, sometimes you get Battlefield Earth.
There are other ways movies get made, but Batiuk gonna Batiuk. If it didn’t happen to him personally, he doesn’t know about it, and isn’t going to learn.
Of course you’re right that movies get scuttled for all kinds of reasons. Like, for example, if you’d shot a few scenes on a soundstage in LA, and then the whole city burned down, presumably including the studios, then the project might be shut down. (Just a random example that occurred to me.)
The reason I’m making these assumptions about the Crankshaft project is that I’m assuming the first Lisa Movie arc was a roman à clef and that it tracks with what happened on the Crankshaft movie. And I’m assuming that the second Lisa Movie arc was wish fulfillment in its tormented way.
Why do I make those bold assumptions, seemingly without evidence? Because, as we have discussed, Puff Batty doesn’t seem to have any “theory of mind.” He’s not good at writing characters that aren’t essentially him.
And he rehashes his disappointments and bitterness again and again, both in his blog and in his strips. The failure to hold onto his comics collection from childhood. The failure to buy key issues 55 years ago that would be valuable today. The battle between disapproving women and the comic books that men love. The toting of a portfolio to a publisher and the failure to be hired. The apparent nonexistence of a real Marvel bullpen.
And then the corresponding wish-fulfillment arcs. The complete Timely collection found in an attic. The bitter defeat of a comics-hating harridan in court. The hiring of a comics nerd with a blank check from a generous tycoon and the reassembly of a former real Bullpen, complete with raising Kack Jirby from the dead to reunite with Lan Stee.
Given the evidence, IMHO it would be bizarre to assume that the Lisa’s Movie arcs don’t follow the same pattern: Bitter resentment that The World Doesn’t Understand, followed by triumph that proves the author avatar was the smart, brilliant one all along.
The key to understanding his madness is his love of declaring that he’s being bullied when people call him on his weak nonsense. He cannot and will not understand anyone who isn’t him (thus a ‘happy’ ending of making passive, defeatist pea-brained white men mankind’s nation) so he cannot understand being told that he’s misreading things or not telling the story remotely properly.
I am guessing that the same narrow, empty mind that can’t understand a metaphorical bullpen is going to be mystified and angered by the phrase “development Hell.”
FWIW, once upon a time, there was a prolific and highly intelligent, if bellicose, poster named Justifiable on the CK Funky forums. (BwoEH will remember her well.)
Justifiable specialized in no-holds-barred takedowns of whatever point TB was trying to make on a given day. She would usually pick the strip apart point-by-point. She really went off the chain during the Second Lisa Movie Arc.
I picked up a very strong vibe that Justifiable was a film industry insider, though she never actually claimed to be one. And one of her posts said, in so many words of frustration and fury, “DAMMIT, TODD, that’s not how shopping agreements work! (She always referred to Tom as Todd, referencing that old article where they got his name wrong.)
Curse CK for all eternity for deleting all those years of snark. I wish I could find the post and all the surrounding ones, but suffice it to say that according to this poster, who clearly had a deep knowledge of the film industry, Puffy got everything wrong, in every strip, all the time.
I’m not a film person so I have no way of knowing any of this. I mean, I could research what a shopping agreement is, but I don’t really care enough to bother. Just thought I’d toss this old info out there.
When the Lisa Movie Second Try arc happened, I wasn’t posting here. But I did write this little ditty for the CK comments section, encapsulating the action.
To the tune, of course, of “That’s Entertainment!”
When a schmuck
And a star with some pluck
Make a pitch
Well, it won’t make ’em rich
Laugh in face —
get tossed outta the place
That’s entertainment!
“I can’t lie
This won’t fly in Shanghai”
“Needs some sleaze
Just to please the Chinese”
Get turned down
By some hoodie-clad clown
That’s entertainment!
This guy’s wife lost her life from a cancer disease
What a bore! What a snore! What a puddle of cheese
Don’t bother pitching it, please —
Don’t tell us it has “heart” — we do business here, not art!
When a hack
Serves as Leslie Moore’s flack
Seeking cash
For some hackneyed old trash
Mason’s schtick
Always sinks like a brick
Just use your excuse:
“It’s run by the Jews!”
That’s entertaiiiiiiiiin-ment!
Hmmm. Perhaps I didn’t know @Justifiable that well after all.
😮🤔😂 (The Three Faces of Eve Hill)
I remember @Justifiable bristling after a commenter he was arguing with referred to them as “she.” It could have been just deception, I suppose. Did you read something from @Justifiable that I missed?
Until now, I thought he was a guy. After our “Hershey Barr” kerfuffle, possibly an African American guy. He sure had strong objections to Batiuk’s use of that name.
@Justifiable was always a good read. Nobody was as hostile toward Batiuk and his works. Sometimes a bit of a snob. Sometimes went too far, wishing physical harm on Batiuk. Most of all, I remember learning not to get into an argument with them. Especially if you were defending Batiuk. You weren’t going to win.
In some ways, @Banana Jr. 6000 reminds me of @Justifiable. There are similarities between them. Both are very intelligent and hostile toward Tom Batiuk and his works. However, @Banana Jr. 6000 stands out for being notably more respectful towards other commenters.
Yes, I’m sure you’re right about Justifiable’s gender. I don’t recall a gender being mentioned. I think I assumed female because there was a certain hectoring quality to the posts that I associate with politically active women of a certain age. Regardless of gender, Justifiable did seem to have insider knowledge. Of course, one never knows, but the irritation seemed real enough.
I myself have no idea what the true structure of a shopping agreement is, nor do I know anything about how a film is pitched. But given that TB gets so much wrong even about his favorite topics, like comic books, it’s easy to believe he messed up all the details.
“Kill fee” was the ultimate nonsense. He made this nonsense up just to show poor little Les getting trampled by big greedy Hollywood. Boo boo.
Even though Les was the one trampling them. He shut down an entire movie, because it offended him in ways he couldn’t even articulate. Imagine investing in a movie, or getting a role in one, and they tell you it’s cancelled because the author didn’t like it. Les wouldn’t have gotten a second chance. Mason would never get his foot through the door once people find out who he’s bringing with him. “Who wrote it again? Oh, THAT guy? Ha ha, GTF out of here.”
Justifiable did have some presence here on the blog, looking back at the 2020 era posts, so if you dig around here you might find some evidence of their opinions on Todd’s failures with moviemaking writing.
By golly, you’re right. Justifiable was here, at least for a bit. I think they had faded away just around the time I started posting here. But I went and reread a lot of the SoSF posts and commentary on the movie-pitching arc, and wow, what horror/fun to revisit it.
I’m not a fan of social-justice lectures, from Justifiable or anyone else, but you have to admit that arc fairly begged for them, from “the rapper Hershey Barr” to the pun-free, yet pointedly Jewish names of the greedy, heartless Hollywood executives.
An execrable mess that only a snarker could enjoy.
Based on the info Batiuk has given out, it would appear that:
A) Actor George Kennedy was a fan of Crankshaft. Maybe especially because George could see that with some appropriate prosthetics, if Crankshaft were turned into a live-action movie, he could play the title role.
BUT…
B) George Kennedy was not a bankable actor. Nothing against the guy, but no-one went to see the Naked Gun movies to see George Kennedy. By 2000 or so, he was a working actor playing supporting roles in direct-to-video stuff you’ve never heard of. I mean, he had a career most actors would be happy to have had, but you’d still have trouble finding one in a hundred Americans under the age of fifty who would know who George Kennedy was. So, no Hollywood development exec was going to be swayed by the sentence: “We’ve got this project, and wait till you hear who we’ve got attached — George Kennedy!”
AND ALSO…
C) You’d have trouble finding one in a hundred Americans under the age of fifty who would know what Crankshaft was. Note that all development execs are themselves under fifty, and are looking for projects that appeal to their own demographic. It can also appeal to other demos, but it’s GOT to appeal to teens, family audiences, and/or 18-34 year olds in some way in order to make money. A comic strip which has proven over time it has no following amongst anyone under about 70? Not a likely candidate for a cinematic greenlight.
AND THERE’S THE FACT THAT:
D) As obscure as Crankshaft is in the US, it’s got absolutely ZERO recognition elsewhere. There is NO marketing value to the property outside America whatsoever (and therefore no recouping costs in foreign markets) — you may as well doodle something on a napkin and try to pitch that instead.
SO…
E) George Kennedy and/or his agent paid out a few bucks for make-up and photos of GK as Crankshaft. And they may have paid some option money to TB for film rights to the Crankshaft property for a period of time. (Or, more likely, it was a deal where TB got very little money up front, so he’d theoretically get more on the back end.)
Sure, maybe they were a little delusional…but GK and his agent then went ahead and took their shot showing Crankshaft to some execs. And they got turned down, and that was that as far as they were concerned. Because while they may have been semi-delusional, GK and his agent still would have known it was a longshot — after all, GK’s worked in the industry for decades. Still, GK and his agent figured the comparatively small outlay was worth it anyway. Because, hey, it gets him into some meetings, and maybe an exec thinks, “Oh yeah, George Kennedy. Forgot about him! This ‘Crankcase’ thing’s an utter piece of garbage, but George might be good as the grandpa in this other project we’ve got going. Let’s set up a casting session with him…”
HOWEVER…
F) Tom Batiuk doesn’t realize ANY of this, and thinks that there’s actually a deal in place where Crankshaft could become a movie. (There isn’t. Just an option to show the concept around.) He thinks his input is actually welcome. (It’s not.) And he believes he’ll have some sort of creative say in the screenplay. (He won’t.)
ALL OF WHICH LEADS TO…
G) With no story, no appeal to a demographic under 70, no marketable IP, and no bankable star, the project was already DOA at the pitch stage.
I have confidence, however, that Batiuk probably made some ridiculous creative ‘demand’ and thereby found a way to kill the project slightly faster than it otherwise would have died.
Batiuk doesn’t seem to understand sales. 99% of the people you approacb aren’t going to be interested, no matter how good your product is. He seems to think prospects just sit around waiting for him to come through the front door, as if he were some novel concept and not one of a thousand people trying to sell them something.
The “bank in China” thing had this presumption that the studios were obligated to buy the thing, and their reasons for not doing so were petty and unjustified. There probably are studios that specialize in making films for foreign markets. And if something has no appeal to that market, they’re right not to waste their time and money on it. But this was presented as some kind of failure on the studio’s part.
Just a very selfish, juvenile worldview.
There’s an author whose site I’ve been reading for 25 years, which is a long time in web years. John Scalzi, the sci-fi writer. He taught me a lot about Hollywood and book writers. IIRC, his books Agent to the Stars (a sci-fi comedy) and Old Man’s War (Heinleinesque military action) both were optioned for movies. For good reason! And then OMW eventually ran out its option time, so–“THE KILL FEE!”
The rights just revert to the copyright owner after a while. He didn’t seem thrilled about it–why would he not want a movie of his stuff made?–but he wasn’t bitter, or even that upset. He seemed to shrug it off–There’s always next time! I believe he even said how much they paid him to cancel. I think it was $3,000. Which, sure, I’ll take that check for someone else not doing anything! That’s like enough for me to live on for like–wait, 2 months? I get that in Social Security?
One of the first reader questions he answered was “How much say do you, as the original author, get to have about the screenplay?”
He said (paraphrased; I ain’t reading 25 years of Whatever to find out), “Nothing. I sold them the rights. I have nothing to do with this now.”
So, Tom was unhappy they didn’t give him absolute veto power over every word? He’s not at the bottom of the totem pole, he’s not even in the same hemisphere the pole’s in.
Why was he the one to get gifted that Oscar? Not the director, producers, screenwriters of the actual script. Marianne’s Oscar would’ve been more likely won by the caterers. They had a bigger effect on her daily life.
It would’ve been great if that foreward was written by Scalzi. I imagine he’d be cheerfully bemused by the offer, then politely decline. If only the Prince Valiant book’s foreward was him saying “I never read this comic strip. I only read Marvin.” This would be followed by his long list of Hugo awards and all the others he’s won.
Tomli the Mental Dwarf, screaming into his cookie milk: “NO PULITZER STILL COUNTS AS NONE!”
If we’re recounting the blatant libel against Hal Foster, it really should also be mentioned that Undead Phil’s “sample” page was copied from a REAL strip. So Batiuk had his character “create” a strip that was stolen by Batiuk, then accused the actual creator of stealing it from the character. Class act all the way, Tom.
(And then we had the later strip where Flash ForgotHisName said Undead Phil “couldn’t draw horses”, just to get back to the previous discussion on Batiuk’s lack of consistency. If you can’t draw horses, Prince Valiant should be the last strip you should be attempting to draw! A more photorealistic art style in a comic where everyone goes everywhere on horseback? Yeah, they’d TOTALLY want someone who can’t draw horses to take over that comic…)
FantaGraphics has Volume 27 of its Prince Valiant collection available in December and Volume 28 in April of 2024. I’m guessing that TomBa has been tapped for Volume 29 or Volume 30.
Here’s their description of the series –
“Universally acclaimed as the most stunningly gorgeous adventure comic strip of all time, Prince Valiant ran for 35 years under the virtuoso pen of its creator, Hal Foster. Starring a daring and gallant young hero, the series features epic swordfights, elaborate scenes of pomp and pageantry, and breathless plotting that always leaves the reader wanting more. Fantagraphics’ deluxe editions, each collecting two years’ worth of Sunday strips, boast superbly restored artwork that captures every delicate line and chromatic nuance of Foster’s art.”
I can’t imagine a more inappropriate pairing.
I can’t imagine a more inappropriate pairing.
There’s a couple of huge movies right now that were paired just as a web joke.
FunkyValiantbeaner!
It would be just deserts if the Prince Valiant folks invited Batiuk to write a foreword for the collection… and then dropped it in the trash when they got it.
Prince Valiant People: Sorry, Tom, we’re only behaving the way you portrayed us.
Batiuk’s endless self-congratulatory blogs make me doubt the Prince Valiant people even considered him for the foreword. Why would they?
More likely to me:
Batiuk: They probably noticed my heartfelt mention of Prince Valiant in my comic strip last year. They’ve also read in my blog that Prince Valiant was a shared favorite between my father and me growing up. I’ll give them a thrill and write up the foreword for their upcoming Prince Valiant compilation.
Hey, gang< I can't comment on this thread because I cannot bring myself to read any Batiuk Blog, but there's something odd going on with the 'Shaft strips for Monday. The strip dated 8/21/23 over on Arcamax is another "Ed at the BBQ Grill" side-splitter noteworthy solely because it mentions the Canadian wildfires, which started back in April, making this remarkably timely of Batty. Meanwhile, over at GoComics, their 8/21/23 knee-slapper has the Dale Evans crew talking about seeing the future with a "muddled aphorism" of "Deja prevue." Two different Crankys with the same date? What's up with that, and which will survive?
Sunday’s Crankshaft is still missing on Arcamax.
Arcamax seems to be having a number of issues. Primarily, no new Comics Kingdom title content since Friday (as of this post).
Is there some kind of contract dispute? Is The Comics Kingdom raising Arcamax’s fees too? Have too many readers left The Comics Kingdom for Arcamax?
Today Arcamax and GoComics have different Crankshafts, and weirdly, both of them are dated 8/21/2023. I can’t figure out what happened there, but it tracks with the general quality control on the strip.
This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them.
NO! NOW THERE ARE TWO CRANKSHAFTS??? This is genuinely alarming news. Zero Crankshafts is far, far too many.
My suspicion was that the strips running in ArcaMax were the ones TomBa originally intended for this day, but GC decided to offer (and run) alternative strips because of the current wildfires in Canada and the past week’s deadly fires in Hawaii. Given that TB “writes” stuff a year in advance, there should be plenty of alternative strips available.
Problems with this explanation are:
a) far as I can remember, there was not a wildfire in Canada last August. If the “fire” strips are really the originally planned strips for today, that would mean TB’s only writing a few months ahead, not a full year.
b) poster JP Puzzle Whiz at Arcamax and GC said he heard from GC that the ones they’re running are the correct strips for today, meaning the ones on ArcaMax are substitutes from… somewhere.
c) gets even weirder when you notice the strips on ArcaMax contain a full Andrews & McMeel (GoComics) copyright notice.
I can only conclude that TimeMop® (the rather elegant solution™) is back at work!
That is odd. Go Comics also has the “deja preview” strip. The internal dating on the strips both have “8-21”, so it appears that the wildfire one was initially intended for today. Could someone (Davis maybe?) have pulled it because of its tone-deaf content and substituted an old Dale Evans-themed strip?
As of now, they’re both still up. Both strips have a date of 8-21 written on them, and a 2023 copyright. The existence of two CS strips for today can’t just be a technical glitch. (Unless the rabbit hole goes way deeper than we ever thought.)
Batiuk’s blog is useless as usual, and I can’t find any media stories about a replacement strip being run. Daily Cartoonist and Joshreads.com have no commentary about it. No guest posts on any of these sites have any new information. Did anybody find out what happened?
Frankly, BJr6K, I think the existence of even one CS strip a day constitutes a technical glitch.
As well, Arcamax does not have a Crankshaft strip for Sunday, August 20th at all.
Has anyone seen a certain janitor hanging around, nudging things?
Today’s Crankshaft:
Hilarious and timely Canadian wildfire joke there, Tom. Six people are dead, and right now tens of thousands are being evacuated from their homes in Yellowknife and elsewhere. But hey, you got a gag out of it for your little cartoon! Pretty much evens out, I guess, right?
Looking forward to your knee-slapping Maui volcano smoke strip.
Looking forward to his Hurricane Hilary strips where Cindy, Masonne Jarre, and Marianne Winters escape the storm by hiding out in a cave that leads them to the lost subterranean realm of Murania. After meeting with the Queen, Masonne buys the rights to the kingdom’s story and launches a $300 million big-screen remake of “The Phantom Empire.” Producer Jarre accepts the Oscar for Best Picture but winds up giving it to Jfff, who told him all about Murania and where the cave was during a midnight screening of the original “Empire” at the Valentine.
Given TomBa’s tendency to recycle plots and his apparent affection for that odd Gene Autry serial, I fear your post may be prescient.
And it’s all to set up a weak-ass arc about how Ed Crankshaft should not be allowed access to any sort of ignition source like a charcoal grill, a fireplace or a firework.
To add insult to injury, the whole blasted thing is there to set up an arc about how Cranky shouldn’t be allowed near ignition sources.
Dual Crankshaft week continues!
Twice the number of strips — same amount of laughs!
Why is this happening? I can get that they might want to not run “hilarious strips about deadly wildfires” right now. But why do they run it on one site and not another?
Why is ArcaM’s joke-like-object “Some people just want to watch the world burn,” and GC’s like some Jar-Jar cosplay?
I think the answer might be that the barbeque strips were the original ones submitted. I also think that someone at Go Comics saw them as being inappropriate given the tragedy that was unfolding in Maui (and the Canadian Northwest) and asked for the substitution. I stand by my theory that Davis did them using (mostly) existing artwork. Whether TomBa supplied the dialogue (or was even consulted) for the replacement strips is an open question. I could go real “tin-foil hat conspiracy theory” and posit that the Prince Valiant introduction task may have been a diversion given him to keep him from meddling.
See, I’d guess the other way around. I’d guess the Ed-yakkin’-at-the-diner strips were done a year ago, and dated ‘8-21’, ‘8-22′, etc. Then four months ago, TB had the hilarious wildfire/smokin’ BBQ idea. He wanted to get those published as early as possible, figuring that the stories of smoke billowing across the US northwest would still be relevant NOW, but a year from now, who knows? So he dated those dated ‘8-21’, ‘8-22′, etc., possibly the earliest he could make arrangements with the syndicate to have them published. The Ed-yakkin’-at-the-diner strips could then be pushed back a week.
Arcamax got the memo; GoComics didn’t.
Just a guess, of course. But that’s how I’d see it playing out.
UPDATE: According to poster JPuzzleWhiz on GoComics, late Monday night:
“I sent a note to GoComics, telling them about how the strip was different on ArcaMax. They told me that ArcaMax made a substitution and what were seeing here [i.e., on GoComics] is the proper strip for 8-21-2023.”
Arcamax “made a substitution”? What right do they have to change Batiuk’s content? And why do substitute strips even exist? This makes way more sense if everyone BUT Arcamax substituted, because the wildfire jokes are in very bad taste in light of current events.
I have no idea what the contracts say, but there have been several instances where syndicates refused to run a particular daily strip because it was in poor taste or controversial. Didn’t this actually happen before in Crankshaft, with the infamous “Don’t worry, you’re too old and ugly to get raped” strip?
Didn’t this actually happen before in Crankshaft, with the infamous “Don’t worry, you’re too old and ugly to get raped” strip?
Yes, but I think it was only one tiny newspaper in Wisconsin. Basketball coach Bobby Knight got in hot water with a similar comment 15 years earlier. And I think there was a TV weatherman all the way back in the 1970s. Teflon Tom Batiuk gets off scot free again.
Does anyone still read a newspaper with Crankshaft in it? Kind of curious to know which strip is in print.
Are newspapers running different Crankshaft strips too?
Yes, and once again, both strips have today’s date, 8-22, and a 2023 copyright.
I’m assuming it’s the creator, not the syndicate, who dates the strips, but this seems like a bizarre mistake even for TB to make.
[shaking fish] TIIIIIMMMMME-MOPPPP!
That was supposed to say [shaking fist] but… there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.
Let me see if I can get what you’re saying here. You are expecting consistency and quality and a proper process from Tom Buymybooks. Is that correct?
What i’m not expecting from Tom Batiuk is effort. He can barely be bothered to do one comic strip a week, and this situation requires him to do two. And he just complained about busy because he’s writing the Prince Valiant foreword.
Well, I should have known sequential numbering was beyond him when he created the key to the characters the “Hallelujah” pre-finale, and skipped a number, and didn’t bother to go back and fix it even though he eventually noticed he’d messed up.
And he’s sometimes missed holidays by a couple days — it seems to be beyond him to consult a calendar or Grandpa Google or the freakin’ Farmer’s Almanac to see what day Thanksgiving falls on, for example.
But this seems beyond the pale. And doesn’t the syndicate notice that there are two comics with the same date? Don’t they care? Don’t they notify the creator of the error? Do they flip a coin to decide which to run?
Of course, I’m assuming the creator dates the comics, but that would have to be the case, wouldn’t it? I can’t see creators sending a big mass of undated comics to the syndicate and saying, “You date ’em, run ’em in any order, I don’t care.” Especially not a control freak like TB.
An anonymous poster on JoshReads speculates that it’s “a case of Arcamax not getting the memo that a storyline has been pulled and they have to run the replacement strips”. That would fit the facts.
I like shaking fish. Time-Mop deserves to be fish-slapped.
The one on GoComics has got to be a re-run from the 90s, if Mitch’s haircut is any indication…
There’s a story that George McManus, the creator of “Bringing Up Father,” had a substantial lazy streak. So when he would read about a plane crash, he would telegram his syndicate and say “The latest strips were on that plane, run old stuff.” One time he tried that again, and the syndicate wired back, “George, no wonder your strips are always late. That plane was going in the opposite direction.”
I had to read TB’s blog post about four times before I noticed that he said he was working on an intro for the “Prince Valiant” collection, but never said they would actually publish it.
Greater luminaria than he have written things and then had them then not published. The liner notes for Frank Zappa’s album “You Are What You Is” were originally written for Newsweek, which deemed them “too idiosyncratic for publication,” which is how they wound up as (in FZ’s words) “decorative filler material.”
Wanna bet that if TB’s intro to the latest “Valiant” is bounced by Fantagraphics, we’ll be able to read it in his blog?
Greater luminaria than he have written things and then had them then not published.
Yes, that’s what a kill fee actually is. It’s when they hire freelance work but choose not to publish it for some unrelated reason.
But you make a good point – Batiuk is an unreliable narrator about his own life. Also, having him write a Prince Valiant foreword is pretty inconsistent with the kind of people Fantagraphics had write them in the past. They’ve almost all been historians or artists. And more recent editions haven’t had forewords.
Prince Valiant doesn’t lend itself to whimsy or humor. It’s not The Far Side, whose books had some pretty epic forewords by Steven King, Robin Williams, Jane Goodall (after the ‘tramp’ incident) and others.
Since Andrew mentioned above that Justifiable had once been a poster here during the movie arc — before I was a regular reader/poster — I went to look up the comments in that arc. What fun, and then I found this doozy by the estimable Charles:
How… how did he know? How could he know? Is Charles… Timemop?
Oh, Leroy……?
I got you, Duck.