Picking up Speed

January 24, 2010.

The Marvel Character Speedball circa 2006

I know we’ve made fun of it a lot. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve misunderstood this Komix Korner strip. Maybe Batiuk was well aware that Speedball had jumped off emo mountain into a sea of psychotic and deeply disturbed spikes and Batiuk was actually commenting on his turn as the ridiculously gritty ‘Penance’.

If Batiuk ever brings this strip up on his Annotated Funky, I’m sure he will helpfully refuse to explain; instead letting us know that John Howard and Kevin are watching as Crazy Harry explains Silver Age Speedball to an audience of Owen, Cody, and the temporally displaced and de-aged Pete Roberts and Coach Stropp.

Speaking of deeply disturbed and borderline psychotic…

Wally had dropped out of college and was working Montoni’s at this point.
Becky’s two armed doppelganger sitting right behind him is making Wally sweat!
St. Les and Blessed Funky The Beatified are the only ones to notice Wally’s freakout. Definitely not Skunky and the One-Armed-Bandit.
Oh, Rana notices too, I guess…
I wonder if this is a flashback or fantasy sequence? If it’s a flashback I guess these other guys crawling and surrendering were straight up executed at some point. Dark.
Wow. What a powerful display of emotion. Rana must mean a lot to Wally. I’m sure that Rana will be a big part of Wally’s recovery and future life and that he won’t forget to invite her to his next wedding and be completely in the dark about her future plans, education, and religion.
Skunky really adds a lot to this arc.
He’s looking into the darkness, she’s looking into the corner.
Yeah, just fine. Why do you ask?
Gotta give Ayers some props for the nuance in Wally’s expressions here…

And where have we seen this close up longing look to signal the end of a relationship before? Oh yeah! Back in 2003. When Cindy finally picked fame, fortune, and the big city life over a man with part ownership in a failing pizza restaurant who would age like a lump of mozzarella in the sun.

I bet that kiss tastes like Diet Coke and Maybelline mixed with garlic.
The average response to Funky Winkerbean, the man or the strip.

I guess it’s a Winkerbean divorce tradition.

Speaking if Marital Bliss! I’m flying out to a friend’s wedding tonight. But I’m sure Epicus, BJ6K, and/or TFH will fill in the gaps until I get back.

55 thoughts on “Picking up Speed”

  1. This is the clumsy way Batiuk paints himself out of a corner. Instead of making Becky look like a mindless flake, he makes it Wally’s idea to remove himself and his issues from her equation.
    It’s like how Funky takes his alcoholism ball away because he doesn’t think Cindy is strong enough either.

    1. Yep. It’s like he introduces plot points, and then insulates his characters from having to do anything in response to them. Gut-wrenching love triangle? Make one of the suitors disqualify himself. CTE and medical expenses? Have the sufferer kill himself, and the police conveniently covers it up so they can commit insurance fraud. Terrorist bombing? Does no actual damage. Medical malpractice? Ignore it all, accept slow and painful death, then a write a book off-panel even though he was despite being a useless basket case throughout.

  2. This strip is a great example of the flaky tone in Funky Winkerbean:

    This doesn’t look like a combat veteran having a serious mental breakdown. This looks like a man being chased by something hilarious.

    Batiuk’s art style was too silly for drama, and too realistic for comedy. It tried to straddle the line but failed badly at both.

        1. Posting any URL that ends in an image file extension (.JPG, .GIF, .PNG, others) will display the image in the discussion,

      4. Here’s one. Kind of a salute to Comic Book Harriet.

        STAMPEDE!!!

        I wish I knew how to remove the cowboy.

      5. Here’s another.

        Uh, oh. Seems like Buddy fathered a litter. I guess somebody forgot to neuter him. Oops.

      6. Happy Friday, everyone. It’s amazing how productive I can be when I’m properly liquored up. Hubby was mixing Manhattans tonight.

        Here’s my favorite of the three. RUN AWAY!!!

        Thanks for the Wally images, guys!

  3. I bet that kiss tastes like Diet Coke and Maybelline mixed with garlic.

    Unlike TB’s comic strips, this is worth framing. Outstanding!

  4. What was the point in having Les notice Wally’s episode?

    Batiuk: Les’s hyper-awareness and cat-like reflexes have him prepared for any type of emergency.
    (wipes away tear) He’s the greatest.

    1. Despite Les noticing Wally’s distress, he never follows outside to see if he can help. I guess Les is only interested in carrying damsels out of burning buildings and driving suicide attempts to the hospital.

      Les: I don’t help dudes.

      2. “Wally marches towards Les and pummels the shit out of him, leaving Les a barely breathing bloody mess”

    2. He didn’t actually notice Wally’s episode. He just realized someone is seating in Lisa’s special place in the bleachers, and he’s trying to figure out how to get up and remove them.

      1. Oh, right. The spot in the bleachers where Les and Lisa sat together because Timemop “nudged” them. 🙄

  5. Wally’s gaunt, hangdog, resigned, heavy-lidded, bald face is just Lisa in drag. I want to slap, then strangle, then slap him every single time I see him appear.

    Does that make me a bad, unsympathetic person? Then I’ll wear that badge proudly.

    FYI, it’s far more common for PTSD and trauma victims to try to show a brave face to the world vs moping around with their head hung down. But once again, Puff Batty doesn’t trust us to understand that people who are messed up are frequently scared to show weakness, and so it’s common for them to try to bluster their way through, hoping they can fake it till they make it.

    He figures we won’t understand that Wally is damaged unless he stamps DAMAGED GOODS on his forehead in each and every panel

    Imagine how much more impactful this would have been if Wally had insisted he was okay, and then we found out he was white-knuckling it through the whole time.

    1. He figures we won’t understand that Wally is damaged unless he stamps DAMAGED GOODS on his forehead in each and every panel

      Oh my Jeebus, was Jared Leto’s Joker based on Wally Winkerbean? That would explain so much!

    2. We should have been seeing the same slow burn we got before the IT WAS HER BABY thing on M*A*S”H but all Batiuk watched was Hawkeye driving the tank out of the compound.

  6. So why was Wally sitting surrounded by people he (probably) doesn’t know, rather than sitting near his actual acquaintances? I mean, I can understand why he might not want to sit next to Becky and Skunky. And I can understand why he wouldn’t want to sit near Les (he’s an insufferable douchebag). But why wouldn’t Wally try to be near Funky, his unclecousin, someone who could at least try to help him if he has a complete freakout? You’d think Wally would want to stick close to the people he’s familiar with, and that those people would try to keep him close in case his PTSD kicks in, but… nope, not in Batiuk World, I guess. Let the traumatized war veteran fend for himself!

    1. That depends on some unknown backstory. Did Wally even know he had the condition? It’s possible he didn’t, which means he wouldn’t have taken any precautions. It’s fair to ask why he’s not sitting with friends, but under the circumstances her may not have had any. The Funkyverse runs on “characters do whatever the story needs them to do”, but this is a less egregious example IMO.

  7. If I were going to do a strip about PTSD, I’d research the hell out of it before even trying, then run my script by some people who have it to make sure it’s accurate.
    Tom, however, is all “Silent movies are from the 1940s, where no one talks but chimps” because a week’s research is too much work for a strip that’s only written a year in advance.
    “Murderous bus driver never held accountable” is okay if you’re going for flat-out goofiness, not when it’s supposed to be Oh-So Serious. Pretending you know more than anyone without trying…Kind of a trait of his.
    Severe alcoholism, hooliganism, and regular beatings to the head by your wife’s rolling pin–“Tom Batuik’s Andy Capp” would be dark. And yet, somehow less realistic than the actual Capp.

    1. Bill the Splut:

      You remind me of Harvey Kurtzman’s satire of *Bringing Up Father,* in which we see two takes on the same material.

      First, Will Elder renders the slapstick mayhem in a comic manner, as you would see in George McManus’s original.

      Second, Bernard Krigstein depicts it in a realistic fashion, and you realize how dreadful the circumstances would be in real life (“Jiggie” will not grow another tooth).

      I’m in the minority in preferring Kurtzman’s war title work (where he did extensive research, unlike certain other cartoonists we won’t name), finding his satire uneven, but when he was good, he was definitely great, as he was in *Bringing Back Father.*

  9. An addendum to the oft-discussed Speedball and his Funkyverse shoutout: by 2012 the Penance angle was actually done and over with, with the character being written to better cope with his trauma and starting to move on and forgive himself (most notably covered in the “Fear Itself: The Home Front” miniseries in 2010). Maybe that’s part of the layers in Tom’s shoutout; he knows Marvel realized the error of their ways and went for Speedy specifically because he “proved a point” regarding too much “disturbed and borderline psychotic” writing. Of course we all know how that comes off.

    Not too much to snark about with regards to Wally’s breakdown, TBH. The expressions are definitely a bit over the top and the rate at which people notice him is a tad annoying, but I guess it’s fairly believable as a breakdown. The main issues of course still stem from this certainly feeling like more “generic” war PTSD than the conditions someone held captive for 10 years would be more concerned about. Would he really want to exile himself in a dark apartment with that logic, for one thing? And as for Becky and Skunky, if this had continued to be his level of presence in their lives I’d be a little more satisfied, but of course we know what does (or doesn’t) happen next. Most I remember is that we’re a few months away from John’s recession blues being so bad that his rent struggles will send Funky towards a direct encounter with some woman talking on her cellphone while driving…

    1. And a PS note on the Batty blog: Today Tom made a shout-out to the biography and legacy of an old Golden Age creator by the name of Mac Raboy. Quaint as it is, it’s also framed with yet another “Nostalgic Memory” context of our young author eating pumpernickel bread on his dad’s lap as the Flash Gordon strip was read aloud to him, with the recommendation that it’s the ideal snack for such a reading. Man really loves his “comics with food”, that much is clear.

  10. Hoo-boy, more fun with Flash Fridays! https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/flash-fridays-the-flash-321-may-1983/

    The cover to this issue is the weakest in a recent string of pretty uninspiring covers, and it frankly points to an overall lack of editorial oversight.

    Yeah, “overall lack of editorial oversight” is something you’d know all about, isn’t it, Tom?

    Even the tone of the letter col is of condescension to the readers and their input.

    Yeah, “condescension to the readers and their input” is something you’d know all about, isn’t it, Tom?

    No one seems to be paying any attention to the writing, and, as a result, the book has been allowed to drift back to being nothing more than a series of incidents rather than a cohesively told story. It’s mess that will only contribute to the decline in readership.

    Yeah, a “mess that will only contribute to the decline in readership” is something you’d know all about, isn’t it, Tom?

    Any one of these elements could have supported a good solid story. Rather than sparking interest, however, this indifferent, throw-everything-on-the-wall approach merely sows confusion which, in turn will lead to indifference on the part of the readers.

    Yeah, an “indifferent, throw-everything-on-the-wall-approach which sows confusion” and “indifference on the part of the readers” are things you’d know all about, aren’t they, Tom?

    Batiuk’s complete lack of self-awareness is probably funnier than anything he’s written in decades…

    1. It’s interesting that he expects other people to dig in and do the job right for his entertainment, but cannot see how he’s lacking in the exact same things.

      Also, just seeing the cover, I was surprised it wasn’t featured as a “cover me” entry. Seems pretty dynamic and, well, “striking” (sorry). Just goes to show that Batiuk cannot be predicted.

    2. “Any one of these elements could have supported a good solid story” is practically Tom Batiuk’s tagline.

    3. That single page cements the case. Tom Batiuk deserves and has deserved every ounce of criticism he gets.

    4. It’s kind of typical of Batiuk that he doesn’t understand that he’s what he’s complaining about. It’s like Quasimodo asking “WHAT HUMP?”

  13. I was at work when news of the Oklahoma City bombing happened. My coworkers thought “It’s Muslims!” Which made sense; this was just 3 years since their failed WTC attack. (In the parking garage, if you’ve forgotten) I said “Pretty sure those guys don’t even know Oklahoma exists! It’s right-wing militias!” Turned out, it was not Muslims.

    In 1999, I wrote a parody of “Independence Day.” The opening attacks were described as “The complete and utter destruction of our beloved national monuments–Graceland, GONE! Six Flags Over New Jersey, POW! The Grand Canyon, FILLED IN! The Insurance Capital of the World, Hartford Connecticut, IGNORED!”

    I tried to find out what happened during “USA!!” Why did terrorists attack the post office in some rust belt Ohio town that was just crumbling infrastructure and a pizza place? Man, just wait a few years, that town’s gone anyway.
    I did not find an answer online, but I did find a 1996 article from the Hartford CT Courant abut that arc. It’s all Tom smarm, and certainly proves that he never has held back a storyline because of current events. “I held onto the bombing story line for about a year,” says Batiuk, 49, who has been guiding Funky and his friends through Westview High School and adulthood since 1972. “I wanted some time to pass because of Oklahoma City.”
    Dude, you hold back every strip for a year. Who writes a strip on “a week opening an envelope” without asking themselves “Is this remotely interesting? Tom says YES!”
    It’s so him. Too bad that typo (deliberate?) of “Johnny Darling” didn’t stick.
    Anyway, here ya go:
    https://www.courant.com/1996/07/29/when-funnies-get-serious/

    1. Why was the post office bombed? Well, it turns out… um… we have no idea, really? Maybe it was because of right-wing talk radio, but that’s only sort of implied in a very loose way. At the beginning of the arc, Tony’s listening to a talk radio show and defending it by saying it’s not meant to be taken seriously. At the end of the arc, he shuts the radio off rather than listen to the show again. We’re thus probably supposed to conclude the bomber was inspired by the rhetoric of a Rush Limbaugh-type. But honestly, their motivation could have been anything; maybe they petitioned the Postmaster General to issue a set of commemorative stamps for The Phantom Empire and were rejected. Batiuk never bothered to actually reveal who the bomber was, and thus never explained their motivations. Yep, that was the big denouement: we find out nothing about the who or the why, so we can see more of Les. Thanks, Tom! The Pulitzer is on the way!*

      *(Just not on its way to you.)

    2. Why did terrorists attack the post office in some rust belt Ohio town that was just crumbling infrastructure and a pizza place

      Because it has to affect the characters personally, otherwise they don’t give a shit. See, for example, the entire city of Los Angeles burning down but after we assess what happened to Mason’s house, it no longer matters. Dare I ask how Batiuk portrayed 9/11 in FW? I only know the 10 year anniversary strip that was pretty throwaway.

      I’d also forgotten that Batiuk had the radio shock jock that inspired the post office bombing complaining about “portrayals of teenage pregnancy in newspaper comic strips” rather than any relevant political or social flashpoint: the fucking cojones on that guy, combined with his incredible cowardice in any other context.

      1. the radio shock jock that inspired the post office bombing complaining about “portrayals of teenage pregnancy in newspaper comic strips”
        Please tell me you’re joking. I realize that TB thinks he’s the only person in the world who matters, but that’s beyond the pale.

        You sure it wasn’t “USA!! ARE MY MAIL ORDER FLASH OMNIBUSES OKAY?!” (tears books from the burnt arms of a corpse of a short woman in a postal uniform) “THANK GOD!” (yells to nowhere in particular in the flaming ruins) “Lisa, I’ll come check on you tomorrow!” (kicks corpse) “Outta my way, Extra Crispy!”

        1. Nope, that’s actually what Batiuk had the guy complaining about. Also said comic strips talking about “guns in school” and “teen suicide”. I’m sure Batiuk was patting himself on the back for drawing the ire of a fictional right-wing talk radio host that he himself invented.

          1. The Mary Sue avatar who everyone loves, especially those of whatever persuasion the author thinks is hawwt, and all his very evil enemies try to destroy him, and only him, because he’s that important?
            Put that on your next Pulitzer CV, Tomba. “I invented 1998 AOL author-insert fanfic sites.”

      2. I’m struggling to find more content about 9/11 in FW. There were some strips about it featured here in the past but I can’t find them right away. I recall there being a few strips of Cindy being a reporter and standing aside the rubble and giving the usual bloviating lines that sound noble and intellectual but take 1000 words to say nothing. Coincidentally, that’s pretty much exactly what happened in real life anyway, so that’s a happy accident for TB’s writing to not stray from reality there.

        There was some talk of comparison to a lone tree growing nearby and and allusion to the city rebuilding. Apparently there was some interview with Ann Apple, but I don’t recall seeing that here.

        Overall, nothing that I can immediately recall as being extraordinarily bad.

        In my search I came across a project that all strip artists collaborated upon for the 10th anniversary of the attack. There was a site: cartoonistsremember911.com . All gone now.

        1. We might end up getting to that, according to our own Act 3 timeline, the 9/11/2011 strip actually featured Becky and Wally together for pathos

  14. Not sure if anyone here reads Mary Worth, but a new story began this week with a mysterious stranger and the Comics Curmudgeon asked us to speculate on who this person is.

    A commenter there left this reply:
    taig
    September 21st, 2023 at 4:46 am Reply
    Mary Worth: In a surprise no one was expecting, it turns out he’s Harry Dinkle’s forgotten son, and the bag holds the band turkey Harry gave him those many years ago.

    1. I’m no longer a reader of Mary Worth, but you made me look. The guy resembles Aldo Kelrast on steriods. Aldo’s son?

      I hope he pursues Mary like his father.
      Aldo Jr.: Mary! I want to squeeze your muffins!

      1. I’d think that Aldo Jr. would probably just sic the police on the meddlin’ she devil for causing the death of Aldo Jr.’s father

        Scott Hewlett: Marian Worth, You are under arrest for the murder of Aldo Kerast Sr.!

  15. Rush Limbaugh wannabe ragging on newspaper comix featuring mentally illness = Evil bigot who deprives Les of his freedom of speech

    Crazy Harry ragging on comic books featuring mental illness = Truth-teller who enlightens the benighted youth of today

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