67 thoughts on “Alive…Without a Purpose!”

  1. It will be funny seeing how quickly Atomik Komix drops no-talent Durwood after Pete leaves, since Pete is the only reason Durwood has ever gotten work as a creative in the entertainment industry (to be fair, Frankie and Lenny made Boy Lisa an offer).

    It won’t be funny for very long, though, since we all KNOW where Durwood is going to work once AK decides to replace him with the ghost of Frank Bolle.

    *sigh* Well, we all did say we were sick of all the comic book shtick in the Batiukverse…

    1. Atomik Komix pretty much has to go out of business now. Ruby Lith retired, Flash and Phil are ancient, Pete’s leaving, and apparently he’s making Mindy leave too. Durwood is the only long-term employee left.

      I predict this won’t be a problem, though. They’ll just keep making comic books with one employee, just like they had a bloated product line with six employees.

      1. It’s hard to imagine TB voluntarily giving up his ego-w@nking Sunday comix covers — virtually all of which, pathetically, are ideas from his prépübescent years.

        I think Atomik Komix will continue with a skeleton crew.

        1. It’s hard to imagine TB voluntarily giving up his ego-w@nking Sunday comix covers

          Which is another data point supporting your retirement theory.

        2. Droop Dawg will continue to be the BEST guy Tom wishes he was! He’ll be writing hit movie screenplays AND hit comical books AND turn Montoni’s into the premiere restaurant in the much-desired rust belt of the Cleveland area! Without DOING ANYTHING
          He’s comics! Those guys have everything handed to them on silver trays! Especially (wink wink) Hot Blondes!! Maybe Sailor Moon will literally drop from the skies into his arms! (“She thinks he’s cute!!”)
          (sniff, sniff) Huh. Smells like 1999 Daveykins in here…

          2. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in awhile
            And probably wish you hadn’t.

            Dumb Farm Hick: “I don’t know an Obi-Wan Kenobi–Maybe old Ben Kenobi has heard of him!”
            Let’s admit it: We all love the Real Trilogy, but gol-dang if it didn’t have some goofy dialog.
            (Why is there a droid that speaks millions of languages that everyone else easily speaks? I can only get general concepts through to my cat)
            R2D2: “SQUEAK BEEP BOOOP!”
            “I fed you 3 times today!”
            (cranky R2D2 noises)

      2. If you remember, Mopey and Dopey became pretty much vestigial appendages at Atomik Comix once Phil and Flash joined forces to produce new comics for them.

        Also remember that Batiuk saw nothing wrong with the idea of 100 year-old Cliff Anger starting up a business in the highly stressful, highly competitive industry of media figure representation. I don’t think he realizes that Phil and Flash probably wouldn’t want to keep doing this at 97 or however old they are. Hell, Crankshaft’s still driving a bus and shit and he’s somewhere around 108.

  2. Great cover art, ComicBookHarriet! Do you draw it, yourself?
    Gratefully borrowed from the Duck of Death:
    [shaking fish] TIIIIIMMMMME-MOPPPP!
    I do predict a time skip, (it is so easy!) between Mopey buying Montoni’s and the reopening. He will not show the fully stocked inside until it is already operating. As is his usual, TB will avoid all of the potential stories inherent in the startup, and learning a new business. It will jump one month later where Mopey is wildly successful and the pizzeria is always jam packed.
    The only plus side from the time skip: we might actually see Ed Crankshaft in his own strip.

    2. For real entertainment, read Crankshaft comments on GoComics for today 10-26/2023.
      It is nothing but knives and cutlasses. Everybody hates anyone with a differing opinion. It is so busy, (How busy is it?) that JJ O’Malley can only get two replies in and no original comment. Bill the Splut holds his own, and dearly beloved Brian Perler has his back. But, saving the best for last, is Be Ware of Eve Hill asking, “Where is Crankshaft? Check her on the previous days. BWOEH has been on fire this week on GC. Even more than Ed’s chimney.
      I know my next comment is late, but Davis drew some beautiful panels of Ed’s chimney on fire. Perfection. I hope you all saw them in color. Finding art in surprising places.

      1. Funny thing is, all the GoComics regulars have been complaining about the same things we have this week.

      2. “Dearly beloved”? Honestly, I think that made my day, thanks.

        (In case it’s not clear, that’s actually me, I signed up on GoComics under my real name, and never changed it to an alias.)

      3. Well, to be fair, my main comment was a very obscure Bronze Age comics reference comparing Mopey Pete to a member of a gonzo Marvel villain team whose members all had something wrong with their craniums (we miss you, Steve Gerber!). I’m sure there’ll be something I crack wise on Fri. or Sat. that’ll get someone’s Calvin Kleins in a bunch.

        1. JJ O’Malley
          ⭐️⭐️⭐️🌟 for the Steve Gerber reference. My brother loved Howard the Duck. It is sad that Steve didn’t live long enough to see his creation on film. (No. I am not mentioning that one.)
          You make me anticipate Friday and Saturday for the GC jocularity.

  3. Duck Has A Theory! part XVII

    We’ve often discussed the fact that TB has no “theory of mind” — in other words, that he can’t conjure up emotions for any of his characters that he doesn’t have himself. That’s why there’s no conflict in his world; it would require characters to disagree, which would mean at least one character thinks something TB doesn’t think. And that’s beyond his capability to write, or even imagine.

    So what we are seeing here is effectively TB announcing his retirement.

    Today, Pete tells Mindy, “Yeah, I’ve kind of soured on the comic book biz. Been there… done the therapy!”

    The last time we saw Pete he was as enthusiastic as ever about comix. We certainly haven’t seen him have, or even need, therapy related to it.

    This is simply Batiuk putting his own thoughts into the mouth of Pete, one of his favorite Gary Stus.

    He’s soured on comics. He’s ready to leave the business.

    If this is true, that means “The Burnings” will likely be the final arc of his career.

    2. The man has been on auto-pilot with his work for more than ten years. He’s said everything that he wants to and can think to say by now. It’s time.

      Love the cover, Harriet!

    3. …and I also remember that Ruby’s retirement was the harbinger of the end of FW.

      Jeez, talk about a “hidebound literalist”….

      1. Always remember: literally the last-ever Funky Winkerbean strip contained the line “It’s time to retire”. (Somehow, when doing his “Annotated Funky” blog posts, Batiuk managed to not inform us that was a meta-reference to him retiring the strip. Not sure how he pulled that off.)

    1. What a strange strip. No one looked to Siskel and Ebert to dictate their opinions to them. It wouldn’t have worked in any case, since the two often disagreed.

      The point was not that the viewer would see every movie and reserve judgement till S&E weighed in; the point was that the critics would preview the movie before release (recall that the show was called “Sneak Previews” — Tom, do you think that might have been a hint about content?). The viewer would decide whether the film was worth paying to see. Is TB being intentionally disingenuous here, or just incredibly dull-witted?

      You’re right, bc. Clearly one or both of the guys either praised something TB hated, or panned something he liked. Truly an unforgivable sin.

      Ebert has been discussed here before — he was a warm, witty, knowledgeable, and highly engaging writer whose fans adored him. And he wrote the screenplay for a camp classic. No doubt there was a little jealousy showing there for ol’ Tommy.

      I know there are many Ebert fans here, so I’ll drop this little gem: A mimeographed fanzine he wrote when he was a teenager. Absolute gold, and you can already detect the Ebert voice. I cannot post links, so do the necessary:

      https: // fanac. org/fanzines/Stymie/Stymie01. pdf

      Ebert’s Wikipedia page includes this wonderful quote, and the mention of the smartalecky EC title Bats obviously despised is a clue to why Ebert offends his sensibilities:

      “I learned to be a movie critic by reading Mad magazine … Mad’s parodies made me aware of the machine inside the skin – of the way a movie might look original on the outside, while inside it was just recycling the same old dumb formulas. I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies; I lost it at Mad magazine.”

      — Roger Ebert, Mad About the Movies (1998 parody collection)

    2. I doubt they ever bothered reviewing something so old (even when they were alive) and obscure. But yeah, Siskel and Ebert was a strange thing for Batiuk to attack in his comic strip. Also, Roger Ebert was the kind of guy it’s unwise to start a war of words with. Ask Rob Schneider how that worked out for him. (Ebert could even use the same argument against Batiuk.)

      1. I’m sure they never reviewed The Phantom Empire. But they clearly didn’t appreciate something TB holds dear, we may never know what. According to TB, though, you should never have opinions that differ from his.

        1. rogerebert.com is a repository of all Ebert’s past reviews, and there isn’t one for “Radio Ranch” or “Phantom Empire.” There are a few for movies that old, or older (you can search by year). Its probably just too insignificant/dated to warrant a review.

          1. BJK6K

            Yeah, how could he leave “The Phantom Empire” out of “Great Movies” and include something like “La Ceremonie”?

            Or think John Wayne in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” was worthier of attention than Gene Autry in “Radio Ranch”?

            The mind boggles.

          2. Well, that’s kind of a symptom of a larger issue: Batiuk fixated on a niche phenomenon no one else bothered paying attention to and inflates the lack of interest into a great big slam against him and joy and what the Hell ever. The next year will be a big hunt for that idiotic band box toy that didn’t make it as big as Batiuk thought it would.

        2. The man also thought that they commissioned the campy sixties Bat-Man with the sole intent of punishing him for liking comic books. His opinion is junk.

      2. Arguing with the likes of him was beneath his dignity. He made a point of not reacting at all when the dime store Lynn Johnston behind Stone Soup thought his review of Ya-Ya Sisterhood meant stay in the kitchen when it actually meant “How does it help women to confuse spouting thought-terminating slop with wisdom?”

        1. Ebert’s response to Rob Schneider was such a nuclear burn that I won’t judge him for it. It’s why his review book was titled “Your Movie Sucks.”

          1. As for Ya-Ya Sisterhood, he gave a film filled with twee, arch and insufferable women propelled with an impatience for the men who subsidize their lunacy its right name and got raked over the coals by…..a twee, arch and insufferable woman animated by an active impatience with men, children who talk back, co-workers who exploit her passive-aggressive refusal to tell him not to dump the work they don’t want to do on her desk…….

          2. Bizarrely, I recently read *Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood* and made a discovery:

            Tom Batiuk and Rebecca Wells do have one thing in common!

            Their research is sloppy. Siddalee, our Louisiana-born heroine doesn’t know that Huey Long was Senator from the Pelican State and not Governor in 1934, for instance, and when she references a movie, she doesn’t bother to check when exactly it came out.

            For instance, we have a Shirley Temple Look-a-Like Contest in 1934 and the text references “Bright Eyes”…which opened late in December that year (December 28th, to be exact).

            After the Ya-Yas screw up the contest, there’s mention of a “Flash Gordon” serial as a reward for the customers…but the first serial came out in 1936. There was a radio serial before the cinematic one, but that was in 1935.

            Also, there’s the offer of free passes to “To Be or Not to Be” at the end of 1942…when it opened in February 1942. There’s no indication that Thornton gets movies that late in the year. (Furthermore, the fact that Carole Lombard, its leading lady, died in a plane crash while rallying for bonds isn’t even mentioned!)

            My favorite example is a 1943 nod to Orson Welles’s “Jane Eyre” (Robert Stevenson has the directorial credit; if you had to pick a star, wouldn’t teenage girls be more apt to think of Joan Fontaine? Especially when they loved her sister Olivia in “Gone with the Wind” a few years earlier? The quartet doesn’t seem to be capable of appreciating “Citizen Kane” or “The Magnificent Ambersons”)…which opened in 1943, yes, in the United Kingdom. In the United States, it opened in 1944.

            But I’m sure she knows that Charlie Chaplin’s last pure silent picture was 1931’s “City Lights.”

            Sometimes it’s hard being a historian, even if you can understand why Captain Kirk planned to take Edith Keeler to see Clark Gable rather than Richard Dix.

            And maybe I have to stop picking up books on the sidewalks of New York, which was where I found Wells’s novel.

    3. OK. This JD about Siskel & Ebert doesn’t entirely miss to my sensibilities. I’m going to get long winded and personal again, so get your Page Down key or scroll wheel ready if you’ll skip it.

      I was 10 years old in 1990 and raised in a Chicago suburb. Even at that age, I enjoyed watching S&E at that point for many reasons. They were two Chicago newspaper critics so I found it interesting to see them speaking in person, because I’d read their reviews in the Sun Times and Tribune. It gave me exposure to many movies which I know I’d never see. It gave me their mentalities behind what they liked and disliked. It gave me an exposure on how to form an opinion rather than merely simply holding an opinion. It informed me on how to say how I liked something rather than if I liked something. Also, seeing their endorsements on movie posters, usually with theirs being the largest, told me that their opinions had sway. They mattered. All they did was talk about movies and the general public cared about it.

      However, then as now, I more personally cared about video games than movies, so for as much as I ate up S&E’s print and televised reviews, I was doubly as engrossed with that from video game magazines and such. Through my voracious reading all of the EGM and GamePro and Nintendo Power and the rest, I did wonder where the S&E of the video game world was. Sure, those magazines all had reviews, but they didn’t carry practically any kind of clout at all, much less like that which S&E had. Mid 90s comes bringing Next Generation magazine and game reviews in newspapers, among other things. The conversation was maturing and becoming more relevant to the public conscious. At this point I was writing my own content for local fanzines, because from watching S&E as a child to a teenager, I wanted to try my hand at maybe becoming something of an S&E caliber reviewer of video games myself, if nobody else was going to fill that void.

      Time marches on, the Internet murders journalism and monoculture, and now there is no chance that there will be another Siskel & Ebert ever again for any kind of medium – print, music, film, games, anything. No chance. Everything and everyone is fractured off into their own isolated bubble, and nobody’s critical word carries enough weight that the public at large deems it to have any value. Well, not individually – rather, what we have now are aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic; so now, rather than individuals holding that kind of cultural sway, it is an amalgamated collective which forms that voice. So much so that companies will actually calculate bonus pay to the creators of these works on the basis of Metacritic values. To me, this is absolute madness.

      I’ve spent enough time playing video games that I know what I like and I know what I dislike, and I know that most games which get high marks on Metacritic are games that I don’t care about playing and typically don’t like playing if I ever bother trying. I spent an hour on Bloodborne to find it fully unenjoyable to play (and I’ve 1-credit-cleared Cave shooters so you can take your git gud retort and cram that up your ass), so much so that I won’t touch Elden Ring regardless of how many awards it gets. I only liked Nier Automata during its tutorial and found it to be a complete bore once the open-world portion begins, and dropped it at that point. 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim has critics endlessly fawning over it and I absolutely can’t stand the act of playing it because of how that game displays combat action as literal dots on a radar map. Radiant Silvergun is the media darling of the shooter genre and I can write ten times the words I’ve written here to say how much I loathe practically everything about that game. And so on. At this point where I’m at now, I take any critical word about a game, in isolation or collective, with a partial grain of salt. I really don’t care who or how many people say that a game is good – I know what I’ll like and what I won’t, critics be damned.

      It’s one thing for a two hour movie – if you take a critic at their word that a movie is good and you hate it, well, you’re out two hours, that’s too bad. But I cannot fathom why anyone in the current year takes any video game critic at their word about any video game. This is especially so since we know – Game Informer plainly said as much – that mainstream video game reviewers write content that they think their audience wants to read rather than write what their actual opinions are. We also know that most video game reviewers do not take the act of writing a review seriously and in most cases are completely inept at even playing the damned games. As a child I didn’t realize it but it’s been made explicitly clear for years now – the standard video game journalistic review is nothing more than an alternative form of an advertisement, and people read them with no greater intent than to validate their preconceived notions about the game. And, and, and, and, and, despite all of this, other people still yet rely on video game reviews to hold any kind of sway on what video games they decide to buy or play. OK, if you’re a ten year old child, maybe that’s justification there, but if you’re an adult in the year 2023, you have no goddamned reason to take anyone’s word – not Tim Rogers, not anyone else, not everyone else in combination – into consideration if you want to buy and play a game. You should already know god damned well how the reviews for games like Diablo 4 or Final Fantasy 16 or Zelda Tears of The Kingdom or Super Mario Wonder or any game will be written, and you should already know whether or not you care about playing any of them before you read a single word of opinion about them by anyone else. And yet you’re going to announce that you’re going to “wait for reviews” until you think you’re going to buy Street Fighter 6 or not? Fuck off. Just fuck off. Even if you are that dumb you shouldn’t make it known to the public. You already know if you’ll care about SF6 without touching it, so get the fuck out of here with your deference to critics. All the while, Metacritic determines how much bonus money the creators of the games make, because of these critics. Absolute madness.

      So, yes. 30 years after 1990, with all of my personal perspective which I wrote above as a lens to my eye, I looked at today’s John Darling, which makes its stated intent perfectly clear from the outset, and puts the entire ecosystem of Siskel And Ebert into question from a detached perspective, and I laughed. I did. Because, yes, seriously, if I think about it all for a moment, I do have to at least wonder just for a tiny bit: Why did anyone ever care about what Siskel and Ebert had to say about anything? Just – why? Seriously, to hell with them! Just watch the damned movies yourselves! I get it. I get it, because I now find myself saying the same thing.

      In closing, though, there’s only so much fuck the critics attitude that a creator can justify with their own work. Cavalier attitudes like that are a factor for what has ultimately tarnished things like The Simpsons, as it has the work by our dearly beloved Tom Batiuk himself here.

      1. I do have to at least wonder just for a tiny bit: Why did anyone ever care about what Siskel and Ebert had to say about anything? Just – why? Seriously, to hell with them! Just watch the damned movies yourselves!

        Again — back before the 90s, before the Web, there were very few ways to get reliable information about movies that had just been released. Nobody wanted to spend a bunch of money and effort and time going to see a movie that they might turn out to hate — or even taking the whole family out to see a dud, at great expense.

        Most of the mainstream critics (with a couple notable exceptions, such as Pauline Kael) were little more than shills who’d whore themselves out to ensure that their blurbs were quoted.

        S&E would show clips from the movie, and discuss them in context. They often disagreed strongly, which doubled the amount of information viewers were getting.

        The clips and the discussion allowed viewers to judge for themselves whether they were likely to enjoy a given movie.

        Your advice to “just watch the damned movies yourselves” would only work for someone with a huge amount of leisure time, money, and willingness to sit through a whole lot of two-hour snoozefests. Most people back then just wanted to be reasonably sure beforehand that they weren’t going to waste their precious Saturday night on a lousy film. (Source: I grew up before the Internet existed.)

      3. Dear [0]
        I will be 70 this year, so video games were mostly the generation behind me. Yet there were several that I enjoyed. I loved playing and sometimes beating the computer player Atari 2600 Baseball. Very few wins, some ties, and a lot of losses.
        I spent a lot of hours single playing Diablo 2. Absolutely hated Duriel.
        There were two games designed by Danielle Bunten, that I absolutely loved. One called “Global Conquest’. It was a multiplayer game where you had to conquer Little Rock Arkansas. My brother ended up hating me. His time to build his armies was tied to my previous time. So I hurried and cut his time off. War is hell.
        But the best game I ever played was M. U. L. E. My best friend and I played that game for about 20 years. It is a great game on the Atari 800.

      4. I enjoyed Siskel and Ebert. Even when I disagreed with one or both of them, I liked their show because I found it intelligent, entertaining and informative. I don’t think I ever chose to see a movie (or not see one) because of anything they said, but I can recall a couple times when I went to a film they panned and came out thinking, “Damn! I should’ve listened to those guys. I could’ve saved a couple bucks.” Yeah, it was that long ago.
        Flash Fact: I first discovered Siskel and Ebert when “At the Movies” aired on Saturday mornings on the area PBS station. It followed a series titled “Matinee at the Bijou,” which featured episodes of “Undersea Kingdom,” a serial of the same stripe as “Phantom Empire” and every bit as cheesy (episodes later popped up in early MST3Ks).

      6. What about videogames that aren’t part of established series, for which reviews would be of more use?

        1. Good question. I’d look to see who the developer is, who the publisher is, what the genre is, peek at some screenshots, look at a prerelease trailer. Usually there’s enough information out there to make an informed decision on the objective basis of what it is and who made it. But I’m not the atypical video game player.

          The value I’d have in a game reviewer would depend on several factors – which genres do they like and not like, which developers do they like and not like, what’s their top 10 of all time, how much progress did they make in the game, how much progress did they make in other games of the same developer or of a similar genre. What elements do they like from any game, any game of the genre, any game from the developer.

          I’ll pick on 13 Sentinels again. I stated earlier that I didn’t like the game. Over on metacritic, no professional reviewer gives the game less than a 7/10. Here’s one of them – thegamer com/13-sentinels-aegis-rim-review/ . What does this review say? The author says that he didn’t play anything else by its developer. The author says that it doesn’t break the mold of the RTS genre, but doesn’t compare it to anything else in the RTS genre, nor JSPRG – is this game like Front Mission 3? Starcraft? XCom? Age of Empires? Command and Conquer? The author says “It absolutely is fun to coordinate attacks between your team members and build teams based on their strengths and weaknesses”, but cites no example of how this is done at all and what about this is “fun”. The author gives the game a 7/10 but the text makes it sound like he enjoyed it more than what a 7/10 implies, and he doesn’t precisely declare what he disliked about the game beyond pacing issues. All those items that I said previously about what I’d value from a game reviewer are absent here. After reading this article, I have learned nothing from his experience which gives me a perspective to consider, or anything to understand why he wrote the words that he wrote nor gave the 7/10 score. As far as I’m concerned, this review is worthless.

          I can easily blather on forever about things like this. I wish the field paid more. I wish there was a Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert who was writing video game reviews now. I wish I could be that person if nobody else would want to be. But I won’t be and nobody else will be (because anything that isn’t a glowing 100/100 for everything (which is something that I definitely wouldn’t do) is handwaved as being written by a worthless contrarian edgelord who’s obviously only doing it for clicks and has shitty takes which should only be ignored, among other factors which prevent that from happening).

  5. Leroy?

    I thought I could get away with a link if there were enough spaces, but there’s no outsmarting the nannybot. It’s stuck in the torso chute. Sorry.

  6. It seems to me that whoever said that Bathack blames the response to his nothingpizza on the name Funky Winkerbean is right. If Pete makes a success of this, the curse will be lifted.

    1. That whole argument was dumb. If the name “Funky Winkerbean” had ceased to work, why didn’t he rename the strip? Especially after the first time jump?

      “Thimble Theater” became “Popeye” when its focus shifted. Why couldn’t “Funky Winkerbean” have become “Westview, Ohio” or something?

      But hey, it’s the Westview Way: Bemoan a situation and then passively shrug, muttering “hey, whaddya gonna do?”

      1. That’s the other stupid thing he does: behave as if not doing anything about a problem is somehow more heroic that trying and failing.

      2. Heck, Jim Meddick’s Monty has now had that title for several years longer now than it had the title Robotman (a strip name and character thrust upon Meddick by the syndicate). Meddick eventually even made the strip’s original namesake character so superfluous that he was able to write Robotman out of the strip entirely! Which he was happy to do, since Robotman was not his property but rather a creation of British pop singer Peter Shelley.

        De-funky-ing a comic strip CAN be done!

      3. Your Grease:

        Because the spirit of Sherwood Anderson, author of *Winesburg, Ohio,* wouldn’t like it?

        *Whinesburg, Ohio* does have a certain ring to it, though.

        1. See, I knew there was a “Winseburg, Ohio” joke in there and I was too lazy to persevere till I found it. Thank you for bringing the goods.

          1. ^^”Winesburg,” but now that I think of it, “Winceburg, Ohio” would also have been a good new name for “Funky Winkerbean.”

          2. Your Grease:

            Long ago, I read a review of *The Beach Boys Love You* in *Rolling Stone.* One of the songs on the album is “Johnny
            Carson,” and its final verse is:

            Who’s a man that we admire?
            Johnny Carson is a real live wire.
            Who’s a man that we admire?
            Johnny Carson is a real live wire.
            Who’s a man that we admire?
            Johnny Carson is a real live wire.
            Who’s the man that we admire?
            Johnny Carson is a real live wire

            (Almost a catechism there, Brian. Pax vobiscum!)

            The reviewer said you winced at the writing, but the music carried you along, and you also smiled.

            (And Wilson ultimately released *Smile* as a solo album, just as Lewis Shiner’s Ray Shackleford advised him to do in *Glimpses.*)

            I’ve liked the word “wince” ever since.

            Sherwood Anderson’s novels aren’t as well-regarded as his short stories. *Dark Laughter* provoked the derision of Ernest Hemingway (whom Anderson mentored for a time: It isn’t only Elvis Costello who wants to bite the hand that feeds him, I suppose) and he parodied the book in *The Torrents of Spring.*

            *The Torments of Westview* would be a nice title for a comic strip. Alas, Hemingway’s subtitle would be too long for one:

            “A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race.”

  7. Too bad that Time Mop didn’t nudge Batiuk into keeping the name “Three O’clock High” like he’d planned. He would have retired years ago and not ruined his career.

    1. I’d highly doubt that changing the name of the strip would change how FW as a comic strip has become

      1. Of course not; it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. The point is that Batiuk blames the strip name for holding him back. The name is silly, but Batiuk wanted to do Very Serious Drama. Eventually he came to despise the title character, as evidenced by the way he turned Funky into an alkie, a loser, and finally a fat whiner.

        Nothing was stopping him from revealing that Funky’s real name was Francis, or Fuad, or Fulgencio, or whatever, and then changing the name of the strip. Nothing, that is, except the need to blame external circumstances for his own mistakes, and then refuse to fix them.

        1. And nothing was stopping him from turning Funky Winkerbean into a serious drama strip after Lisa died. For all its pretense, FW was very dependent on its gag-a-day roots. And never could move past them. Which is why Batiuk’s “I coulda benna contenda” act is baloney.

      2. csroberto:
        As a kid, I remember getting so excited!! that I was finally going to get to read a comic from day one! I told my comics-loving friends, and everyone laughed at the “Funky Winkerbean” name.
        But we remembered it! It said exactly what the strip seemed to be doing: a modern take on high schoolers, and clearly gag-a-day. And it was! Until “Lisa’s Teenage Pregnancy.” And Monsieur le Thom became (drapes hand dramatically over forehead) an artiste.
        If he wanted to really give the strip a name that would tell us what would come, why didn’t he just call it “Misery Loves Company”?
        Would anyone have read that? No. It would’ve ended 6 months later, and wouldn’t even get a mention on Wikipedia today.

        1. The name draw people in. The gag a day stuff kept people coming back for more. Batiuk felt unsatisfied with doing what he’s good at. The rest is history.

  8. Re: the Friday 10/27 “Crankshaft”:

    Are you FRACKIN’ kidding me?

    That’s it, Batiuk has finally broken me. I need a break to preserve what little sanity I have left. Anybody wants me in GC I’ll be hanging out in “The Fusco Brothers.” For Arcamax readers I’ll be in “Master Strokes: Golf Tips,” which probably isn’t nearly as dirty as I imagined now that I see the final two words in the title. See you all on Monday.

  9. “I suppose our running a pizza restaurant isn’t outside the realms.”
    WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!

    1. It means Batiuk is mangling the phrase ‘realms of possibility’ because deluding himself into thinking he’s eloquent is HIS nation.

      1. Mr. Jones:

        Don’t forget John’s question for Becky after she met with Wally.

        “How did?”

        Maybe they’re as clipped in speech in Ohio as Dick Foley in Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories?

    2. The young people today always pluralize words like “all the feels” and “totes adorbs” to show how trendy and hip they are. How could Batiuk not do the same?

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