I humbly withdraw my earlier criticism that the landmarking of the sign was an “informed attribute.” I see that the whole process and the rationale thereof was shown, albeit nearly 30 years ago.
The Duck of Death, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2023/12/06/sign-of-the-times/#comment-166678
Another fascinating memory-lane trip that shows how oddly selective the continuity callbacks in the Funkyverse are.
Andrew, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2023/12/06/sign-of-the-times/#comment-166685
You’re both right. What happened with this Montoni’s sign is a common Tom Batiuk writing practice I’ve been meaning to elevate to a TBTrope.
Undue Weight is a Wikipedia concept. It means something is being paid too much or too little emphasis, relative to its importance to the overall topic. It’s not even about storytelling; it’s a form of bias. It’s something you want to avoid when contributing to an objective, non-fiction encyclopedia article.
So how does it figure into the Funkyverse? TVTropes’ Law of Conservation of Detail says:
There is a fine line between having good, rich Worldbuilding and rambling on about pointless details. Conservation of detail is all about filtering out irrelevant information to highlight the actual plot points or interesting aspects of the setting or character.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLawOfConservationOfDetail
I need hardly say that the Funkyverse is gigaparsecs into the “rambling on about pointless details” side of the line. But there’s more to it than that:
- The Funkyverse assigns too much importance to pointless details that should not be in the story at all;
- The Funkyverse assigns too much importance to random, cherry-picked events from the past;
- The Funkyverse assigns too little importance to events that a reasonable reader would perceive as important.
The first one is the most obvious. Funky Winkerbean has invested weeks into the arguments behind comic book covers; the backstories of comic book makers; the Starbuck Jones movie; storylines that re promptly dropped; and so on. Of course, they’re there because these are Tom Batiuk’s favorite things to talk about. My rant about Pseudoexposition lists other examples.
The second one is most important to the ongoing matter of Montoni’s sign in Crankshaft. Harriet wrote at length about it here. The references to the town wanting to remove the Montoni’s sign weren’t an Informed Ability, as The Unsinkable Duck of Death thought, but was genuinely explored in the strip in 1996. So it’s a little more honest…. but not by much.
It’s a Continuity Nod. But it’s unfair for the author to expect his readers to remember short, comedic arcs from 27 years ago. Especially considering the author’s Act III “quarter inch from reality” conceit. Which makes it hard to interpret Act I and II arcs literally when they were clearly exaggerated for comedic purposes.
But it’s far from the most blatant example. After Bull Bushka died in a way that didn’t resemble a suicide at all, we were treated to this flashback:
This references a small arc from 1976 (!) where Les tries out for the football team. (Hat tip to BillyTheSkink for originally making this connection.)
The point was to show Les that Bull really was his friend (because that was somehow the important issue). But it ignores everything Bull did as an adult; becoming a force against bullying, training Summer after her knee injury, playing tennis with Les, and so on.
I mentioned this strip before:
This strip is from 2019, but it was the key plot point in Bull Bushka’s CTE arc later six months later (almost to the day). The later story never once said that Bull killed himself because he didn’t receive disability benefits. Even the big reveal concealed it:
“We regret to inform you your husband is not eligible for disability benefits.” Eight more words. In a comic strip that spends 49 words to tell you what Phil Holt was doing in 1963. And he doesn’t do it. He just puts an ellipsis, and expects you to fill in the blank from a conversation six months ago that didn’t seem relevant at the time. That’s not fair. It’s dishonest, and it’s insulting to his readers. And it’s why the last of his legitimate fans gave up on the Funkyverse a decade before it ended.
(EDITED TO ADD: I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that. Commenter Green Luthor correctly points out that the “missing” exposition is right there in Panel 1. I don’t mean to nitpick to the point of being mad at what panel something went into. That would be very beady-eyed of me. It’s a better example of category three, below. Bull’s reason for killing himself was very undersold, and is all told to us by Linda, who made no effort to ascertain any of this. We never saw so much as a thought balloon from Bull.)
On to category three, “The Funkyverse assigns too little importance to events that a reasonable reader would perceive as important.” This strip from October 2022 has been hanging over the discussion of Montoni’s “historical” sign:
This gets back into Law of Conservation of Detail. Funky Winkerbean spent so many truckloads of ink on Les pining for his precious Lisa, that this comes off as an important development. When the action flips to Crankshaft a year later, and the sign is still pointlessly attached to the building months after Montoni’s closed, it raises questions. Why didn’t Les buy the sign, when it was so important to him? Why is it still on the building, when we were specifically told it was up for auction, and the town wanted it removed? Why wasn’t any of this a story?
Not that I want more Les, mind you. But if the Funkyverse is going to spend so much time telling us Les’ Viking funeral for Lisa is important, then it needs to honor that by paying attention to the stories it opens. In most cases of Undue Weight, Les is the biggest offender:
Yes, Les, Bull spent 30 years feeling remorseful and trying to make up for how he treated you in school. But that’s not important because “high school comes with you.” Whatever that means, Mr. Oscar Winner. (Never mind that Bull’s bullying was occasionally retconned as him protecting Les from worse bullies.)
Yes, Les, Cindy freaking Summers spent 30 years feeling hurt that you didn’t try to jump her bones. At a chance meeting, the point of which was that high school girls like her don’t acknowledge the existence of high school boys like you, even after you learn you have some things in common. And other boys’ reaction to you was this:
Much of this third category takes the form of massive, atrocious retcons like these, to reinvent Les into something he wasn’t.
Son of Stuck Funky 
That’s the thing Les did (or didn’t do) that you haven’t forgiven him for, Cindy? Not the time a few years prior to that night at McArnold’s when actually did make a pass at you and then wound up suing you when he didn’t like your answer?
That joke has REALLY aged badly.
It’s funny how we used to mock those old sepia-tone flashback panels. And rightfully so, they were overused and hokey… but man alive has TB’s exposition ability taken a nosedive since he stopped using them
And yet another reminder of what a tone-deaf cretin Les is. Letting a grudge go can’t happen because Les is too stupid and self-absorbed to notice that high school is awkward for damn near everyone. It’s the Great American Awkwardness Factory but the moron thinks that he alone suffered feeling awkward because he’s got no theory of mind.
And, of course, high school didn’t have to go along with creepy Les Moore because he went right back to it.
Today’s Crankshaft (12/08)
Crankshaft: Who the fuck chose our names?
Funky: Somebody who wants to make ME suffer and wants YOU to commit heinous crimes and get away scot-free.
I would have to respectfully disagree about the NFL disability letter, because the first panel specifically says the letter is regarding Bull’s application for the supplemental disability plan. With that information already in the strip, “We regret to inform you” pretty well covers what the letter says; honestly, adding the extra exposition to the second panel would have been redundant and overly wordy. (Not that that ever stopped Batiuk at any other time, of course.) Even without knowing the strip from six months earlier, it’s still obvious what the letter is saying, I think.
(On the other hand, spending an entire g**d*** week on Linda opening the g**d*** letter was just awful; that was a three-strip story, tops.)
You’re right – I don’t know how I missed that. I need to rewrite that section. I blame lack of sleep.
And that was the SECOND time a FW character needed a week to open some mail. Unbelievable.
Honestly, I didn’t hate it when Darrin needed a week to open the letter from the Ohio government about his birth mother. Most stories about children being given up for adoption aren’t happy ones, so I can imagine him going through a round of “do I really want to know this?” The story doesn’t say this of course, but I’m willing to grant it.
I do, however, hate the Funkyverse’s tired-ass trope of someone’s life being destroyed over the happenstance missing of a snail mail letter.
I updated the article, in an attempt to fix my egregious error. It was an example I wanted to use, but it wasn’t an example in the way I said it was. The flashback to a 1976 strip about Les trying out for the football team was a better example of what I was trying to say.
I withdraw my earlier withdrawal of criticism, now that my memory’s been refreshed on the strips from the Montoni’s bankruptcy arc.
Funky is trying to sell a landmarked sign. That’s impossible; it cannot be removed or even remodeled. That was the whole reason for landmarking it in the first place: To make it illegal to remove. TB knows this but chose to make a plot point that would contradict his earlier world-building, driven by the President, no less.
Again, it would have been just as easy to have Les wax nostalgic about the sign without Funky trying to sell it at auction. And what happened at the auction? Was the starting bid too high for Les? Did Summerteeth talk him out of it? The sign was clearly important to him, but that whole point — for which TB contradicted his own world-building — was dropped.
“It’s called writing.”
Really? This sentence, is it also called writing?
“… the pandemic and its aftermath just wiped out thin-crust profit margin” [sic] No possessive adjective, no article?
GRUG SAD PANDEMIC WIPE OUT PROFIT MARGIN. GRUG FORGET EVERYTHING THAT COME BEFORE. GRUG HAVE MEMORY OF GOLDFISH.
Crankshaft today went for the simple joke of Funky and Cranky lampshading their own names (without a hint of remembrance for the Santa incident that Funky’s PTSD was triggerd by with the mere mention of Ed’s name), complete with a “who writes this crap” joke. To his credit, Tom is able to laugh at his own work, but no doubt I imagine that he may find our antics far less funny, if John Bryne’s opinions on us is anything to go by.
Speaking of the author, today’s seen a small Komix Thoughts blog update, and hilariously he dropped his “sorry I’m busy” post with a photo of a raging dumpster fire stock photo as if he thinks its just a funny way to show how crazy-overwhelmed with stuff you are as opposed to… well, the obvious.
Few other nuggets though; aside from saying he’s researching his next Crankshaft arcs and warning us he’s doing forwards for books that aren’t his own, he’s also occupied with “pulling Funky research for Crankshaft artist Dangerous Dan Davis”. So he’s complicit in assembling Davis’s tracing-reference image collection, at least.
I don’t know what’s more gut-bustingly ridiculous: That TB thinks a dumpster fire signifies “busy” and not “out-of-control, irredeemable fiasco” — or the idea that he is “researching” anything for Crankshaft.
Nah, I do know. The idea that he does any research at all is the funniest thing he’s written in ages. He doesn’t even call up a Wikipedia page or look at the first page of Google results, as many of us have proven repeatedly.
I don’t know what’s more gùt-bustingly outrageous: That TB thinks a dumpster fire signifies “busy” and not “out-of-control, irredeemable fiasco” — or the idea that he is “researching” anything for Crankshaft.
Nah, I do know. The idea that he does any research at all is the funniest thing he’s written in ages. He doesn’t even call up a Wíkípêdia page or look at the first page of Gòoglè results, as many of us have proven repeatedly.
Sorry, Duck, the damn filter ate your comment again. Damn filter.
A thought – maybe Duck’s trying to avoid the filter with diacritics is what’s triggering the filter? Because I wrote the world “Google” uncensored three times in my last comment, and the filter didn’t object. I also used it in this post. Google Google Google. If this post has a timestamp of about 8:23 AM Eastern time, that means the filter let it through also.
Unfortunately, the diacritics were the second attempt. The first attempt had none and was also marked as spam. I put my Comics Kingdom filter-evasion cap on and tried to figure out what it was about my comment that made it so offensive. Obviously I was unsuccessful.
The spam filter just hates me, is all. I even changed my WordPress email address, to no avail. I can’t post g i fs or any kind of art, or any links, ever, even though I used to do so with no trouble.
The spam filter just hates me, is all.
This theory is… supported by the facts. You never post anything objectionable. I post images, YouTube links, and f-bombs all the time. And I very rarely get blocked. I don’t know what it is.
Perhaps the filter is reacting to a user name referencing “Death”?
Try posting as The Duck of Life and see what happens!
It’s me! The Drake of Life! I’m posting an image, just to see whether Y. Knott’s theory is correct!
I CANNOT BELIEVE IT WAS THAT SIMPLE
I’m sorry to threadsh!t this way. I’m just trying to see whether this name will solve the problem.
If it does, let this magnificent scene be the epitaph for my former moniker.
For the record: The post by “The Duck of Life” was caught by the spambot, and apparently manually released. The posts by “The Drake of Life” all went through immediately.
The Duck is dead. Long live the Drake! Even if I’m not so fond of the moniker…
Once more, with feeling, and then I, the Drake of Life, will stop sh!tting up the thread.
Duck, if we knew how to make it stop flagging you, it’d already be done. I can’t explain it. It hates Bill Splut’s posts too. I can promise you that we will NOT let you languish, at least not for that long. If I had a suggestion, I’d offer it. At the current time, it’s really the only annoying thing about the site. It’s frustrating.
It hates Bill Splut’s posts too
I always wondered about what got you chuted here. At first I thought, because I’m new? Makes sense! Are my posts too long? Makes sense! Because I talk…a bit salty? That makes fucking sense!
Is it because…Well, I’ve no idea when this started. But is it because if WordPress gets one complaint against a GC commenter who finds one with a recognizable name, that can be easily traced here? I myself have NO IDEA what WEIRDO would do that, just for petty revenge! Truly a mystery for the ages! (hint: she said she’d never comment again, and was back just days later)
About 10 years ago, I read about a small town that built a chain link fence at a public park because it was near a busy road. They wanted to keep kids and dogs running into the road. As soon as it was built, some Puritan demanded it be changed because the “fence post tops look like penises!”
So they replaced it, at a cost of $10K, which could’ve gone to pothole repair. The town council decided “Sexy Chain Link Post” overwhelmed “This lady has a problem.”
If 10,000 people complain about something, it’s something to complain about. If one does…Jeez, get therapy.
(shrugs) Time to post, I guess. See what happens.
Epicus, thanks for trying. The ways of WordPress are mysterious indeed. I remember I asked ages ago about a commenter whitelist, only to find that WordPress apparently doesn’t offer that option, which to me is madness, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
One more try. Maybe this is the charmed moniker.
Again, sorry to $þam the thread.
So it turns out that WordPress doesn’t like references to death on a blog about Funky Winkerbean. Alanis should have used THAT as an example of “irony”.
Well, I tried to write a response and it triggered the spam-trap. And I tried to rewrite it and it still won’t go thru. So if you see two similar posts, you’ll know why.
The Bull CTE arc was a perfect example of BatScam “addressing an issue” while deftly sidestepping even a mild whiff of “controversy”. Then, after an arc that did little more than make Bull an even bigger buffoon than he was previously, he had a) Les disavow thirty years of friendship and amends, then b) had Bull’s “best friend” hit on Linda, for no apparent reason. The hatred Batiuk had for Bull was just so palpable, which was always so weird to me, given how it was a character he himself created and all.
And yeah, Cindy telling Les she secretly wanted to do him in high school was just totally ludicrous, and a complete insult to women (and men too) everywhere. It was almost as ridiculous as a sexy young Hollywood sex vixen suddenly adopting Les and his dead wife as mentors and role models. Or the only remaining single women in town fighting over Les. The passage of time hasn’t made any of this any less baffling or dumb.
ED:
The hatred Batiuk had for Bull was just so palpable, which was always so weird to me, given how it was a character he himself created and all.
Not really. Bull’s the amalgam of every bully he’s ever experienced, and thus can never be redeemed! And I’ll bet Tom meets “bullies” all the time. A guy changed lanes in front of him in 1982 without properly signaling, what a BULLY! That guy in 2001 in the checkout lane with 65 items in his cart who wouldn’t let Tom cut in front of him, even though Tom had only 64, BULLY! Tom failed a history question in 6th grade “Which future president led the charge up San Juan Hill,” so–BULLY! Oh, if he weren’t dead, Tom would so passively aggressively smirk at this pulpit! He strikes me as a guy who sees bullies everywhere, every day.
And of course, Cindy et al are all the Hot Blondes who turned him down for high school prom. All lumped together, into the vacuous blend of…Whatever the fuck Tom thinks women are.
It doesn’t matter how many decades have passed since Bull and Cindy apologized to Les, their hands will never, ever be free of the stains of knowing 15-year old Tom was a self-absorbed and unlikable dick. Suffer they shall!
Wait! After 50 years, I got it! “BULL”…is short for bully! How did I never see such intricate wordplay?! I will never forgive Tom! I’m going to sue him, via my lawyer, named Amicus Br–OH COME ON
No one carries high school quite like BatHam does. I’ve gone years without thinking about high school at all, even while reminiscing fondly about all the stupid stuff I did while not actually attending high school. The school itself? Meh. But Batom, boy oh boy, he just will NOT let that go. And at his age, it’s just more pitiful than anything else. That whole Bull arc was just a sick, twisted revenge fantasy that ends with the bully dying. And every Act III Cindy appearance was vindictive too. Fired for being too old for HDTV, always insecure and jealous, secretly wishing Les had made a move…revenge fantasy. In fact, I’m mildly surprised that Cindy managed to survive Act III, as he easily could have gotten rid of her during that wildfire arc. Then he’d have been satisfied with himself, probably.
Theodore Roosevelt’s niece Eleanor remained with her husband Franklin after discovering his infidelity with Lucy Mercer.
As she put it: “I have the memory of an elephant. I can forgive, but I can never forget.”
Which made her, for some, a Democrat with a Republican memory. (Or a prophet who knew that ten years after her death, Agatha Christie would publish a Hercule Poirot novel called *Elephants Can Remember.*)
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” ― William Butler Yeats
Not just sidestepping the issue, but genuinely enabling it.
All Tom Batiuk had to do was type “NFL CTE settlement” into Google, and Bull Bushka’s story would have been written for him. Batiuk thinks he’s calling the NFL out, but he’s inadvertently covering for them. His story gave the NFL a legitimate reason to deny Bull’s benefits – a legitimate reason that doesn’t exist in real life. (Practice squad players were eligible to receive money from the settlement, though not much. In Bull’s case, I determined it was about $30,000.)
On top of that, it’s another example of the characters’ cruel fates being mostly a product of their own laziness and incompetence. Because Linda doesn’t even question this. All she had to do was type “NFL CTE settlement” into Google, and she would have learned Bull wasn’t eligible. She knows to use the Internet, because we saw her do it in that arc: that stupid “support group” she had. Who also would have told her this pretty quickly.
There are real-life horror stories about the NFL’s efforts to not pay CTE sufferers who were entitled to it. All you have to do is type “George Andrie” into Google. Bull’s story could have been a public shaming of the NFL… made more powerful by the fact that it was 100% true. It could have given a voice to real people who needed one.
Which also would have gotten Tom Batiuk the “prestige arc” he desperately craves. Who knows? It might even have won him that Pulitzer. It was that strong a story. And he absolutely wasted it. He wasted it on an incoherent, glurge-y suicide, another exploration of Les’ high school feelings, and to restart Lisa’s Story as if her death were a more valid tragedy.
What. A. Waste.
To clarify: I interpreted the story as “Bull genuinely wasn’t eligible in the storytelling world.” I think guess the factual accuracy of a real-life settlement program, when a character has a very narrow case relating to eligibility for it, is one of those things that gets lost in the quarter-inch from reality.
In principle, I agree with you 100%. If Bull had been asking for a settlement from the “MFL,” I’d say the author could have his way with the story. But if you’re going to name a real disease, and the organization that has been dealing with lawsuits related to it, you really should keep pretty close to the real-life facts.
Most especially if you’re attempting to grift your way to coverage in the NY Times for your Very Special Episode, Hint, Hint, Pulitzer Committee.
CS 12/10:
Oh. It’s a Christmas miracle. Or it’s 2 weeks of every Who in Funkytown inserting themselves into the strip, as they all string Xmas lights for Moroni’s grande re-opening on that most pizzacentric of holidays, XMAS! I called this 5 minutes after the strip was posted, and I can bet we’re getting “Jazz Messiah” again.
Today, Sunday, we learn that Funky sold off everything in Montoni’s except the Christmas decorations.
Even though this week we’ve seen tours through equipment and shelves laden with sealed cardboard boxes of … something voluminous… and dozens of assembled pizza boxes ready to go.
Wonder if Funky ever sold off his new fleet of delivery cars with snow tires?
It’ll bite Funky in the ass if he DID sell them
If he didn’t, then I don’t know what to think of it
I have to wonder if he simply doesn’t realize “selling everything” would literally mean “everything”. Probably at best the counter and bolted stool chairs would stay but everything would be stripped as useful, they don’t just leave leftovers for a future restaurant, these spaces can easily become a different business entirely.
Or if Funky’s still landlord with the comment to Pete regarding rent (and Komix Korner), he always had this power with some crazy hope an idiot would come to restart the restaurant?
Ah, crap. There’s a clog in the torso chute!
In the “Quiet Corner” of NEast CT, Putnam is a center for antique stores. We were there in the “Pink House,” a tiny, narrow storefront. She was looking at a rack of vintage clothes, when a damn swarm of clothes moths burst out. She is a germophobe, was horrified, we left quick. We’d go back, but in the 20 years since that happened, I’ve never seen her touch vintage clothes. The Pink House went out of business, for reasons no man can ken, nor even Barbie.
One day, we walked into Main Street around the sidewalk around the (condemned) building next to the Pink House, closed with police tape because the sidewalk was smashed in by a massive boulder of collapsed brownstone. Putnam decided “This may not be the inviting look we want for our town,” so they ripped all the avanlache-y bits off and began work on a YMCA!
A winter later, we walked by the Pink House, and I said “WHOA!” because I am secretly Keanu. It seems that when they closed the place, they didn’t turn all the water off. The pipes froze and burst. When it warmed up, the heat came on, and the old-timey 1920s ribbed radiator sprayed water everywhere. By spring, the walls by it were nothing but mildew and black mold. So they fixed, it right? No, they just let it spread through the entire building. Well…likely killed the moths! They stopped construction on the YMCA.
Why the YMCA didn’t just buy what we would forever call The Mold House and gut it in the first place, that I do not know. The YMCA got completed 2 miles up the road; the original site has been empty ever since, and we’re talking over a decade here.
I imagine at the start of this you said “Is there a point to this story?” And I’ll bet you figured it out when I said “black mold.”
How long have those Xmas decorations been sitting there? Let’s sing together! “DECK the mold with spore-filled holly! Fa-la-la–hack cough cough! Let us sing to Mopey’s folly!”