After long deliberation on my part. I’ve decided to sprint through the last decade or so of Dead Skunk Head John Howard material, taking things at least a year at a time, if not longer, per posts. That way this blog can finally finish this yearlong delving into a boring, comic obsessed, tertiary character. And move on to the boring, comic obsessed, primary characters. Or maybe I’ll get get tired of these characters finally, and move on to obsessing over The Green Pitcher and other inanimate objects.
The first year of our sprinting tour of DSH John is 2012. And we are treated to a lovely strip where DSH is nothing more than a benignly smiling, silent, background fixture of the scene.
It’s certainly an improvement over the next couple strips. Where Batiuk decides to spend valuable Sunday Funny Pages space gushing over his own very narrow interests.
Tom, obsessive nerd to obsessive nerd, I get it. I have spent many a night browsing the FleaBays and Amazeons looking for obscure out of print books, only to weep at the price. So this is relatable to me. Me and maybe two other people. Not your core demographic of my mom. This is the kind of joke that works for a mid 2000’s web-comic read only by other weirdos, not a nationally syndicated strip.
Given how much Tom Batiuk draws from his own life for Crazy Harry’s obsessions, I can only conclude Tom’s wife has either been jealous of his comic books, or Tom has fantasized about his wife being jealous of his comic books. Neither is appropriate for a strip printed on The Lord’s Day.
Next, DSH puts in a front and center appearance for the big 40th anniversary strip, beating out other Funkyverse characters of longer tenure, such as Ann and Fred Fairgood, or Wally Winkerbean as well as then-current Montoni’s employees Rachel and Kahn.
Then we’re back to Crazy and Skunky’s wonderful world of obscure comic book wankery. Complete with taking six panels to weakly tell something that only barely resembles a joke.
Then in August we finally, FINALLY, get what I would call an arc involving DSH, and it’s notable for being a rare arc that shows Skunky and Lefty as an actual married couple, doing (what I assume are) married couple things.
So see! They’re married! So super married! They even sleep crammed into the same tiny twin sized bed! Now that that is settled, we can go back to months and months of DSH talking to an all-male cadre of nerds and Becky relying on Dinkle as a weird, semi-incestuous work husband/father.
Oh. Good. I was worried Mopey Pete wouldn’t get any actual lines this post. I’ve been missing him, now that Funky Winkerbean is over.
DSH isn’t in this one. But I included it as it was, actually, pertinent to all the nonsensical crap going on in Crankshaft. Thought you all should know if Mopey is living in the Montoni’s Apartment now, it would be for the second time.
Becky and John and Dinkle (sans Harriett) score an invite to the big chocolate meets vanilla wedding at the Taj Moore Hall.
In November, we get another weeklong arc where ol’ Skunk-For-Head gets to serve as a fictional meat-puppet to pontificate on Batiuk’s myopic views on comic history. Part two of the Chullo and Skunko The More You Know Show.
Should I talk about this arc more? Probably. But instead, why don’t you all watch an obscure YouTube video, made 10 years ago by a comic strip essayist that never really caught on.
And after all that, a heartwarming Christmas tale of nepotism and grift.
First of all, Crazy Harry loses his job as a mail carrier.
Selling. Some. Books. For. Extra. Money? (Turning. Down. Sex. For. Sorting?!?)
Sigh.
Unless Crazy has some really nice first editions or rare and sought after titles, those books are probably about the most worthless thing in his house. After my grandma passed, we burned a ton of books. The old encyclopedias and medical texts and Reader’s Digest Condensed volumes that every estate in the last 40 years has been weighed down with. And the rest we destroyed our spines hauling to the Goodwill on the off-chance that maybe one would be something rare they could put up on the Goodwill Fleabay.
If I really want to give this the benefit of the doubt, then I guess that Crazy has been presented as a collector willing to drop some serious scratch on rarer items. Maybe, maybe, a portion of his collection is valuable. Perhaps his comics collection?
Merry Christmas?
Son of Stuck Funky 
Yet another magnum opus that, in a more just world, would be part of a PhD thesis in Funkology and published later as a book that would hover perpetually in the top 10 of Amazon’s “Comic & Graphic Novel Literary Criticism” bestsellers.
But it is not a just world, so here we are.
I need to sit down with a good strong cup o’ joe to fully digest all of this. But before I do, I have to note something germane to last entry’s discussion.
I’d never seen that 40th anniversary strip. It’s very appropriate: It ties in with a 40th in the Funkyverse and it shows a happy gathering of familiar characters, celebrating. It’s well drawn, well colored, not wordy, not irrelevant, and just generally well executed.
What on earth happened to make the 50th anniversary in the strip so ignored, dreary, and bungled? If even then TB really didn’t give the least little bit of a shit any more, even about his own creation, then why is he still tragically chugging along on bald, flat tires, dropping springs and burning oil like a rusty Model T flivver?
It’s so uncharacteristic of him to miss an opportunity to call attention to his achievements, such as they are. It struck me as weird then, and it’s still weird now. I think we paid more attention to the 50th than he did.
I’ve got to assume that when the 50th came along, Tom knew the strip was ending — and it wasn’t his choice to end it. But being emotionally immature, he didn’t know what to do. He needed, for his own self-image, to play into the narrative that the decision to end the strip was all Batiuk’s. (See also: John Darling) But he didn’t know how to actually do this. Yes, even though it would have been easy to say “Hey, 50 years seemed a good place to bring it all to an end”, Batiuk just couldn’t do it. He wanted FW to continue until he died … for proof of this, just look at recent Crankshafts.
So in terms of the strip’s 50th, Batiuk didn’t really want to discuss it, he didn’t want pity, and he certainly didn’t want people to say “50 years….geez, when are you finally gonna end this thing, Tom?”
It’s not dissimilar to his 2022 appearance at the San Diego Comic Con. That appearance (and the attendant puff piece interview) came AFTER he had finished the strip, and he was done with it forever — at least from a writing/creating standpoint. He has copped to this timetable in subsequent interviews … he finished up his part of FW in early 2022, long before ComicCon. But FW was still being published, as it hurtled towards its ridiculous ending…
Batiuk COULD have used the Comic Con opportunity to trumpet the 50th anniversary then, AND announce the strip was coming to a conclusion — because he already had concluded it. It was a done deal. And from a publicity standpoint, there was every reason to use the Comic Con appearance to generate a story that would have the strip get some attention, and absolutely no reason to keep mum.
But from the standpoint of a petulant manchild, who couldn’t admit he was being forced to shut the strip down? He felt he didn’t have another option….
That’s my take, anyway!
Yeah, it’s all so transparent. 8-year-olds are more skilled liars.
The thing that always struck me about the “comics don’t need to be funny” story is that Batiuk still felt it necessary to include an ostensible punchline in most of those strips. “Comics don’t need to be funny, but I’m gonna write bad jokes anyway!” Way to undermine your argument there, Tom. (But then, he’s good at that.)
In the previous blog post, I had said that the “Lost Finale” could have been done at Montoni’s instead of St. Spire’s, and the 40th anniversary strip pretty well proves that, I’d say. Yeah, there were more characters crammed into the “Lost Finale”, but I have no doubt the 40th could have been reworked with more figures. (Also, it surely says something that Batiuk did a special strip for the 40th anniversary, but let the 50th – a much more significant milestone – pass by without even a mention. Not sure WHAT it says, but it says SOMETHING.)
I know the dailies are usually colored by the syndicate, who rarely care if the colors are right, but… in that last strip, Dead Skunk Head traded in his Batman shirt for a miscolored Deadpool shirt. (Possibly he’s wearing it over the Batman shirt, since that thing probably is stuck to his body.) (It took me a minute to figure out what shirt he was wearing because of the miscoloring, so in case anyone else was wondering… it’s Deadpool.)
And on the subject of Tom’s “comics don’t need to be funny” screed…
F*** you, Tom. Just… f*** you.
Funny enough, that comic strip essayist actually came back earlier this year with a new video, feeling out the groove again. would be cool if he ever came back to Funky, he did say in his original that he had hoped to give Lisa’s Story an earnest chance. Do wonder still how that would work out.
Yes, as the video essayist points out, DSH is a stand-in for TB, and Chullo is a stand-in for us, as Tom gives us all a bloviating, finger-pointing lecture.
The thing is: Has anyone, anywhere ever actually said that comics are supposed to be funny?
I call strawman. Dramatic newspaper strips have existed since the 1910s. The OG superhero comics were far from funny. The first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics in 1939 had the protagonist watching his parents murdered in front of his eyes. Even in 1939, did people complain that the plot should have been humorous?
Today, with the drama of the MCU and the proliferation of serious graphic novels like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and the movies made from them, who exactly is criticizing those works for not having enough punchlines?
In recent years, graphic novels have won very prestigious awards, up to and including Pulitzers. Not a one was “funny.”
If anything, the funnier comics have been looked down on as more juvenile. And this, I think, gets to the meat of Tom Batiuk’s internal conflict:
He wanted to be taken more seriously, so he tried to take the same characters and premise and be “more dramatic,” which he ineptly concieved as “more full of absurdly endless tragedies.” Then, when his clumsy, bait-and-switch radical tone change tone was criticized, he strawmanned his critics into a huge chorus, all screaming “ALL COMICS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY!”
And he successfully slew that flimsy strawman with a light puff of air.
But he never addressed the thing that really bothers him: the criticism of HIS work, specifically. The allegations that the change from comedy to drama was handled with clumsy, inconsistent, confusing time skips. Or that it skipped over the real drama, like what happens to a brilliant musician who can’t play any more, or what it’s like raising a small girl as a widowed dad. Or that dramatic situations were set up and dropped abruptly, never to be fleshed out, while the author focused on minutiae of interest only to him. Or that he didn’t even have the guts to abandon “funny” completely, so these “dramatic” arcs still contained punchlines — turgid, labored punchlines, delivered with smug, punchable smirks.
Worst of all, that Act I Funky Winkerbean, the funny years, was amusing enough, competent, and populated with relatable characters — and the dramatic years were unfunny, incompetent, and populated by flat, dull characters who were also loathesome pricks.
Have DSH John deliver a TED talk on that one, Tom. Then we’ll take your pontifications a bit more seriously.
A minor point, but Batman’s first appearance in Detective Comics #27 didn’t feature his origin; that wouldn’t be shown until issue #33 from later in 1939. The story in #27 was “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate”, which was pretty blatantly plagiarized from “Partners of Peril”, a story featuring The Shadow. (Really, a LOT of Batman was copied from The Shadow.)
(Though it does go into the whole “comics were never really funny” thing; a lot of costumed heroes in early comics were really just pulp characters in a different medium, and the pulps weren’t known for being comedic works at all. Superman introduced the concept of the “superhero”, but even other superheroes who followed tended to owe a lot to the pulps initially, changing over time to what we now consider “superheroes” to be. Heck, Batman regularly used guns and killed people in his earliest appearances, just like The Shadow and other pulp heroes did.)
Thanks for the correction. I learned something today! And, as you mention, the point holds; the early Batman comics were not funny, and as far as I know, were never criticized specifically for not being funny.
Green Luthor:
I’m not sure when the Batman finally put away his guns, but he used them as late as *Batman* #1, when he killed the giants Hugo Strange had made out of asylum patients.
(He wasn’t happy about it, but he did it, much as he slew the vampire Monk with a silver bullet in *Detective* #32.)
By the way, Mr. Scrooge’s long-suffering clerk spelled his name with an “i” (“Cratchit”) and not with an “e” (“Cratchet”). But as Bob could have said when he showed up at Scrooge & Marley eighteen minutes behind his time at the end of *A Christmas Carol,* “I was making rather merry yesterday, sir, and Christams is but once a year.”
Not that he did.
The penultimate chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s *Handful of Dust* began as a short story called “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” Now I’m imagining “The Man Who Liked *Funky Winkerbean*” with James Wilby as Tony Last reading the collected volumes to Alec Guinness as the illiterate Mr. Todd.
“Let us have *My Name is Funky…and I’m an Alcoholic* again, Mr. Last. There are passages in that that I can never hear without the temptation to weep.”
For those who care, the actual Dickens book mentioned in Waugh’s novel is *Little Dorrit.*
As Tiny Tim (who did not die, unlike a certain lady lawyer) would say, God bless SOSFers, everyone!
Anonymous Sparrow,
Once a month, I go to the nursing home where my wife is the administrator. I lead a Bible Study. It took me a year and a half, but we just finished The Book of the Revelation a chapter a month. Well this month being December, we sang Christmas carols. Everybody sang “Deck the Halls”. Then I closed with this:
“Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!”
You and I may be the only 2 that know its source. I am sure that Be Ware of Eve Hill is much too young to have ever heard this carol before. I hope this little melody becomes an ear-worm of joy. (That is ear-worm and not an earwig. Totally different story. Although I could watch Lawrence Harvey watch paint dry all night long!)
Happy Christmas!
SP:
My friend Carey recently sent me a link to “The Possum Experiment”…
And I saw again Todd Haynes’s documentary on “The Velvet Underground,” whose chief songwriter, Lou Reed, would go on to write a song called “Like a Possum”…
So here are the lesser-known verses of the Okefenokee Christmas Carol:
Don’t we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don’t love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker ‘n’ too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, ‘lope with you!
Hunky Dory’s pop is lolly,
Gaggin’ on the wagon, Willy, folly go through!
Chollie’s collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!
Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an’ polly voo!
Chilly Filly’s name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly’s jolly chilly view halloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!
To which I can only echo Pup Dog:
“Poltergeists make up the principal type of spontaneous material manifestation.”
Had there been no *Pogo,* Hepzibah of the Starjammers might have been named Flower.
Anonymous Sparrow,
Fortunately for us, there was a *Pogo*.
Even though it is also true:
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
As you have said before, “Joyeux Noël!”
You have been, and always shall be, my friend.
Yes, yes, “Boston Charlie” is appropriate to the season, but personally I pre-fers Albert the Alligator singing:
“I was eatin’ some chop suey,
With a lady in St. Louie,
When there sudden comes a knockin’ at the door.
And that knocker, he says, “Honey,
Roll this rocker out some money,
Or your daddy shoots a baddie to the floor.”
Oh, spectacular!
Thank you, JJ!
How about a rousing chorus of “Good King Sauerkraut?” That always puts me in a festive frame of mind.
Rodman, you are the man! I had never heard that song. I had to look it up. “Good King Sauerkraut Looked Out On His Feets Uneven.”
Then to my surprise, there was another one. “On the 12 days of Crispness”. (The rabbit said, it’s a parsley in a pear tree. What has a partridge ever done for you?)
True story: when I was in Bible college, I had a free hour before morning service. My friend Mike and I were talking about fractured hymn titles. He brought up, “Lead us on, oh Kinky Turtle,” We go to service, and the director of music picks the congregational song, “Lead us on, oh King Eternal.” I look at Mike. He looks at me. We start uncontrolled snickering. We could not stop. That built to outright laughter. Everyone within 5 rows, turned to stare at us for laughing at this serious song.
Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael approve.
Erdman, mea culpa,
My apologies to our friend Erdmann. I can’t type or Siri can’t correct that early in the morning. Even just now, she rewrote my apology as Rodman 3 times. Not to mention, what she changed mea culpa to. Personally, I bet you are a better basketball player than Dennis.
I remember Mom saying, “Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie?” whenever she saw the carol listed in the church Christmas Eve program.
Her birthday was this past Tuesday. If she were still alive, she’d be 103. Miss ya, ma.
Now, that is the thing of all things surpassing all other things. My dad wasted his life on an endless chase for shiny, shiny trash that he got bored with when he got it only to hunt for some other shiny object to fill a hole in his soul…..and he had the nerve to look down on my brother in law because HE collected a different kind of utterly useless thing.
Sure, Paul, but were they “boxes filled with pieces of [his] soul…a decades-old accumulation of knowledge and imagination…”
Seriously, JFChrist. A grown man, retirement age, married with a child, saying some comix in boxes hold “pieces of his soul.” A better writer would have acknowledged how pathetic that mentality is and used it to explore more of what went wrong in Crazy’s life and why he clings so theatrically to mass-produced artifacts of his childhood.
I know — we all have silly little collections and ephemera we cling to. I would not call any of it “pieces of my soul.” It’s a dangerous thing to store your soul in ephemera. One fire, one flood, one eviction, and your soul can be wiped away.
The problem is that the dodo disappearing up his own hindquarters takes people with him. When he passed on, I was stuck with a load of junk that one of my dimmer sisters insisted I keep because he spent so much time getting them, it couldn’t possibly have been a stupid waste of time.
Oh, boy, I really feel for you. Something about estates makes people lose all reason.
The joke’s on her: she has all that crap now with my blessing. The deluded sap wants to be a kid wanting her DADDY around forever and she’s getting it good and hard.
“Looking’s more fun than finding,” as Walt Kelly had a mother duck say to her children in a *Pogo* Sunday strip.
Exactly so.
CBH: it’s like when your parents would tell you to stop crossing your eyes or they’d get stuck like that. Even the deepest divers have to decompress and surface eventually. Or you’ll get the FW bends, typically marked by uncontrollable wordplay and yawning.
A non-upvotable post. Fascinating. It flashes “1”, then reverts to “0”.
Never mind. It was just a temporary glitch. Still weird.
You really see how goddam tedious Funky Winkerbean is when you see it all at once. This post represents only one year of comic book bloviating, and it’s just smothering. Even the other comic book-loving characters tire of it quickly, but John just drones on anyway. Because what he has to say about comic books is just soooooo important.
You really see how goddam tedious Funky Winkerbean is when you see it all at once.
Good lord, yes. If not for CBH’s commentary (and the commentary of all the fine SoSF regulars), this post would be well-nigh unreadable.
Funky strips pass through my memory like a CS pun through a goose, but I actually remember this arc. This turgid, pretentious tripe about how we should all genuflect to Old Comics. (“SEE? Like TOM, Splut use big wordies too!” [begins hitting club on cave walls until tackled by Lascaux security])
I shall invoke the name again: Daveykins! I was among the very few blessed to read his novel/object that exists “Murder at Disney World.” Umm…”blessed”? “Honored”? Maybe “Cursed by a karmic god”? We were a Lillian’s Book Club that read the only works harder than James Joyce’s. I made it into farther than anyone else, and I quit at 15 pages.
It was even worse than his Peter Pan starring himself, and that had the revelation that Pan could fly because his blood was made of fingernails. (YES IT DID)
The thing is, you do your research, you work it into background details. Unlike Mr Kins and Mr Bats. You do not do an exposition dump. If the reader wishes to learn more, the reader can do so, even in the pre-Net days. You don’t have the first chunk of “Murder at Disney World” be the history you Wikipedai’d. DVK began with that history, because Agatha Christie famously loved talking about Florida land use regulations. Isn’t that the first rule of writing? “Catch their interest in the first sentence? Or is it how Disney drained a swamp?
In 30 damn seconds I came up with “At Disney World, a toddler runs into some bushes. His panicked parents chase him down, but he comes out all smiles. ‘Goofy SLEEPIN’!’ he says. The parents are horrified to see someone in a Goofy costume, lying on the ground covered in blood. They call the Disney Police.” Yeah, it’s not much, but is that a little more interesting than zoning laws?
Yes, Disney has a police force. Davey made sure to tell us, including what their legal powers were. That’s like a Fast & Furious movie starting with a 20 minute lecture from a driving instructor about speed limits.
Tomato Butt, I do not care how “comics” were called “comics.” Why a millionaire comics writer wants to chuck it all for a rust belt shithole pizza dump–that I want to read. Because, wow, it’s gonna be “fingernail blood” level stuff.
Off-topic: I actually found Funky’s adapted lyrics amusing, and I think I’m going to keep “gonna find out who’s naughty as mice” to help me through this season of earworms.
On-topic: TB seems to constantly conflate ‘comic strips’ with ‘comic books’, as if they are the same industry with the same purpose and context. Sometimes he seems to view them as distinct, but mostly he uses ‘comics’ to mean either, depending on which supports his argument.
Yet he clearly believes his true calling is in comic books and is bitter that he is condemned to the ghetto of comic strips. It’s like he sees himself as bringing the gravitas of (insert MST3k clip of ‘Graphic novels, Joel’) to the trivialities of gag-a-day strips.
What’s odd (and I’m not discounting your theory) is that, until VERY recently, comic strips were FAR more prestigious than comic books. Like… it wasn’t even close. Siegel and Shuster had pitched Superman as a comic strip, but when they couldn’t sell him that way, they had to settle for doing him in comic book form (and even at that, they just recut their proposal strips into book format for the early issues). (Of course, comic books started just compiling previously published strips; it took quite a while for anyone to see the value in publishing original material in comic books.)
It’s really only the utter implosion of the print newspaper industry that’s changed the relative positions of strips vs. books, and it’s not like comic books are all that prestigious nowadays, it’s just that the strips are losing value faster than the books are.
And it’s not like people know comic books AS comic books; they know the mass-market adaptations – i.e., the movies – that have been made FROM the comic books, but the books themselves? Most people neither know them nor care. But I’m sure they would have at least a passing familiarity with a fair number of strips (like, even if they don’t read them, they’ve at least HEARD of them). Peanuts, Garfield, The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, Heathcliff, Marmaduke, Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Hagar the Horrible, The Family Circus… you can mention these without getting blank stares, but mention a comic book character who doesn’t have a movie and they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about.
And having said all that… yeah, it does seem that Batiuk has some bitterness about “only” getting into the strips, not the comic books, even though any number of creators before him would have killed to be in his position. (For a few years, he had THREE strips running simultaneously! In the 40s, he would have been a GOD in the industry with that resume.) It really is strange. (But then, it’s Batiuk we’re talking about here…)
You make me think of Ernest Borgnine.
A delivery boy came to his house with a package and didn’t recognize Borgnine as a motion picture actor…but could name the stars of several television series.
Soon afterwards, Borgnine began his four seasons of “McHale’s Navy.”
Every now and again, critics will claim that television has become the new cinema with series like “Breaking Bad” or “Mad Men,” and then take it back.
Thomas Wolfe takes aim at people who think too highly of comic strips in *You Can’t Go Home Again.*
“Good King Sauerkraut, look out!
On yo’ feets uneven.
While the snoo lay roun about,
All kerchoo achievin”
“‘Kerchoo?”
“Gesundheit. Uh, what’s ‘snoo’?”
“I dunno. What’s new with you?”
For the “Wenceslaus is King” version, I like the Roches best (no bums in their carols, though they do sing “Winter Wonderland” in New Joisey accents).
Merry Crispness, everyone!
This makes him the most dangerous sort of idiot: the one who doesn’t even see that he should be envied. That sounds a lot like Les, doesn’t it?
Indeed, the newspaper comic strip world is a very exclusive club that operates on its own rules and has managed to have a strong cultural cachet for several generations of time. Omnipresence, omniculture, and licensing are powerful forces. Dinkle’s omnipresence within the Midwest US high school marching band field is the only reason why I became aware of Tom Batiuk’s work to begin with.
I hope that Tom Batiuk privately accepts and feels thankful for the blessed course of his life, because it definitely doesn’t seem like he has much gratitude on the basis of what he publicly states within and without his strips (outside of the standard platitudes), nor on the basis of how his peers seem to have not included him in their “club” in the same way that even people like Greg Evans has become (He was nominated four times for a Rueben and won one of them? I had no idea.).
It is the icing on the cake. Other artists spend their life trying to get a fraction of the recognition and career stability that Tom Batiuk has enjoyed, and, based on how he addresses it all, it seems like Tom just doesn’t care and he would happily trade it in a heartbeat just to be an unknown writer at Marvel. Meanwhile, he can’t bring himself to step down, either. He wants to stay right where he’s at until his actual death and frown about it until his last breath. How exhausting and sad.
The kicker is:
Nothing whatsoever is stopping him from creating and selling a comic book of his own superheroes or whatever he wants to put in it.
Even in the 70s, there were underground comic books (not a one of which he has EVER mentioned, to my knowledge, which is odd…).
Today, there are so many options for creating and distributing your own comic. Especially if you have name recognition and a “fan base” — it could done with a GoFundMe, or a subscription, or any number of other distribution methods.
If he’s not confident in his own drawings, he can hire an up-and-coming artist for cheap, or one of his old standbys like John Byrne or Rob Ro.
My point is: The ONLY thing standing in the way of Tom Batiuk making his superhero comix dreams coming true is TOM BATIUK.
I often say that TB doesn’t really want to make comic books. He wants to be a comic book maker. He wants to be what Stan Lee or Jack Kirby were in their old age: figureheads who dictate the direction of comic books from on high, and get paid gigantic amounts of money, while micromanaged peons do the actual work. (Which I know isn’t the truth of what those men were. It’s TB’s fantasy of what he thinks they were, and what he wants for himself.)
He’s the equivalent of a kid who wants to be a football player when he grows up.. but never works out or practices, because he’s too busy planning the “baller” lifestyle he wants to have. Those kids usually get a reality check when they get cut from high school teams. For TB, being rejected by Marvel and DC when he was 25 (despite having an admirable body of work at that age) wasn’t the wake-up call it should have been.
He’ll never start an independent comic, for the same reason baller kid will never become a referee or do anything else sports-related: because it’s 180 degrees from what he wants to be. And, altering his career path slightly won’t solve his basic problem, which is that he’s lazy, entitled, and mediocre.
Getting hired by Marvel and DC (and no other comics company) is the first step down the only road he can conceive for himself. If he wanted a comic book career as much as he acts like he does, he would have put some effort into it at some point. He applied for each brand at age 25, and as far as I know, never tried again.
He did with his comic book dreams what Lisa did with her cancer. “Oh, they screwed up, guess I’ll just sit here and die. It’s the hospital’s/hedge fund’s/Comics Code’s/the name Funky Winkerbean‘s/people demanding ‘funny’ comics/everybody but me’s fault.”
My impression, FWIW, of what they told him at Marvel and DC was more like, “Go home and keep working at it” and less like, “Depart, and never darken our door again.”
Perhaps to his young, tender ears, it sounded like a door slamming in his face.
Either way, it was beyond scummy to rewrite it a year or two ago with TB as Phil Holt as Jack Kirby, only this time the plot was:
“I showed the company my portfolio, they kept a piece of it [this doesn’t happen — ed], and threw it away [not how this works — ed] and then Hal Foster stole it and printed it as his own [libelous and laughable — ed].”
Those interviews also seemed very preliminary. Like the interview you’d get if Marvel ran a want ad and you applied to it. The interviewers treated him like a guy of the street, which he may have been to them.
TB has said that he expected to be hired at Marvel and also expected to be writing Spider-Man within a year or so.
If your expectations at 25, with the modest talent he had, are that you will be whisked in for an audience with Stan Lee, then given a firm double-handed welcome handshake, a corner office, and a secretary… then just being told “this is a good start” must be a shocking letdown.
He always says that his portfolio was rejected because it didn’t meet the Comics Code. We all know that’s a bunch of hooey. Marvel has editors who direct the content; this was just a portfolio to show his capabilities.
My best guess is that someone kindly took the time to give him a critique on how he could bring his work up to standard, and it included a mention of the Comics Code, so he fixated on the idea that Frederic Wertham had somehow destroyed his promising career.
Can you imagine what would happen if a talent on par with a 25-year-old John Romita or Jack Kirby had walked in with portfolio images that didn’t meet the Comics Code? Do you think Marvel would have said, “Hey, these images that you didn’t draw for us, and didn’t intend for publication, run afoul of the Comics Code, so get the hell out of our office?”
Yeah, I have noticed how he never seems to show us any of the actual content of his supposed strips and movies. And he doesn’t even need to take the risk of writing such a book and trying to get it crowd-funded or published; I’m quite sure the syndicate would let him take a month to just run a “Starbuck Jones” or Atomik Komix storyline. Enough other comic artists have done it.
So I have developed an alternate explanation, that TB is not so much interested in the comics themselves as in the process of writing them. I’ve used this comparison before, but I’ll repeat it here: I think he wants to produce, in pretty much all of his Darren and Pete storylines, something like the old “Dick Van Dyke Show,” which was all about the goings-on in the writers’ room (a more legitimate “bullpen” than the one he created for his komix stories, by the way) for a “Your Show of Shows” type weekly TV show. “DVD” very rarely showed small bits of the fictitious “Alan Brady Show”; it was about the work and personal lives of the people who wrote it.
Trouble is, I don’t think that formula works for comics production. TV shows actually do have regular writers’ meetings, scripts are collaborative efforts, there are read-throughs and rewrites and interference from the network censors and the stars and so forth, lots of material that can be used to create interaction and humor. Comics, not so much; collaboration is long-distance and typically in writing; there is no “bullpen.” So Tom (either from ignorance or just to force-fit his chosen subject matter into the kind of story he wants to write) makes stuff up, and it shows.
I wonder if, at some level, he knows he would have been better off keeping “John Darling” and giving “Funky Winkerbean” the axe, if his interests had really moved in a “workplace sitcom” direction. I never read much of that comic, so maybe one of y’all can tell me: was “Darling” more about the actual show, or more about the behind-the-scenes around its creation?
It seemed roughly half-and-half, from what I’ve seen — half workplace humor, half on-air hijinx.
There have certainly been enough successful TV shows about hilarity behind the scenes of broadcasting — The Dick Van Dyke show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, NewsRadio, and Frasier, among others. It’s a neverending mine of comedy material.
So, of course, he turned his back on it.
I’d prefer to find out who’s naughty Anne Rice.
You will at the Witching Hour, Your Grease, and May Fair winds introduce you to Mildred, Mordred (or Morgan) and Cynthia in a Kindly mood.
Monday: We’re going to make rum balls!
Tuesday: We’re going to make rum balls!
Wednesday: We’re going to make rum balls!
Thursday: We’re going to make rum balls!
Friday: We made rum balls!
Saturday (predicted): We made rum balls!
No actual story. No point. No emotional impact. Nothing about how good they are. Nothing about why the recipe is sacred. Nothing about why she chose Jenna Rickblonde #6 for this honor. Nothing about the rum balls Lillian made three weeks ago. Nothing about how she ran out of the primary ingredient both times. Nothing about Lillian’s implied alcoholism and/or dementia.
All because someone’s idea of story telling doesn’t include ‘meaningless’ things such as ‘who are these people?’, ‘why do they do what they do?’ and ‘having done it, what happens next?’
After all, no one asked those questions when Flash used running at Ludicrous Speed to defeat Rainbow Raider.
Flash running at ludicrous speed would at least be visually entertaining. This is like watching The Flash do his taxes.
Barry Allen/Wally West/Jay Garrick doing their taxes would be a lot more entertaining
And not at all the waste of time this week was.
What happens when Tom Batiuk is at the test screening….
I see over at GoComics that Captain LatePants has returned. Welcome back, bwoeh.
The strip with Crazy going through and deciding which books to sell because he needed the money is especially maddening. He’s acting as if all of his books are worth something and just going about weeding books out of his library like he’s decluttering.
I’m reminded of the when I visit the local locations of a relatively popular chain of used book/movie/music stores. When there, I will invariably hear a customer at the back counter (where the store buys merchandise from the public) contesting the store’s offer for whatever it is they have brought in. Their books are always rarer than the store’s computer claim, their LPs are all in great condition because they removed anything that did not playback well, they heard VHS is coming back when perusing Yahoo! News 3 months ago… It’s absurd. And arguing with the store’s employees, whose jobs depend on the business of buying stock at lowball prices and selling it well below the price of a new book at Barnes & Noble, is even more absurd.
The strip with Crazy would actually work as a commentary on this ridiculous real life behavior, but TB doesn’t know to go there because he appears to be one of these people. So the strip is all but completely unhinged! Crazy confidently deciding to sell a book whose contents “can easily be found on the internet”…. are you kidding me?! That’s the LEAST valuable kind of book. I had/still have many many Star Wars character/ship/planet/language/etc. guides purchased in the 1990s for a cumulative price well into the hundreds of dollars. They were great fun to flip through back in the day. And now, they make up 1/10,000th of Wookieepedia, at best. Selling them all anytime in the last 15 years would have, optimistically, bought me lunch at a Chili’s. Without an appetizer.
TB doesn’t know to go there because he appears to be one of these people (who ridiculously overvalue their collectibles).
I wonder how much of his (significant) lifetime earnings Tom Batiuk has “invested” in comic books. Maybe that’s why he’s so fixated on this fantasy of non-premium, mediocre-grade comic books being insanely valuable. Because he’s in trouble if they’re not.
He uses the strip to indulge all his other fantasies about how the world should work to his advantage. This fits perfectly with the endless writing awards.
I’m sure it’s the despair of his heirs. He’ll be leaving them a comic book collection worth only slightly more than bupkis, and a comic strip property worth considerably less.
Tom’s heirs: “Hoorah! We can sell Dad’s comics!”
3 long days later: “I never thought I’d see so many Deaths of Superman, and X-Force #1’s…”
I recall watching that Comic Critic video when it was posted here some time before, and it mainly reminds me that I find the predominant strawman purported by Tom Batiuk and those who negatively criticize his work are both incorrect.
TB wants to use the “everyone only thinks comics are supposed to be funny” line to conveniently handwave all detractors, regardless of the fact that, as shown by other posts here, he undermines his own strawman both while in the midst of delivering that message as well as contradicting it the other time with the Les at the bedside Sunday feature.
The broad brush that is used to negatively paint TB’s work is that it is a “bleak black hole of negativity”, as if it is a concentrated form of sadness and depression. This isn’t true, either. The YT clip highlights the Wiki page of the topics “discussed” by FW but we know that what constitutes “discussion” within the FW world is to maybe acknowledge that something exists without going into any further detail and certainly avoiding depicting any kind of actual conflict as much as possible.
The issue is that TB wants to have recognition for his strips to discuss serious matters but he continuously demonstrates time and time again, year after year, that he is completely incapable of discussing and presenting these matters with any kind of consistent logic or means by which actual humans from planet Earth discuss and respond to these topics and events. No living and breathing actual human who have been subject to a life like what people like Wally, Cayla, and Becky have been shown to live would ever act the way that they do or speak in the way that they do about their lives. They simply wouldn’t.
The first thing that the week of bloviating about comics that John gets wrong is that people ask him why comic books are called comics all the time. The fuck he does. Like hell. Do people go into GameStop and ask if video games are art or not “all the time”? Do people go to Dick’s Sporting Goods and ask why football is called football “all the time”? No, no, no. You can think of a dozen other parallel examples of this right now. If you’re going to a comic book store, you’re going there to look at and maybe buy comic books, not get into an intellectual debate about the etymology behind the term “comic books” with the minimum wage earning teenaged counter clerk, or that person’s Dad who owns the place. You’re not.
The ultimate point that needs to remain the focus isn’t that Funky Winkerbean (and now 90%+ of Crankshaft) is “just a comic strip” – it’s that it’s “just a bad comic strip”. That’s the heart of the matter that needs to be acknowledged long before anyone argues over whatever comic books or comic strips are “supposed to be”, as if that could be objectively determined.
Merry Christmas, Harriet. Thank you for your work here. To the rest of you as well.
I had forgotten the clumsy phrase describing Crazy as “CEO of [his] library”, which he used more than once in this remarkably implausible story. I don’t thank you for reminding me of it again. It grates on the inner ear.
Did it cause you to be immortally wounded?
There’s a clog in the torso chute.
Today’s Crankshaft (12/16):
Lillian: You despicable fathead! You ate all but two of my extremely alcholic rum balls
Crank: What can I say? I love rum balls!
Fat Fucking Fuck Funky: Did somebody say RUMBALLS?!
Holly: FUNKY, NO!
(Funky runs to Crankshaft’s house and eats one rum ball and pukes everywhere, which causes Crankshaft to tackle him and throw his fat ass into the street and run him over with his school bus)
RE: The ‘Shaftless 12/17/23 “Crannkshaft”:
Yes, of course. When re-opening a pizza restaurant that’s been shut down for about a year, the top priority is hanging up the Christmas decorations.
No one bought the jukebox when the contents of Montoni’s were auctioned off last November in FW?
And what, pray, does Mopey mean by “raise the do-re-me” (which is generally spelt “mi”)? If he’s talking “dough-re-mi” as in money, didn’t he and his partner the Pizza Box Monster already buy the place? And if it’s a literal reference to pizza dough, shouldn’t he…oh, I dunno…hire actual kitchen staff to prepare the ingredients to bake pizzas, strombolis, calzones, etc. rather than expect his comic book artist pal to help with that?
All that being said, you’ve gotta admire the identical semi-smirk stares on Generic Batiuk Blondes Min-dull’s and Jessica’s faces in the last panel. “Wait a minute,” each is thinking. “How can I be standing over there with that nebbish when I’m supposed to be over here with this nebbish!?”
Of course, they make sure to show the faded spots on the walls where the pictures used to be, so we know those were sold off (and… I guess they didn’t repaint the walls?). And, of course, Lillian bought her Tiffany lamp back. So it looks like that big auction sold the lamp, the pictures, and… that’s it? (Well, we’ve yet to see the band box, so maybe that sold as well, who knows? Or cares?) (At least they didn’t have Funky claim to have sold “everything” at the auction, that’d be embarrassing!)
(I’m just going to assume that all the food was left in the back for the past year, and that Mopetoni’s is going to just keep on using the same ingredients. If you can cook a turkey that’s been sitting in a freezer for thirty years, surely year-old pizza ingredients are fine, right?)
(Also, I’m reasonably sure this is Max and Rummy Hannah, not Boy Lisa and Jessica Darling Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered.)
I have a sinking feeling that, like a bland penny, the band box will be back.
Curse me for a novice. I got my Random Batiuk Blondes mixed up, and compounded it with their bfs. Yes, of course that’s Max and Hannah, who should be out running the Valentine. Jessica made too much sense as she worked as a waitress at Montoni’s. Sorry.
“C’mon, honey, let’s go. I was thinking… Everyone’s out tonight, so when we get home let’s put on some music, pour some wine and have some fun. Hmm?”
“Uh, Max? I’m not your wife. I’m your sister.”
“What? Oh, crap! Why do you two have to look so much alike? This is the third time this has happened this month!”
“Er, actually, it’s the fourth…”
Wonder if we’re on the way to a “it’s like poetry, it rhymes” moment with Montoni’s opening on Christmas Eve or something to pair up with how it originally closed. I’m sure that would be seen as the “elegant solution” in spite of the quarter-inch realism questions of how fast a restaurant can open from vague scratch.
…by people who have no skill at running a restaurant, and still have other full-time jobs as far as we know.
IMO, This Montoni’s resurrection arc is the final nail in the coffin of Tom Batiuk’s neurotypicality.
I’m still confused about why he had the whole “Montoni’s is closing” arc. I was confused even then. Because when the NYC branch closed, Funky was all depressed and downtrodden. But when he announced that the Westview OG Montoni’s was bankrupt, he was all smiles. And there were no apparent emotional or financial repercussions for anyone at all.
So why even have Montoni’s close, just to resurrect it for the Jazz Messiah arc and now for this bizarre dreck?
From the “Life is Stranger than Batiuk” file: my sister-in-law was telling me about a pizza joint in her neighborhood that recently changed hands. Place was called “Dondi’s,” and like MoPete and Minty, the new owners kept the big “DONDI’S PIZZA” sign out front.
Only trouble is, they re-opened as a taco place. They don’t sell pizzas anymore. Customers come in looking for the Dondi’s Pizza they’ve eaten for years (apparently the place closed because the owner retired, not because it was doing badly) and are more than a little unhappy when they discover there is no pizza.
Somehow I could see Batiuk doing something like this. I would be at most only mildly surprised if by July we found Montoni’s is now a coffeehouse where people sit around talking about komix. Oh, wait… that’s what it was half the time even before it closed…
“Dondi’s Pizza”? Was the original owner a precocious Italian WWII orphan?
I think Funky should have felt sadness when Montoni’s closed because he worked at Montoni’s for a very long time
@csroberto: Or at least he should have felt fear, because a failing restaurant (which is Funky’s second that we know of) would take a serious bite out of someone’s retirement plans.
A week or two ago I posted about making a last visit to a local Mexican restaurant that was closing after 30 years. Well, apparently so many people came in for a final meal, and to say goodbye to the owners that they were convinced to remain open, got a family member to invest some money, and are going to do some updates to the decor.
That’s a great story!
The question that burns in my mind – Will the green pitcher be making a comeback?
And what of The Rag? Cory’s Rag? What’s it been up to? Did it start a new life in a faraway town, say Cleveland, or has it never lost the faith, patiently waiting to wipe down the Montoni’s counter once more?
#corysragstan
“How can I be in two places at once, when I’m on no place at all?”
Firesign Theatre
Hola my beautiful nitters!
Sorry for the delay in a new post. Expect 2013, (the horrors of dance), to go live some time tonight.
*sniff* you’re all just…the most wonderful commenters…any blog could ask for…. and I want you to know that…
Aw, CBH, you know how much we all love you… come on, now… oh, don’t you start crying, dammit! If you cry, I’ll cry too!… BAWWWWW!
12/18 Crankshaft: Really, an Elon Musk/Twitter joke? And it’s this? Perfect example of Batiuk trying to write topical jokes 11 months in advance, and then never updating/editing them to reflect more recent events. The agedness of the joke adds a lot of subtext Batiuk probably didn’t intend.
The 11 months that passed changed Twitter into something Pete wouldn’t compare himself to. Pete made a big show out of keeping the name Montoni’s, and restoring every last bit of tacky kitsch, while Musk inadvisedly renamed and overhauled Twitter.
On the other hand, it positively nailed the parallel vibe of “Undeservedly successful narcissist who overestimates his own charm wildly overpays for a floundering business about which he knows next to nothing, assuming it will be easy to run while still deigning to occasionally dabble in the business endeavour that actually made him wealthy.”
The weird thing–besides everything–is that it’s not “Melon Husk” at “Twatter” or something. This is a writer afraid to say “McDonalds.” Or eBay. And called it “the flu” because he thought in 2020 that in 2021, no one would remember the word “covid.” Dude, just don’t make topical jokes a year out.
“My launch of Space X was a great success!”
“Melon, it exploded!”
“Yes, but it exploded further out than it did last time!”
Sorry, not “exploded.” It had an “unplanned rapid disassembly.” Prepare for disassembly, Trophy Blond and Comics Clown.