Slipping Away.

Apologies that the Cranky Awards are late, but Snowmageddon has hit the Midwest.

I hope everyone has been enjoying what seems will be an entire week of Crankshaft lying prone on the sidewalk while zoomers galk at him.

It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Literally. Though this time the role of Pam was played by the Generic Long Faced Youth.

We used to get hilarious strips of old people slipping and falling on the ice more often, when Rose Murdoch was still alive. For example, back in 2008, when Rose was still living alone in a house based on Batiuk’s childhood home.

Having enjoyed that mini arc, it was stretched out for an entire month in 2011, so we could revel in this spiteful old woman’s misery for multiple bitter, passive-aggressive, weeks. So, enjoy!

132 thoughts on “Slipping Away.”

  1. You know, there are times when I think Rose Murdoch was TB’s all-time best character. She’s one of the realest characters for sure. And as far as I remember, her behavior is generally consistent with her established personality.

    Let’s be honest — she’s a great villain. And TB actually knows she’s a villain, unlike other characters who do hateful things that TB seems to think are cute or funny.

    Speaking of which, I had an idea for a theme for future posts — not that CBH, BJr6K, Epicus, or any of our esteemed bloggers would ever run out of ideas. But if you guys ever did, we could examine the most hateful deeds of every character. You’d probably find the “good guys” have done more awful things than the “villains” ever did.

    1. I’ve pitched Harriet on a “The Worst of Les Moore” series. It would require a lot of research, though.

      1. That’s all too true. And perhaps CBH doesn’t want to dive into the ugliness. Or perhaps we could ask for nominations for most hateful behavior of character X from the Funky historians among our commenters?

        1. It’s certainly a thought, though many characters not named Les Moore would have their worst action be some kind of inaction. Having any of his characters actually choose to do something reprehensible in late stage Funkyverse would be giving them too much agency.

          Also, we’d have to decide if we’re including Act I. Since some of the zanier antics from that were downright criminal, but in a looney tunes kinda way.

          1. Many of Les’ worst actions are also inactions. But he’s a manipulator, so I think that’s by design.

      1. bwoeh, you should know by now that “nominate” is a dirty word round these parts….

        [cut to pinlight still illuminating empty spot on TB’s mantel, 16 years later]

        1. The timing of your reply is quite coincidental. I was just logging in to apologize for putting you on the spot a couple of days ago. I wasn’t sure if you were too keen on me nominating you. For what it’s worth, I think you would be great in the role.

          Upon reflection, I realized I didn’t know what the Pulitzer award looks like. It appears to be a plaque adorned with two gold medals. To us, TB will always be a tin medalist.

  2. Regarding today’s Crankshaft… others have already mentioned that falls in the elderly just aren’t funny. You’d think a man in his late 70s would know that. I personally was close to two people, one in his 80s, one in her 90s, who were healthy and active and fully mentally present until they had falls. Both suffered a terrible decline, physically and mentally, ending with their death. “T’aint funny, McGee.”

    I guess the point of the current run is to show how terrible those young people are, what with their rock and their roll, and their Tik and their Tok. But how do we know these weren’t former riders of Crankshaft’s bus? Maybe they’re just relishing the chance to see their tormentor suffer. Who can blame them? Film of Crankshaft writhing on the ground will be the hottest viral video that ever hit Centerville — hotter even than “Masonne Jarre kisses a starlet”!

    1. He’s certainly writing for his audience; one person in the Arcamax comments saying they’re 85 did the whole “THAT’s what’s wrong with kids today!” With an affirming reply, and a lot of the earnest GoComics commenters are musing similar things.

      Way too easy joke, but for the newspaper crowd that’s still worth sensible chuckles and coffee rants I guess.

      1. This could have been funny IF it didn’t involve a centenarian slipping and falling on a sidewalk.

        MUCH more realistic, yet not so realistic as to be scary: Crankshaft is yet again hanging from his house’s gutter, or a tree limb, and he calls out for help. A crowd forms, all holding phones. He assumes they’re all calling 911, but they’re all uploading videos to TikTok, FaceLook, InstantGram, etc. Then the fire department arrives, and the firefighters stand around filming as well, calling out how many likes their livestream is getting.

        As already pointed out, videos of the aftermath of an ordinary fall never go viral, unless they’re being watched by slip-and-fall lawyers looking for new clients.

  3. Today’s Funky Crankerbean (01/09/2024)

    Crank: Help me get up!

    Random Westview Man: No fucking way! You made our childhoods miserable! (walks away from Crank)

    Crank: You on the phone! Get off of TikTok and dial 911!

  4. I know Mel Brooks said “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” But Batiuk is applying it way too literally. It’s like he made it another one of his “Rules of Cartooning.”

    I guess the point of the current run is to show how terrible those young people are, what with their Tik and their Tok

    What galls me about it is that we just saw Crankshaft do the EXACT SAME THING to Pop Clutch. He let his friend die, to complete a childish task. But it didn’t use the internet, and the dead person wasn’t anybody important, so it’s fine. Now that Crankshaft is the injured party, it’s supposed to be appalling, and the people doing it are monsters.

    how do we know these weren’t former riders of Crankshaft’s bus?

    In a good story, the characters would say this. “Hey, it’s that bus driver! Remember all the times you left me at the bus stop? Well…” (walks away)

    This is classic Laser Guided Karma. The villain finds himself in the situation he put others into. And Batiuk doesn’t even realize it. Of course, he can’t even see Crankshaft as the villain. Or even as an unsympathetic protagonist who deserves the occasional comeuppance.

    Film of Crankshaft writhing on the ground will be the hottest viral video that ever hit Centerville

    Batiuk also misses the point of internet videos. The idea is to make a video of something funny happening, not record the scene after the funny thing has happened. If anything funny had happened here, which it didn’t. There’s nothing remotely TikTok-worthy about this moment. (But it’s an inadvertent metaphor for Batiuk’s writing. Show us everything but the funny/important part.)

    Complete hackery. Retire, Tom.

    2. All the Pop Clutch story needed was one little tweak–Clutch saying something like “Don’t feel bad, Ed, I was the one encouraging you!” And it would have been fine. An editor who, you know, edits could have come up with that.

      TB’s work is edited by a box of breakfast cereal.

      1. It could have actually been morbidly funny, instead of just morbid, if it had been pushed a bit further, so Pop Clutch’s last words had been something like “And after all those years of mentoring him… the student has surpassed the master!” Or “I’m glad I taught Crankshaft the right priorities!” Or just “Attaboy!”

        I know I’ve said this before, but TB used to be perfectly competent at pushing ridiculous ideas until they became funny.

        Crazy Harry loves music and pizza… what if he played a pizza as a record? And what’s more, what if we push that further and it actually plays some audible “music”? Les takes his job as hall monitor really seriously… how seriously? Let’s go further and give him a machine gun like a guard in a turret at a prison camp. Etc.

        Now he comes up with the ridiculous ideas and almost immediately slams on the brakes. Result: Boring and loathesome. It’s the equivalent of sending Les to school to walk the halls with a machine gun for no discernable reason. There’s no joke in it and it’s well into the realm of extreme un-funniness.

        1. Replying to myself to add: The Rose Murdoch strips are actually funny in a dark, nonmirthful way. The joke is that Rose is such a vicious, narcissistic sociopath that she is willing to grievously injure herself just to hurt Jeff. And the reason there’s a dark humor in it is that so many of us have known people just like this. Some of us even had parents like this, and there is a lot of truth in Rose’s hateful behavior.

          And in bitter truth there is humor.

      2. TB’s work is edited by a box of breakfast cereal.

        @TeaberryBlue. Hmm, sounds about right.

    1. I…. I….

      This “Match to Flame” is one for the books, folks. He’s looking back at something he wrote probably a decade ago….

      I had already taken a swipe at explaining the situation in the introduction to The Last Leaf, the third book in the Lisa’s Legacy Trilogy. So I figured that I would take a look at what I had written before and rewrite it, tweaking and expanding on it as needed. But, upon rereading it, I thought: “Wow, I really nailed it! It’s perfect the way it is!”

      We joke about his philosophy being “First thought, best thought,” but here it is, in black and white. He’s probably the only writer in history who could look back on something he wrote long ago and not find a single thing he’d change.

      We’ve also discussed the bizarre lack of direction after Lisa’s death. Did he really have no plans, no ideas for dramatic repercussions? Yes. He really had no plans for what to do after his big act. And he really couldn’t think of any dramatic situations that could have resulted from the death of Lisa.

      I couldn’t make this up.

      https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/match-to-flame-202/

      1. You know that at least once a day, Batiuk says out loud: “Wow, I really nailed it! It’s perfect the way it is!”

        (More than once a day if he’s reading his own blog posts.)

      2. That blog post may be the most quintessential Batiuk thing ever. Just… so many things we’ve long said about Batiuk and his writing process, and there he is admitting to them with no sense of irony or shame.

    2. I chuckled to myself at the Dec 19th entry, with the latest Funky collection volume’s Kayla cover and his statement “I may be prejudiced…”

  6. Wow, today’s Komix Thoughtx entry is a hoot. It’s a copy of a copy of one of Batiuk’s older book intros, and of course it’s about how he has no ideas for Act 3 and was lost in a “cold and empty” playground before hitting on Lisa nostalgia as the way forward.

    There’s a lot that can be picked apart, like how “nothing felt comfortable” about New York Montoni’s and he admits to “paying the price” for the “casual” choice to time jump, but I can’t help but dwell on his mention of a “Wally Wood” rule:

    “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.”

    This explains so much about his blogging methods and the Davis era of Crankshaft, doesn’t it?

    1. You know what, though? Wally Wood was right. What he didn’t add, because he thought it was self-evident (as you’ll see if you look at his body of work): Don’t do shit work. Don’t sign your name to something embarrassingly slapdash.

      Tom Batiuk’s writing would improve 10,000% if he would follow Wood’s rule, but the writing version: Use A Tried-and-True Plot.

      There are many different lists of the Basic Plots, but here’s one from 1895 with 36 options, any of which could make a successful FW arc… if they were fully implemented and followed through.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations

      Or hell, just go to the library and take out some fairy tales, Greek and Roman myths, or a Joseph Campbell book. Or borrow a plot, denouement and all, from a favorite classic movie, or even a freakin’ Twilight Zone or Star Trek episode.

      These classic plots have endured for thousands of years for a reason. They are flexible, they work, and they are satisfying.

  7. The general idea behind the whole young people are monsters who deserve to live in a used up world is that boomers don’t like the idea of dying and vanishing down the corridor of time like other generations did.

    1. Which is, of course, a tale as old as time. From the ancient Greeks, to now. All the Kent State hippies Batiuk hung out with thumbed their nose at ol’ ma and pa for being warmongering old industrialists. And now they’re all 75, retired in their cosy little McMansions.

  8. I’m probably the last person to figure this out, but I just realized…

    — Rose Murdoch’s house is based on Batty’s childhood house

    — Rose was always railing against her son Jeff’s love of comic books

    It’s inescapable: Rose Murdoch is clearly based somehow on TB’s mom. That might be why she’s one of the most real, most fleshed-out characters in the canon. She’s a villain, but not a straw villain like Frankie or Roberta Blackburn. She’s all too believable, and so are her motivations (eg, to punish her son for trying to live his own life with his own family while she is old and alone; to exercise what little control she still has over her child in the most effective way she has, etc.)

    Is this how Tom Batiuk saw his mother? As a hateful, spiteful, book-stabbing Rose Murdoch? Good lord. If so, that explains so much about why he’s still fighting the “comics are valid” battle decades after it was decisively won.

    1. Below is a picture of Tom’s childhood home.

      And Rose’s old house, right as she was moving into the Murdoch home.

      The real life house is still standing. It’s 1153 Herman Avenue, Akron, Ohio.

      Tom’s mother, Verna Greskovics Batiuk, died in late 2003, his father Martin in 2009. (Similar to Jeff,) Tom also had one sister, Mary Ellen. No spouse for her is listed in Verna’s obit, but a life partner named Joyce is listed in Martin’s.

      Verna and Martin were Catholic.

      Verna Batiuk, 87, tutored at library

      https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/ohio/name/martin-batiuk-obituary?id=26509919

      1. Wow. Way above and beyond the call, Harriet!

        Verna was one of 12 kids. Now we know who the majority Batiuk’s readers are … his what-must-be-innumerable cousins!

      2. It’s interesting that his sister has a female “life partner” (perhaps they are now married?), because TB has made tiny stabs at being all progressive about LGBT issues, but always seems squeamish about really taking a stand. You might think that having a gay sister would make the topic less abstract for him and give him some reality to base a plot, or characters, on…

        You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

        1. Lynn Johnston’s “coming out” arc in the 1990s was inspired by a gay man she knew, who was murdered. (Though it’s unclear whether that was an act of homophobia, or just robbery.)

          1. Robbery…but you wouldn’t know it from her account. She had Five Oh be happy the gay man got dead when in fact, they were glad to nail the robber.

      3. Sweet! I’ve always wondered about Batiuk’s childhood home in Akron. I read in one of his blogs that it was on Herman Avenue. I looked up Herman Avenue on Google Maps but didn’t know which house. I bow before your superior detective skills. 🙇‍♀️

        What?! There’s no Tom Batiuk museum on the home’s upper floors, like the Jerry Siegel house? There are no Funky Winkerebean characters on the grounds or exterior of the house? No historical markers of any kind? 😲🤣

        Are there any extremely rare comic books hidden away under loose floorboards?🤣

    2. While reading those strips, I thought “Tom sure hates old ladies with glasses! Especially who hate reading! By which he does not mean books!” (Name a time he’s mentioned any books, besides Gibson last week because *SHRUGS*, or Hemingway that one time he compared himself to him)
      Of course, there is Mrs Blackburn. No glasses, not an ancient crone. But BOY HOWDY! them comical books!
      And Lena? Why does he hate her? Was Mrs Batuik bad at bowling, and a bad cook? (Except for those chocolate cookies and milk!)
      NOT Lillian! She’s an author of imaginary books and does what anyone would do after finding the Greatest Comics Stash ever (carefully preserved loose in a box in a leaky N. Ohio attic for 75 years), she doesn’t sell them at auction! She gives them away to a nerd!
      The Burnings…Will they just be Mrs B at a stake?

    3. Is this how Tom Batiuk saw his mother?

      I don’t think there’s any question it is. But strangely, it doesn’t bother me that much. Fictional parents tend to be exaggerations, and real parents are to easy to exaggerate. My parents were loving, hardworking, stable people I’m very grateful to have had. But they could both be terrible sometimes, in their own little ways. And any depiction of them, or inspired by them, would focus on those. Especially if I’m writing a humor story and not a realistic biography. So yeah, it probably is how he saw his mother.

      What bothers me more than that is the strip’s constant depiction of “took someone’s comic books away” as the cruelest, most immoral act you can do to someone. Especially when Batiuk’s own blog posts about his childhood suggest he was never without them for very long. That’s where he’s really venting his mommy issues. Because his mommy issues are really just his comic book issues. Ms. Batiuk made the mistake of getting between Rain Man and Judge Wopner.

      1. Here’s another observation about Rose Murdoch being based on Batiuk’s mother.

        How many sisters does Jeff Murdoch have? Just the one, right? Just like Tom. What a coincidence!

      1. Picturing life in the Batiuk household…

        Tom pours his cup of morning coffee. Mrs Batiuk: “Tom, what are you doing?

        Later, Tom sits at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. Mrs Batiuk: “What are you doing, Tom?”

        Still later, Tom watches the game on TV. Mrs Batiuk: “Are you watching the game on TV?”

    5. That’s exactly how he saw her. We used to call her Tom Batiuk’s Mommy Issues for a reason.

  9. Holy cow, Lillian… making Rose and Crankshaft’s psychopathy look tame. Joshreads undoubtedly would rate this “extremely menacing”.

    1. I checked the Comics Curmudgeon archive for the ‘Rose Murdoch on Ice’ story arc. There was no ‘Crankshaft’ entry for the comic you posted, but there was a mention on 2/21/11.

  10. Ha ha ha! It’s funny because he’s OLD! Get it? Oh, those zany elderly folks, with their crippling injuries and lingering illnesses, such a rich vein of comedy to mine. And the way that no one cares is just the icing on the cake.

    1. If someone would just give ol’ Cranky a pack of cigarettes and a light, he’d be up and dancing the Charleston in no time at all! It’s a miracle cure for old age!

  11. Red Skelton, a master of physical comedy, once explained that what makes a pratfall funny is not the fall itself, but the attempts to get up, which must immediately demonstrate that the person who fell is not hurt. It’s OK to laugh at a guy who slips on a banana peel if he then thrashes around, trying to get up but each time slipping on the same peel again, and you see that all of his body parts work.

    Somebody lying on a grate, apparently too injured to even make an attempt to get up, is not funny. It’s just somebody who got hurt.

  12. I hate to be a beady eyed nitpicker but Crankshaft is lying supine. Prone is face down. Thank you anatomy class.

      1. Yes, entrancedcat, if you are a beady-eyed nitpicker, we are your people. Are you by chance a Twitter Tot too? Then you’re in the right place.

  13. I’m actually kind of offended by today’s Crankshaft that portrayed young people as callous and uncaring.

    Back in December of 2020, I was involved in a traffic accident that left my SUV on its side and totaled. The semi that crashed into my vehicle and forced it into the barrier never even stopped. Two young men in their 20’s did. The first pulled over in front of my vehicle, called 911, and stayed with me until the paramedics, police, and highway patrol arrived. The other, a truck driver pulled up behind my vehicle, set flares, and warned other drivers to slow down. The truck driver was actually headed in the other direction and witnessed the accident. He exited the highway and re-entered just to assist me.

    Hardly the phone-obsessed youths portrayed in today’s strip. If it is supposed to be a joke, I don’t find it funny.

  14. I was offended by today’s Crankshaft. Not all young people are callous and uncaring.

    Back in December of 2020, I had a traffic accident that left my SUV on its side and totaled. The semi that crashed into me and forced me into the left-side barrier didn’t even stop. Two young men in their 20’s did. The first stopped in front of my vehicle, dialed 911, and stayed by my side until the paramedics, highway patrol and police arrived. The second pulled up behind my vehicle, set flares, and waved at traffic to slow down. He was actually headed in the other direction, but had witnessed my accident, exited the highway, reentered the highway, and stopped behind me.

    I found today’s “humor” to be cliché and extremely unfunny. Please don’t tell me young people don’t care, because they do.

    1. It’s a tired cheap shot. But the comics page basically runs on this cheap shot. Boomers love to say “young people suck” to themselves over and over. Entire strips run on it, like Dustin and Pluggers.

      When the Boomer generation finally dies, the comics page is going to be one of the first cultural things that dies with them. It is of no value to anyone born after 1961. Even the Far Side/Bloom County/Calvin generation (to which I belong) has no use for the comics page, because no one is producing works of such excellent quality.

      1. Hey! That “1961” seems awfully specific! I often refer to myself as a “trailing edge boomer.”

        I know what you’re saying. A couple of decades ago, I used to enjoy reading the comics page with my adolescent son. While visiting over the holidays, my now adult son noticed me reading comic strips on my phone. He incredulously remarked, “You’re still reading the comics page?” He’s in his mid-thirties now, and probably quit reading comics sometime in high school.

        Compared to the heyday of Far Side/Bloom County/Calvin, contemporary comic strips seem watered down. There’s no edge. When was the last time Mr. Dithers held Dagwood outside a window by his heels? Recently a commenter on ‘Beetle Bailey’ lamented how much more curvy Miss Buxley used to be. On GoComics I used to have ‘Garfield’ and ‘Garfield Classics’ back-to-back. The juxtaposition between the two titles made it obvious how much more funny ‘Garfield Classics’ was. I wonder if that’s why GoComics removed ‘Garfield Classics’? ‘Garfield’ was a good strip before Jim Davis sold out. Something Bill Watterson refused to do. Nowadays while reading comics, instead of laughing out loud, my reaction will likely be, “Oh, that was clever.”

        Speaking of ‘Dustin’, there are very few comic strip characters more unlikeable than Ed Kudlick. A commenter on ArcaMax refers to him as the “human bowling pin” because of his appearance. 🤣 (That’s funny)

        1. Re “Garfield” selling out: I think the strip’s biggest problem was that at one point Davis sold out to somebody who did far more with the character than he did. I’m talking, of course, about the company that turned the strip into a good Saturday morning cartoon, featuring the voice of Lorenzo Music (also the voice of the unseen doorman on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I think) as Garfield. I just recently watched the episode where Binky the Clown was fired from WBOR TV for being “too violent” and replaced with the Buddy Bears (“We are the Buddy Bears, we never never fight/Anyone who disagrees is never ever right/If you have a point of view, just keep it out of sight”), and of course Garfield has to foment a battle between the Bears to get Binky his job back. It still holds up.

          On the other hand, “US Acres” was equally lousy in print and on TV. Some things can’t be helped.

      2. Another overused, tired comic strip cheap shot is the dumb, lazy dad who can’t cook. I negatively react to this trope every time I read it.

      3. Batty used to brag about visiting Medina High School for research. But, as always, he only sees what he wants to see and hence learns nothing.

        I give an engineering lecture once a year at a local college and have hired a few young people over the past year. There are lots of motivated people out there who aren’t snowflakes. It seems to me that many young people are not slaves to social media and enjoy doing real things. I have interviewed people that did a lot of traveling, that enjoy building things, etc. Sure, the snowflake social media whores get all the attention, but there are a lot of bright young people out there too.

        1. But, as always, he only sees what he wants to see and hence learns nothing.

          He really does. Look at his asinine “research trips.” He goes to Hollywood to photograph a famous celebrity eatery, and comes back with dozens of pictures of rectangular concrete office buildings. He goes to see a parade float being built, and he fixates on a band director figure because he thinks it’s Dinkle (though it actually wasn’t). Every shot is poorly framed, poorly focused, and poorly lit. There is no human activity or “feel” to any of it. He sees what he went there to see. Everything else is an S.E.P. – something he ignores because it’s not relevant to him. Being laser-focused can be a good thing, but he has no insight into his chosen subject matter either. Just “here I am! This is the thing I took a picture of!”

    2. Eve, I can report a similar experience that I had occur some years ago.

      I was a CDL driver on a local route. Bad weather at 4:00AM led to me being washed off the road alone. I happened to ditch out in farm land, so it was nothing short of a miracle that I walked away unharmed, but there I was in the middle of nowhere. The first car that approaches as I stand on the roadside is a car with three young people, early 20s at most, and they stayed there and let me sit in the car until police arrived.

      The core conceit of Crankshaft is “assholes doing assholish things”, and as Banana said here, it’s very tired cheap shot even though it is basically within the strip’s MO. But the gocomics comment responses of several people who wanted to use that strip as a springboard their grievances with Them Youngins In The World Today was rather telling and disappointing. I’m not getting younger, and I’m not getting less jaded as I age, but at least I’m still not yet operating under that kind of Boomer mentality.

      1. Glad you walk away unharmed. How big of a vehicle was it?

        Yeah, the Crankshaft readers’ reactions were rather telling and disappointing. Somebody should tell them “It’s just a comic strip!” 😁

        Something else I noticed at work today. If someone holds a door or the elevator for me, it’s usually a young person. They call me “ma’am.”

        1. It was a standard day cab big rig truck. The trailer wasn’t the standard full 53 feet long, but a bit shorter, as it was the type that had a platform lift embedded in the tail. My role was to deliver car parts to dealerships, something of a GM Fairy in a way. That lift at the rear and the fact that the trailer wasn’t stuffed every day meant that there was a lot of weight on the bottom (engines, transmissions, rotors, etc.), nothing towards the top, and I was driving through heavy winds in the middle of miles of corn, so there was nothing to break the gales. I’m on the road, all is fine (weather notwithstanding), I blink, and I’m jackknifed against the trailer and sailing backwards into a ditch at 60MPH.

          Also, while I’m here, I want to address your comments about Garfield from prior. One thing to bear in mind is that Jim Davis originally conceived the strip as being a vehicle for merchandising and sales, and he never tried to allude otherwise. The strip was born to sell out. But the older strips were indeed actually funny at times and a few still stand out today, despite its commercial intent.

          It bears repeating here – US newspaper comic strips are one of the remaining vestiges of monoculture. People knew about them at least in general by mere virtue of being in newspapers, which they saw regularly. It was a powerful position to hold. What does it say about Tom Batiuk that he has held that position of power for fifty years, and has only achieved this amount of success with it, and seems to only give voice to his eternal grudges before any kind of appreciation for his achievements.

          1. While Jim Davis has long been quite frank about his commercial ambitions, which were on display with Garfield quite early in the strip’s run, I don’t think it is entirely fair to say that the strip’s creation is owed to those ambitions.

            By all accounts, Davis aspired to be a cartoonist from a young age and had his comics printed in his high school newspaper and yearbook (he was on staff of both, but still…). He studied art in college before dropping out and eventually went to work in advertising for a time. Now, advertising is an industry we associate quite strongly with naked commercialism these days, but it is also a common landing place (especially before 1990) for people who studied art in college and/or wanted to get paid to draw (my father had a long career in advertising that began in this fashion, he got into the industry entirely because he liked to draw, not because he liked advertising). And Davis paid his dues before finding his runaway success. He had been working in the comic strip field for close to a decade before launching Garfield, first assisting Tom Ryan on Tumbleweeds and later with his own non-syndicated strips Gnorm Gnat and a briefly-run proto-Garfield strip called Jon (Davis’ artwork in both of these strips, and in early Garfield, is very much like Ryan’s Tumbleweeds artwork).

            That said, Davis’ choice of a cat as the subject of his strip was calculated, he has been frank in admitting that he chose to make Garfield about a cat because there were few cat-oriented comic strips running at the time while there were many dog-focused ones. Even that, though, seems a fair decision given that Davis found his efforts to get Gnorm Gnat syndicated unanimously stymied by editors who told him that bugs were unrelatable and unappealing as the main characters of a comic strip.

          2. Jim Davis has long been quite frank about his commercial ambitions
            Where’s my REAR WINDOW SUCTION CUP LISA DOLL?!

  15. Does anyone else with a WordPress ID have any trouble logging in? I enter my credentials and the login hangs… and hangs… and hangs. Status bar says, “Transferring data from wordpress.com.”

    Not sure if my previous post is in the torso chute or lost to bit heaven. I’m tired of messing around and decided to post this comment without trying to log into WordPress.

    1. Nobody else is having issues logging in or having their posts hang?

      If I attempt to post a comment using my usual email address without logging into WordPress, I’m led to a webpage that tells me the email address is already in use and forces me to log into WordPress.

      Logging into WordPress is a pain. I enter my email address and password and hit enter. The browser tab hangs for several minutes and eventually times out. I right-click and select “Reload”. After another tab that hangs and times out, I again select reload. After about 15 minutes my comment finally gets posted.

      This seems to happen with Chrome and Chromium-based browsers (i.e. Brave). regardless of my device. I clear all browser data but still have the same issue. Perhaps it’s a time-of-day issue?

      🤬

      1. I’ve been having the “forced to log in to WordPress” issue, though it usually doesn’t hang for me. (I’m using Firefox, though.) (Kind of annoying that logging into WordPress uses the WordPress display name, which resulted in a couple of posts yesterday under the wrong name. Ah, well, not the worst thing to ever happen.)

        1. I’ll have to try Firefox. My brother has been recommending it to me for years. He’s a big proponent of open-source software. Linux, LibreOffice, etc.

          I noticed you posting under your real name. I was wondering if you were having some kind of “I am Iron Man” moment. 😉

          What is “Green Luthor”? Anything to do with comic books?

          1. Yeah, it’s tangentially a comics reference. Actually, a cartoon based on comic books. It’s from an episode of Challenge of the Superfriends. See, the Legion of Doom decided to go back in time to stop Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern from ever becoming superheroes. In the case of the last one, as in the comics, the dying Abin Sur used his ring to find someone worthy to give the ring to, and selected test pilot Hal Jordan. So the ring pulled Hal to Abin, including the flight simulator Hal was in at the time. To stop Hal from becoming Green Lantern, Lex Luthor tells Hal to get out of the simulator, then hops in himself so that Abin Sur gives HIM the ring instead. (Abin Sur wasn’t very good at his job, it would seem.) So Lex, now a Green Lantern, returns to the Legion’s Darth Vader Helmet headquarters. Scarecrow cries “Oh, no, it’s the Green Lantern”, to which Lex replies, “No, you fools, it’s only me, the GREEN LUTHOR.” Of course, Lex, armed with one of the most powerful weapons in the universe, proceeds to do… absolutely nothing with it. Seriously, he apparently just chucks it away because he’s not even seen wearing it again for the rest of the episode. (The show really wasn’t known for things like “making sense”.) For some reason, that Green Luthor scene struck me as hilarious, and looking for a pseudonym to use on the Internet, I remembered that scene and… here we are.

          2. @Green Luthor

            Much obliged for your profile name origin.

            I may not be familiar with that ‘Challenge of the Superfriends’ episode, but I am familiar with the Legion of Doom’s Darth Vader Helmet headquarters. Thanks to the Robot Chicken DC Comics specials.

        2. The previous post and this one were made via Mozilla Firefox. It went through immediately. YaY!

          Thanks!

          1. The Firefox thing is way out of my league, but on my corporate account I can access my email on Firefox, but not Safari. On my laptop I can access ESPN on Firefox, but very. very slowly on Safari

  16. “Wow, I really nailed it! It’s perfect the way it is!”
    Wow, indeed. I recently re-read a couple of my older stories. I think they rank among my best work and they won awards but in no way do I think they’re perfect. In fact, I found issues with both that made me cringe. A poor word choice here, an awkward sentence there.
    It’s one thing to be proud of your accomplishments, but sheesh!

    1. Batiuk’s latest blog post is a better indictment of himself than I could ever write. It confirms everything we’ve long suspected about him.

      He’s lazy to the point of recursion, re-using a past book forward to make a point about re-using his own works. He’s undeservedly proud of himself. He’s blind to his own mistakes, like being lost after he skipped over a goldmine of stories about coping with Lisa’s death. He has no creative process, and writes about whatever random thing comes to his attention. He writes a lengthy (and perceptive) list of things that weren’t working in Funky Winkerbean, and ultimately didn’t change any of them. His complete dependence on Lisa. His failure to use standard comic conventions, calling Lisa “obviously not real” when he portrayed her in a realistic way. The way he asserts everything, without ever explaining or giving an example why.

      And finally, the absurd notion that what got Act III moving was Les’ need for a night job to augment Summer’s basketball scholarship – something we didn’t even know she had, because she was 7 years old when Lisa died. Batiuk’s solution was to reinvent a character out of whole cloth, and give her an award for it. It was the first of many deus ex praemia in Act III. And fittingly, it’s also how Act III ended, with the “algorithm that redefines humanity as our nation” arc.

      1. Yes, it confirms our worst speculations and then some, doesn’t it?

        I was struck by… well, I was struck by every word of it, but particularly by the part where he admitted he jumped ahead 10 years and had no ideas. Zilch.

        So what did he do? Did he use his imagination to think about what it would be like for a widower to be raising a teenage girl who didn’t even remember her mother except from pictures and stories? Did he look up some stories or movies about widowers raising children? Did he ask his friends for brainstorming or ideas? Did he ask his wife, even, who lives with him and knows all about what it’s like to be a teenage girl?

        No. He sat and moped and shrugged, with no sense of responsibility toward his audience, some of whom had been sincerely invested in the story of Les, Lisa, and Summer.

        And then…Ah! The clouds parted, the sun shone through! Fate’s handmaiden, the Muse Terpsichore, dropped into the lap of this Great Artiste the inspiration he needed! (Translation: someone gave him a bootleg CD.)

        He listened for hours to a waltz on repeat. (How odd that he talks up the artist and the song but doesn’t tell us who and what. Just that His Life Was Changed.) And after hours of this, he visualized Les visualizing dancing with Lisa.

        That’s it. No further inspiration. A waltz, listened to on repeat dozens of times, made him think of two people dancing.

        And he went from there. To where? Right back into the Lisa Years. Because the well was DRY. And fair Terpsichore and all the rest of her Muse sisters could have helpfully thrown buckets down that well for all eternity and never fetched so much as a drop of moisture.

        He’s describing what it’s like when you’re flat, plumb, utterly out of ideas — and framing it as if it were a thunderbolt of inspiration.

        #SAD

        1. Batiuk’s blog really is the distilled essence of Tom B. It’s astonishing how much this self-absorbed man can reveal to the world about himself … without ever landing on a moment of self-awareness.

        2. The juxtaposition of the time skip, with Batiuk not knowing what to do after it, was revealing. It didn’t even OCCUR to him that maybe he should have rethought that time skip. Nor did anyone advise him against skipping it, an obvious step any human being would have suggested.

          Which is consistent with something I’ve long suspected: after Jay Kennedy died (7 months before Lisa did), the syndicate never assigned Batiuk a new editor. And/or Batiuk rejected all attempts to edit his work. I also think Jay Kennedy would never have let him do that time skip. Batiuk’s own blog posts suggest that Kennedy steered him away from his worst instincts as a writer. Once he was gone, and Batiuk could do whatever he wanted, we got Act III.

          1. It’s odd that there wasn’t anyone anywhere, whether his wife, his son, his artist/s, his peers, his friends, whoever, that he could bounce ideas off of. This is a syndicated comic strip we’re talking about; it needs to have mass appeal. More input would have helped that.

            The explanation of how he “didn’t want to spend a year of comic book time just mourning Lisa’s loss” simply doesn’t wash. He could have shifted focus to other characters. How did Holly feel, knowing that she survived breast cancer but one of her closest friends didn’t? How was Darrin affected, having finally found his mother, only to lose her so soon?

            Or he just could have focused on Montoni’s or other story lines, and only occasionally checked in on Les and Summer.

            Or he could have shown what mourning really looks like for parents who lose their partner — they don’t have the luxury of losing themselves in grief. They have to carry on, for their child’s sake. There’s great dramatic potential in the classic parental dilemma: knowing that something is irrevocably terrible but putting on a brave face so as not to frighten or depress your child.

            Or he could have, you know, stared into space, thinking, “Nope. Got nothin’. Oh well. Nothin’ it is, then!”

          2. Just the mere fact that he “didn’t want to spend a year just mourning Lisa’s loss” and then proceeded to spend the next FIFTEEN years doing just that anyway.

            But that’s Batiuk for ya. Does a MAJOR change in setting with NO plan or ideas, but Sadie was his biggest misstep. He truly has no self-awareness, does he?

          3. Please forgive me if I’m posting excessively, but I’ve got thoughts on this “Much too Lame” blog post of his.

            Funky had opened a Montoni’s franchise in New York City, and nothing felt comfortable there. Nothing felt all that comfortable about Montoni’s back home either.

            Right! Why should a small-town Ohio baby boomer feel comfortable running a pizza parlor in midtown Manhattan? Why didn’t you run with it? Why didn’t you lean into the fish-out-of-water angle, and let us see Funky struggling? Or maybe it’s the opposite; maybe Funky realizes he loves the city, and starts spending more and more time there, causing tension between him and Holly. A million dramatic possibilities, but Batiuk admits that he, the creator, felt uncomfortable, so he just shut the whole plot down. He’s so unsuited to anything but gag-a-day; discomfort is the engine of drama, and he flees from it.

            I had an expat Afghan former insurgent running the place and . . . well, that was pretty much it.

            Exactly. Again, a situation bursting with drama, but instead, this Afghan warlord fit into small-town Ohio as if he’d been born there. No conflict; no clashes; no friction. And then he disappeared.

            I think TB thinks that situations, themselves, are drama. Example: A wildfire burns down pretty much the whole city of LA while Les is there making his Lisa movie. And then… well, that’s it. Nothing actually happens. But the situation is dramatic, right? Tom set up the situation, so he did his job, right?

            What had once been a welcoming stage for my characters now felt cold and empty. Even my third set piece, Les and Lisa’s house, was no longer a familiar setting—as single parent Les struggled to raise his now high school–aged daughter.

            Beady-Eyed Nitpick: This is not what “set piece” means, Tom. Get a goddam dictionary, like EVERY OTHER WRITER who ever lived, and stop trying to impress us with phrases you think are fancy. You misuse them, misspell them, or both, every single time. I’m embarrassed for you.

            And yes, this is one of the awful things about grieving. Places and things that should be perfectly familiar and reassuring can be weird and sad and off-kilter when the people you loved aren’t there any more.

            Again, he recognized the emotional and dramatic potential here. Again, it scared him.

            Again, when drama reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled. Yes, brave Sir Thomas turned about, and gallantly he chickened out.

          4. when drama reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.

            I think Batiuk avoids drama for a simple reason – he knows he can’t write it. He’s incapable of writing a geninuely touching moment like Calvin’s squirrel dying, or Peppermint Patty having a breakdown about her tomboyishness, or Opus’ attempts to locate his mother. Because he has no empathy, no theory of mind, and no actual interest in drama. He does it because it got him an award nomination once.

            It’s not a drama strip, but it’s not a gag-a-day strip either. It tries to be both, but accomplishes neither, and creates an off-putting tonal mishmash.

        3. It’s become really apparent to me that “time jump” was pretty much the entirety of his idea. He had successfully done it before (well… more or les) and it bought him time to figure out where he wanted to go next while he got to spend weeks upon weeks reintroducing his cast.

          I’m sure he thought ideas would strike him the way they did after his first time jump… but then they didn’t, so he dove hard back into the Lisa well (and later, the comic book well). TB got bored with his new cast of high schoolers fairly quickly, ultimately creating two more generations of them that he somehow got even more immediately bored with. So he clung to his core cast even more than he did in Act II… but unlike after the first time jump, he couldn’t really find anything new for them to do because he had already made them adults. That’s really all that his ideas were in Act II, the cast went from being teenagers to adults and they did adult things they didn’t do in Act I: got jobs, got houses, got married, got kids, got cancer. What did they do in Act III? Nothing, they were still employed, still in the same houses, still married, still had kids, still had cancer (I mean, Lisa effectively didn’t die, and because it defined her completely, neither did her cancer). This would not have been a problem if he had them change or grow or shown ANY interest in their kids, but, well…

          1. Wouldn’t you think that aging the characters to his actual age would help him think of engaging story lines? Aging brings an endless array of new emotions and experiences. Like accepting the accumulating limitations of your body, a body that you sometimes can barely recognize. Like watching your children and realizing that the world you grew up in is as distant to them as a moon of Jupiter. Like going through the estates of loved ones who have died, and all the personal and family drama that involves.

            The closest we ever got to any of that was Funky hysterically out when he was getting (elective) cataract surgery. There was a really golden opportunity to explore aging with the Melinda/Holly Flaming Baton Fiasco, but again, it descended into Funky coming back from the store with ice cream instead of ibuprofen, waka-waka, ha ha.

            Doesn’t he feel the emotions the rest of us do as the decades roll by? How can he have been writing about aging folks year after year and never touched on the endless depths of the subject? Anyone else would have incorporated poignancy without even trying; you have to make a real effort not to with a plot like Melinda vs Holly.

            We were talking about fitness at the kitchen table in my house a couple days ago and I said that staying fit and healthy while aging is like a “red queen’s race” — you have to run with all your might just to stay in the same place. There’s a topic for you, Tom. Melancholy and real. Pulitzer bait, even. But you won’t dare touch the third rail of real emotion.

          3. Well said. Drake. I’m only 51 and my perspective on life has really changed. Now my aim is to do everything i want to in life, while I’m still physically able to do so. I’ve had COVID and a stroke in the last two years, so I don’t take life and health for granted anymore. Has TB never had this realization? Maybe he hasn’t.

          4. @Banana Jr. 6000

            TB had prostate cancer. I would think that would qualify as a life-changing event.

            Oddly, despite getting cured of his prostate cancer, in his comic strips, he often trashes medical professionals. I’d like to know what that’s all about. He looks like an ingrate.

            Tom Batiuk is one befuddling individual.

  17. It’s odd that there wasn’t anyone anywhere, whether his wife, his son, his artist/s, his peers, his friends, whoever, that he could bounce ideas off of. …

    Not really. I’m fairly certain that anyone in Tom’s life knows that serving as a ‘sounding board’ will basically just be an exercise in listening to solipsistic droning while having your suggestions ignored. So after a couple of decades of this, they’d have developed strategies to be elsewhere if Tom was looking for advice…

  18. The explanation of how he “didn’t want to spend a year of comic book time just mourning Lisa’s loss” simply doesn’t wash.

    Of course not. Les needed 14 years, a 10-year time skip, three books, two movies, and a comic book to mourn her properly. And there’s no indication he’s done.

    It’s odd that there wasn’t anyone anywhere he could bounce ideas off of.

    I think there was, but he’s just not interested in outside ideas about the Funkyverse. His wife was alive at the time; he still seems to have a good relationship with his son; he has friends and collaborators he name-drops; and I’m sure his carefully-screened fan contacts have some input. He prefers to aggressively bury his head in the sand, and demand complete control of his Potemkin village of a comic strip.

    1. I believe this ties in with his “first thought-best thought” philosophy. Obviously, if the first thought is the best thought, then any changes people might suggest would make the work worse.

  19. Today’s Funky Crankerbean:

    Pam: I’m serious, dad, You need to go to the hospital!

    Crank: BULLSHIT! I feel fine!

    (Crank takes one step and his left knee explodes in a shower of blood and gasoline, causing Crank to keel over screaming in pain)

    1. Note also that today’s Crankshaft cut to Ed standing up. Not Ed getting up; it cut straight from him being on the ground yesterday to him standing up and being fine today. Did he reject the TikTok kids after they said they’d help him? Did he use his psychic powers to summon Pam to the scene, when she wasn’t there earlier?

      What was the story, then? He could get up anytime he wanted, so why did he lie on the ground for two days and then ask for help from strangers? Is Batiuk so protective of his “main” character that he can’t even show him receiving help, when the entire story is based on him needing help and it’s perfectly reasonable that he’d need help?

      1. I think the TikTok kids realized that Crankshit’s situation was dire and helped him to his house

      2. You remind me of “The Holdovers.”

        One of its characters, Angus Tully, gets injured, suffering a dislocated shoulder. The hospital staff pops it back into place, and, for a few scenes, we see his arm in a sling.

        Then the sling vanishes and the injury never gets mentioned again.

        I’ve had dislocated shoulders on both sides, and I wore slings much longer than that…and had programs of supervised physical therapy (go away, Rose, you’re dead) and personal home exercises.

        In fact, I think I’ll do some now…

      3. Your comment cracked me up. How did Pam get there? Did Ed insist on waiting for her? Did he refuse all help until she got there?

        Good Samaritan: Sir! Are you all right? Please, let me help you!
        Crankshaft: You’re not Pam. @#$% off!

        Paramedic: Brace yourself. We’re going to lift you onto the gurney.
        Crankshaft: Wait. Pam’s not here yet!

        🤣

  20. Much has been said about how Batty will avoid real human drama like the plague. Sadly, he isn’t alone.
    If I may briefly discuss a different comic, “Gil Thorp” recently did a story arc in which the title character’s high-school age daughter underwent an abortion. No, it was never stated outright what was going on, but it was obvious. It seemed a bold direction to take the strip, but then nothing came of it.
    First, everyone was supportive, including the boyfriend’s Hispanic family, neatly sidestepping anyone objecting to the procedure on religious or any other grounds.
    Second — and this is the one that really bugged me — in one strip, a character tells the teen her mom has come to see her. The next strip is some time later and the girl is out of the hospital and fully recovered. Gil’s wife had divorced him to run off with another woman earlier in the year. A scene between an absentee mother and her teen daughter who just had an abortion could’ve been incredibly powerful. It could’ve been the emotional center of the story, but we never saw it. Indeed, they never even mentioned anything about what transpired between them. Everyone in the strip just moved on as if nothing had happened.

    1. Current Gil Thorp is pretty odd that way. Like, it seems to dance around the actual stories, giving you hints of what’s going on, but never quite saying it outright. The abortion story was a pretty prominent example, but even the entire divorce story seemed to be happening just off-panel most of the time. It’s honestly kind of weird, like every other strip was taken out and we’re left to piece together what’s going on, and it’s not like Gil Thorp was ever a master class of storytelling to begin with.

      (On the other hand, they could probably teach The Phantom a thing or two about laying out a story. I think the current story started sometime in, like, 1987?)

    2. Gil Thorp is a strip I have been a genuine fan of for a long time, even when the stories haven’t been all that great, but what it has become under Henry Barajas has been… disappointing. I’m not even trying to be polite with that description, I think that is the best word for it because it isn’t interesting enough for stronger words the way TB’s work is.

      I have wanted to give Barajas the benefit of the doubt and I have wanted to keep my criticism of his work on GT constructive because he is new to writing a comic strip. For the most part I have done that, but being frank, nearly everything I have seen in his tenure so far demonstrates a complete lack of effort: scattershot storytelling, clear lack of understanding of sports rules and lingo, little interest in the inherent narrative of sports competition, and an inch-deep approach to “important” and “modern” issues. That last trait in particular would seem to parallel one of TB’s most morbidly fascinating flaws, but TB commits to his disingenuous interest in “substantial ideas with obtuse and ill-informed determination. Barajas, on the other hand, lobs these topics like grenades, coming across as someone un-cleverly trying to troll the old fuddy-duddies he believes his readers to be. That isn’t interesting, just disappointing.

    3. This seems to happen a lot on the comics page. They’re always telling you what they’re about, without that thing actually happening.

      It doesn’t want to tell a story about abortion; it wants to repeat the word “abortion” over and over, so you know that Gil Thorp tackled the topic of abortion, and will associate the comic strip with abortion when award season comes. Which is straight out of Batiuk’s playbook. Like his “gay prom” arc, which had no gay people in it and where nothing gay actually happened.

      I don’t mean to suggest that Batiuk is inspiring imitators. Rather, much of the comics page suffers from the same problems the Funkyverse does. Zero oversight; perverse incentives to do “topical” stories while also avoiding any whiff of controversy; and just plain poor writing.

      1. The recent abortion non-story in Gil Thorp may have also been intended as a response to a 2002-2003 story arc in the strip where then-writer Jerry B. Jenkins (most famous as a Christian author, particularly for the Left Behind novel series) somewhat controversially had Gil and Mimi talk a pregnant teen out of getting an abortion. The pregnant teen, now an adult, and her now teen son were among the first characters Barajas introduced when he took over writing the strip, and she played a brief and unclear role in the recent abortion story arc.

        Jenkins’ could certainly be ham-handed when moralizing, but darned if he didn’t know how to pace a comic strip and how to write sports narrative. The whole teen pregnancy story arc played out behind a state championship contending run for the basketball team that depicted 27 games. There is a reason that Jack Berrill himself asked that Jenkins take over writing the strip.

        1. Rumors of the abortion story piqued my interest enough a few months back to go and consume a couple weeks of Gil Thorpe, and it was completely baffling to me. The art is hideous. I knew it was bad from the times it’s on the ‘Mudge, but even reading an entire week it’s incomprehensible what is going on where and how.

          It looks like a collage of random images cut out of old family science worksheets, repurposed together, and then photocopied one thousand times. You can’t feel anything for any of these characters because they’re too darn ugly. Half the time they have black holes where their eyes should be.

          The art style would struggle to carry a story even if it was being actively drawn by someone who cared. And I doubt that this is the case any more. I know that Rod Whigham is technically still the ‘artist’, but I’d put good money on the art being outsourced to the same copy/pasta intern crew I theorize creates Crankshaft.

          1. It’s honestly kind of disappointing to see Rod Whigham’s name on the art, because he’s not a bad artist. Some of his work on Marvel’s G.I. Joe series:

            Maybe not perfect comics or anything, but at least you can tell what’s going on and the narrative flows from panel to panel.

      2. It’s the problem with awards. It has nothing to do with topical stories, or even addressing modern problems. Awards are the problem, as they pull things toward them. Remember the Oscars in the 80’s and 90’s? If you wanted to win a Best Actor Award, you’d better play someone mentally or physically crippled.

        It’s the same with all awards. If I had a comic strip about ducks who deliver mail, and I found out that there was an award for “Proper Boat Maintenance in the Media” from the Proper Boat Maintenance Group, yeah, I might have my ducks decide that they might need to deliver mail using a boat, and maybe a week or two on “proper boat maintenance” might get me a nomination.

        My readers might think “What’s all this boat stuff?” but I, as a professional cartoonist, know where my priorities lie. Someone comes up to me on the street and says “Hey, I like your mail ducks strip” and that’s great, but where do I hang that? A nomination for an award, on the other hand, I can put that in a frame on the wall. I can place that in my resume. That goes in the scrapbook. That goes in all the blurbs about me. That’s solid.

        NB: I don’t have a comic strip about ducks who deliver mail, the preceding was meant as a metaphor and nothing else.

      3. The weird thing is it DIDN’T repeat the word “abortion” over and over. I’m pretty sure it never actually said the word ONCE. (Or “pregnant”, or anything else that would actually be a definitive statement about what was going on.)

        It was basically “I have a problem.” “We support whatever you decide to do.” “Okay, now I’m recovering.” “Great, glad things worked out.” You could probably pretend she had a tapeworm and not change the story in the slightest.

  21. I don’t usually intentionally start a tangent, but I’m curious about something. I know we have quite a few film buffs here.

    We had a minor dispute in our household this evening. I wanted to watch Pan’s Labyrinth, a movie I haven’t seen in about 15 years. The film was only available in Spanish with English subtitles. Whether silent movies or foreign films, Mr. bwoeh does not like movies with subtitles. He insists if he wanted to read, he’d pick up a book.

    As if to prove a point, he went up into his study and started watching a Godzilla movie he recorded off Turner Classic Movies earlier this month. To me, those Godzilla movies are the worst example of dubbing. I find the mismatch between the dialog and the movement of the actor’s lips distracting. Godzilla movies are the epitome of bad dubbing.

    When viewing a foreign film in a different language do you prefer English subtitles or a version dubbed in English?

    1. To make your tangent back on subject, here’s a Crankshaft strip from this year!

      As someone who consumes a decent amount of anime and some foreign films, I usually go for subs first. I like the sound of foreign languages. And it seems like the translation is usually a little more literal. Sometimes for a second watch through I’ll put on a dub, especially if I’m using the show/movie as background noise while I’m doing something.

      I know a couple people that don’t like subtitles though, and I get it. If you’re not a fast/automatic reader you can miss the picture and action on screen staring at the words.

      One thing I hate about dub tracks, from a writer’s perspective, is when they mangle the dialogue around, or add a bunch of nonsense words, grunts, or whatever, just to try to match the ‘lip flaps’ I’d rather have it NOT match and have the dialogue be real and natural sounding.

      1. I tend to go for the subtitles first, too. Most foreign films I watch are dramas and don’t have a ton of action. If I were watching anime, I’d choose dubbing. One of the things I like about silent movies is they only use subtitles when necessary. The actors used expressions and gestures to communicate their feelings.

        Some people don’t like subtitles or closed captions at all. While visiting my parents, we watched one of those British mysteries on PBS. Mom’s hearing was going, and she didn’t have her hearing aids yet. The actors in those series also tend to let their voices drop. Mom kept asking, “What did he say?” “What?” Eventually, my brother asked if she would like him to turn on the closed captions. She said yes. Mere minutes later, Dad complained about the closed captions being distracting and quit watching. He picked up the newspaper and started working on a crossword puzzle. Ah, Christmas memories of days gone by. Eight of us were in my parents’ living room, watching the same 24″ CRT TV.

        1. We long ago started using closed captions–and, yes, the British shows are the worst from the English-speaking world. We live in Belgium (Flanders) most of the summer, and the apartment has cable tv, so we get channels from Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, and the UK. It’s too expensive to dub into Dutch (small populations), so English-language programs on the Dutch channels are subtitled. English programs on the German and French channels are subtitled.

          Some years ago we saw the Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, at a movie theater in Antwerp. It was in English, but subtitled in both Dutch and French–which made it rather distracting.

          That said, dubbing technology is now so good that it’s sometimes hard to tell if it has been dubbed. And, with AI, it will soon be about perfect

          1. Correction. The English language programs on French and German channels are dubbed into those languages, not English

          2. After I graduated from high school, I was able to visit family in Sweden for six weeks. One of our nights out featured going to see the movie ‘Hair’. The film was in English and Swedish subtitles. That was cool because I didn’t know Swedish and would have been lost otherwise.

            One of the gifts I took home was a t-shirt with usable phrases in Swedish.

            Europeans generally have a good grasp of foreign languages. For instance, my cousin was fluent in English, French, German, and of course, Swedish. However, sometimes they mix things up, like when my aunt mistakenly asked me a question in German.

          3. I can see that those phrases would be very useful for a recent high school graduate 🙂
            I think one reason so many Europeans speak multiple languages is because the countries are so small, and they get long vacations in the summer, so they travel all over the continent

      2. Also, I like the Crankshaft comic strip you posted. It is so much better than the recent story arc, “The Gift of the Magi “Gifts for the Bag Eye”. That Mopey Pete story arc made me ill. I’m surprised nobody gave Mopey Pete their house.

        I agree with your comment below. Today’s Crankshaft strip didn’t draw an adverse reaction.

    3. Dubbed!
      I’ve had this argument many times. It can be easily solved by running dubbing and subtitles at the same time. Subs are written for an average reading speed, and so they cut 30 to 50% of the actual words off. Dubbing gets the meaning across more accurately and detailed and faster. Tell a subtitled person to try subs and dubs at once–and boy howdy, do they not want to.
      I’ve had friends who insist with subs they’re “honoring the filmmaker’s original vision.” Do you speak Mandarin? Then whose vision are you honoring? Not the actors, the director, the cinematographer, the SFX guy, because you’re too busy staring at 15% of the screen. All you’re doing is proving how superior you think you are to the plebes.
      It’s called a movie because it moves. And, wow, when you have my reading speed, the audience does NOT like you getting every plot twist or joke a second before them.

      1. I do use subtitles, but only for movies in English. Like British crime movies, where the dialog is “Oi, facking quertle innit?” Or US action movies. BATMAN: “Mumble mumble. Mumble…” so I turn up the volume, and then something explodes and my windows are rattling and my ears ringing and the cat hides.

    4. Personally, I’d say I prefer subtitles for live-action films and dubbing for animated films.

      I’ve watched a good number of foreign-language films with subtitles and generally didn’t have a problem with the subtitles. But, for example, I tried watching “Akira” (animated) a few months ago with subtitles and I found it difficult to read while following the visuals too, so I switched to the dubbed English track.

    5. I’m inclined to want to default to subtitles every time because my knowledge of how things can get changed in translation (especially with some animes that were handled through kids networks of the 90s, and not just in text but in visuals and soundtrack alterations/censorship), I want to at least get as much as an understanding of how the show was sold to its native audience as I can.

    6. Thank you for the feedback, everyone. I was curious about the opinion of the many wonderful readers of this community. Sorial Promise must not have a preference.

      One of the reasons I asked is a film on my Tubi watch list, Train to Busan is offered in two versions. Korean language with optional subtitles or dubbed in English. Since it is a movie with a lot of action, I’m leaning towards the dubbed version. If I find the dubbing to be a distraction, I can always swap.

      Cheers

      1. Be Ware of Eve Hill,
        1. You managed to drag the hibernating bear out onto the frozen 🥶 tundra. It has been (-16°) the last 2 nights. It is up to 4° right now at 1:20pm Monday. My car is outside, so I start it, and drive for a couple of miles. My temp gauge actually works. Mrs. SP gets the garage.
        But it’s nothing like CBH IN IOWA. They would think they were in Florida, if they had Missouri weather.
        2. Even with my hearing aids, I use CC, on my TV. My Mom used CC and high volume on her TV. For some odd reason, my volume has been higher for streaming than it has to be for cable. For my cable I listened around #13, but for streaming, it needs #’s40-50. Go figure.
        3. My daughter and I went to the theater to watch “Life is Beautiful” with Roberto Begnini. It was in Italian with English subtitles. What a powerful film. The end credits were not subtitled. No one left. We were all trying to get our tears under control.
        4. I was in the USAF in the mid 1970’s in Omaha. It was (-25°) on a Saturday in January. The next day it hit 50°. Nobody wore coats.
        5. Weather wise, New Mexico must be heaven. Or just maybe that’s what Mr. bwoeh thinks cause he is with you.
        I am going back to hibernate.
        ♥️💖❤️🫂🌺💐🌹

        1. Well, hello ‘dere. Mr. Sorial Promise, sir.

          1. Oops. Sorry to wake you. Hibernating seems to be a pretty good way of waiting out the storm. -16°? Brrrrrr! I bet your fireplace is getting some use. Mrs. SP up for more cuddling? 😁

          I hope you had your ice scrapers and snow brushes in the car. Blankets, etc. When I lived in KC, I often forgot to prepare the vehicle for winter and had to borrow a scraper or snow brush from a friendly co-worker. Due to Mr. bwoeh’s hobby, a home with a three-car garage was a must. I don’t care what he parks in his two spots. The third one is mine!

          Poor CBH. Look at all that snow at the service station in the photo she just posted. My cousins who live near Buffalo claim to have gotten three feet. Yikes! Have you gotten much snow?

          2. No hearing aids for me yet. My tinnitus is pretty bad some days, though. Too much loud music. Too much time on the shooting range. I helped Mom change her hearing aid batteries whenever I visited. They’re are so tiny. Hard for someone with arthritis to hold.

          3. I’ve seen “Life is Beautiful” on TV. Most likely on one of the premium channels (SHOWTIME?). I believe it was subtitled. Very good movie. Roberto Benigni is a funny man. Very sad ending, though. I’m not crying. You’re crying!

          So, you haven’t cut the cord yet either? We still have Dish Network. I can’t convince Mr. bwoeh to drop it yet. Our bill is about $90 a month, but we’ve cut so much. No sports, no premium channels, no local channels.

          4. You were a prop jockey, eh? I believe I told you my son served in the USAF. Mostly at Ramstein AFB in Germany. He refers to his military service as a glorified gate guard. He met my DIL (‘The Captain’) at one of the military credit unions in Missouri. She now serves at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, outside Shreveport.

          5. Most days we’ve had a high in the mid 40s and a low in the mid 20s in the morning. It is supposed to reach 50 degrees tomorrow afternoon. We had a dusting of snow one night, but it was gone by morning. Mr. bwoeh cooked dinner on the outdoor grill tonight. Steak for him, scallop kabobs for me.

          I’ve been thinking of you folks in the Midwest. Stay safe. Stay warm.

        2. Dadgummit! I made a lengthy reply to your post, but it must be clogging the torso chute.

          HEY! LEROY!

          Bummer.

  22. I did not find Saturday’s Crankshaft to be horrible. Actually quite tolerable. Probably one of the better strips we’ve gotten this month. Seems like it’s based on an actual human interaction between two people who know each other.

    2. As somebody said recently (and I’m sorry I forgot who): falls are only funny when we know the person is OK. Crankshaft is not OK. He has multiple diagnosable injuries, in what is supposed to be a realistic world. And from his baseball career, he’s at least 104 years old. This. Is. Not. Funny.

      “Men won’t go to the doctor unless they’re actively dying” is a passable trope. But it just doesn’t work here.

      But Tom Batiuk has no concept of “it just doesn’t work here.” If Batiuk thinks of a gag, it’s going straight into the strip. No matter how hatefully misaimed it is. No much it contradicts the truth of the world. Now many times he says “I’m not a gag writer” on his blog.

  23. On that “dubbing or sub-titles” thing, I have a slight preference for dubbing, if it’s smoothly done, but I don’t mind sub-titles at all. Although, one time I saw “Sundays and Cybele” at a theatre, and nearly half the sub-titles were unreadable, because it was pale letters on a pale background.

    1. Agreed, white captions on a white background don’t work.

      One of the things I like about streaming is the ability to customize captions. You can adjust text size, color, and background.

  25. The thing about this week that irritates me is that it’s clear to me that he could have not done three strips and told the same story better. Monday/s fall, Thursday’s not wanting to go to the doctor and Saturday’s half-hearted expression of thanks were the only really necessary strips. The rest were filler that advanced a pointless agenda that’s easily contradicted by remembering the real past, not the fake past where obsessive drones who die alone ‘save’ comics from the ‘bad’ person.

  26. For the record, after one tolerable Crankshaft, today’s is reassuringly bad, with a ‘punchline’ that makes absolutely no sense.

    Also, the perspective in panel 4 is completely wrong. Either a twenty-foot wall of solid ice has suddenly materialized in front of them, or they are both leaning over the frozen pond at an 89-degree angle.

    1. Yes! And Jeff’s action is throwing overhand but the rock is skipping. Never mind the absence of follow through, the rock should smack once and bounce high and that’s about it. Everyone knows to skip you have to crouch a bit. As for a joke? Skipping a rock on a frozen lake can make a lovely gong sound; skipping a rock on open water does not make a gong sound. Uhm, that’s all I got.

  27. Today’s Funky Crankerbean:

    Crankshaft: I don’t care how much you BITCH and WHINE about it, I’m not gonna get a massgage!

    Pam: Then I’m gonna tell everybody that you let Pop Clutch die.

    Crankshaft: OKAY OKAY I’LL GET A MASSAGE!

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