My colleague Epicus Doomus and others have said: you had to like Funky Winkerbean before you could hate it. This was certainly true of me. I was once a genuine fan of the strip. Now I write venomous screeds about it for this blog. (And don’t worry, that book signing screed is on its way.)
I acquired my love of newspaper comics in the early 1980s, from my dad. I consumed them in a particular order, based on the order they appeared in my newspaper, and in descending order of how much I liked them. It was my little comics ritual.
Peanuts was always first, because good ol’ Charlie Brown holds a very dear place in my heart. Garfield, which was still pretty fresh at the time, was second. The true giants of the 1980s comics page hadn’t come along yet, so unremarkable stuff like Drabble, Shoe (hey, I wanted to be a journalist) and the Mort Walker strips were in the middle. Funky Winkerbean was last. It batted ninth in my lineup, but it made the team. I considered it the last strip worth reading, though I did enjoy it sometimes.
But I can pinpoint the exact day Funky Winkerbean lost me as a reader, and only regained me as a hate-reader 30 years later. That day was November 19, 1988.
To explain why, I need to paint a picture of who I was at that time. I was 16 and a half years old (almost to the day), and a junior in a large public high school. My teenage years weren’t that bad. I wasn’t one of the cool or attractive kids, and never would be. But I was OK with that. I had friends, purpose, respect, and wasn’t anybody’s punching bag.
However, I was awful at socializing, especially with girls. I was shy to the point of catatonia, had a crippling fear of embarrassment, and a keen sense that I was no girl’s idea of “dreamboat.” I was exactly this guy:
In 1988, I related to Les Moore. His life was a comically exaggerated version of my own. People took one look at Les and immediately discounted him, which was a feeling I knew very well. I was never forced to climb the gym rope, but I probably wouldn’t have done it any better than he did. I saw Les as a new age Charlie Brown, someone whose teenage problems mirrored my own. Until November 19, 1988.
So what happened that day? It was a Saturday. Then, just as now, it signaled the end of an arc. The above strips are excerpts from a three-week arc, where Les is infatuated with a new, unseen girl named Angie. Here’s how it ended:
My reaction was as follows:
No. No way. There is no way. There is no way in hell this girl wanted to be asked out by Les Moore. None whatsoever. I was 16 years old, just as clueless as Les, and even I knew this ending was bullshit.
I used to think Funky Winkerbean understood me. It was an honest look at what it was like to have the level of social anxiety I did – a subject that was very under-explored at the time. This strip destroyed that feeling. It angered me. I felt betrayed.
I couldn’t articulate why it was bullshit at the time. But as I got older, and my dating skills got better, I came to realize why. Even if Angie did find Les “cute”, his behavior would have immediately turned her off. And Les isn’t even being creepy in this arc, just overly shy.
In high school, I didn’t see anything but attractiveness and popularity as being important. I learned in adulthood that confidence, personality, positivity, values and common interests are far more important.
That’s where Act I Les fails. He’s unlucky, and certainly didn’t win the genetic lottery, but there are ways to put your best foot forward. I think learning your strengths as a person, and how to maximize them, is the biggest lesson of high school. But Les has no interest in improving himself, and can’t even be bothered to try. He’s always seeking easy answers. He never got past the “attractiveness and popularity” stage. Nobody in Westview did! Not even in their 70s! Which is why the characters’ charmed adult lives, like Cindy Summers being a national journalist and later trophy wife, are complete hogwash. But that’s a topic for another day.
Tom Batiuk is clearly channeling Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl. And why wouldn’t he? It’s an iconic story. But he misses something important. Charlie Brown, despite his crushing social anxiety, has a lot going for him. He’s kind, loyal to his friends, never gives up, and is widely liked. These are attractive qualities. So when LRHG seems receptive to his clumsy advances, like in You’re In Love, Charlie Brown, it feels earned.
This doesn’t feel earned. There’s nothing positive or likeable about Les, even if we ignore everything we know outside of this arc. The end of the story is what Act II and III became: the story is sacrificed on the altar of cheap, contrived drama, so a character can be given something they didn’t earn.
Batiuk and Schulz are trying to tell the same story here. Our hapless hero would have succeeded with his dream girl, if he’d just tried. Charles Schulz did this very skillfully; unrequited love was a major theme of his. Tom Batiuk poisoned the well so much Les should have failed even if he did try.
After this strip, I lost all interest in Funky Winkerbean. I had long since abandoned the comic strip rotation of my childhood. More importantly, there were far better things to read: Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and The Far Side. All of which were a big deal at the time, especially Bloom County. I remember the book Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, complete with an honest-to-God vinyl record, being loaned around my high school. We didn’t know it yet, but that book was a preview of the Internet age. It was a multi-media extravaganza, and a clever mashup of two things that don’t normally go together. It was ahead of its time, on top of being an iconic collection of comic strips.
Those three comic strips, and later Dilbert, set standards Funky Winkerbean could not live up to. The strip threw away everything it used to do well. And this was three years before Lisa’s pregnancy brought an end to Act I.
Son of Stuck Funky 
It is astonishing how well Les would have worked as a character had TB just been able to see him for the shmuck that he is. I suppose he did do this for the first 12-15 years of the strip’s existence… and then decided to identify with Les for reasons beyond comprehension.
He also could have made Les grow up, but of course the next time he has a character do that will be the first.
BJ6K, you put into words exactly what I felt about FW as a child of the 80s…abandoned. I really liked and followed the arc of Act I and then it was like seeing your father, a soup kitchen Samaritan, kicking a homeless puppy when he thought no one was looking.
Or something like that.
I also pivoted to The Far Side, Bloom County, etc. as reliably kind and steady stepcomics after FW abandoned me. The one exception I take is that I really liked Drabble. In fact, it was the last one I read – I read them in ascending order.
I was 16, and I had been a very compliant child all my life. But I was beginning to understand which adults deserved my respect, and which ones didn’t. I got better at spotting when adults were bullshitting me, or didn’t have my best interests at heart. Funky Winkerbean was bullshitting me. It didn’t “get” my anxieties, like I thought it did. I no longer saw it as a source of valuable insight. (I was also getting better at spotting bad writing, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Allie Brosh has been mentioned here before. She’s everything Tom Batiuk thinks he is, and wishes he was. Her work explores difficult themes of social anxiety, embarrassment, depression, low self-esteem, suicide, parenting, and why you make weird decisions when you’re a child. It’s much of the same subject matter the Funkyverse tries to cover. But her stories are so personal, so brutally honest, that they ring true if you’ve ever had these feelings. They’re also hilarious.
She’s not trying to bullshit her way into a Pulitzer Prize, like a certain hack cartoonist I could name.
BTW, I also liked Drabble very much. I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t good. If anything, I meant to imply it was good.
BJ6K, you put into words exactly what I felt about FW as a child of the 80s…abandoned. I really liked and followed the arc of Act I and then it was like seeing your father, a soup kitchen Samaritan, kicking a homeless puppy when he thought no one was looking.
Or something like that.
I also pivoted to The Far Side, Bloom County, etc. as reliably kind and steady stepcomics after FW abandoned me. The one exception I take is that I really liked Drabble. In fact, it was the last one I read – I read them in ascending order.
I never liked Funky Winkerbean unironically. Maybe that is why I don’t usually have strong hate for it either. Barring a few absolutely egregious plotlines such as Bull’s death, I’ve always seen it more as a fascinating auteur piece. My own personal Neil Breen.
But I fundamentally understand where you are coming from, BJ6K. And you’re right, Angie might have thought Les was cute, but in the end she didn’t really know him, and it wouldn’t have lasted. Because Batiuk doesn’t ever sit and think, “What about X would a person like?”
It’s why the year long romance with Lisa pre-pregnancy arc kind of worked. Lisa was presented as an awkward girl herself, one who might be willing to put up with all of Les’ Act I awfulness for a while. And even then the relationship ended in an over the top (hilarious) breakup.
Maybe fodder for a future post, about how to write a believable relationship. Coming from me, an unpublished armchair critic amateur with the relationship experience of the average 17 year old.
This is the question that people who want to bully Batiuk keep asking him. This is a question that baffles and angers him. He has no idea what people might want because he appears to be convinced that what they want is to hurt him and take things away from him.
I’ve mentioned it around ten thousand times already, but FW lost me as soon as Lisa told Les she was pregnant. And the reason was that as soon as she told him, I, along with every other FW reader, knew EXACTLY how the story would play out. It wasn’t Les’, it was a bad decision, she decided to have the child and surrender it for adoption, Les would be at her side the whole time, they’d live happily ever after. So the “happily ever after” didn’t really pan out long-term, but the rest of it was so unbearably telegraphed there was just no point in reading it at all.
BatBrain was a reasonably good gag-a-day writer, but as a WRITER writer, he sucks cold soggy balls. And this was exposed immediately, the second his brave, noble “tonal shift” began. AND he never improved, not even one iota. The idea that he was a real writer really irked me, and the idea that his terrible little stories represented an improvement over what FW was before REALLY irked me, as it was simply not true.
I had a different problem with that story. Who the hell lets their 17-year-old son go to lamaze classes for a baby they didn’t create? Les is putting a KICK ME sign on himself, except it says PLEASE SUE ME AND MY PARENTS FOR CHILD SUPPORT. Not that they had anything worth suing for. But Lisa’s family was apparently so trashy that this was probably their best option in life.
Lisa’s pregnancy was never Les’ business. Any responsible adult, including Lisa herself, would have told him to butt out. But we all know why he was there: because he’s a Niceguy(TM). Les was there because driving a knocked-up teenager to lamaze class was the only date he was ever going to get. Nowadays we call this “not the flex you think it is.”
And the retcon that turned the pregnancy into date rape made the whole story even worse.
After years of enjoying Batiuk’s wacky gag-a-day take on suburban high school life, the tonal shift was jarring enough. But knowing EXACTLY how the story was going to play out after reading the very first panel was so deflating and, quite frankly, annoying. I thought it insulted the reader’s intelligence. There was only one way that story could have played out, given the realities of daily comic strips. Then it did play out that way, and a more tedious spectacle I cannot recall.
And I remember those Lamaze class strips, ripped straight out of every cornball TV sitcom ever. The secret untold truth (well, WE tell it, but you know) about BatYam is that he put NOTHING into those stories. Not a single clever twist, or even a mildly surprising turn. It was every pregnancy trope ever, distilled down to ultra G-rated pablum.
And the forty years of endless victory laps didn’t help either. It was alomst like he was daring me to dislike him, and he succeeded. Sometimes, the whole strip felt like a taunt, as if he was mocking us. And that continued, right up to the very last week.
Heck Ed Crankshaft is just a cheap ripoff of Archie Bunker. Dinkle is Batty’s only original character, but of course he ruined him too when things got all serious and dramatic.
It brought in something else: the idea that passively whining about a problem that a character doesn’t have the guts to do anything about is a moral victory when it’s actually an immoral chickening out.
Ha ha, yeah I think I still have that Boingers record somewhere. It was somewhat difficult to play since the vinyl was so thin, but yeah Berke was ahead of his time. Unlike Batty who included a “chap book” inside the book of Lisa’s cancer stories.
My mom taught me and my sister how to read using the daily comics. I also had a defined order and limit to what I would read. I’m embarrassed to say Nancy made the cut, but I liked the art for some reason.
There are cover versions of “I’m a Boinger” on YouTube. Clearly a lot of people enjoyed that song.
Not “U Stink But I ❤️ U”, sadly. That one had an actual tuba solo, which was Opus’ instrument in the band. This is the kind of fun that can happen when writers care about getting their continuity right.
Yes, this is what happens when an in universe joke gets well established—it gets funnier. The Simpsons are masters of this. Batty’s jokes fail too land because they are just throw-away gags that can be mouthed by any character. Hence there is no depth or substance to them.
grrrr autocorrect…. “To”
Can we maybe agree here to not post corrections of typos, unless they make the post confusing? I make mistakes “to”, but I didn’t even catch your typo until you mentioned it.
It’s not our fault this system won’t let us edit.
Sure, that is a good idea.
I’ve kind of leaned towards neutral and unironically liked a part of it (Act II) because of a couple of characters who had a lot of potential but weren’t used afterwards (Heather “Chien” Parks, Ally Roberts-Reynolds, Matt Miller and Eric “Mooch” Myers) and also some others (Wally Winkerbean and Marianne Winters)
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Day Six of this nonsense with Loathsome Lillian, and The Most Loathsome Band Director
The most awkward wording ever. Ok, I know Batiuk is a Ukrainian name and so Batty probably goes to one of the many Ukrainian clubs here in NE Ohio, but why talk about fundraising for Ukraine? That hasn’t been a big thing for a couple years now.
I’m not against fundraising, it’s just that it is awkward and unnecessary in this strip. Couldn’t the band be scheduled to play somewhere else?
Related to the Batiukverse: My FW Storyline (Prior to Act I)
Related to the Batiukverse: My FW Storyline (Act I)
In the “original” timeline, the Act I students (Funky, Dick Facey, Dead Saint Lisa, Crazy Harry, Bull, Cindy, Holly, Frankie, et al.) graduated in 1988. (Batiuk did the 4-year time skip in 1992, and just set the post-time skip date to the current time, rather than trying to set it four years in the future.) So all of those characters would have been born circa 1970.
By the end of the strip, he had Timemopped their graduation date to being 1972, so they would have been born around 1954.
Note that, if Act I ended in 1972, Act II began in 1976, and lasted about 15 years. So Act II ended in 1990-1991. Also note that it was during Act II that “President” Clinton visited Montoni’s despite not being elected until after Act II ended under the revised timeline. TIMEMOP!
And the Act III time skip was about 10 years, so Act III would have started in 2000-2001. Even though somehow Wally went missing during a military conflict that hadn’t started at the time of the ambush. (Also, the strip acknowledged 9/11 despite it technically not having happened yet in the new timeline. Yes, Dan Ronan predicted actual Funky events!)
If we accept the ages listed in the “Meet the Act III Cast” art, we can also extrapolate their birth years that way. The Act I students were said to be 46 at the start of Act III. (And they were 68 at the end of the strip in 2022, which further shows that Act III started around 2000. It would have covered roughly 22 years, even though the publication time was only about 15 years.) So, again, that puts them as being born around 1954.
Ann Fairgood: 59, so born ~1941.
Fred Fairgood: 60, so born ~1940.
Lefty, Sadie, Susan: 33, so born ~1967. (Wally didn’t get an entry so that Batiuk could do his “it’s called writing” reveal, but it’s safe to assume he’s the same age.)
Boy Lisa, Mopey, Jessica Darling Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered, Chien, Matt Miller, Mooch: 28, so born ~1972, i.e., the same time as the Act I graduation. (Note that they pretty much have to be all born around that time, as Boy Lisa was born while Dead Saint Lisa was still in high school, and thus 1972, under the revised timeline, is the latest he could have been born. His classmates, likewise, would need to be fairly close to that time as well.)
Cory, Maddie, Girl Les, Rana: 15, so born ~1985.
Harry L. Dinkle World’s Greatest Band Director: 67, so born ~1933 (and also thus 89 when the strip ended).
Dead Skunkhead: 38, so born ~1962. (Ironically the same year Amazing Fantasy #15 came out, even though he had to find an 18-year-old copy on a park bench.) Kevin was also 38, so presumably he and Skunky were classmates?
Khahahahn: Also 46, so the same age as the Act I students.
Linda: 52, so born ~1948.
Nate: 55, so born ~1945.
Rachel: 36, so born ~1963.
Tony: 66, so born ~1934.
Wade: 84, so born ~1916. (And thus would have been 106 by the end, if Batiuk remembered he still existed. Still younger than Walt Wallet, at least.)
Donna “The Eliminator” was said to be five years younger than Crazy Harry, so she would have been born ~1977.
Also note that in Crazy Harry’s time travel adventure (which had to have happened, since Skunky said he got the money to start his store by finding a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 just lying around, which we would then see happen due to Crazy’s time travel, the date was specifically stated to be April 15 1980. Yet whether you go with the original 1988 graduation date, or the revised 1972 date, there’s NO WAY IN HELL these characters could have been in high school at that time. Either they graduated years earlier, or wouldn’t start high school until several years later. (There’s also the anachronisms of making topical references that are knocked out of synch by the timeline changes. The aforementioned references to President Clinton or 9/11, and the presence of the Defender arcade game long before it was created, for examples.)
(There’s also the question of how the timeline for John Darling Who Was Murdered as affected. His murder occurred in 1990, the year the strip ended, and there was so many topical references that the strip kind of had to stick to the real-world timeline. But if Act II ended in 1990, and Les wrote his “Fallen Star” book during Act II… does that mean Les solved the murder of John Darling Who Was Murdered BEFORE John Darling Who Was Murdered was murdered?)
(This long rambling post bought to you by Timemop. Timemop: The Elegant Solution™!)
I count this as ABSOLUTE CANON. Or as canon as anything with constantly (and pointlessly) shifting timelines can ever be.
Also, ED SHOULD BE DEAD. “Oh, you mean my great-great-actually kinda sucky grandfather the bus crash driver? Hanging off gutters and still exploding himself at 108? Yeah, he fell into a wheat thresher so totally by accident, it took 5 of us to squeeze him in head first! That was in 1993, but we wanted his gummint checks to keep coming.”
Yes, it’s a very impressive effort to organize the 50+ year Funkyverse timeline. And probably the most sensible one we’ll ever get. Tom Batiuk’s rules for his own creation changed constantly, and were never adhered to consistently, so we’ll never be able to reconcile every single strip. But this is about as good as the world can hope for.
(cs walks out into the WHS parking lot and screams:)
DAMN YOU, TIMEMOP!!
Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Harry L. Dipshit: MOVE IT, YOU WRINKLED OLD PIECES OF GARBAGE!!
(Walt grabs a bat and bashes both Lillian and Dinkle with it)
My Act II: Timeline (up until 2006)
1990-1991: Les becomes a teacher and Wally and friend’s freshman year
1991-1992: Wally and friends’s sophomore year, and in June, Funky and Cindy marry
1992-1993: Wally and friends’s sophomore year
Second half of 1993: Les tries to find who murdered John Darling, and Cory Winkerbean is born
1993-1994: Wally and friends’s senior year, in june, Becky loses her arm (in my canon, the car crash never happened and it was something else that Wally wasn’t involved at all) and Wally blames himself for it, eventually joining the army to atone
1996: Funky and Cindy divorce, Crazy Harry meets Donna/The Eliminator, Summer Moore is born
1999: Jinx Bushka and Maddie Klinghorn are born
2000-2001: Darin and friends’s freshman year,
September 2000 – December 2000: Lisa tries to save Danny Madison from being executed, but fails
December 2000: Owen Miller is born
March 2001: Cody Fletcher is born
2001-2002: Darin and friends’s sophomore year, Mooch sets a fire in a trashcan in september but not the one in his locker (somebody else does it and frames him for it), Mooch, Darin and Pete gaslight Jim Kablichnick into believing that an asteroid is going to kill them all, in January, Wally becomes MIA
2002-2003: Darin and friends’s Junior year, Darin and Pete skip school on Senior skip day, Darin becomes friends with Jess Darling, in June, Wally is found alive, and returns to Westview City
2003-2004: Darin ditches Pete’s comic book for Jess and football, football team wins, Jess and Darin throw a party, Mooch goes on a date with Mindy, and Chien and Pete go to prom, Becky and Wally are engaged, in March, Wally Jr. is born
2005: Wally goes to Afghanistan to atone for what happened 11 years ago, Meets Rana and Khan, Wally almost gets blown up. John gets prosecuted for owning hentai in a comic store, but is acquitted
My Act II Timeline (stuff I forgot)
My Act III Timeline: (2011 to July 2017) (This is going to sound really long-winded)
Ah, I read the comics in a certain order too. From what I considered the worst to the best. So I would jump around the two pages(!) that we got in the paper. Over time, that morphed to just one. I still do that, in a way. All of the comics I follow on GoComics are listed in reverse order of preference. The only difference is the crappy ones aren’t there. Well, except Crankshaft, that I would probably drop if the comment section was ever turned off.
I never read Funky in its earlier days because it was carried by the Detroit News and we go the Detroit Free Press. Eventually the papers semi-merged, and on Sundays we’d get a combined comics pages in color. Funky would be in that but that’s the only time I’d see it. Never read “the god old days” except when they get reposted here on this blog.
Ah, I read the comics in a certain order too. From what I considered the worst to the best. So I would jump around the two pages(!) that we got in the paper. Over time, that morphed to just one. I still do that, in a way. All of the comics I follow on GoComics are listed in reverse order of preference. The only difference is the crappy ones aren’t there. Well, except Crankshaft, that I would probably drop if the comment section was ever turned off.
I never read Funky in its earlier days because it was carried by the Detroit News and we go the Detroit Free Press. Eventually the papers semi-merged, and on Sundays we’d get a combined comics pages in color. Funky would be in that but that’s the only time I’d see it. Never read “the god old days” except when they get reposted here on this blog.
An interesting story on one’s Act 1 reading experience for sure. I wonder how Tom felt as the 80s landscape of strips shifted. Did he ever want to engage with Bill Watterson in some way as far as the group of Ohio strip writers? That’s a bit of a thought.
This arc conclusion is certainly an indicator of how near the end as plans for the future developed, Batiuk start to take pity on Les and tried to show that things wouldn’t be so bad, that he had more admirers than he realized and that he could have a brighter future. But as minor as it may be for one girl to consider him cute, it indeed wasn’t quite the slack a Charlie Brown-esque loser would gain, particularly if it didn’t feel earned by way of Les’s actions (or lack thereof). The best that can be said about those early years is he was certainly helpful when Lisa was grappling with pregnancy, but that’s more basic Good Samaritanism, even if it relates to the romance that was mandated-to-be by time travelers.
Arguably his is in part why his rant of a valedictorian speech is infamous with the snarker crowd, because you can read a lot out of his words that matches the cynical reading that we take away while Tom likely never intended. He blames his classmates and their culture for why people are excluded and isolated, why he was the isolated nerd, putting no responsibility on his own behavior or inaction, and even scapegoating them for the reason Barry Balderman isn’t in his place instead (having had a nervous breakdown over grades instead of anything social-related). Yet at some level its a sentiment Batiuk still champions about high school culture if his final high school reunion arc is anything to go by (when all the primary cast felt like outcasts in retrospect, even Cindy!)
And that’s the funny thing about the full run, while Les still had his loser moments as he grew up, the cutting of slack and good things coming his way in return never stopped, eventually outweighing the loser status. No matter how many times he acted as an annoying out of touch dad still struggling as a teacher, you can’t outbalance a successful book deal ending in an Academy Award-winning movie where the real winner gave you the trophy, and then having your daughter inadvertently revolutionize the world by following in your footsteps. On top of his attitude making him the biggest asshole in the strip.
The torso chute has been extra sticky lately, apologies folks. I’ve been unclogging it just as soon as I check it.
Also, having both Dinkle and Lil accept payment for what is supposed to be a charitable fundraiser is a real humdinger of a dick move.
“a real humdinger of a dick move”
But…but…How could it end without the Author’s Avatars being rewarded?
How many people in this town AREN’T Tom?
Remarkably on brand, though.
Again, if he was planning on them getting paid, then why say it was a fundraiser? Batty just loves to fill up those word balloons.
To be fair: celebrities do this kind of thing constantly. You wouldn’t believe the gift baskets A-listers get just for showing up at events. Check this out. $175,000 worth of merch. That’s more than 98% of Americans make in a year.
(Seriously, the possibility of winning a prestigious Oscar trophy wasn’t enough to get them to attend? They needed incentives?)
Granted, that’s for the Oscars and not a charitable event. But the same principle applies. Any time there’s a big made-for-TV celebrity fundraiser event, like for the Maui fires in 2023, rest assured that anyone you see on camera was well-compensated.
But the Funkyverse is not Hollywood. It’s supposed to be the opposite. Which is a constant theme of Tom Batiuk’s work. Les Moore and Atomik Komix are “real artists,” unlike those phony Hollywood people. The characters are constantly patting themselves on the back for this. And shooting daggers at anyone who dares suggest they have no motivation to bankroll a project that has no target audience.
Yet, Tom Batiuk’s characters are constantly seen indulging in the worst excesses of the most shallow Hollywood stereotypes you could imagine. And today’s Crankshaft is a perfect example.
Tom Batiuk doesn’t hate Hollywood people. He just thinks he’s more worthy of being one than they are.
BJr6K, thanks for the excellent post and I concur totally with your take on the tipping point. What a sad sack of a missed romance shaggy dog story. Think of it though – that might have been the last strip where Les didn’t get what he wanted in the end.
Gosh, that Oscar gift bag is a lot of junk. I did wonder about the 10,000 meals contribution offered by some food charity. One occasionally hears “a $10,000 contribution was made in your name”; I wonder if such an applied deduction lowers a celebrity’s tax bill, and is effectively compensation?
To my knowledge, no. Only the actual donor can claim the tax deduction; you don’t get a tax deduction if someone “makes a contribution in your name.”
I think the article said they actually have to pay taxes on the gift bag as income. Its value is more than $599, which is the maximum for income you don’t have to report. Or at least that was the maximum was the last time I checked.
It occurs to me that perhaps the most genuinely “quarter inch from reality” thing in FW was the Lisa’s Larceny Run, in which ordinary people contribute money to support a charity, and Les gets all the credit. We see this all the time in the real world: a millionaire celebrity (or a corporation worth billions) gives ordinary people like you the opportunity to donate money to a good cause… for which the rich & corporate (who often contributed little beyond the use of their name) get all the credit.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Lillian and Dipshit walk away richer than before? grab the sawed-off shotgun, we’re going on a hunt
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
HE HAS RETURNED AND HOLY SHIT IT’S NOT GOOD
still Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
(Cs throws a jar of Jarate onto Lillian, causing a bunch of Heavies and Scouts to pounce onto her)
Crankshaft would totally be a Sniper main…
1. First off: HAPPY MOTHER’s DAY!!! 🌺💐🌹🫂
I know for certain that Be Ware of Eve Hill is a momma. I know for certain that ComicBookHarriet is a fur Mommy. I am not sure of the status of Mrvy, Mela, and the Drake of Life, but my blessings on all the wonderful gals of SOSF.
2. My comic strip reading began in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s. (Yes. I am old. I have no memory of Eisenhower, but being raised Roman Catholic, I remember the 1960 election intimately.)
Kansas City Missouri had 2 newspapers at that time: KCTIMES and KCSTAR. Both had comic strip pages. Such as Peanuts, TumbleWeeds, Dick Tracy, and one of my favorites, Li’l Abner.
But neither paper had my all time favorite strip: Alley Oop by V. T. Hamlin. For that, I had to visit my Grandma in Kansas City Kansas, and read the KCKANSAN. Great prehistoric artwork in Alley Oop! (But the best part was sitting on Grandma’s lap and she read the comics to me and my little sister.)
3. I agree with those of you who point out, TB certainly skips over the point of his arcs, like this week’s concert. Would it have killed TB to give one panel of the Lizard singing: “I don’t want her. You can have her. She’s too fat for me!”
Roger Corman will live forever to those who enjoy movies–whether the movies themselves, or the making of them. And those who mentored in his studio have gone on to win multiple Oscars.
Tom Batiuk will be immediately forgotten when he passes.
I met Roger Corman once at the Anthology Film Archives and asked him a question about similarities between “Nightmare Alley” and “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.” He didn’t rule them out, but didn’t think that they were intentional.
I remember thinking him a very pleasant and gracious individual and feeling glad that if he’d never won an Oscar, he’d been in an Oscar winning film, “The Godfather, Part II,” as “Senator #2.”
Pax vobiscum et requiescat in pace, Mr. Corman.