After a brutal fight in the virtual blog writer’s room, I’ve emerged to provide analysis for Crankshaft this week. So congratulations to Banana Jr. 6000 for his victory.
A few hours ago I was standing in the kitchen, freshly washed from a day on the tractor, trying to explain to my housemate just how uniquely terrible this week was. As a woman with cardboard long boxes in her closet, a Star Wars tattoo on her ass, and more action figures than socks, I’m ready to say it: I’m frikken sick of comic books. Superhero fatigue has hit SOSF big time. It’s part of why I stealth-ended the year long Dead Skunk Head Analysis this fall. I was just kinda done with the Funkyverse’s weird fetish for superheroes. Maybe I’ll revisit some of it someday. But ugh, not for a while.
It’s just so gosh darn repetitive at this point. The same points hammered over and over and over with the same sentiments and, now, no plot to speak of. Like being stuck in conversation on an airplane with a militant vegan.
I mean, really think about this, the hoops we went through in order to get the emotionally stunted baby-man, Jeff, and his crew cut shadow demon, Jffy, to Atomik Komix to gush with his hyperaged heroes.
First of all. HAHA I GUESS HE’S FREEMAN AGAIN.
And yeah, Jeff should know. He should know because Mindy used to work with the same guys, at the same office for years. In fact, you should have already met Flash Freeman and Phil Holt, when you went to the Atomik Komix office less than a year ago.
I hate the fact that Mindy, Jeff’s daughter, had a job for years in the industry which is basically Jeff’s religion, and this was really never used for father-daughter interactions, except for him tagging along at a Comic Con where they all kinda did their own thing.
AND, now…even that has been forgotten. Pete says ‘I’, not ‘we’.
A writer who spent WEEKS performatively playing white knight for all the poor widdle women comics creators through the ages, has memory-holed Mindy’s entire career.
HA.
And then, when we get to Atomik Komix, we get this.
And, like, is this implying that this is the first hardcover omnibus of Starbuck Jones? When there’s already two blockbuster Starbuck Jones movies, that have been out for years? You better believe they’d be cranking out trade-paperbacks and hardbound editions to coincide with the movie releases, just like they did with Marvel movies.
ALSO: Pete without eyebags in panel two is oddly appealing, and it’s the most off-putting thing in the entire week. Like a multiverse rift opened and we’re suddenly seeing a much more attractive and younger Pete from a universe with a better artstyle.
The next two days of strips is just grumpy old Phil Holt bitching. I get the sense that part of the reason we’re here this week is Tom just wanted to spend some more time playing with his fanfiction versions of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee/Joe Simon.
Then we get this.
As I said in the comments on the last post, this strip is a reference to Tom Batiuk’s own letter to the editor which was published in The Flash #121, June 1961, under the heading ‘Flash Art Appreciation’. (So, the same thing he still does on his blog all the time. )
What’s funny is that if you search for this issue, along with the name ‘Batiuk’, you see that multiple auction sites mention that one of the letters in the issue is by Funky Winkerbean artist, Tom Batiuk.
Knowing that Jeff is a Batiuk avatar, this makes Friday’s strip pretty…uh… Unless Batiuk actually got his omnibus signed by Joe Giella or Carmine Infantino. I mean, he did get Joe Giella to ink a Starbuck Jones cover for him. So it’s possible something like this interaction may have taken place. Maybe.
But even if it did, taking an entire day to make your cutout paper dolls act out remembering that time 60 years ago you got your letter published in The Flash, and then having the expy of Stan Lee ask for your autograph.
And if you do bad work, someone might start a blog!
(IN OTHER NEWS MY OLDER SISTER SPAWNED AGAIN YESTERDAY AND HE IS JUST ADORABLE AND I JUST WANTED TO SHARE WITH THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL BLOG FOLKS WITH WHOM I HAVE A PSEUDOPARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP OF MUTUAL RESPECT! THIS IS ENTIRELY SELFISH OF ME AND I DON’T CARE. THE AUNT SPICE MUST FLOW.)
Son of Stuck Funky 
Congrats on the extended family addition, CBH! Good to get the formal confirmation on the DSH recap, fully understand what you mean there. There’s a lot to unpack since he ultimately does become the shepherd of Act 3’s comic-nostalgia endemic with all the Starbuck/Baton lore, and that’s a lot for one person to tackle.
There’s a lot of vibes to this story that just scream “they’re doing this now?!” All these years Pete and/or Mindy were in the heart of the business and Jff never gets a mention in that regard? It’s one of those things that feels like they get lost in Timemop’s antics, sticking out and making you think about how drastic that shift really feels like. Time and effort to age up the CS cast just thrown out the window for… this.
And then you think about how this strip has crossed over with Dick Tracy and ignore Batiuk’s offer of a nickel not to, one can only wonder about how this world literally exists in one where aliens lived on the moon and yet he couldn’t even commit to a sentient computer being real. There’s a lot I could try and write about that if I wanted to, even if it would be kinda rambly and full of Star Wars jokes.
Congratulations, CBH!
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Phil: you’ll wont get paid while people who make shitty art or use AI to make it get paid MILLIONS!
Meanwhile in Big Nate:
Ha ha its funny because Nate did something to make Francis that traumatized
link to today’s Big Nate: https://www.gocomics.com/bignate/2024/06/15
Related to CK: Now I can’t even look at ANY the strips on CK because they fucked it up even more
(Cs throws a rock at a window and jumps out of it)
Batiuk took the 4 years of Mindy working for Atomix Komix and wiped his ass with it by retconning that shit away
He wiped his ass with everything. Mindy’s complete lack of agency was bad enough. But he completely ignored the fact that Pete and Mindy’s departure would have been fatal to Atomik Komix. It left only two old people, the no-talent Darrin, and an absentee owner. There’s no way their impossibly-long list of titles is being kept alive by three people.
And Darrin’s feelings should be hurt. He was supposedly Pete’s best friend. But Darrin seems not to have made the cut into Crankshaft, so he can just FOAD, I guess.
Funky gave Pete and Mindy the “you won’t have any spare time” speech, when he sold them the business (which is a whole other list of problems.) But they seem to have no shortage of time to sit around and smirk at each other, even though they never added any employees. But I guess Cory, Rocky, Rachel and Adeela can FOAD too, for the same reason as Darrin.
Worst of all, Batiuk spent all this time moving them to Montoni’s, and we haven’t even seen a Montoni’s story yet. What the hell was the point?
Well the circumstances of her getting hired were pretty unbelievable. Easy come, easy go, I guess.
Me, on today’s (6/16/24) strip:
“The more I look at this strip, the more it seems: Why isn’t this a week’s worth of strips? Heck, a month’s worth? There is a story behind each panel, I know it. Which Tom won’t show. It’s Called Writing cuts into the comic book signings. It’s all there: Birth, childhood that we know wasn’t great, exhausted but proud after a day fighting for civil rights in baseball, possibly the last night before he shipped off to near-certain death on D-Day, pretending he can read to his kids…now, old psycho bus driver. What made 2024’s Ed? We’ll never know. Tom doesn’t care.
Okay, I know Tom has no idea how his timeline works. And that’s not helped by Davis using clip art that doesn’t make sense. Panel3: Ed’s mom is wearing a cloce hat and an Edwardian jacket. Okay, there’s a story! These are the only “good clothes” she has: her mother’s hat from 1925, and her grandmother’s 1912 clothes. She’s penniless in the darkness of the early Great Depression. She’s trying to make a good impression, as she gives Ed up to Happy Harry’s Orphanage for Super-Unwanted Children for $3. But in P2, she’s wearing her Costco polo. Sadly, 10 years later she ate too many $1.50 hot dogs and died on the way to the hospital because some bus driver wouldn’t let the ambulance pass.”
If Tom begins Monday with a story behind each panel, my opinion of him will change a lot. Maybe he has stories he’s never told? If it’s just “I have some more Dinkle puns I forgot!” yeeeaaah, the strip’s bidding fare-thee-well on 12/31.
I truly bet not a single person here could write a story for each panel. Short, either funny or explaining why Crank became a sadist.
Not a single person here could do that.
That’s the first thing I noticed.
Batiuk, you created a gimmick character for your comic strip, and his gimmick is that he’s such an over-the-top asshole that it’s funny. Most of his humor comes from twisting an ordinary situation (eg. Buses go slow and traffic builds up behind them) into a deliberate hostile act by your gimmick character (eg. He’s holding you up on purpose to be an asshole)
That’s what Crankshaft has been, and every year this strip has been in existence, Crankshaft has hit on this gimmick. So it’s just obviously incongruent when you try to portray him as being a kind, decent person his whole life. I notice the incongruity long before I notice the actual point Batiuk’s trying to make.
I think this may be a particular weakness of the sort of hybridization Batiuk’s done with this strip. He’s done the “go against type” sequence so often with Crankshaft that he often forgets that Crankshaft’s an asshole. And this gets even worse when he can’t think of anything, goes back to his gag-a-day staples and does a throwaway sequence where kindly, decent Ed Crankshaft is once again a massive asshole.
It’s as if Charles Schulz later in Peanuts had Charlie Brown win everything he ever participated in but still would five times a year focus on how he never wins anything and is a massive loser. And we’re supposed to sympathize with his self-pity.
Which is kind of what Batiuk did with Les. So maybe it’s innate with him.
Batiuk loves his “pet the dog” moments, but they don’t make any sense. The “Roughriders” story did: Crankshaft was illiterate, and I can see him not wanting anyone else to go through life without an education. That made sense for his character. Everything else…. just doesn’t.
Really, he fixed Keesterman’s mailbox? That just makes him seem bipolar. Or intentionally cruel, repairing it so he can smash it again.
And the revelation that he straight-up killed Pop Clutch so he could win the traffic jam game pushed him over a line he can never come back from. The ignoring and abusing schoolchildren was bad enough; now he’s a murderer. But all characters except Lisa are disposable, so nobody cares about this heinous act.
He’s basically a psychopath. Serial killers think the way Ed Crankshaft does. Tell me how much of this list he checks off.
So much for being any fraction of an inch from reality. In the real world, history cannot be rewritten to make the story work. Batiuk can huff and puff about being bullied by nitpickers until he turns blue but people remember stuff anyway.
Interesting that 2 letters from Northeast Ohio were published in that comic book.
“As a woman with cardboard long boxes in her closet, a Star Wars tattoo on her ass, and more action figures than socks…”
Would it kill you to actually get a tiny Princess Leia slave outfit? Huh? Would it?
(Tinier the better. You do not want to disrespect Carrie Fisher. There are such a thing as standards and expectations!)
[To reference *the Muppet’s Shoe when Raquel Welch was the guest, “Miss Welch, you don’t have to wear this skimpy little bikini unless you want to…(long pause then they all appear begging) Puhhh-lease! Want to!”
{I believe the Alice Chalmers makes a fine substitute for the Millennium Falcon.}
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
What the hell is this strip?
A very special Father’s Day strip? We do have a panel where he is reading to his daughters, hey wait a minute, I thought he was illiterate back then.
Well I guess the point is, time is ticking away and soon we will all be dead, like Lisa.
I’m sure that the strip said that Crankshaft made up his stories as he went along
Which works just fine, except that the reason he started wanting to read after all those years is because widdle toddler Mindy kept pestering him to read The Cat in the Hat to her.
I guess missing out on his one chance to play major league baseball wasn’t enough of a motivator.
But not Phil. Who also may or may not like omnibuses. And who also may or may not have been recognized for his talents throughout his life.
also, Happy fathers day
fun fact about my father: He was born in mexico and moved here around when he was a teen (he’s a naturalized citizen)
Were you born before he was naturalized? If so, you are eligible for Mexican citizenship by descent. I am currently doing this to obtain Italian citizenship through my grandfather.
I’m not eligible for any other citizenship, but I would totally get one if I could.
My wife and I plan to live over there part of the year after we retire. This way we can travel about Europe much easier. Who knows, maybe I will end up living there permanently.
It is a lot of paperwork but I have a lawyer helping me with that.
He became a citizen sometime in the 80’s-90’s
I was born in 2006, so that means both me and my older sister (who was born in 2001) are eligible for Mexican citizenship
Nice! I see Mexican citizenship by descent is different from Italian citizenship. Will you do it?
Congrats, CBH.
Batiuk’s letter reads like the template he sends out to the people assigned to interview him.
It’s actually pretty wild to see so much of the TB we know today packed into that letter. The over-polished wordiness, the self-involvement, the pretension around the importance of comic books… the genuine compliments to Misters Infantino and Broome are a nice gesture, but what a strange wrapper they come in.
Meanwhile, here’s a Will Eisner quote from the wonderful 1988 documentary flop Comic Book Confidential that takes comic books seriously in a far less infuriating way.
Someone also posted a similar comment from Mark Evanier, about being a letter-writer as a child and gaining more perspective on it as an adult. That’s something Batiuk can never, ever do. The letter contains “the TB we know today” because 8-year-old TB is the TB we know today. It’s as if he’s got arrested development or retrograde amnesia.
I’ve always said that for a guy who loves old comic books as much as BatYam does, his stories about them are always f*cking terrible. It takes a special kind of talent to ignore continuity even more in your fictional sub-universes than you do your main one, but Batty makes it seem effortless. And “effortless” is exactly what it is. He created an entire fictional mythology, did nothing with it, then ignored it and/or retconned the hell out of it, like when he brough Phil Holt back from the dead. Just typing out that sentence alone made me 8% stupider.
He’s created a world of comic books no comic book fan can possibly relate to.
The original Starbuck Jones premise was mostly believable. It was a short-lived, obscure title from the 1970s that became a valuable collector’s item. Reasonable enough.
Then Holly started the SJ collection arc, and suddenly SJ became a long-running title, with hundreds of issues. Well, OK, I guess. I suppose there have probably been other obscure comics that ran for decades, although I can’t think of any right now. Mostly reasonable, I guess.
Then SJ became a beloved old serial movie franchise from the 1940s-1950s, and things began getting a bit ridiculous, let’s say. Then Batom began exploring what drawing and writing SJ back in the day must have been like, which was odd, as it was a movie franchise by that point, and not a comic book at all.
Then, of course, it became a MODERN movie franchise, at which point all hope was lost. And the funniest part is that through it all, we learned almost nothing about Starbuck Jones himself, which always struck me as fascinating, given how much time BatWeenie spent on it.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
(cs sufferes BRAIN DAMAGE! (in the TF2 crit damage font) from reading this strip, and puts a gun to his head)
I just got around to reading Sunday’s comics. Both Cranky and Zits did Father’s Day strips featuring characters over a period of several years.
I found Zits touching and very, very realistic. Crankshaft left me thinking “you’re all alone because you’re horrible and people justifiably hate you.”
He’s also 105 years old, so he jolly well should be hearing the tick-tock of his clock. The guy’s had way more than he deserves.
See my post of a few minutes ago. I spent most of Sunday thinking there was something seriously wrong about this strip, beyond it being hopelessly cliched. A hundred miles of motorcycle riding whilst thinking about the strip brought some clarity. And—as is obvious in retrospect—the strip shows just how much Batty hates Ed.
And so, after like 2 weeks of warning the same way Mason gave last-minute warning to his staff, we’re here for a week of movie premiere jokes and rambling on how Centerville should be a way bigger deal for being chosen for movie premieres twice begins.
All I got to say for now is nothing’s going to top “Holtron”‘s red carpet appearance in my eyes. How I miss his Act 1 vibes
dhlyg0v-4b9f617a-1668-4a47-bc34-fa244bfb06cc.gif (1440×459) (wixmp.com)
We mostly mocked it or griped about it at the time, but darned if Davis’ increasingly soul-less art swipes don’t have me all wistful for Rick Burchett’s swoopy, messy, actually cartoony penciling.
And Mason’s dialogue suggests that he had no hand in fixing the place up for the premiere whatsoever.
I look at this and think about how many people show up to a big movie premiere, and yet there are all the people who work at/own this theater standing outside feeling smug about themselves. Who’s manning the store? Did they hire a bunch of people who have mastered their jobs in such a short time that they don’t need oversight from the boss? Who’s working their one (1!) ticket booth? Where’s the security? Who’s manning the concession stands? Where are the helpers who helpfully explain to all these people from out of town where the bathrooms are and where they go to find their seats? Who’s there to clean up? Who stops me if I’m there and I decide I’m going to go up, ignore the pointless velvet ropes, slap Marianne Winters on the ass, yell “F- her in the p-ssy!” at that cameraman and walk right in to the theater without buying a ticket?
Apparently it’s those three douches in the foreground, sitting back smugly congratulating themselves on a job well done.
First thing I thought about, well, that and just the sheer amount of cut-and-paste art from other strips in this thing. Sheesh, Davis collected a paycheck for this.
The fate of the sequel, I guess—the original Starsuck movie had hundreds of Beautiful People sitting in rows of chairs in the street. Starsuck III has a few people loitering around the entrance to the Valentine.
Or maybe Davis couldn’t find the right clip art in the Crankshaft Reusable Art Portfolio.
Late Sunday night, long after all the commenters at GC had retired, sitting in a campsite overlooking the Mississippi River, I wrote this analysis of the Sunday “Time the Avenger” strip:
Now, to drop that hot steamer in the punchbowl…
This is a mean spirited strip, and suggests to me that Tom despises the title character of this strip as much as he despised the title character in his previous strip. Yes, viewed in isolation its a cute, if cliched, commentary on aging and how we all hear the timer ticking down. But in the context of the last two years of Crankshaft, Batiuk’s doing what he did to Funky Winkerbean: exiling him from his own strip, and punishing him for not being what the Glorious Writer wants him to be.
For those who don’t know, in Act III Funky Winkerbean, the title character started showing up less and less often. And when he did show up, he was usually suffering—from alcoholism (though his AA meeting rambles eventually became something of an unintentional joke), overweight, aches and pains (remember all those “running with Les” strips, in which Tom’s author avatar did just fine despite being just as old?), divorce, his son being captured by the Taliban and thought dead not once but twice, and the eventual failure of his business. All this because (some say) Tom didn’t like his silly nickname, which Tom chose as the title for the strip. I never much bought into that; I always thought Tom hated Funky because he actually graduated from high school and put it behind him—unlike the other characters in the strip, who seemed to have never fully left.
So now today’s Crankshaft. Yeah, Cranky’s sitting on the porch swing recalling his past and hearing his “bury by date” clock ticking. Kinda sweet, until you consider the last week or two of the main story. This week alone we have seen children (Homunculus Jff), middle-aged adults (MoPete), older middle aged adults (Jff), old people (Flush Foreman) and dead-but-still-under-contract people (Philled Hole) actually doing things. Everybody else in the strip still seems to have a life, while the title character sits on the swing waiting to die. What’s that tell you? It tells me Tom hates Ed as much as he hated Funky, because Ed represents everything Tom “grew out of”: jokes, humorous exaggeration, setups and punch lines, and oddly enough, stories set in actual human experience that readers might relate to. Yes, Ed must be punished. Before he is written out.
Oh, and to answer the obvious question, “what about Les?”
I believe we will never see him again. Not because he’s being punished, but because the Les Moore Saga has reached its completion and nothing can be added to make it any “better.” Dead St. Lisa’s Story has been made into a (not very) moving picture, there is an Oscar sitting on Les’s mantelpiece, and DSL’s spawn turns out to be the Savior of Humanity. It is finished. It is perfect. Dinkle, MoPete, even Jff, still can regurgitate Tom’s fantasy, and probably will. But Les is done. Complete. Perfect.
Perfect what is left as an exercise for the reader.
These are excellent insights into Ed, Funky, and Les.
I think the “father’s day” strip was more misguided than mean. It was supposed to be about fatherhood, but only one image depicted Ed being a parent. So it was really just Ed thinking about himself and his own mortality. Which is perfectly in character for Ed, because he’s a selfish prick.
As a father goes. Ed is somewhere between Archie Bunker and Les Moore. On a good day, he’s merely closed-minded. On a bad day, he’s selfish to the point of harming his own children, and he doesn’t even realize it.
I agree that we have most likely seen the last of Les. FW’s ending indicated that he said all he had to say about Les and Lisa.
The Father’s Day strip would have worked better without the increasing Tick Tocks. I got what he was going for, but it came off as creepy as opposed to relective.
The only difference between funky and Crankshaft is that Crankshaft is far more deserving to suffer
Ed Crankshaft killed a man.
Man, you look at today’s strip and you feel like it’s prime-Act 3 Funky all over. Literally the only sign of the Crankshaft world is the Valentine, but you can’t even see a clear sign that that’s the theater in question. We really have completely lost sight of this particular strip’s roots here.
Gabby writes, Congratulations CBH!
Re: the DSH comics arc, someone recommended The Ten Cent Plague as a good history of the comics controversy history. Thank you! It was very interesting and very well-researched. It goes beyond Wertheim into many other anti-comics efforts. Although the book was written more than 10 years ago, many of the explanations he offers resonate scarily well with the current social media hysteria
On Day Two of Smuggestly Punchable Jerk-Jar’s Joker-like Face: Why does Tom so love the characters the readers seem to hate? Even the “Clever LOL So?” crowd ain’t exactly racing to the defense of Mayonnaise Jar.
Everyone hated Les, but there he was, front and center. I mean, no one likes the Interchangeable Blond Chicks, besides maybe some incels who wore out their waifu pillows. (Their mom threw them out after the house began to stink. What a hag! They’re MORE collectible stained, MOM!)
Kinda makes you wonder about Tom’s relationship to the world. Does every worker inwardly groan when he walks into the Kroger?
If he loses his composure the way Les did when Summer bought what a constipated douche like him thinks of as the pole dancer dress when he is treated like the nobody he is, I’d say the odds are good.
In a strip filled with low moments, that was the lowest.
“There’s an old man in your store, screaming at a teenage girl ‘TAKE OFF THOSE CLOTHES!’ and chasing her into the changing rooms!”
“Oh! Mr Moore? Oh, isn’t he the grooviest?! He’s northern rust belt Ohio’s greatest celeb! He’s so fab and gear!”
“He’s terrifying that kid! WHO IS HE?!”
“He’s–a Published Author who almost won the ‘Guy Who Showered The Least’ award in high school! He–he–READS COMIC BOOKS THE RIGHT WAY!”
(both swoon!)
Batiuk doesn’t seem to realize that Les stopped being a sympathetic character when he got serious on us. All he is now is a sad reminder that a loveable loser is a contradiction in terms.
One of the funniest semi-recurring strips is from Reuben Bolling’s “Tom the Dancing Bug.” The best is when he does “SUPER-FUN PACK COMICS!” One of the characters is this horrific asshole named “The UN-Lovable Loser!” Know what that guy’s name is?
“Dinkle.”
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
day two of this Masone Jarre bullshit
Cs killbinds, only to respawn 7 seconds later
And, of course, it’s not just the movie industry that’s bad for not churning out mindless pap a social phobic like Jfffff can lose himself in. Fans are also bad because they bully Batiuk by not being desperate and weird.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Looks like Mason Jarre is about to suffer the same fate as Steven Seagal: being a talentless hack trying to make money
At least Masone is in shape, unlike Seagal
RE: The 6/19 Shaftless ‘Shaft:
Hahaha, it’s funny because Masonne has nothing but disdain for the SJ decoder ring-wearing fans making him “rich.”
Would it be too much to hope for that tomorrow’s strip is a flash forward to San Diego Comic Con 2054, where a saggy-jowled and forlorn Masonne Jarre sits at a visitor-free autograph table as the throngs glance his way and quickly move along, making him the sci-fi equivalent of late, great “WWE Superstar” Virgil?
Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack with today’s strip. Batiuk’s characters – and Batiuk himself – do constant book signings. Which they… hate doing? Why do they do it? Nobody’s making them!
I think Tom Batiuk is fantasizing that he gets more attendees at his book signings… so he can fantasize about being rude to them all. He really is a nasty little creep.
Masonne’s been borrowing from the Dakota Johnson school of press tours this week. But alas, he’s not borrowed any of the funny parts…
This is genuinely terrible. Thing that strikes me is how every one of Batiuk’s characters has a relentless disdain for the people who support their careers, and how the strip consistently portrays them in such a way to justify it.
Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean
cs runs up to the top of Montoni’s, jumps off the roof and killbinds, only to respawn 2 seconds later
It’s Wednesday and this shit is getting tiresome
I’d much rather read the Crankshitter strips from 2014
Like this one:
and this one
they may not be great but they’re miles better than the nigh-unreadable garbage this week
“Someone goes to an attic, and finds a box of inexplicably NM comics”–what a great twist! Be a shame if some writer wore it out.
Notice how Mindy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the comic books, dismissing them as not important.
So when she joined Atomik Komix, her interest in comic books came exclusively from her relationship with Mopey. Despite growing up with comic book dipshit enthusiast Jfff as her father, she didn’t care about them until a relationship mandated it.
Mooch’s expression in panel 2 (which is why i sometimes refer him as Fappy McFapface) suggests that he loves comic books to the point of jerking off when it’s just mentioned