“Welcome to Funky Winkerbean’s Untold Tales. Back when Funky ended, I had mentioned that my intent was to create some new Funky stories now and then and post them on my blog. It took a little while for reality to catch up to intent, but it has as evidenced here by a small little story that I just didn’t have a chance to stage before the curtain came down on Funky...”
Well, what have we here? Since Funky folded, we’ve seen the Crankiverse visited by Harry Dinkle, and Mason and Cindy. Pete and Mindy are moving in to that dumpy apartment above Montoni’s. We even had a cameo from Westview’s time-traveling janitor just last week. Now, Batiuk finally makes good on his threat promise “to post new original Funky stories at my new website tombatiuk.com from time to time”.
“I’m partnering once again with Rick Burchett whose peerless pencils I get to delineate…”
It’s surely because Crankshaft “penciller” Dan Davis must be exhausted from cutting and pasting characters from old Funky strips. Batiuk has re-enlisted Rick Burchett, whose Funky was populated with maddeningly inconsistent, weird-looking, balloon-headed characters. Crazy Harry is rendered decently enough, and dumpy Donna gets something of an upgrade. Summer Moore has always been an androgynous cipher, and, because she’s wearing that hat, we know that the other person must be Harry and Donna’s daughter Maddie. At least Rick can draw bricks!
Anyway, what’s Summer doing hanging around the Klinghorn house? It was only two years ago, at the wedding of Cory and Rocky, that Maddie was grilling Keisha about her stepsister’s relationship status. Have these two since become an item? That would be a much more interesting Untold Tale.
“…and Rob Ro, whose colors are somewhere over the rainbow. Beautiful stuff…“
Yeah, those colors are somewhere. Not here.
So join us each day this week for a brand-spanking-new funky fable I’m calling The First Time.“
Maybe tomorrow’s installment will be in color! At any rate, we’ll be covering this Very Special Funky Fable daily as it unfolds! A special hat tip to BananaJr6000 for putting this on my radar. Please tune in daily, and let your comments fly!
Son of Stuck Funky 
That artwork is pretty on-model for Burchett, are we sure it’s him holding the pencil? The shout out to Rob Ro’s colors with a grayscale strip below is top shelf TB! Bravo!
Summer was depicted as being pals with Maddie back in early Act III, well, as much as Summer was depicted as being pals with anyone. So I get why TB might have them hanging out (setting them up as a couple using that Cory wedding strip is absolutely something TB would do, but for the fact that he would need an ambition he hasn’t had in 15 years to do it), especially if this story isn’t taking place in the “present” of the Batiukverse but rather when the original Act III gang was still in high school (which seems as plausible as both of these ostensible college graduates being back living with their folks).
Anyways, if we’re going back to the time Crazy and Donna first met… we’re probably gonna mostly see some skeevy Act I flashbacks. Hey, it beats Crankshaft! *knocks on wood*
I’m actually looking forward to this. Crankshaft and Mary Worth have both been horrible lately.
My response to every Mary Worth strip for the past two weeks has been, “Dear Lord, it’s a FISH!”
If a child asks you what “being an enabler” means, this Mary Worth arc is an excellent example of it.
If the strip were colorized, then Maddie’s would’ve been mistakenly colored blond instead of red
“First time?” says Rachel…
Crankshaft is somewhat timely for those of us in NE Ohio. Hollywood has been in Cleveland filming for a new Superman movie.
I understand the apostrophe at the beginning of “rents” as it indicates the missing “pa.” What on earth is the second apostrophe doing there at the end?
You’d think that maybe with Summer and Maddie talking to each other comprising most of this strip, that might mean that there’s more in store between those two characters.
And you’re wrong. This is totally a setup for more boomer navel-gazing. We’ll follow Crazy and Donna to Montoni’s where they’ll reminisce about the time when Donna played Defender and eat pepperoni pizza despite its deleterious effects on folks in their ’70s and Crazy will give Donna an anniversary gift like a bottle of salad dressing or a vintage comic book or something similarly stupid and masturbatory.
And we’ll only hear from Summer or Maddie again when they comment on these proceedings.
So, TimeMop turns up in a single panel for the first time in CS, and now time has been reset to Act III?
How do you “nudge” Cindy into being born 30 years later, and Crank 30 years younger? If TimeMop is that powerful, why didn’t he prevent The Burnings? This goes beyond nitpicking, Tom.
I think Timemop is a rogue Time Lord that specializes in changing history
“Timemop is a rogue Time Lord that specializes in changing history”
Like in the best Fourth Doctor serial, “Genesis of the Daleks.” He goes back to stop them before they conquer the galaxy, but his conscience won’t let him exterminate them. So he delays their emergence by 200 years. Which gives the Daleks an extra 2 centuries to prepare and build, and when they do dig themselves out, they conquer the galaxy in half the original time.
TimeMop: What a Fuck-Up.
Let’s do a crossover!
Timemop is the Invader Zim of Time Lords. He wanted an assignment, so Gallifrey sent him to the most useless world they could find. And gave him the busywork task of making sure yet another Dead Lisa book gets written.
“Yes, Timemop, this book is of great importance to this world! You must make sure it is eventually written! It’s called… uh… (looks at cover) Westview! (tries not to crack up) Yeah! So make sure Westview is written! It’ll… umm… (badly improvising) make them see humanity as their nation! Now go! And whatever you do, don’t lose your Timey-Wimey Helmet! (takes button off microphone, turns to colleague) Well, that’ll keep him busy for a while.”
TimeMop would probably piss off the Doctor (most likely Six, Ten, Thirteen or Fourteen), and TimeMop would be strapped with chains and thrown into a black hole
TimeMop: “I’ll use my sonic Screwdriver!” (opens Thermos of “vodka and orange,” chugs it while making “Mmm BOY! Moppy needs his medicine!” noises sonically.)
Shit. “Sonic.” I just left an opening for cs, didn’t I?
Obviously, he can’t prevent The Burnings, because The Burnings happened and he can’t make any changes that might prevent us from recognizing humanity as our nation or whatever the hell Timemop was yammering on about. Since The Burnings happened in the original timeline, he has to ensure they happen again, in the exact same way.
Of course, this doesn’t answer the question of WHY Timemop had to go back in time to ensure everything happened as it did originally, since there was no indication that anything was threatening to change the course of events in the first place. Either it’s a closed-loop time travel story, where everything happened the way it did BECAUSE of the time travel (i.e., Timemop ALWAYS caused things to unfold the way they did), or Timemop effectively did nothing at all and thus was completely wasting his time. (And ours.)
But, y’know. It’s called writing or whatever.
There’s a forgotten big budget Hollywood movie from c.1980 titled “The Final Countdown.” A modern nuclear aircraft carrier gets sucked into a(n entirely unexplained) Time Tunnel and ends up near Hawaii on–DECEMBER 6th, 1941! A day that didn’t super live in infamy. Not 2 days AFTER Pearl Harbor, or a week before, the day before.
The whole movie was the crew of this gigantic ship (the Enterprise!) deciding whether to change history or…Unclear. Just hide the damn thing for 40 years? Yeah, let’s not destroy Imperial Japan, and totally not then sail to the Atlantic and have a nice chat with Mustache Boy. War would’ve ended then and there, but why save 70+ million lives? It’s like Sherman always said to Mr Peabody, “But if Columbus doesn’t discover America, all the history books will be wrong!”
At the last minute they decided to intervene and, I dunno, stop the Holocaust like some buncha buttinskies. Annnd–the Magic Portal reappears and drops them back to the exact minute when they left. Nothing happened.
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT MOVIE? What’s the point of THIS movie? Yeah, it’s called writing. Shitty, lazy, unimaginative writing.
No doubt there’s a lot you can write about the consequences of changing history in a time travel plot. Will your actions truly be for the best, or will the butterfly effects mean the alternative paths lead to an even worse outcome? Will you let parties become aware of you being time travelers, something they might want to achieve themselves? Will the action of interference cause paradoxes that could affect your birth or development and snarl up the timeline?
That said, doesn’t sound like the film explored that very interestingly if it ended up being just all-talk aboard the ship.
Hate to be that reader, bill, but the vessel in question in “The Final Countdown” (why do I picture Gob Bluth performing an illusion?) was actually the USS Nimitz. There’s even a line where a 1941 Navy officer is shocked that Admiral Nimitz had the gall to name a ship after himself.
There’s even a line where a 1941 Navy officer is shocked that Admiral Nimitz had the gall to name a ship after himself.
Batton Thomas says hi.
One of my favorite *Dr. Strange* stories appears in *Marvel Premiere* #12-14, as the Sorcerer Supreme (newly that, as the Ancient One is no more). It involves a time-traveler named Sise-Neg, who seeks to absorb mystical energy at significant periods of Earth’s existence and make himself into a god, rewriting the universe in the process.
Well, he does this, but while he’s been absorbing the mystical energy, he’s had an epiphany: humanity, while far from perfect, is as close to perfection as a species can be, and he therefore resolves to recreate the universe as it was, and to hope that people will speak in the future “not of the man called Sise-Neg, but the God called Genesis!”
(You spelled it backwards as soon as you saw the hyphen, didn’t you? Come on, admit it…)
And it works, because it has Steve Englehart writing, Frank Brunner drawing, Stephen Strange and Baron Karl Mordo dogging Sise-Neg, like the angel and the devil on a sinner’s shoulder, to say nothing of Lancelot Du Lac, Lot and his daughters and Shuma-Gorath.
Some features, alas, just aren’t as fortunate, and an ancient paper which appears to contain a recipe for borscht in truth actually contains only a recipe for borscht.
What used to be a funny slice of life story arc got ruined by Batiuk’s obsssions and fear of female (especiaaly maternal) agency.
Does anyone know how many times he’s already rehashed this story? It’s probably two or three, at least, but it seems like way more, doesn’t it? Batiuk sure does love his victory laps, where he relives his favorite old arcs over and over again.
How could we tire of the magic moment when a teen burnout met-cute an… adolescent boy ? Hmm, this has Pride Month special written all over it.
I’m very much looking forward to the SoSF commentary on this series of comics I will not read, except to understand the SoSF commentary on them.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Looks like we shifted from Starfuck Jones to Mopey McMopester
Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean
cs shits from the roof of Montoni’s onto Crankshaft and Pete
a small little story that I just didn’t have a chance to stage before the curtain came down on Funky..
Doesn’t he mean “a small little story I decided not to use, because the end of Funky Winkerbean was totally my own decision”?
God, he’s a bad liar.
LOL yeah, given the quality of some of the crap he was churning out in 2022, and given how central that dumb Eliminator helmet was to “The End”, what the bloody hell is he even talking about here? He could have easily sledgehammered this nostalgia trip into that whole thing with the helmet instead of squandering his final few months on Batton f*cking Thomas and Kitsch Swoon. HE chose to run those strips, no one else. As if he agonized over which stories would make the final cut. Please.
Yeah, he could easily worked this nostalgia trip about the Eliminator helmet into all the other nostalgia trips about the Eliminator helmet.
It’s surely because Crankshaft “penciller” Dan Davis must be exhausted from cutting and pasting characters from old Funky strips.
Davis probably has absolutely zero knowledge of 2007 – 2012 FW
Making him a perfect collaborator for Batiuk, who shares the condition.
There is still nothing that will make me read Tom Batiuk’s blog, but I’ll admit this is a nice try.
Batty could learn a thing or two from you about consistency.😂
Why do I get the feeling that the Crazy Harry and Donna story on Batiuk’s blog is going to be a massive disappointment
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
This story arc in 2024 is the same as Mopey Pete moving into Montoni’s in 2008, but without Mooch/Sir Nuts-A-Lot, Darin and Fat Pedophile Skunkhead John