Process of Elimination.

Heya all my beautiful Nitters of the Beady-Eyed Variety!

After a week that saw me travelling deep into the blistering inferno of drenching sweat, blinding sunshine, and endless Cracker Barrels known as the American Southeast, I’m back and ready to continue the deep dive on our favorite gender-nonconforming computer whiz, The Eliminator.

After their two week introductory arc that started July 12, 1982 (Happy 42nd Birthday Eliminator!), they pop up again for a Sunday strip on September 12, where the focus was still completely centered on Vidya games and pop culture.

The part where the hero saves the mainframe universe’s concept of a higher power by throwing a frisbee at a giant spinning face? My idea. Got it after an amusing incident where a Scientologist wandered into the St. Spires pancake breakfast.

Though I would say Batiuk was enamored of the concept of ‘Eliminator’. I don’t think, at the outset, he’d really had a good thunk about how he would utilize the character when he ran out of jokes about being really really unnaturally good at arcade games. If I had to guess, I’d say that he made up the character with exactly one arc in mind, and then shrugged and went, ‘I can make up enough BS to have existential leaves be an arc every year, surely more material will come to me later.’

Partially hindering him, at least for now, was that he’d established the kid in an age bracket where he had almost no other recurring characters. The only exception being nearly every summer when there was a Montoni’s Little League team arc. He didn’t think to incorporate ‘Eliminator’ into those, which is a huge missed opportunity IMO. As the next arc with ‘Eliminator’ shows them to be obsessed with statistics and analysis in a way that could have been capitalized on, ala the strategy nerd from that classic 90’s kids-sports-underdog-comedy movie, Little Giants.

I don’t know if Vader or ET is ‘Freddy’. I also don’t know if Vader and ET know that their close friend and presumed classmate is a girl, Maybe all of them are secretly girls pretending to be boys as they go door to door to complete strangers.

“We deducted extra points for that awful peanut saltwater taffy stuff that comes in black and orange wrappers. Because that stuff is like sucking gritty dogshit.”
So Freddy is here. And possibly Vader? No confirmation on if ‘Freddy’ is secretly ‘Fredricka’.
‘You’d better have a piece of the rock!’ Wat? Peanuts reference? Maybe? EXPLAIN THIS TO ME!
You know, in the time we spent explaining this to you, on a night where our candy extorting time is limited, we could have visited like six additional houses. You should factor that into your donations.

After this little Halloween treat, the Eliminator disappears for the rest of 1982, not showing up again until January 23 of the next year.

“I already had to trade out ‘Defender’ for ‘Kangaroo’ after the damn kid broke my machine.”
Oh, wait, no, by June 10, 1983 we’re back to ‘Defender’. Though it whimpers in fear at the torment it has come to expect…

And here’s an interesting little tidbit I noticed. In most Eliminator strips it is conceit of Batiuk’s to redraw the helmet’s little antenna differently in every panel. I say redraw, because he’s obviously pasting/tracing most of it again for the next panel. And for that I do not blame him at all. The characters being stationary is part of the rhythm of the joke. But the pattern of antennas means you can also tell when the art has been reused from one strip to another.

Which I also don’t blame him for. Because at least the art is able to convey the joke. Batiuk admitted that he was a painfully slow cartoonist, so why redraw the same tableau for the same style of joke?

But it does add to my weird and growing respect for Ayers and his refusal to churn out massive amounts of copypasta, no matter how droopy faced and lumpy he got there at the end.

Next time! THE END OF THE ELIMINATOR?!?

83 thoughts on “Process of Elimination.”

  1. At least the bizarre motive Donna had isn’t six days of whining about seats at movie theaters.

  2. CBH:

    Skip Rawlings is unavailable to launch into a tirade against Mordor Financial, so I’ll just say that “a piece of the rock” is most likely a reference to Prudential Financial, Inc.’s slogan, which called on customers to get just that At Prudential, you could count on “the Strength of Gibraltar.”

    (Jack Lemmon’s character in Billy Wilder’s last movie, “Buddy Buddy,” says that in happier days he “had a piece of the rock.” This is not one of Wilder’s best pictures, so look for it to appear at the Valentine very soon!)

    I like your allusion to “I got a rock” in the trick-or-treating from “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” very much.

    1. More specifically, amongst Prudential’s financial services is insurance. So the joke is, if they don’t give out good candy, they better hope they have good home insurance. (Or maybe life insurance. One never knows.)

      1. Green Luthor:

        Thanks for your elaboration. It gave me an extra giggle as I remembered Marvel’s original Viper, who made a joke about another insurance firm in *Captain America & the Falcon* #180:

        “Like a good neighbor, State Pen is there…”

        All hail Johnny Dollar, the Fabulous Freelance Insurance Investigator with the Action-Packed Expense Account!

          1. Ed Crankshaft would probably enjoy the “Laughing Matter” serial, in which Johnny goes south and interacts with a police chief (a jefe!) who apologizes frequently for “not being so good with English” (best example: he doesn’t want to give Johnny “the bum cow” when he means “the bum steer”).

            As often happens in “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar” shows, the idiosyncratic English is not a reflection on el jefe’s intelligence: he knows his job, and does it well. In fact, the official police are rarely foils for our hero, as they would be for Sherlock Holmes. In that regard, we’re nearer to the Continental Op (who generally got along well with the police) than to Sam Spade (who did not like Lieutenant Dundy at all, though he did call Sergeant Polhaus “Tom”).

            Johnny is an avid fisherman, but he never bagged an engagement tiger, even when the series gave him a regular ladyfriend in Betty Lewis.

    2. This is definitely what that reference is. It was a ubitquous commercial back in the day.

      1. Thank you all, I figured it was another ‘Fine Corellian Leather’ situation.

        Amazing what ad jingles persist for decades, (Can you hear me now? Where’s the Beef?) and which will date a single generation.

        2. I only knew what “piece of the rock” was referring to because I watched Mel Brooks’ short-lived Robin Hood tv show/Borscht Belt revue When Things Were Rotten (a sort of proto Men In Tights) about a decade ago and looked it up after the slogan was used as a gag in one of the episodes.

          Funny what makes you curious…

  3. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Someone staggers to 10 feet of Max, Mary, Crankshaft and Hannah and vomits up an entire stream of s’more-flavored ramen onto Max, Hannah and Crankshaft

    Hannah: I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t have given that bizarrely-flavored ramen to ANY of the customers.

    1. Today is just another Batty rant where pines for the good old days. You cannot watch movies properly unless it is in a vintage theater. Bleh, I am happier watching from the comfort of my own home and no I’m not watching some obscure crap from the 30’s either.

        2. Excellent!

          (Did you ever expect that you would — at any point in your life — sincerely and unapologetically type the sentence “Oh, I’ll have some things to say about Cup Holder Week.”?)

          1. No, but I never would have imagined a lot of the things I say. Life takes you a lot of weird places. And that’s awesome.

        3. Every single time CBH posts an early FW retrospective, it amazes me — Tom Batiuk used to be reasonably competent at this whole comic strip thing. The Eliminator is a fun occasional character, and there are some actual laughs here.

          Appreciate the deep dives, CBH!

          1. Yes, act 1 was a solid comic strip that fit in well with the times. But then he had to get all serious and ruin everything.

    2. Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean

      Max: Yeah…about that…We spent all of our money on the mega-cup holders and now we’re poorer than dirt. (changes tune), THIS COULD BE SO MUCH MORE! I HAD POURED EVERY PART OF MYSELF INTO THIS THEATER AND THIS IS WHAT I GET! IT’S! NOT! FUCKING! FAIR!

  4. Good eye on Kangaroo. That was a mid-tier platformer from the arcade era. And it’s a good example of a classic video game that’s inessential today. It’s worth a play, just to see all four levels, especially the clever level 3. But once you’ve done that, it has nothing else to offer. The controls are also pretty wonky.

    Platform games exploded with Super Mario Bros. on the NES. Not much before it is worthy of attention. The original Donkey Kong is, of course. I also think Lode Runner from the PC gaming world deserves more attention. But most of the rest you can skip.

    1. Heh, I used “ubiquitous” before I saw your comment. Great minds and all.

    2. Thanks Jeff! I guess I missed this commercial on my last watch through of the Star Wars Christmas Special 😀

        1. Holiday Special. Holiday Special. It even aired closer to Thanksgiving than Christmas.

          Mea Culpa.

          1. I was, umm, lucky enough to see it the the first time it ran. I was home for Thanksgiving with my college GF. We saw half of it before she said “God, this is awful!” I said “YEAH IT IS!” (I was fascinated by bad sci fi movies before MST3K made it cool)

            She made me turn it off.

          2. And thus you missed the rest of a beautiful piece of history, and also never got to see a completely coked out of her mind Carrie Fisher sing a nonsense ballad to the tune of the Star Wars Main Title on live TV.

            Sometimes I wish the internet was a around in the 80’s, just so we could have YouTuber angry critic reaction videos to stuff like Caravan of Courage.

          3. We stopped at 30mins, I think after the beloved Harvey Korman…thing. I’d have to wait for the internet before I saw it in its entirety.

            I will add that our college was Oberlin, in Lorain County, and we flew out through Cleveland. I bought a book while waiting for liftoff: “The 50 Worst Films of All Time.” What, I’m not the only person who watches dumb shit because it’s funny?! This was definitely a life-changing moment. Why else would I be reading suck-era Wankerbean 40 years later?

            We also broke up right after this, a couple weeks after going back. And my bisexual radical feminist ex decided to be a lesbian. Yes I’m quite the catch, LADIES

            DO NOT WITH THE WATCH OF STAR WRAS XMAS SHOW, may make you’re GF realize that this 19 year old idiot is–well, some kind of an idiots.

  6. That surgeon general strip from early 1983 seems prescient as the great video game crash was about to happen… though it affected the home console market far more than the arcades.

    Not sure I would trust any Halloween candy analysis from Freddy’s Atari 800. If his parents wouldn’t spring for an Apple IIe, why should I think they would have spent money on the Atari 800 port of VisiCalc?

    1. The 1983 crash also concentrated solely on the US console market. US markets for PC and arcade gaming were fine. Markets for PC and arcade gaming everywhere else in the world was fine. Sorry, it’s a point that grates on me, because it feeds into the Nintendo-Jesus narrative such that there are still people to this day (and likely will be forever) who parrot lines about how “we wouldn’t be playing any video games today if it weren’t for Nintendo”; a statement to which my most polite response is “bull fucking shit”. But, anyway, who cares!

      Thank you for more content CBH. My blind spots regress with each new post.

      1. So what explanation would you give? Yes, I think it’s fair to say that the Great Video Game Crash narrative was a US- and console-centric phenomenon, brought on by a glut of bad decisions by Atari.

        But also I think it’s correct to say that (1) US stores simply didn’t want to stock video games anymore, (2) which Nintendo got around by marketing Rob the Robot as a toy, (3) there were downstream effects on PC and arcade gaming, since a lot of them were made by the same suffering companies, (4) there was a widespread belief that video gaming was a fad that had simply run its course, and (5) and home gamer consoles would start yielding to PCs, which could play games and had other uses.

        1. The notion that PCs would end the existence of consoles was definitely strong in a lot of the literature I have read from that time. Even then 11-year old Rawson Stovall, who wrote a syndicated video game review column called “The Vid Kid” from 82-90, was predicting consoles would be obsolete by the 90s at the time, if not by the middle of the decade, due to the gaming capabilities of PCs.

          The video game crash in the US was also accompanied by a less pronounced but still significant contraction in the sales of hi-fi stereos. For retailers focused on small electronics like hi-fi and video games, such as the chain my father worked for in the early 80s, times became as rocky as they were for the video game companies. My dad’s chain went from having 150+ stores to bankruptcy and liquidation in about a year from 1982 to 1983.

        2. Banana – What I take umbrage with isn’t the label of it being a crash in and of itself, but the connotation that the entire video game medium was at risk of being eradicated if not for Nintendo managing to have the NES sell well in the US. There are people who have said that and will continue to say that, and it’s entirely wrong. If consoles were to have been eschewed from big box stores in the US and were relegated to the likes of Radio Shack, that still would have been enough for that specific type of product to have a market, and the rest of the world would have continued to do what it did regardless.

          Billy – Thanks for that link to that book, that was interesting to poke through. It reminds me of the “How To Win At Nintendo” books that Jeff Rovin wrote in the late 80s and I read repeatedly. It’s interesting to see the criteria upon which games were evaluated and the language invoked for describing them back then. I wonder what it would be like to have a child of the current age read some of those descriptions of those games and then try playing them.

      2. I was a head cashier in a KB Toys when the crash started. It was caused by there just being too many hack games spewed forth at the time. How many times is Dad gonna shell out $40 ($125 today) for pure crap that gets played for half a day?

        We had a big table of remaindered games by the front, I mean hundreds of titles. Mostly Atari, but a few Intellivison ones as well. I had an employee discount of 25%, and part of my job was filling the table–which also meant I got first pick. For very little money I got things you’ve never heard of. (Intellivoice module, anyone?)

        The games were too expensive to play enough to figure out that the key to successful shopping was only buying from certain labels. Atari games leaned weak, but Imagic and Activision were great, sometimes phenomenal. Like Activision’s Robot Tank. They squeezed a lot into that game–weather, day changing to night and back. You can play it, but keyboard controls aren’t ideal. https://www.retrogames.cz/play_331-Atari2600.php?language=EN.

        If you’re wondering, the last games left after continual markdowns to 99c were Cosmic Creeps and, unsurprisingly, future mass burial victim ET.

        1. Those were some of Atari’s forementioned bad decisions. A more complete list:

          1. Letting anybody and their mother make cartridges for their system, leading to a glut of games that were mostly crap and didn’t sell (which was a major factor in Nintendo’s tight control over the NES);
          2. Treating their programmers like garbage, driving them away to form companies like Activision, Imagic, and Electronic Arts, where they made excellent competing products;
          3. Paying big bucks for the Pac-Man license, and then skimping on it by trying to fit it into a 4 MB cartridge instead of the 8 MB cartridges that existed at the time;
          4. Paying big bucks for the E.T. license, and then putting programmer Scott Warshaw on an unrealistic timeframe to get it done in six weeks for Christmas sales;
          5. Wagering that these two games would sell millions of new consoles, which wouldn’t have happened even if the games were good;
          6. Not acknowledging the fact that the 2600 was technologically behind the curve by 1983;
          7. Betting big on the Atari 5200, which was decent but had awful controllers, no backwards compatibility with the 2600, and other problems;
          8. Betting on their line of home computers, which compared badly to the Apple IIe and Commodore.

  7. There’s a Tea Fougner (AKA Tea Berry-Blue, AKA Mintberry Crunch) sighting on the Comics Kingdom. I’m sure many of you remember Tea as the Editorial Director of Comics for the Comics Kingdom. Tea was the one who damned Batiuk with faint praise by summing him up in a tweet as a “nice man.”

    Apparently, Tea has decided to write a series of blogs titled. “Do You Speak Comics?” Thus far, it appears to be “A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Comic Strips.”

    https://comicskingdom.com/trending/blog/2024/07/07/do-you-speak-comics-part-1-the-basics

      1. Not sure how. The list of titles s̸h̸e̸’̸s̸ they’ve added to the Comics Kingdom roster is less than impressive. One could say, “they sucketh. Big time.”

        Do you know anything about her predecessor, Brandon Burford? He was the features editor following Jay Kennedy and preceding Fougner. Apparently editing Batiuk didn’t fall under his purview, or interest.

  8. A couple of strips i pulled out of m̶y̶ ̶a̶s̶s̶ the Toledo Blade archives

    Great, Now I can’t sleep for weeks

    I also have this image in higher quality, thanks to the Seattlepi website which allowed me to view and save the images without the preminum fee (and I saved as much as I could until FW was removed in June of last year)

    Here it is in it’s full horrific glory

    Terrifying, is it?

    Ha ha it’s funny because Dinkle is a sore loser and is barely able to hold it in

    3. Ringo is not a mod or a rocker, but a mocker, and Steve Miller is a Joker:

      ‘Cause I’m a picker, I’m a grinner
      I’m a lover and I’m a sinner
      I play my music in the sun
      I’m a joker, I’m a smoker
      I’m a midnight toker
      I sure don’t want to hurt no one
      I’m a picker, I’m a grinner
      I’m a lover and I’m a sinner
      I play my music in the sun
      I’m a joker, I’m a smoker
      I’m a midnight toker
      I get my lovin’ on the run
      Woo-ooh, woo-ooh

      What is the Pompatus of Love, Barnabas Collins?

      1. ED CRANKSHAFT: “Elvis was the Pompadour of Love!”

        ****SMIRKS GALORE**** grill explodes

        1. BTS:

          Ed Crankshaft (through you) has made up my mind for me.

          When I complete my current listening with Warren Zevon’s *Wind,* I am going to listen to Elvis Presley’s *Complete 1950s Masters.*

          Should we ever meet in New Orleans, I will buy you a meal of pompano in a bag!

  10. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Meanwhile in Centerville, Lillian is ambushed by this hideous creature from Eltorro64Rus’s Down Your Throat video:

    Down Your Throat!Heavy: Now, Heavy will vomit down your throat.

    Lillian screams for help, but nobody came. Meanwhile in the Valentine, Crankshaft hears Lillian’s shrill screams, but thinks it’s just the wind

  11. Scalzi has a very brief bit on something you should read, but likely won’t:

    https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/07/10/a-reminder-about-things-allegedly-in-development/

    AMAZINGLY, the “Based on the Book” guy does not get to appear on set and have veto powers over the director and producers!

    As with “Can you give an Oscar away”, the answer is “Oh fuck no. What, are you a vendo turnstile?!” (Insult Tom came up with after hearing that the New York subway exists. He heard about it on Gargle.com!)

      1. In real reality, I want vendo turnstiles. As Tom would say, you drop the coinage gerbil down the vendo hole, turn the stile, and you get a Starlight mint! Oh, like nobody on the NYC subway doesn’t need fresher breath!

          1. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.” So true, even today.

          2. There’s a Julie Klausner video I highly recommend called “Silence,” in which she spins a tale of Clarice Starling meeting Dr. Lecter.

            My feeling about Hannibal the Cannibal is that he’s at his best seen entirely behind bars (in *Red Dragon*), sort of like *Watchmen’s* Rorschach saying that “you’re locked in here with me,” or like Patrick Stewart’s arrested Karla silently dominating the action with Alec Guinness’s George Smiley in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” The freer he is, the more I want to see someone like Porfiry Petrovich or Lieutenant Columbo bring him to justice and leave him baffled that a vastly stable genius such as himself was outwitted.

            I might feel differently if he had me for a friendly dinner…

  12. Crankshaft 7-12: I think the joke here is that Tom Batiuk has had a stroke. I’ll give him this: it’s one of those things that make me stare until I doubt my ability to spell.

    1. Going by the GC comments, not everybody got today’s…joke-like object. Maybe because there is no joke? I explained it:

      For those wondering, the high-larious japery is: “MADE YA LOOK!” It was funnier when Pee-Wee Herman did it. I guess PubeyChin was worried he spelled it “Stormy WHETHER,” snort chuckle guffaw! I think it would be better as “Stormy Weathers.” (Meth Head Shaggy gets tapped on the shoulder) “Hello. I’m Stormy CARL Weathers. Eye of the tiger, man.” (hauls arm back, swings and Apollo Creeds him all the way to 1972! Or…1982, 2017, the Mesozoic Era, who even knows with this strip)

    2. I’m stumped. I can usually figure out an alleged joke Batiuk was aiming for (and failed to hit), but ‘Batty had a stroke and Davis doesn’t care’ is also the best I could come up with here.

      1. After I put more thought into it than Batiuk, I THINK the punchline is supposed to mean “Fooled you!”

        The problem is that “Gotcha” has several meanings, probably the most common being “I understand you” followed by “I understand your request and will comply.”

        The most logical punchline would be “Made ya look!” But Batiuk’s grasp of the language is such that he cannot, cannot, cannot take the “easy” way out, because he’s such a massive genius that such is beneath him. It’s more important for him to show off his “[anti-]smarts” than do his job.

        1. “Made ya look!” would have worked well — it would have made the joke actually comprehensible.

          As for the comic’s failure, I’m loathe to put any blame on Davis, as I feel the guy is in a no-win situation trying to make anything remotely entertaining out of Batiuk’s fetid brain droppings. But in panel two, Evil-Mirror-Universe-Archie-Andrews seems to be registering “Ack! I did make a mistake!”

          And then in panel three, he’s, uh … smug, I guess? Or scheming? Or maybe some combination of lustful and sleepy?

          What I’m saying is that the facial expressions in the Crankshaft Reusable Art Portfolio™ really didn’t help Davis let the the audience in on what was going on. So although the writing was poor, I believe the art did the final product no favours….

          1. Whatever Batiuk thought he was doing with today’s joke, I think it would have worked better if the film had a long title. “Stormy Weather” is only 13 letters long. If the guy had just put up “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” I think that would have worked better.

            Or, alternatively, a much shorter title. If the marquee read “E.T.” the joke would still have worked.

          2. While the entire premise of Friday’s strip was something I would have expected in “The Family Circus” (Jeffy tells Thel, “Mommy, there’s a giant purple spider on your shoulder! Made you look!”), the simple fact that Max had to grab the letters that spell out STORMY WEATHER before going out and hanging them on the marquee kind of negates the chance that he would have fallen for it. Even so, if Max’s and Hannah’s heads had been reversed in Panel Three so that her “Gotcha!” came before his ever-present smirk it might have made a bit more sense. At this point, though, Batiuk is to cartooning what Larry Buchanan was to filmmaking. To quote “MST3K,” “They just didn’t care.”

            Oh, and no arthouse/rep cinema that I’m familiar with shows a single film (certainly not multiple times in one day). The vast majority of rep schedules were double features linked by some theme (“Citizen Kane” with “The Lady from Shanghai,” for example, or “Stormy Weather” with “Till the Clouds Roll By” or “Cabin in the Sky”). I’m just sayin.’

      2. It amuses me when people try to find jokes in contemporary Crankshaft. There are no jokes in Crankshaft anymore. The “comic” strip IS the joke.

        I admire people’s dedication to reading Crankshaft every day. Especially those who still make the effort to find something to snark about. Every strip is blah blah blah as everyone stands around yakking it up under over-sized word zeppelins and smirking. There is hardly ever any action. TB imposes on his readers a nostalgic fantasy world that only he understands and cares about. He litters his strips with dialog from his private made-up language. I quit reading Crankshaft because I could no longer tolerate all the self-indulgent wankery.

        GoComics Moderator in the Crankshaft Comments: Hello everyone. Andrews McMeel Universal regrets agreeing to a contract to carry Crankshaft. We apologize. We’re sorry.

        Don’t waste your time reading crap like this. Please help yourself to one of the many high-quality comic strips on this website instead.

        1. The strip “Bozo” (by Foxo, and his cousin Chickenpoxo) is frequently incomprehensi-bobble, but it’s 80 years old. Tom seems to me to have basically lost it after Funky went to The Farm Upstate.

          1. Really? ‘Bozo’ is a pantomime comic, but I rarely have trouble understanding it. When I do, I post a question, and without fail, a friendly ‘Bozo’ reader will answer me.

            ‘Bozo’ is a comic with no words. Batiuk’s work has too many. Some of which is complete gibberish. ‘Bozo’ also has a few other things going for it.

            ‘Bozo’ is a tight-knit happy community. Nobody snarks on ‘Bozo’ in the comments. Batiuk’s work receives almost nothing but snark.

            Also, Michael Reardon, Foxo’s son, expresses gratitude every day to the readers who show an interest in his father’s work. On the other hand, Batiuk doesn’t acknowledge his readers at all. I’ve been reading Batiuk’s combined works for almost ten years. He has yet to make an appearance in the comment section. He’s too busy up in the ivory tower of his comic book castle reading comic books and writing his nowhere blog for nobody.

            Funky went to The Farm Upstate. 😂

            —————————–

            There is another GoComics title I’ve grown weary of, and that is ‘Nancy,’ by one “Olivia Jaimes.” When “Olivia Jaimes” took over ‘Nancy,’ it took me a while to adjust to their style. I eventually learned to like the new ‘Nancy’ but in the last several months the strip has gotten repetitive and tiresome. It seemed every day used the same repetitive punchline, where the “joke” is always “a character says/does something to reinforce/contradict the ridiculous absolute presented in the first panel”. I could tell others felt the same way because the number of daily likes for the strip dropped into the 30s. I was about to drop ‘Nancy’ when I heard that “Olivia James” was taking some time off. Let’s see if the comic strip rebounds.

            FYI, I did not like Guy Gilchrist’s ‘Nancy’.

            Cheers.

            ———————
            What the @#$% happened to the WordPress text formatting tools?

          2. Dadgummit. I meant “I’ve been reading Batiuk’s combined works ONLINE for almost ten years.”

          3. Eve: I didn’t mean Bozo was bad. I read a lot of vintage comics on CK. Okay, TRY to read them. Like everything it does, CK is all “PAY US so we can not show you what you’re paying, and make you log in randomly 3 times a week.” My CK dudes, they’re called “Sunday throwaway panels” because they’re something you THROW…AWAY. I haven’t been able to read a Sunday Candorville for months. Yes, Sally Forth has beautifully drawn ones, but not giving us the old “expand” view really don’t help me none, when I just want to read the actual strip. Why do you want me to NOT read a strip? But still keep expecting money from me?

            I see Bozo as more of an intellectual exercise. Some pictographic Sudoku. I fail at many of them, but I also wasn’t born when Roosevelt was president. (meaning Teddy) Those Sunday Pearls strips with their insanely long and convoluted setups? I put my hand over the last 2 panels and see if I can figure out the punchline. (My record: By panel 2) OTOH, I read Brevity with teeth clenched. The dad puns are worse than any Crank one.

            I like how Bozo exists in its own fantasy bubble. A city with only one cop, and only one crook–and both wear a uniform. Of course, violence and sexual harassment are considered normal, but whevs. I’m gonna guess Foxo didn’t throw 20 year tantrums over not getting a Pulitzer.

            As to Nancy, yeah not sure what Olivia #1 was getting at, but my theory is that she was a therapist and these were based off doodles she did in sessions. Olivia #2 is carrying on the same characters, but it’s okay now that I can read the word balloons.

            Speaking of balloons, I liked Gilchrist’s Nancy as well, except when he got all Tommy with the nostalgia. Yeah, the 8 year olds today LOVE Roy Rogers! (The “balloons” are about Fritzi. Boy, did Gil love to write words on her straining tshirts)

          4. Oops. Sorry Bill. Didn’t mean to leave you hanging. I must have missed the WordPress notification. I use more than one web browser and this one was still on our conversation where I left it.

            Another thing fun about Bozo is locating Fuzzy, the guy with the umbrella who always has his back turned to the reader. He could be getting hit by a car or sleeping on the roof of a building in the distance.

            I think the Nancy comments are turning into a must read. The guest artist is mocking the Bushmiller purists. The Jaimes fans and the Bushmiller fans are attacking one another in the comments. Personally, I much prefer Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (AKA Nancy Classics).

            I’d take Jerry Scott’s Nancy over Gilchrist and Jaimes any day. In the latter days of Scott’s Nancy, she was like the girl version of Watterson’s Calvin. Jerry Scott works on Baby Blues now, a much better comic strip.

            I stopped reading the CK’s vintage editions after the last “upgrade”. That’s when they decided to merge the vintage strips with the current. If I wanted to continue reading the vintage strips, I’d have to find them in the archive with a shitty interface that wouldn’t even let me specify a search date. What few Comics Kingdom titles I read are on ArcaMax and the Seattle Times websites.

            I go to the Comics Kingdom’s Comic A-Z list, pick a title, and it navigates to as strip of that title from six days ago? I guess displaying the current days strip is a paid perk. Maybe.

  13. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Meanwhile in the Valentine, someone is in the port-a-potty, shitting entire bricks after eating too many nachos with cheese on them, a brawl has started in the ticket counter, and the seats are so infested with rats that all the rats from New York decided to move into the Valentine

    1. The image didn’t post.

      And you’re right — it’s still infinitely better than the actual strip.

    2. As Tom will tell you, Schulz is “overrated.” That’s why you can’t buy “Joe Cool” merch any more. Suave dude in glasses? Get a tshirt with Mr Moore on it. All the kids are wearing “Les Cool”shirts now!

        1. He sounds like a jealous little punk sniping at the Big Man On Campus to me.

  15. Related to the Batiukverse: Behold, what I think is dumbest storyline of Funky Winkerbean Act II (I got this from the Toledo Blade archives)

    Props for Cindy for keeping calm. If I was in that position, i’d be shitting myself in fear

    Buddy, you’re really lucky that Dick Tracy WASNT around, because he would’ve pumped your ass full of bullets

    1. I hope that he gave a tip of the Funky Felt Tip to the story editor for Barney Miller.

  17. Today’s Funky Crankerbean:

    Max: Hannah, I’ve just got an idea!

    Hannah: Max, what is it?

    Max: We’re going to serve Pink Sauce to the customers!

    (not one day later)

    The Daily Bleak

    Local Theater Closes After Serving Pink Sauce To Customers, Which Gave Them Severe Food Poisoning And Even Killed A Few Of Them

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