It’s Day 4, Week 3 of The Burnings, and Lillian is about to take the action that will result in her bookstore being attacked. Do you know what else also would have gotten us to this point?
This is the August 30 strip. I only edited one of Lillian’s two word balloons in the second panel. This could have been the first strip of the arc. It introduces all of the key story elements. But it skips over Dinkle’s stupid autobiography, Dinkle’s smug-off with Les, Les introducing an unnecessary offscreen location, Skip unnecessarily introducing himself to Lillian to announce unnecessary offscreen events at that unnecessary offscreen location, Skip downplaying those events, Lillian announcing what she’s going to do (despite not having any reliable information to act on), and Les answering the phone and announcing who Lillian is, even though who just saw who she is. My version does the work of 16 strips. Today is September 12; the story could have been here with a week left in August!
I just argued that The Burnings are a clip show, but Tom Batiuk sucks at writing those too. He’s introducing all his characters like they’re Latka Gravas, as if their mere presence in the scene is a moment of awesomeness. “Oh, it’s Lillian McKenzie, the owner of the Village Booksmith in Centerville!” (pause for canned applause as if she’s going to walk in and spew a brilliant catchphrase)
Also, why didn’t Les just order the books from Lillian’s bookstore in the first place? Kind of rude, after she hosted a book signing for him. And the story has taken us to the Village Booksmith twice already! Three times if you count Lillian in the inset of the comic book cover, because of course there’s a comic book cover.
And I think it’s about to get worse. According to Tom Batiuk’s “Rules of Cartooning”, which didn’t survive the migration from funkywinkerbean.com to tombatiuk.com, stories shouldn’t be longer than three weeks. Well, it’s been three weeks, so it’s time for Batiuk to rules-lawyer himself by switching to something else for a week. He set up a third week of Batton at Montoni’s, which also fits perfectly into how self-indulgent this story is. I’m sure Batiuk thinks he’s got his Pulitzer half in the bag, and we need a week to meet the author of this brilliant narrative.
News stories were published about this story, and it’s 15/16 filler. If you count the comic book cover, a week for Ed Crankshaft’s future appearance to talk about his illiteracy, and if I’m right about next week being Batton Thomas, it’ll be 30/31. Literally an entire month of a two-month story is filler. What else is there to say?
Son of Stuck Funky 
Banana Jr. 6000,
Please don’t be right about Batton Thomas. Please! DON’T BE RIGHT!
I know back in the FW days, the posters had maybe a week advance notice to write SOSF. I am hoping that is not true in this case.
Not that it matters to TB, but what purpose does it serve to include Batton Thomas in this story? He doesn’t write books. His comic strip on a comics page could be useful for kindling. But why did he start a massive story with Dinkle? Or the BookSmeller Store? Or Skippy? BJ’s single panel editing is smart, elegant, and to the point.
Unexpected consequences: this arc could be so frickin’ (I cleaned that up for the delicate ears of Be Ware of Eve Hill!) bad, that Epicus Doomus just may demand we shut down SOSF. We would probably vote yes.
I have no ability to see future strips; it’s just a guess on my part.
Unexpected consequences: this arc could be so frickin’ (I cleaned that up for the delicate ears of Be Ware of Eve Hill!) bad, that Epicus Doomus just may demand we shut down SOSF. We would probably vote yes.
But if SOSF gets shut down, most of the Act III archives would dissapear with it
Tom Batiuk himself through his newsletter announced the Funky Winkerbean archives are coming to GoComics.
The optimist in me hopes GoComics will be able to start with the ACT I gag-a-day strips. The Comics Kingdom readers will recall the host putting out those strips as Funky Winkerbean Vintage. They must exist somewhere.
The realist/pessimist in me thinks the Funky Winkerbean archive might start in the early 2000s, like Crankshaft did back in 2023. Is there some kind of rights issue between syndicates? Batiuk has produced comics for a lot of years, but it would be nice if he didn’t change syndicates at the drop of a hat.
It would be even nicer if syndicates wouldn’t accept him at the drop of a hat. Though I wonder if Funky Winkerbean Vintage has enough value to keep the whole Funkyverse financially viable.
I fail to understand Tom Batiuk’s continual extraordinarily good luck. Much like his favorite characters, people reward him for no discernible reason. How the hell did Crankshaft get chosen to be in the ‘Gannett 34’?
TB must really be able to turn on the charm. The only other reasons I can think of involve hypnotism, magic (witchcraft), or a deal with the devil.
Ignorance by the decision-makers?
Decision-Maker: Tom Batiuk has been around for more than fifty years. To last that long, he must be pretty good. Oh, well, tee time is less than an hour away from now. ‘Crankshaft’ it is.
Be Ware of Eve Hill,
You write:
“I fail to understand Tom Batiuk’s continual extraordinarily good luck.”
Eve, you are the current reason TB has such good luck. You are a dispenser of blessings and good will. TB is just on the receiving end. Scientifically, you are a good will wormhole. You constantly receive good will, and then you give it to others. They in turn receive it and you motivate them to pass it on. How does Tom Batiuk pass it on? Believe it or not, there are people on ArcaMax and GoComics that thoroughly enjoy Tom. Then take SOSF for instance. We are blessed because TF Hackett and Epicus Doomus chose to pick up the mantle of the original Stuck Funky. What if they had chosen a worse comic strip, and a worse author?
So Eve, the fault lies in you. Quit being so good at dispensing joy, happiness, and blessings. You make it so easy to catch and pass on.
Sorial Promise:
I’ve never felt so blessed to be blamed for Batiuk’s success. Thanks. 😊
————
It always feels awkward to me to use the reply set up for one person and use it to reply to another.
Hi, Banana Jr. 6000. I hope you’re having a super-sparkly day! 🦄
Be Ware of Eve Hill,
I am literally all tingley inside for you conversing with me.
BJ6000 thanks you. Tom Batiuk thanks you. And most assuredly, I thank you! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I don’t want to speak for ED, but I can confirm that he is on board with us covering The Burnings, and with the once-a-week Crankshaft updates.
If nothing else this strip excelled at its ability to take the wind out of the sails of a story in a lukewarm attempt to mimic the dramatic pacing of an 80s TV drama. Half a weak of rapid escalations at Westview High have given away to a week and a half of news discussion, and now we have two entire strips going through the motions to depict a phone call happening. Certainly has sucked the wind out of me thinking of funny things to say, and I’ve already spent my time making long-winded rants about the big implications so far.
Really is just a matter of waiting for something better. At least we’re not in the days when an unlucky member of the crew had to think of things to say for six days of opening a letter.
The Burnings are another six days of opening a letter. The “story” is just a depiction of unreliable narrators telling each other things that happened off panel, that wouldn’t make any sense even if they were happening on-panel.
And the story is lowering the styakes itself at every turn. Today we learn that Lillian’s “heroic act” is to hand out the books Les bought somewhere else. Books that aren’t restricted in any way, not even to minors. This whole story is about circumventing a school board’s “suggested” (and as I argued, probably unenforceable) reading list.
For a story about banned books, it won’t ever be about banned books.
I’ll be willing to bet a substantial amount of money that Batiuk will never address why F451 has been banned in the past, much less any objections the faceless, formless people in his strip have for the novel. He doesn’t have Les say anything in support of the principle or the novel. He doesn’t say why it should be taught in spite of the objections. From all we see, he’s doing it just to be a contrarian dick. Batiuk himself doesn’t do anything with the premise beyond the notion that banning books is bad and this point is so obvious, in spite of book bans being a regular thing throughout human history, that nothing needs to be said about it.
He’s a crusader who doesn’t have a crusade. Batiuk gives his audience nothing to justify reading this crap. We read it in spite of him and his intentions.
There’s certainly plenty of reason to believe Les is just being a contrarian dick. Because the story hasn’t shown us anything else. It hasn’t told us anything about his motivations or the protestors’, so we’re in no position to know who’s in the right or wrong. Hell, the story even waffled on whether the fire and Les’ actions were even related!
Truly, the genius of Batiuk is to be a thoroughly incompetent writer in an ever-unexpectedly and unpredictably boring way (i.e, we know his writing will be boring and stupid, but how will it be boring and stupid?)
He has more than lived up (down?) to his well-earned reputation with this arc so far. But I do believe we’re just getting started…
The reason for its being an anticlimactic waste of space is actually on the page: Les is too blasted arrogant and stupid to do what’s expected of him.
And nobody will do anything about Les’ arrogant stupidity, or even react to. Especially not the principal whose job it is to make his teachers comply with school board rules, and would be taking the actual heat in this situation.
Alternatively, the story could have given us some reason to justify breaking the ban, beyond “it’s what Les wants to do.”
That’s all we’re gonna get. There’s a lot of smug idiot kid in Batiuk.
The more I think about one of Batiuk’s characters introducing another so elaborately, the less I think of Voltaire (“I have come, young and beautiful Zaire…”) and the more I think of that soul-scarring TV series he has disdained (“Aren’t you millionaire Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward Dick Grayson?”).
Wanna talk about wounds, Mr. Thomas?
No?
Well, there’s always meteors…
Anonymous Sparrow,
I think of Voltaire (“I have come, young and beautiful Zaire…”) reminds me of:
“I came. I saw. I conquered.” And…
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
“I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.” Thomas Paine
I began watching *the Westerner* last night with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennen. Rumor is that Cooper hated this film. I think it a wonderful example of a great film (by William Wyler) that allows the villain to outshine the hero. Along the lines of Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, Christian Bale’s the Dark Night, and Bruce Willis’s Die Hard.
Brennen just overwhelms the film, but mainly because he plays off of Cooper so well. Terrific script writing.
I found this bit of trivia that you and Be Ware of Eve Hill will enjoy: the origin of limelight from the Goofs section of the Westerner…
“When the opera house’s lights are turned down, the stage is dark, then the stage lights turn up and light the curtain. But in the 19th century, the stage lights would have been lamps that burned lime (hence the term, limelights).”
Finally, you made me laugh with this:
(“Aren’t you millionaire Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward Dick Grayson?”)🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪
SP:
Believe it or not, the actual remark from Okie Annie in the “Come Back, Shame” episode is:
“Aren’t you millionaire Bruce Wayne? And aren’t you his youthful ward Dick Grayson?”
It has the strange quality of Jimmy Harper in the “Reefer Madness” musical speaking of William Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers as Romeo AND Juliet.
Annie is also the no-nonsense lady who tells a women’s apparel salesman that Bruce is looking to purchase “a full slip, size 38, white and washable.”
Of late, I’ve become addicted to “First Time Watching…” videos on YouTube, and one of them was for William Wyler’s later Western, 1958’s “Big Country.” As a result, I very much enjoyed your comments on “The Westerner,” which I hope some cinema in New York will allow me to see on a big screen one day: I saw it on the computer, and it had to contend with a rave review of Walter Brennan’s performance I saw once in the *Time* capsule for 1940. On a small screen, Brennan seemed good, but not that good, and while I liked (as I almost always do) Gary Cooper, I would rather have been watching him in “High Noon” or in “Man of the West.”
(Cooper and Brennan worked together again for Harold Hawks in “Sgt. York” in 1941. Frank Capra brought them together for “Meet John Doe” that year. My favorite movie with them together may be “The Pride of the Yankees.” Of course, it not only has them, but a lovely Teresa Wright as Mrs. Lou Gehrig and Dan Duryea as a cynical sportswriter who ultimately grasps the greatness and goodness of the man whom ALS* toppled…and the last time I saw it, Cooper’s daughter was on hand to introduce the picture and discuss it afterwards. So I admit to being biased.)
Your references to Julius Caesar (whom Claude Rains played in 1945’s film of “Caesar and Cleopatra”) reminded me of the orations over him in Shakespeare, of how Brutus spoke in prose and Mark Antony in verse, of Brutus addressed “friends, Romans, lovers” and Antony appealed to “friends, Romans, countrymen.”
It’s not surprising who had to flee Rome and who set up a triumvirate with Octavian and Lepidus.
I had no idea of the etymology of “limelight.” Thank you for sharing it. (Strangely, it doesn’t make me want to see Chaplin’s 1952 film with that title…but it does give me a craving for the picture he made after it, “A King in New York.” “A Countess from Hong Kong” can wait.)
Muchibus thankibus, as they say in James Joyce’s *Ulysses.*
What would make me very happy with “The Burnings” is if some of Les’s students watched the Francois Truffaut film of “Fahrenheit 451” and we had a few strips about the differences between Book and Movie. It wouldn’t be as funny as “Book! Movie!” in Harvey Kurtzman’s *MAD,* but you could pun on Truffaut and truffle:
a strong-smelling underground fungus that resembles an irregular, rough-skinned potato, growing chiefly in broadleaved woodland on calcareous soils. It is considered a culinary delicacy and found, especially in France, with the aid of trained dogs or pigs.
And
a soft candy made of a chocolate mixture, typically flavored with rum and covered with cocoa.
Did Dinkle ever sell the latter?
*
In the U.S. we call it “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” but in countries where they don’t play baseball (calm down, Ed!), they call it amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS. I realized this when I read one of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley mysteries (*A Traitor to Memory,* I think).
Anonymous Sparrow,
I have my favorite Walter Brennen films. One is *My Darling Clementine *. “When you pull a gun, kill a man.” The second is *Hangmen also Die*. The assassination and aftermath of killing Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia 1942. When I taught adolescents at the Behavioral hospital, I did a group on Lidice. There is a website devoted to the Nazi massacre of the entire village. I printed out the names of the victims. Then had my patients find one that was their ages. We talked about what those kids and teens could have talked about before the roundup.
I remember Lidice.
The 3rd film is *Rio Bravo*. Old Stumpy! A perfect film by Howard Hawkes. I could go on with my favorite Brennen films. Like *Nortwest Passage*.
As for *Big Country*, I do not care if Burl Ives is acting or singing to adults or kids, I love him. He appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson the day of his divorce. Gripping!
“Well, there’s always meteors…” I can’t find that reference.
Then last of all without appearing maudlin, (which made me look up Bill Mauldin, “Willie and Joe”, I thought he would look like Andy Rooney—-Heck no! He’s just a kid!) as I was saying, Tuesday, I have those 2 stents insertions. But my biggest worries is my allergic reaction to the contrast dye and the IV Iodine. Don’t get me started on that topic.
Une joie pour toujours est une conversation Anonyme Sparrow!
SP:
Boy, your timing is good.
Not simply because I saw “Hangmen Also Die!” not too long ago (I didn’t register Brennan. though I took note of Byron Foulger, who was in “Prisoner of Zenda” which I saw around the same time: Foulger was also one of Preston Sturges’s stock company), but because I began rereading Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle yesterday and in its alternate history Heydrich didn’t die in 1942.
“Meteors” reflects the discussion Batton Thomas had with John Howard about Flash #123, in which the cartoonist brought up immortal wounds and meteors. (I wonder whether the end of Three O’Clock High ended with Thomas receiving Saltines and a ream of copy paper as Coach Stropp did when he was retired.)
Brennan did a lot of good work: “Come and Get It” (his first Oscar win and “Red River” (his Nadine Groot is not Chuck Berry’s Nadine, though the Clash name check the movie in their salute to Montgomery Clift, “The Right Profile”), to say nothing of what you mentioned with “My Darling Clementine” (his only work for John Ford) and “Rio Bravo” (for what it’s worth, if you’re up to a 164 minute Spanish film, watch “Close Your Eyes,” in which the protagonist sings “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.” Stumpy would be sure to pronounce it a “good ‘un!”). His second Oscar win was for “Kentucky,” and as that is on YouTube…
Burl Ives won Best Supporting Actor for “The Big Country,” but could just as easily have been nominated (and won) for his turn in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in which he recreated his Broadway role of Big Daddy.
Stents sound serious, so I wish that “every day, in every way, you are getting better and better.”
En francais, je serais “le Moineau Anonyme.”
“le Moineau Anonyme.”
(Pardon my French. It is muy malo!)
Your timing is so much better than mine. So glad you reminded me about, *Come and Get It*. Yes! Brennen is in that. Also Edward Arnold. FRANCES FARMER. So beautiful. It knocked me over when she sang Aura Lee, the folk tune that Elvis took for “Love Me Tender”. The song and the actress are haunting. I do not know the full story, if anybody does, but it seems her parents did her wrong. If they didn’t, then the medical professionals certainly did. Jessica Lange is superb in the biopic. So is a very young Joel McCrea in Come and Get it.
Preston Sturges uses McCrea to great effect in my personal favorite, *Sullivan’s Travels*. Put those 2 films together, and you got quite the double feature. Plus Veronica Lake. Boy, when Hollywood serves a bounty, it is overflowing.
Mon bon ami, tu me fais me réjouir!
Merci pour vos aimables vœux.
SP:
It’s hard for me to rank movies, or to grade them (no Les Moore me), but with Preston Sturges, I would have to say that my top three are “Hail the Conquering Hero” (which Sturges thought was his picture with the fewest things wrong in it), “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.”
Every now and again I study Sturges’s use of Freddie Steele in the rally sequence of “Hail the Conquering Hero.” It is, in a word, masterful. (It may even be honest, courageous and veracious, Doc Bissell.)
Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert are wonderful in “The Palm Beach Story”; McCrea isn’t as fine in “The Wonderful Moment,” alas.
For Westerns with McCrea, I recommend “Colorado Territory” (which is a variation on “High Sierra”) and “Ride the High Country” (Byron Foulger has a small part in it, as the son of Percy Helton, who played the morgue attendant in “Kiss Me Deadly.” Helton’s also the inebriated Santa Claus Edmund Gwenn replaces in “Miracle on 34th Street”).
Frances Farmer’s story has inspired a biopic and a musical called *Brilliance.*
You may not call it timing, but in thinking of the biopic “Frances,” I remembered that Kim Stanley played Farmer’s mother Cora Lillian (identified as “Lillian” in the credits). She had a small filmography, but in my “First Time Reaction” video studies, I’d encountered her twice recently: as the voice of the grown-up Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and as Pancho Barnes in “The Right Stuff.”
Her two most famous cinematic leads are in “The Goddess” and “Seance on a Wet Afternoon.”
In “The Goddess,” she played a Hollywood sex symbol, and I can imagine Marianne Winters watching it and thinking:
“If only she’d met a man as wonderful as Les Moore, how much happier she might have been…”
Prediction:
No one who sees “The Burnings” through to the end will learn the name of a single character in *Fahrenheit 451.*
Yes, yes, and yes, BJr6K. That one strip would have saved us a lot of interminable boredom. The plot itself, however, is irredeemably gibberish and says nothing about censorship, book banning, or literature. But at least your version would have brought the whole mess mercifully closer to its anticlimactic end.
So today we learn that the banned books survived the fire with no damage, and these books are in Les’ possession? Why would he take them to Lillian in Centerville to distribute to the students, when he could just do it himself? Are we going to see a confrontation between these nameless “protesters” and Lillian, or will it just be more vague offscreen action?
Probably the latter. Batiuk learned the wrong lesson from his wrong-headed, poorly executed prestige arcs. Rather than get his facts straight, he’ll show the beady eyed nitpickers bullying him by not showing them things.
Batiuk learned exactly this from his prestige arcs: he can get newspapers to print his press releases, and he can promote himself for the awards he wants so badly.
Without a doubt, Batty knows how to manipulate the media. He is adept at getting newspapers to publish his press releases and securing well-orchestrated interviews.
Unfortunately for him, the award committees can see through the facade of bluster and self-promotion. They can discern that his product falls far short of expectations and choose to pass on giving it an award.
I’d love to know what the other National Cartoonist Society members think of Batiuk.
I’d love to know what the other National Cartoonist Society members think of Batiuk.
Batiuk still doesn’t have his well-deserved Gold T-Square two years after FW ended. And award committees don’t waste time on giving lifetime achievement awards, given the advanced age of the recipients. So I think we have our answer.
The most amazing thing about this arc is that Bats truly believes this half-written, tell-don’t-show, here’s a character on the phone AGAIN, incomprehensible garbage will get him a FUCKING PULITZER.
I read this strip in the same way I used to read Daveykins. If Tom was just a hack, no one would care. But he’s a hack who screams from the church steeple “I AM A GENIUS!”
At least Davey got better. Tom’s just going to get…not better.
It’s why he thinks the current arc is fricking awesome. It’s just Lilian Lizard getting Dick Facey to take a stand after he gets pushback but he sees genius.
Nobody’s making Les take a stand. Nobody’s making Les do anything, ever. Everyone is completely committed to this cockamamie stand of his. He absolutely must teach F451, the books absolutely must be acquired in this silly way he prescribed (even though a commenter pointed out it can easily be read for free online), and everyone else absolutely must make these things happen. Even though it’s already put this “Booksmellers” in danger, and further puts Nate, Lillian, and his students at risk.
I’m reminded of what one of the tow operators on Highway Thru Hell said about a guy who’d spun out and blocked the highway: “The whole world is being held hostage by this one guy.”
I don’t know if the lack of Gold T-square has to do with industry disdain for him personally. Maybe? But there’s a lot more going on than just that.
It has also ONLY been offered twice. Ever. Both to artists with much greater overall impact than Batiuk.
And we also have to remember that Ayers was Batiuk’s artist for about half his career. Even if Funky Winkerbean was famous worldwide, and Batiuk universally loved, a Gold T-Square still might not be appropriate.
How many other people had 50-year cartooning careers, though? Especially ones who aren’t otherwise noteworthy? Maybe they *are* holding the lack of artwork against him. But he also produced 2-3 strips for most of his 50 years. He’s the Royce Clayton of cartoonists.
Batiuk is exactly who *should* win a T-Square. He had 50+ uninterrupted years, had some good moments here and there, and doesn’t have a lot of other awards to his name. He’s the kind of guy you’d like to see get a moment in the spotlight. Even I wouldn’t object.
Isn’t it ironic that Batty regards Silver Age comics as the apotheosis of storytelling, yet refuses to show any action, art-wise or even plot-wise, in his own comic?
Can you imagine a 1960s Flash comic where characters stand around talking in a static, eye level shot for panel after panel after panel? Exposition in Silver Age comics tends to be kept to a bare minimum, and often takes place during action panels.
He writes like someone who’s never seen a comic, movie, or play — let alone a book by Bradbury or anyone else with the slightest amount of skill. It’s as if he’d never read anything but the most turgid PhD theses imaginable, and based his entire writing style on vague circumlocutions.
Please, Puff Batty. Go back and reread Flash #123 again. Rearrange your molecules once more, and this time rearrange them so that you notice how, in that comic, things happen and they are depicted in the art.
Never thought I’d miss the days of Les running down the street shouting “USA! USA!”
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Day Eighteen of the Byrnings
If this storyline was written by anybody else (except for JC/Jack Cranely, Chris Chandler and Steven “The Human Penguin” Seagal), the week would be a lot better
I’ve been away for a while and am still catching up, so maybe somebody’s already asked this question…
In the newspaper puff piece, did Tom say The Burnings™ will include Lillian’s store being torched? If so, doesn’t that conflict with the ending of FW, in which we’re told Lil’s store is the only bookstore to survive The Burnings (and, of course, the repository of the Holy Writ of Dead St. Lisa)? Or is TimeMop®, the Rather Elegant Solution™, going to step in and fix everything?
I think he just said that Lillian would draw the ire of the protesters, not that they’d actually torch her store. (Although Batiuk being Batiuk, he may have used the phrase “come under fire”, but I really don’t feel like reading them again.)
I suspect we’ll see (or be told about, more likely) an unruly mob outside Lillian’s store, but they’ll be placated by an impassioned speech and the whole thing will be forgotten about in a week.
(My prediction: Ed will explain to the crowd how he was illiterate most of his life, and bookstores are really important for reading or whatever, even though he never seems to actually patronize Lillian’s store.)
(I’m also guessing we’ll see an impassioned speech by Les to the school board about why Fahrenheit 451 should be taught in schools, followed by Ghost Lisa saying “good speech, counselor” or something cheesily stupid like that.)
(Just putting these out there in case they turn out to be true.)
You’re right, but I think the story will get even more self-contradictory.
I was in a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library yesterday and saw a notice on the bulletin board promoting the “Books Unbanned” program sponsored by a consortium of public libraries across the country and supported by the New York City Council.
When the government itself and public libraries nationwide are actively promoting these books, I think we’re pushing the definition of “banned” into meaninglessness.
Further investigation reveals that the books on the BPL’s list are actually books that have been “challenged” — a vague word if ever there was one — or banned in some country or other at some point.
Okay, then: Since all these right-thinking people are such fierce supporters of free speech and book-unbanning, how about promoting some of the most prominent banned books? Such as Mein Kampf, banned until very recently in Germany (and elsehwere). And actually banned, meaning it was illegal to publish, copy, or distribute it in any way. And still banned in Russia!
If Mein Kampf seems a bit boring, maybe you’d prefer How to Make Disposable Silencers or The Anarchist Cookbook, banned in Australia. They’re probably a lot less wordy.
Australia’s so far away, you say. Well, closer to home, Canada has banned and destroyed copies of The Myth of the 20th Century, the famous antisemitic polemic, and The Turner Diaries, the novel about a future racial war.
Banned! Physical copies destroyed! (Burned?) People sent to prison for the crime of owning these books! Surely we should ensure that all teens read these powerful —
What’s that you say? Sometimes it’s good to ban books, if they’re bad books? Okay, and who decides what’s bad? Oh, right. The good guys. But how do I know who the good guys are? Right-o. The good guys are the ones who are against the bad books. It all makes sense now.
Just one little observation: Anyone who condones banning any book is pro-book banning.
They just want to be the ones who decide which books are banned.
All right, fine, but then we are expected to applaud as they primp and preen and congratulate themselves for their brave stance on free expression.
If I find out Tom Batiuk is for unbanning, even promoting, any of the banned books mentioned above, just on the basis of their having been banned and destroyed, I will humbly retract this screed. I will call him a brave 1st Amendment advocate unafraid of controversy.
Till then, I’ll call him a cowardly, self-congratulatory hypocrite.
I think we’re pushing the definition of “banned” into meaninglessness.
We are, largely because it overlooks a huge amount of nuance.
America doesn’t really “ban” anything. 1st Amendment case law errs very heavily on the side of allowing free speech. Pretty much any book can be written, read, bought, and sold, no matter how vile it is. American society prefers to let social sanctions, or the “marketplace of ideas”, decide what ideas will be tolerated or rejected.
Other countries, even open and progressive ones, aren’t like this. Germany, for example, has very strict laws against things like Holocaust denial. And they are enforced. I think Japan is the same way, because of things like Aum Shinrikyo. To say nothing of less friendly nations, who often have ignoble and self-serving ideas of “dangerous content.”
In America, even books that run afoul of some peoples’ sensibilities can still be owned and read by adults. No one serious is suggesting they shouldn’t. Calling such books “banned” is a conflation of these things.
Another conflation is between “age-based restrictions” and “content-based restrictions.” The former are Constitutional; the latter are not. Skip’s comment “the protestors felt there were things in the book they didn’t their kids to see” is too vague to be useful, and makes no sense considering what book it is.
(Also, if they “don’t want their kids to see” things in a book that’s being taught only to one class, and they said this to a news reporter, why don’t we know who these people are? And if they were motivated enough to commit arson, we don’t we know what they actually want?)
But I think the biggest conflation is between “challenged books” and “the cultural war over what values our children should and shouldn’t be taught.” Which I think is the real issue behind book challenges this decade.
Right, and that doesn’t lend itself to childish distinctions between “good guys” and “bad guys.”
Are there ANY books that kids shouldn’t read? ANY books schools shouldn’t promote? Most people would agree that there are.
From there, it’s a question of who decides what those books are. Who has the right to determine what children read? Schools, or parents, or some combination thereof? Or should decisions be made to mollify the minority of parents who are outraged by Huckleberry Finn or Roald Dahl or older Dr Seuss books — or LGBT books, or sex-ed books?
It doesn’t make for a neat little story about how everyone else is a moustache-twirling, cackling villain and only Les has the courage to stand up to the evil that stalks Westview.
Real life is like that: Messy, confusing, and nuanced. Fortunately, Funky Crankerbean is 1/4 inch from reality. But watch that 1/4 inch — it’s a doozy!
Not only does Tom Batiuk think only in terms of heroes and villains, he can’t even see when his preferred characters are the villains.
Because I want to know how Ed Crankshaft is going to become a defender of literacy. Ed is by far the biggest obstacle to reading in this world. His shtick of abandoning elementary school children at bus stops, and then making them late for school so he can cause traffic jams for sport, would keep far more children from books than anything going on in The Burnings.
I expect another one of those mismatched-tone stories, rising to the point of hypocrisy and self-unawareness.
Les himself isn’t much of a hero either, because his motives are just an unclear as the protestors’. There’s nothing so noble about F451 that it needs to be forced onto children in this manner. It’s a perfectly fine book, but whatever Les thinks it teaches can be learned in other ways.
Drake of Life, Banana Jr. 6000,
Your discussion of free speech is clear, concise, thought provoking, well balanced. Thank you.
Free speech is the backbone of America. It is discussed equally well in the US Constitution (where the right has teeth!), and just as clear it has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations. It is defended comedically in of all places by Don Knotts in *the Love god* and dramatically by Woody Harrelson in *the People Vs. Larry Flynt*. It has been argued many times in the Supreme Court: “I know pornography when I see it.” Does it have a redeeming social value”
Our free speech right overwhelmed John Adams, Sedition Act of 1798. Bad mark on J. Adams. Great man.
Last year it was taken to court in Florida. Somewhat overlooked was it emphasized responsibility towards younger children. I think the same issue comes up in “Drag Queen Story Hour. Is it responsible to allow them access to small children? Considering that drag queens are targeted to adult entertainment and not children, then the restriction against their appearance could hold up in court.
I am now quoting Green Luthor or possibly billthesplut, “Arggh! You force me to think!”
I enjoy you guys so much!
Thank you too, SP. I enjoy your presence here as well.
The USA is the “free speech absolutist” argument writ large. The USA will allow pretty much any content, but restrict it from minors when appropriate. I support age restrictions, but I also think calls for age restriction can be disingenuous sometimes.
In the interest of staying as apolitical as possible, I won’t argue the pros or cons of any particular issue.
Banana Jr. 6000,
I agree with you. I am more interested in these issues as they are fought about in the Courts. I respect any political opinion on SOSF.
Regarding banned books, I remember reading Mein Kampf way back in 7th grade roughly 1967. Got it from my local library. My anti-Soviet stage.
Regarding banned TV shows. If I had to pick the most daring show, I would pick *Married With Children*. Some woman wanted to kick it off of Fox. My older brother said he didn’t want some small group picking what he could watch. I asked him did he know how many people at Fox picked MWC so he could watch it?
Banned Music. Again in the mid-60’s, I believe *Louie Louie* was constantly banned. Yet it kept coming back. But I do remember a song from that same era, called (I think I have the title right!) DOA. It was permanently banned in KC.
I err on the side of free speech absolutism. I think horrible writings *shouldn’t* be kept from public view, because they have value in learning how the writer’s mind attained such a state. They have value, even if it’s just as a bad example.
Regarding MWC: there will always be filthy content, and people who want it removed. Personally, I think this violates America’s social contract. We all have freedom, but so does everybody else. It is implicit that our own freedom also gives other people the freedom to do things we might not approve of, or even find appalling. In other words, the price of freedom is being offended sometimes. So we need to have a thick skin about it.
“Louie Louie” was kept off airwaves because people thought the lyrics were secretly filthy. It turns out they were completely incoherent, and the singer’s poor elocution didn’t help. A good pre-Internet example of how hand-wringing over content can have no basis in reality.
I guess the alternative is to hand the books out at Komix Korner, which is… not better.
But it would give the staff of The Komix Korner an excellent chance to enlighten us all about the importance of being able to freely distribute Art! Especially Comics Art, which is the most noble Art of all! Did you know that the term “Comics” is a misnomer? It’s really Art! Art which should be available to all! But perhaps this is completely new information to you! So please, just sit back and let The Komix Korner Krew explain it to everyone over the course of six days….
Y. Knott:
If you do it at Komix Korner, Batton Thomas could pontificate on how EC Comics did adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s stories in the 1950s.
(Not only in the science-fiction titles, either: “The Small Assassin” and “The October Game” appeared in Shock SuspenStories, “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” {as “Touch and Go”} in Crime SuspenStories and “The Lake” in The Vault of Horror.)
Interestingly, the creators were more excited about the adaptations than the readers: at one time, the letters of comment expressed a distaste for them.
When asked about that decades later, publisher Bill Gaines shrugged and said: “Well, I never said this was a democracy.”
Something as exquisite as Bernard Krigstein’s version of “The Flying Machine” can make you very glad that it wasn’t.
I’ve long held that Bats has some kind of irrational hatred for EC, because even when he goes off on a tangent about terrible, wicked Frederic Wertham and the unspeakably loathesome Comics Code and all the usual hobbyhorses, he omits key information: William Gaines, EC publisher, and his testimony before a Senate subcommittee helmed by Estes Kefauver.
Gaines seemed to have been born without a single f#ck to give, and for any foe of censorship, he comes off as somewhat of a free-speech martyr.
Ultimately, he had to shut down all his horror comics and change his one remaining title, MAD, to a magazine in order to evade the forces of censorship and the dread Comics Code, Bats’ bête noire.
Nary a peep about this from Batty.
And I don’t think he’s uttered a word of praise for the stable of brilliant artists regularly employed by Gaines, either.
My best guess: The content was too sharp, too cynical, too smartalecky, too… too New York Jewish for him.* From the very beginning, MAD parodied comic books, and without pulling a single punch. They went right for the jugular vein. (In fact, that was their tagline for a while: “Humor in a jugular vein.”)
So MAD’s name is mud in the Batiuk house.
*ironically, early Woody Allen shared this exact sensibility and came from the same time, place, and milieu. Yet Batty loves him. Go figure.
Panic was “Humor in a Varicose Vein.”
You’re probably right about this, given the strange comment from Flash and Phil about boasts never run on EC covers.
It’s just that the Bradbury adaptations are so good (and Bradbury appreciated other EC stories, such as “Judgment Day,” a powerful look at prejudice) and the attention given to Fahrenheit 451 here just echoes Henry Drummond’s comment about the Bible in Inherit the Wind: “The Bible is a book. It’s a good book. But it’s not the only book.”
Bradbury was not a one-book author.
And I’d like to see Batton Thomas or Crazy Harry acknowledge his appearances in a medium they both love.
But given their creator’s attitudes, the chances of that are slim and none.
Ironically, my first exposure to EC came in the 1971 anthology from Nostalgia Press. The introduction quotes Fahrenheit 451.
(Curious footnote there: the anthology has one story from Will Elder — “Strop! You’re Killing Me!,” which is a lesser effort — and nothing at all from John Severin. Severin mostly worked for Harvey Kurtzman — who certainly wasn’t going to be included here, due to Gaines’s fallout with him in 1956 — but the two artists collaborated on some fine science-fiction stories, including two Ray Bradbury stories, “King of the Grey Spaces” and “The Million-Year Picnic.” I suppose the legal rights were a bit daunting, which doesn’t explain why we don’t have “…For Us the Living” for the team…or the infamous “Right on the Button” for Elder alone.)
“‘t’ain’t the meat, it’s the humanity…”
The crucial difference: Woody Allen never made light of comic books.
And the real thing of it is: the CCA was designed to almost specifically (if not exclusively) target EC. Marvel, DC, and the other major publishers really didn’t care much about the CCA, because they (for the most part) weren’t putting out material that wouldn’t meet the CCA’s requirements. There may have been the occasional story that needed editing, but the overall changes to the comics were minimal. (One major publisher – Dell Comics – didn’t even bother with the CCA. But they were publishing Disney’s comics, and Disney’s guidelines were even more strict than the CCA’s. So Dell figured everyone would already know nothing objectionable was ever going to find its way into a Mickey Mouse comic, so who needs another outside agency dictating to them? Didn’t hurt their sales in the least, either, so it’s not like they were wrong…)
But EC? The CCA guidelines might as well have read “If EC wants to do it, you can’t do it”. If you’re going to talk about how evil the CCA was, and NOT mention EC, you’ve completely missed the point. (Yeah, I know. Batiuk completely missing the point? That’s unpossible!)
I assume this animosity toward the Comics Code is based on his assumption that his portfolio was rejected by Marvel and DC because it didn’t conform to the CCA.
Anyone who has ever been in a position to review a portfolio knows this is 100% pure bull. A portfolio shows your capabilities. If you are actually employed, your employer will give you direction and guidelines to follow, and you will execute accordingly. The end.
I’m pretty sure what happened is that he submitted some typical derivative, incoherent, amateurish garbage, and was gently told (perhaps) that, say, the layouts needed to be more dynamic, or that he should go home and work on anatomy, or that the dialogue was too wordy, or that the plot needed to be much tighter, or whatever, and oh, also, by the way, if he were writing for one of the big publishers, he’d need his work to follow the Comics Code, so that’s something to keep in mind for the future.
In his mind, that turned into: A brilliant future — DESTROYED by the accursèd Comics Code! Damn you to hell, Frederic Wertham!
Ironically, it’s the Comics Code that put paid to the dark, violent, and cynical tone of the EC comics (and even some of the early costumed superhero comics) and ushered in the era of muscular, square-jawed heroes punching out bad guys in the name of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. In other words, the era he loved.
The Comics Code is history, but I don’t see Bats excitedly praising the new, far more explicit content, including kinky/gay sexual expression. I thought he was all for gay people being in the comics?
Or is it best if we only see their hands and let our imagination do the rest?
@Drake: Tom Batiuk’s old blog had a story about how his writing sample for Marvel or DC had something to do with a vampire story. Vampire stories were initially forbidden under the Comics Code, but later became permissible under certain conditions. Either he submitted a vampire story when he couldn’t, or didn’t submit one when he wanted to and could have; I don’t even remember. Anyway, he loudly implied this was a factor in Marvel and/or DC not hiring him. So I suspect much of Batiuk’s very active hatred for the very dead Comics Code is because he blames it for costing him his comic book career.
Okay, so imagine that a writer of the caliber of, say, Chris Claremont, or an artist as talented as Neal Adams, walked into Marvel or DC off the street with a portfolio showing their stuff.
Imagine that some of what they had done was outside the bounds of the Comics Code.
Can you imagine them being told, “Nope! This work, which you didn’t draw for us or under our direction, runs afoul of the Comics Code. I therefore deduce that you will never in the future be capable of doing work that does adhere to the Code. Hit the bricks!”
Something about this story stinks like Crankshaft’s unwashed penny sock.
For those in the know, “stinks like Crankshaft’s unwashed penny sock” is right up there with Raymond Chandler’s “as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
You’ve had Farewell, My Lovely…
Now it’s time for Farewell, My Lisa!
(Remember, young and beautiful Zaire, Les did solve the killing of Jessica Fairgood’s father John Darling, who was murdered…)
@Drake It’s also possible that a writing assignment for a job application may contain instructions to follow, effectively making it part of the test to obey them. If the applicant fails at this, that’s on them.
Also, how does a man obsessed with comic books, and with getting a job making them, be this out of touch about industry standards? It reeks of “doesn’t care very much.”
Yes, BJr6K, that’s also possible — that they gave him an assignment that included the instruction “keep it within the bounds of the Comics Code,” and he just plain ignored the parameters.
If that happened, then, as you say, it was hardly the fault of the CCA.
I’ve read a couple accounts of his rejections over the years, but they seem as murky, vague, and squishy as any of the rest of his storytelling. It’s hard to get any hard facts out of them.
A few days ago, a commenter on another website asked me what happened to Skip Rawling’s left arm. I responded, the first time I saw Skip in Crankshaft was to write an article on Crankshaft’s baseball career with the Toledo Mud Hens. He was already missing his left arm. Its absence was never addressed.
I was morbidly curious about Skip’s arm and decided to use the contact page on tombatiuk dot com. I’ve used this contact page for answers several times in the past. Tom (or someone) will quickly answer your question. It always pays to be polite, and it doesn’t hurt (much) to butter him up.
After asking about Skip, I lied through my teeth and signed off with, “Enjoying the latest Funky Winkerbean story arc.”
As I was about to click the “Send a Note” button, I noticed I had mistakenly typed “Funky Winkerbean” rather than “Crankshaft.” It’s an easy mistake to make considering the disappearance of the title character.
The mistake was left in out of curiosity to see if Tom would correct me. He didn’t. Was he just being polite? Or, as most of us suspect, the separation between the titles no longer exists. The name of the strip is irrelevant.
So how did Skip lose his arm? Did Tom tell you?
I’m sure you have found the answer below by now. The Drake accidentally stole my comment thread.
Batty was rather vague in his answer. He said Skip has always been missing his left arm. It’s possible he was trying to be coy. It would be nice if he admitted Skip was based on someone he knew in real life or a character he saw in a movie. Perhaps he enjoys maiming news reporters for no reason. Batty could have thought to himself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this old-timey reporter had only one arm?”
Perhaps Batty had a newspaper doll (action figure) as a child and enjoyed pulling one of the arms off.
It’s so typical that he’d create a one-armed character and not even ask himself once over the decades, “I wonder why Skip has only one arm?”
He’s that incurious, even about his own characters. Even when giving one of them a trait that clearly resulted from some kind of life-altering trauma.
Same with Becky. She had her arm ripped off in an accident, costing her a Juilliard scholarship and making it impossible for her to ever again play her instrument… and Bats was 100% uninterested in how that would affect her, so he just showed her jolly and fully recovered, as if nothing had changed.
And these are his own characters.
Imagine how incurious he is about everything and everybody else.
Yeah, but the first time we see Skip, he is writing an article on Ed Crankshaft’s baseball career with the Toledo Mud Hens. Why bother creating a one-armed reporter? The missing arm wasn’t integral to the story. If there’s no reason, it’s a strange thing to include. Was it handicap awareness week?
OTOH, Beck’s left arm had to be cruelly sacrificed for the sake of some ham-fisted melodrama. Becky was only “the girl”, so her cruel misfortune had to take a backseat to Wally’s misery and feelings of guilt. Her forgiveness only served to torture Wally more. Poor Wally.🙄
I just had a thought. It could be true that Skip is based on some real-life newspaper man who wronged Batty years ago. We all know how TB can hold a grudge. I’m sure he wouldn’t want to admit to having the grudge to a random person contacting him on his webpage. It might also explain his coy response. It was a nice way to say, “None of your business.”
Batty: I will base this character on that hack reporter who failed to write a favorable article on me years ago. To make sure he doesn’t think it’s him, I’ll remove one of his arms. It’s genius!
I doubt Skip was based on someone who did Bats wrong, because ol’ Skipperdee is clearly supposed to be a Crusading Old-School Reporter Unafraid to Speak Truth to Power. We’re supposed to admire the smug, thieving hack.
My guess is that the missing left arm is Batiukian shorthand (LOL) for “this character is a scrappy fighter who’s taken some licks but gosh darn it, they’re still in the ring trying their gosh darndest and nothing’s gonna make ’em throw in the towel.”
I don’t think it’s ever occurred to him how strikingly bizarre it is that he has two characters with at-the-shoulder left arm amputations. He had no choice; both characters are “scrappy fighters who [etc]” so they both have to have the missing left arm that signifies that status.
I choose to believe that the smug old Commie tore his own arm off by patting himself on the back too vigorously.
Aaaand… that was supposed to be a reply to bwoeh’s post about the cause of Skipperdee’s missing arm.
Don’t keep us in suspense, bwoeh! What was TomBa’s answer?
Sorry.
Please don’t shoot the messenger.
If Bitter Batty never answers another one of my questions, we’ll know he reads this website.
Did… did you give Tom the thought that he should do Skip’s origin story? Are we going to be “treated” to a three-week arc that’s all about Skip?
You really are “eve hill”.
😛
Sorry. 😩🔫 We all know how hard up Batty is for subject matter.
Sometime next year, Batty will have a puff piece interview on cleveland dot com discussing his upcoming magnum opus on the hardship of disabled Americans.
Whatever sordid tale Batty decides to tell about Skip, we can safely assume Ed Crankshaft will be M.I.A.
For Gourd’s sake, Skip HAS a left arm. He had to go to Centerville (which as we all know, is somewhere to several of the sides of Westview), because there they called him “Skip the Dip.” He pretends to have one arm, as he is a left-handed pickpocket. This is CANON, as I made it up.
Good answer. 😂
Much better than what I wrote to that commenter, “I like to think Skip lost his arm as a paperboy, for the Sentinel, while battling an overzealous chihuahua.” Not even small house pets tolerate the unlovable Skip.
Does Skip’s appearance remind anyone else of a Muppet?
Skip reminds me of R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, if Mr. Natural moved to the suburbs become a Mac evangelist. He’s always spewing that same style of self-righteous phony-baloney wisdom, but reveals his incompetence every time his mouth.
Instead of worrying about whether Lillian will be safe distributing the book, why doesn’t Les save his students the effort of traveling to Centerville?
Les is in for a penny, in for a pound regarding Fahrenheit 451. He wouldn’t get himself into any more trouble with the school administration for giving the book to his students than the trouble he might (supposedly) be in for teaching it in his class.
I guess he just wants a lot more “climate damage” from the unnecessary driving out of town.
Or, y’know, tell them to download Kindle on their phones and send them e-books, which they’re all much more likely to read since they don’t have to schlep a book around with them.
But obviously you can’t burn e-books, and TomBa has to make his point with all the subtlety of the Wehrmacht invading Poland, only of course the Wehrmacht actually did things instead of sitting around talking.
… come to think of it, what is his point?
This is Best Actress Award Winner Les Moore. Rather than discipline him, the school administration will award him ‘Teacher of the Year.’
The school administration will most likely apologize to him for putting Fahrenheit 451 on the list in the first place. They will also apologize for any stress and discomfort the decision caused him.
I came up with a new interpretation of Les: he’s Anthony Fremont, the telekinetic kid from The Twlight Zone, but he’s lost his powers and nobody knows this yet.
It would explain why people are so cowed by him, and so eager to appease him, despite his inability to intimidate.
That is good. It’s about the only thing that makes any sense. That Twilight Zone episode was titled, It’s a Good Life. There’s a bit of a coincidence, that episode took place in Ohio.
Instead of telekinesis, Les’s superpower is a pout that can be felt three counties away.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Day Nineteen of The Byrnings
It looks like GoComics isn’t showing today’s strip for any of the comic strips on the site
It just popped in about 12 minutes ago. Gosh that Lillian is so fierce.
I was hopping around Wikipedia and landed on “Star Hawks,” a comic strip by Ron Goulart and Gil Kane that debuted in the late 70’s.
Quoting Kane about the strip, this sentence caught my eye:
“I got a call from Ron Goulart, who told me he’d been having some talks with Flash Fairfield, who is the art editor of the comics at [the newspaper syndicate] NEA“
I wonder if that was the reason Batiuk’s Stan Lee scarecrow was sometimes referred to as Flash Fairfield.
Almost certainly. Batiuk has referred to Flash Fairfield as something of a mentor, and said he named Flash Freeman as an homage to Fairfield. So the most likely explanation is that he was doing that one particular story and subconsciously wrote the wrong name. And since proofreading is for chumps, he never noticed in the 11 months between writing and dumping it onto Ayers.
(He really only used the “Fairfield” name in one story; in every subsequent appearance until he showed up in Crankshaft earlier this year, he was only ever called “Flash”, so it was left to our assumptions what Batiuk thought his last name was going to be now. Odds are, Batiuk completely forgot – assuming he ever noticed – the wrong name being used.)
Thank you, I guess I missed that bit. Which leads me to my next question–would any of you want to be immortalized by appearing as an avatar in a Crankshaft strip? Keep in mind that you would not be characterized in a flattering way.
Still tricky to think of things to say, yesterday’s strip was more of just self-affirming jargon about how “brave” everyone is. What the heck has Lillian been hearing about that’s made her feel unsafe for a while – a bookstore licensing crackdown? Does my theory about the Funkyverse’s book-banning wave having been active since last year’s Sunday strip have legs?
I’ll repeat the main point of the discourse; this mean underbelly of Westview/Centerview, OH is something that’s just sprung out of the woodwork with no point of origin. It’s like how we only just got Covid references in Spring 2021 due to Batiuk not wanting to interrupt his eleven-month backlog and imagine his Ohio as an ideal normal until it wasn’t. His world is a perfect one where “good” stories get a well-deserved Oscar to their author regardless of if their name’s on the trophy, up until it isn’t just so a comic writer wants to give up and run a comic shop.
And speaking of Mopey Pete, look who just showed up with his fiancé! Besides the fact that Mindy was Lillian’s neighbor and Pete was Les’s student, both years in the past, how even did they get roped into being helping hands with this? I’d ask if we going to see Montoni’s sponsorship for the F451 handout (another potential alignment for my Bingo board), but Pete’s Redbubble-photoshop-tier T-shirt tells us the more “noble cause”. I’ll start the for-snarking-purposes comic ban research now folks; that’s a real t-shirt that the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund sells, our friends who were proponents behind the defense of Castillo v. Texas we so deeply covered last year in regards to DSH’s haphazard parallel lawsuit. The shoutout is natural, and perhaps they’re more on pulse with current book ban issues with how LGBTQ+ graphic novels are often under fire, but regardless we’ve got our first explicit connection of comics to the F451 Burnings. Watch out for your building, Chester!
…up until it isn’t just so a comic writer/screenwriter wants to give up entirely and run a pizza shop instead.
Ruined my own snark there. Need to proofread more lmao
TB should have gone with the “Bill Gaines was right” t-shirt. I mean, it’s got the photo of Gaines right from Wikipedia, make it easy for Davis to trace.
RE: Sat. 9/14’s Funkyshaft (Saw it on Arcamax; who knows when it’ll appear on GC):
So, Lester picked up all the copies of the book he wishes to distribute to his students from the burned-down bookstore in Westview, put them in the trunk of his car, and–with help from Mopey Pete & Min-dull and the Grady Twins*–drove them to a bookstore several miles away in Centerville so that said students can at some point head out there–somehow–and get them from Lizard Lil? What a flawlessly uncomplicated plan! No wonder this guy has an Academy Award!
Also, what on Earth are Mopey and Mindy doing there? They’re neither students nor parents of students and should be busy running Montoni’s. How did they get roped into Lester’s shenanigans? And why do the twins–who were de-aged to tweens following Timemop’s 2022 retcon–appear today to be back to high school age? They were 11 or 12 when they were in this strip last year! Can Batiuk keep any part of his continuity intact as he goes all out for that elusive Pulitzer?
*Seeing Mindy with Emily and Amelia for the first (?) time, I originally thought TB had made them triplets.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Looks like Batiuk suddenly remembered how old Ameila and Emily were in 2022 because they suddenly turned back into high school graduates
When he’s confronted on his arrogant and juvenile disrespect for the readers’ intellect, Broseph sneers “it’s called writing.”
Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Day Twenty of the Byrnings
Not even the Byrnings keep Dick Facey from being a massive asshole
Wow, such adventure! Such thrills! Today people are actually walking while they’re talking!
Meanwhile, here are some of the many, many things we don’t know:
1 – Who is objecting to this very old, very classic book that’s been taught to millions of high schoolers?
2 – What specific content are they objecting to?
3 – Was the Booksmeller fire actually arson? If so, who is the suspected arsonist and were they arrested?
If the Booksmeller owner was colluding with Les by ordering a dozen boxes of books specifically to circumvent a school board policy, then aren’t they the hero? I mean, it was their bookstore that got burned.
And I notice that instead of trying to help them pick up the pieces after they stuck their neck out and got terrorized for it, Les ignores them and gives his business to another book store.
What a preening phony, what a callous ingrate Les is.
Finally,
4 – How the hell many copies of Fahrenheit 451 does Les need? A class in an Ohio public high school should have about 25-30 kids in it. He looks like he’s bought a copy for every teenager in the Westview metroplex.
In the Sept. 3 strip, Les told his students, “The books have already been paid for and you can pick them up at the Booksmeller bookstore for free.” So, apparently, Les already gave his business to Booksmellers by paying for the books.
There are still lots of problems with this storyline, but I can’t say that Les is necessarily treating Booksmellers unfairly.
“This is exciting!”
Oh, I haven’t laughed out loud at Crankshaft strip in good long while. It feels weird.
“Spending my weekend driving to another town with my English teacher, then moving boxes of the 70-year-old book he assigned us to read? WOW, THIS IS EXCITING!,” said no one born after 2005, ever.
Or anyone born before 2005, for that matter.
You do realize they’re all going to Montoni’s later? Woo hoo!
B̵e̵s̵t̵ ̵A̵c̵t̵r̵e̵s̵s̵ ̵A̵w̵a̵r̵d̵ ̵W̵i̵n̵n̵e̵r̵ ̵L̵e̵s̵ ̵M̵o̵o̵r̵e̵’̵s̵ ̵t̵r̵e̵a̵t̵!̵ Yeah. Probably not that.
I hope this isn’t breaking one of the rules of our gracious hosts, but this comment was too delicious to keep to myself. On another site, defending this glorious arc:
Is TB actually venturing onto the internet now? Has Les somehow manifested IRL? Whoever wrote this, I stand in line. I doff my hat. I shake silently with laughter until my abs hurt.
Oh, for crying out loud. Even the infamous Funky Winkerbean falling leaves are invading Crankshaft.
Falling leaves? The leaves in our neck of the woods haven’t even started changing color yet. Batty really does live in own little world.
Not to pick nits, friend eve, but I spent a good part of last Thursday afternoon raking and vacuuming up leaves for my 97-year-old aunt in northern Delaware. In that part of the woods the leaves have been coming down since early August, probably due to a combination of excessive heat and dry weather.
YMMV. Where I live in the American Southwest, all the trees are still green.
I wish I had thought to ask my brother Saturday, who lives in northeast Ohio, about the leaves there.
FWIW, I made the comment about the falling leaves before I read all my comics that day. Hi and Lois and Off the Mark also featured falling leaves.