The ▇▇▇▇.

CBH here!

Our dearly returned Anseriform of Ephemerality went on a epic rant in the comments of the last post,

“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?” — Drake of Life

These passionate words inspired me go all Davis on some clip-art.

“When you look at books that have been banned throughout history going back to Copernicus’s ‘Revolutions’ or Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ which is an allegory of the Holocaust, book banners are invariably on the wrong side of history.” –Tom Batiuk.

Because, boy, we getting some riveting inflammatory action in this pivotal and groundbreaking arc! Why ‘The Burnings’ storyline has had me on the edge of my seat every night, guessing how many times the same Lillian McKenzie face would be ever so slightly tweaked, as she hatches up some kind of cockamamie plan for High School students to drive from Westview to Centerville to pick up some books they don’t actually have to read for a class that Les Moore can’t teach. I can’t wait to learn how all of these burning bookstores were actually the result of a hilarious misunderstanding of some mishaps involving that loveable coot Crankshaft sleepwalking while grilling.

I promised all of you that I would be spending this interminable nightmare of an arc archive diving into the past to pull up all the prior censorship and free speech adjacent arcs Batiuk seemingly forgot. So today we’re covering the majority of Act I.

Act I of Funky Winkerbean being the comparatively quality strip that it was, there was a glorious, blinding, lack of preachy arcs where author mouthpieces could pontificate at shrewish strawwomen for strips and strips. In the twenty years Act I ran for, there was barely a single arc on the subject of censorship, vice, or battles over curriculum.

Instead a couple of the very earliest strips even poked fun at the embattled victim mentality of so-called-subversive groups begging to be repressed while actually being supported and celebrated by the structures of power.

‘Good job sticking it to ‘The Man, you scallywag!’
The Library of Congress catalog number for ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’ by William Powell is 71127797. 

There’s a couple meta jokes about the censorship of profanity in newspapers.

At least not with a hard ‘R’ at the end.
(This entire mindscrew of a week is an especial favorite of mine.)

There are some general strips about vice, moral busybodies, and racy stuff.

A proto Roberta Blackburn.
‘If only there were some kind of magical electric mirror that could discretely transmit and contain all the smut a person would ever need, all within the privacy of their own booth at McDonalds.’
Still a better work of literature than ‘Lisa’s Story.’

As far as the politicization of school curriculum or censorship of students, there were a handful of gags over the first few decades. Mostly putting Principal Al Burch in the crosshairs,

‘Especially any rumors that we have homeless kids squatting in their lockers.’
‘Handing out political materials isn’t ‘good citizenship’, it’s littering!’
I wish the current Crankshaft arc was just this strip repeated for two months straight.
“Now, Johnny Unitas, there’s a haircut you could set your watch to.”
‘Just wait till you see what we’ve done with Spot!’

There are a couple jokes about prayer in schools. One that’s almost funny, but feels out of character for Tom Batiuk.

‘Now it’s all animal sacrifices to Darwin in the science lab.’

And this one which would be funny except of course the ruling against prayer in school was against school led organized prayer and never ever did anything to even attempt to ban what ever unholy deal with a higher power Les Moore was privately making at his desk.

‘If I pass this test, I promise you anything! My first born. Heck, my first girlfriend!’

Last but not least, there was sex education. Which came up in one of the very first Funky Winkerbean strips ever ran.

Decades later, Rita Wrighton replacement of the late 80’s, Ginny Wolfe, would do a series of arcs on a sex-education class. But the majority of the humor was the Cindy Summer’s reaction to repeatedly being paired up with Les Moore for projects. There were no arcs where the school board, parents, or superintendents protested her curriculums. Just ol Coach Stropp, ignorantly, yet endearingly, wanting things the way they’ve always been.

‘How about Teenage Introduction To Sexuality?”
‘So that’s why my wife didn’t like that thing I did with the pinky?’
Reading Act I made me love Coach Stropp. Probably the most endearing character of all of Act I.

58 thoughts on “The ▇▇▇▇.”

  1. Your amended artwork is absolutely glorious, CBH! Glad you had time to take a breather from bovine bother and agrarian aggravations. I like that you left “1984” in there too; it’s got something for book-suppressors of every stripe to hate.

    I hadn’t seen that quote of Batiuk’s. Oh boy, what a gem. First there’s the part about the book-banners “invariably” being on “the wrong side of history.” (Imagine! banning Der Führer’s magnum opus! Wrong side of history indeed!)

    Then there’s the part about Maus being “an allegory of the Holocaust.” Allegory? It’s an autobiograpy, encompassing biography when it describes Spiegelman’s father’s concentration camp experience. Yes, the characters are drawn with animal characteristics, but that doesn’t make the narrative an allegory.

    Did he never read it? It won a Pulitzer, which must give him paroxysms of jealousy, especially since the art and writing are immeasurably superior to Batiuk’s efforts. Furthermore, Spiegelman founded a very influential indie comic (Raw), and I have the sneaking suspicion TB has never liked indie comics or the people who create them.

    But hey, kudos to TB for even mentioning Maus. Too bad it’s never been banned, but why get bogged down in little details like that?

    I like the Tom Batiuk that wrote the Act I strips you shared, CBH. Whatever happened to that guy, anyway?

    1. What happened to that guy? His ego consumed him. Batiuk got some kudos for the Act I-ending Lisa pregnancy story, and got the idea he was some kind of serious writer. He’s spent the last 30 years proving that he isn’t.

  3. Harriet has presented a perfect example of what I’m forever going on about re: the difference between old FW and the piece of crap it became. It wasn’t knee-slappingly hilarious, or an unforgettable work of genius, but there were daily jokes, and many of them were pretty snappy, fun, and legit good. The author of the strip clearly had a satirical, contrarian, and sort of cynical sense of humor, and reading the strip every day was a largely pleasant experience.

    And it had WAY more artistic value than the atrocious piles of maudlin slop he started pumping out later. Like, imagine if, say, Cannibal Corpse suddenly became a middling power pop band, cranking out third-rate Weezer ripoffs, then said they felt death metal was just too limiting for their maturing sensibilities. And everyone would say “but you were good at it and we liked it the way it was”, but they just ignored everyone and kept churning out more garbage no one liked or even listened to.

    See, I’m doing it again. But still. It’s fun to see those old strips and reflect on that long ago time. Kind of hard to believe it all led to this, isn’t it?

    1. With these posts, you really see how far this strip has fallen. It’s clear that Batty is not the great storyteller he thinks he is.

      1. He’s not even a competent storyteller. In a world that is less than 1/4 parsec from reality, the protestors are arrested for arson, Les is fired for insubordination, and the story is over.

        But not that’s the story Batiuk wants to tell. So he’s frog-marching the characters through this ridiculous charade that’s already failed once, and putting themselves at risk for no coherent reason. And he’s equally frog-marching the unseen straw “protestors” through their equally ridiculous charade of taking their feelings waaaaay too far.

        Meanwhile, everyone whose job it is to get involved (police, school board, Principal Nate, the owner of Booksmellers, the parents of Les’ students, lawyers) sit on the sidelines.

        The central problem is that Fahrenheit 451 isn’t worth defending OR burning. To the extent the book is challenged, which it barely is at all, it’s for vulgar language or religious reasons (because some holy books are burned in F451). The former clearly puts Les in the wrong, because age restrictions are reasonable. The latter completely reframes the story into being about religion, not literature. So which is it? Because we need to know how we’re supposed to perceive the story. But we have to rely on the Prime Directive of the Funkyverse, which is “Les Moore is never wrong.”

        1. I’ll go a step further, and state that he’s without a doubt one of the worst storytellers who’s ever lived. They’re all objectively terrible. He has no idea where to take his timely, topical premises, so he kills a few weeks by lapsing into a broken version of his old gag-a-day style, then uses a word balloon or three to “advance” the premise, then repeats the cycle over and over again, so any story developments take weeks to play out. If they “play out” at all. And all the “suspense”, as it were, centers around how incredibly moronic the resolution will be.

          TomBan couldn’t write his way out of a soggy paper lunch bag if he had a kitchen knife in his free hand. You read those clever little smirky strips he used to do, and it’s difficult to believe it’s even the same guy.

  4. Al Burch usually strikes me when reading these old strips, he’s a character who TB really seems to know and to know what to do with. Somewhat sympathetic as he navigates his impossible role managing demanding parents, feckless students, and poor teachers; somewhat maddening as he is often resigned, stuffy, and ineffectual. A caricature that understands not just what is ridiculous about a school principal but also why. That title panel with him grimacing while being drawn with long hair and sideburns is just straight up excellent cartooning, a funny visual fully informed by the character.

    He’s a bit like a proto version of well-received (if not beloved) animated school administrator characters such as The Simpsons‘ Seymour Skinner or King of the Hill‘s drab and shiftless Carl Moss.

    1. I got a chuckle from that strip too. When Batty turned all dramatic, he lost his sense of playfulness and the strip suffered greatly as a result. Calvin and Hobbes is the classic example of strip that could navigate between drama and playfulness.

      From Act I you can easily see why Batty got the job. But nowadays you wonder how it is that he still has a job.

    2. Yes. The characters were one-note caricatures, and it worked. That’s all they ever needed to be. No one wondered what Al Burch’s home life was like, or how he became such a caricature, and no one was clamoring to see him react to “real world” situations either. He was what he was, and it was amusing. “Amusing” being the key word. When was the last time Principal Nate said anything amusing, if he in fact ever did?

  5. Thanks for making me miss Chuck Ayers, Davis. His one-panel Sundays were always pretty great compositions to see, a big canvas for him to flex his perspective and character posing. As opposed to now when “Dangerous Dan” is given the same window and just gives us a comic-creator like angle of the Booksmith interior, barely even able to see what the book at the center of the story is barely legible (I count like 52-ish visible copies? Probably a dozen or two more are hidden behind people and the box? And all ordered in hardcover? How many kids was Les expecting to teach again?). To say nothing of how half the cast is using stiff pre-posed designs that we regulars subconsciously recognize from all their overuse in past strips.

  8. Still Gabby says, Re book bans–our local Gannett paper had this front-page article today (Sunday): “Facing a federal lawsuit with accusations of unconstitutional censorship, a Florida school board has agreed to place books it banned back on library shelves as part of an out-of-court settlement.

    “In total, 36 books will be returned to the Nassau County School District, according to a settlement agreement signed on Wednesday….”

    (Nassau County borders on Georgia, directly north of Jacksonville)

    1. Which is yet another angle this story ignores: censorship tends to lose badly in court. Legal pressure works. American legal precedent is against them, unless there is a very good justification for it.

      But the oh-so-perfect Les isn’t taking that path, is he? No, he’s just going to do whatever he wants, and let everybody else deal with the fallout.

      1. Well, having been a Tom Batiuk character for several decades now, he knows that if there is fallout, it will be largely skipped over and then abruptly dismissed in a sentence or two.

  9. The 3-week trend is broken! The fourth week of Burnings is confirmed, and we’ve finally got something burning! The unironic anti-Bradbury mob is confirmed to hold arsonists in their ranks as they embark upon their campaign to stop kids from being exposed to 70-year-old anti-screen-potato literature!

    Oh, speaking of screens:

    Besides this nostalgic memory from another comic strip’s franchise, I can’t help but think of this quote from the molotov scene of the “God’s Club” movie I mentioned over a week ago: “If you can’t stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen!” What a G-rated declaration of war, that was.

  11. 9/16:Something’s…HAPPENING? Before our EYEBALLS?

    I can’t cope! I need 2 people describing this over the phone! For a WEEK!

    OH NO! Her store’s on fire, and she’s gonna SMELL AWFUL! That’s what perp hates–Books that SMELL! (Nah, we saw this 2 years ago. The sign on her store just gets a little bent, and Lillian gets replaced by a robot. As if this strip’s characters don’t act like robots already)

  12. So…who among Les’ group is the traitor? Because it’s not possible that the arsonist learned Lillian has the books. Unless the arsonist is just targeting all bookstores, in which case Les’ little stunt was pointless.

    Also, where the Hell is she? Is she sleeping next door to her own house/store?

    1. The bookstore is located in the attic of her detached garage.

      My money is on one of the twins… the trauma of rapidly changing in age over and over again must have finally gotten to their brains.

      1. My money is on Amelia. The rock ‘n’ roll, guitar-playing, rifle-shooting, black t-shirted teen. Emily is the twin who is sugar and spice and everything nice.

  14. Laying aside the idiocy of every other aspect of this plot…

    Knowing that the Booksmeller was torched because it stocked F451, why would Les move the books to LizLil’s shop, thus making her the next target of arson?

    Why would she accept them, when she’s not going to get paid because they were already purchased from the Booksmeller, and knowing that she’s at risk of being torched too?

    Why didn’t Les take those paid-for books, already in the trunk of his car, to his own house, and from there to the school?

    (And who is paying for those 100+ hardcover books? [List price $27.99. Let’s say he got a volume discount to $20. So $2000ish for the whole batch.])

    And how are his students going to get to Centerville to pick up these books? Do they all have cars? Are they going to ask their parents?

    “Mom, c’n you drive me to Centerville? I gotta pick up this book for English class.”

    “Centerville? Why? So help me, Jake, if this is that goddam Moore guy again with his bullshit antics, I swear I will drive over to that school and bitchslap his ugly face halfway to next Sunday.”

    “If you do, let me know, because I know I can sell tickets to everyone in the school.”

    1. Since when are kids getting hardcover books in high school lit class? Back in the 80’s it was all paperbacks. Heck, kids today probably just get provided a link to download the book directly onto whatever device they want to use.

      Here we have Batty’s last ditch effort to win that Pulitzer, and it ain’t pretty.

    2. You raise a good point – handing out the books at Lillian’s bookstore is a completely pointless act.

      If the original idea was to circumvent school board restrictions, it didn’t work. Somebody knew what Les did, and responded to it. Everybody knows at this point; there’s no point in concealing it any further. Les might as well just hand out the books himself. And announce his intentions to teach the book in defiance of school board instructions, because there’s no point in concealing that either.

      But that would require Les to make a decision, take a stand, and show concern for people other than himself. And Lord knows Les ain’t doing any of THAT.

      This “book drop” is happening for one reason: so the straw villains will have something to attack that isn’t Les. Even though he’s the only one antagonizing them. You can interpret that as Les using a frightened, elderly woman as a human shield because he’s a complete psychopath, or Tom Batiuk protecting Les for whatever reason he does it.

  15. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Day Twenty Two of the Byrnings

    YES FINALLY

    SOMETHING IS ACTUALLY SHOWN BURNING AND IT’S LILLIAN’S HOUSE

    I know Lillian is protected (goddamn it) but still it’s nice to see something bad happen to her (the first to happen since 2014)

    1. But surprise fires are an everyday occurrence for LizLil, living as she does next door to the Twisted Firestarter, Crankshaft. I’d think she’d smell smoke, then roll over and go back to sleep, assuming it was just lovable Ed, that gosh-darn old pyromaniac.

      1. I’d think she’d smell smoke, then roll over and go back to sleep, assuming it was just lovable Ed, that gosh-darn old pyromaniac.

        And then Lillian either wakes up to her entire house up in flames or never wakes up, having died in the fire

  17. So what’s your bet on who the Villain is?

    I know Roberta Blackburn is a favorite, due to her highly nuanced portrayal as a comic book-hating, shrieking harpy with one personality trait. (See above; harpy, shrieking)

    My money’s on the apotheosis of all evil, FRANKIE! We ain’t see’d no hide nor hair of that varmint for years! Course he’ll be here for Tom’s last rodeo! He has LESS than one personality trait. He’s the Xmas Skeletor Meme: “But I don’t like feeling good! I like feeling EVIL!” He’s destroying the towns because LES got LISA! Despite Frankie’s sex-ay hatchet mouth. Dude can use his lips to open cans of Alpo.

    Chester Chiseler, whatever his name, I ain’t looking it up, the Atomik Komix guy. Cuz he wants AAAALL the comics! He’ll burn the AK racks in Lillian’s to get even the ones HE HIMSELF published! Oh wait he likes komix ferget it. It won’t be a komix fan or anyone who has ever done a book signing. (Sorry, Dinkle–my dude, you sure earned this)

    Bull Bushka’s helmeted head. Hey, Tom hasn’t kicked that corpse all the way down the road!…YET. Vengeance–will be TOM’S

    Holtron, which is possessed by the ghost of–PHIL HOLT! Damn straight, you didn’t see that coming!

    “NOOOO–My father was NOT murdered! He lives–to KILL AGAIN! Only *I* Jessica Darling can defeat him!”

    A rock from The Phantom Empire. (but it’s a very nice rock) Wielded by–RICTUS HOMUNCULUS!

    Wally’s dog.

    No one who will ever be named or identified, because Tom would have to think of something, and–omigod! Maybe someone on the Pulitzers LIKES burning books! Can’t offend them!

    But who knows? It’ll be weirder, stupider, and more boring than anything we can come up with.

    1. It’s the parent of one of Les’ students. They flat-out told Skip Rawlings this.

      “The protestors felt there were things in the book they didn’t want their kids to see (in) a book in a school literature course the school board had banned.” That’s a very specific set of circumstances that applies to no one else.

      But I bet Batiuk needs at least a week to unravel this sub-Scooby Doo mystery. Assuming the story bothers identifying the perpetrators at all. They’ll probably just vanish from the story once the virtues have been signaled, just like the gay prom kids did.

      1. But then the very next strip Skip says they don’t know if there’s any connection between the protesters and the fire, so… who even knows.

    2. It’s Zanzibar the Talking Arson Chimp, who is actually upset over a new book that implicates him in the “Butter” Brinkel scandal.

      1. Zanzibar, in a dusty Camaro: “Where’s father’s INCOMPREHENSIBLE COMIC?!
        “Oh, it’s that way? Thanks man, I’m frickin’ Thelma and Louise-ing in any OTHER direction!”
        As Z-Bar drives away, he screams back “It was WALLY’S DOG! He knows what they did to the Winkerbeans!…” His voice fades away as he speeds off, laughing and tossing an empty beer can.
        In the back seat sit Frankie and Holt/Tron. They smirk.

        A dog barks in the distance, in front of a rickety Ohio bookstore…And lifts an empty can of gasoline. He says “Hooza a good boy?! I am. I AM.”
        They could see the flames in Medina.

    4. Lillian has a long list of justified enemies. Yes, some of them are dead (Lucy, Rose Murdoch, Eugene maybe?)… but so was Phil Holt at one time.

    5. “I’ll be god damned if I have to go before the PTA and the School Board one more time to run interference for this pompous idiot,” he said, unscrewing the cap of the gasoline can.

      As he began screwing in the nozzle, he muttered, “… called on the carpet yet again by the district Superintendent? Grovel again, cap in hand, to keep my job?” The nozzle was firmly attached, and he approached the wooden stairs.

      “Oh, no. No, sir. Not this time. You’ve screwed Nate Green over for the very last time, you pube-bearded prick.” And he lit the match.

    6. Plantman, after serving 25 years in jail for the murder of John Darling, has returned! His plan? To destroy every book that ISN’T Fallen Star, the book in which he’s a focal character…

    8. I initially thought it was safe to rule out Buddy, Wally’s dog, but then it hit me:

      Perhaps the strain of being the most honorable character in this universe has gotten to him, and he has snapped.

      I have a rocket launcher and some son of a bitch will die.

      Chester’s last name is Hagglemore.

      1. They had trained them both well! He knew to go “Yip yap WOOF WOOF!” and Wally changed.

        Wally was a POW for–10 years? Twenty, 30? There is no time anymore. The dog Buddy was his only solace. He wondered why the Taliban had given Buddy to him. Or why they insisted only letting him watch crumbling VHS tapes of “The Manchurian Candidate.”

        He went home, after…a while. Time no longer had any meaning.

        He tried to blend in. Get a job at the pizza place, even if it meant working with a father who hated him. He struggled against the PTSD, and he won. But the nightmares! They involved…things burning. Why were the nightmares happening?

        Then one day, “Yip yap WOOF WOOF!” said Buddy. Wally heard it as “nine,” “homecoming,” “one,” and “freight car” in Russian. The Red Queen! He couldn’t…not…act…He had no choice.

        Gloved hands shaking, he poured the weirdly brown gasoline they gave him.

        Buddy’s tail wagged. He’d get a TREAT after this!

    9. I’m not the first to suggest this, but the fires were started by Les Moore himself.

      The whole thing reeks of hero syndrome. And he fits the profile perfectly: a shrieking narcissist with a God complex who craves public recognition and isn’t getting it anymore. He’s also arrogant enough to think he can get away with this, and stupid enough to think it’s clever.

      If this crime was legitimate, it would be easy to solve. Very few people would know about Les’ actions. Even fewer people would care, much less incriminate themselves to this extent over a Ray Bradbury book. Better solutions are available, such as simply reporting Les to the school board.

      No, this is Les trying to make himself a hero by taking a stand nobody on earth would care about, and then making up a threat against it so he can be the brave defender of literacy. And hoping nobody notices he was never actually attacked.

      The whole story is so goddam ridiculous it’s the only explanation that makes sense.

    10. It could have been the Post Office Bomber, although that would likely fit under “no one who will ever be named or identified”. I’m not ruling it out, though.

      Or maybe Skylark finally found out what his favorite spaceship toy was made from and had his inevitable psychotic break. (And maybe he finds Timemop’s helmet and goes back in time to be the Post Office Bomber himself. Sure, why not? It’s no stupider than what we’ll actually get, right?)

  18. I had a very stupid thought. The arsonist is Ed Crankshaft.

    Why? Well, he was illiterate, but then he learned to read, and he loves reading (and books) so much that the very thought of a story where books are burned distresses him to his core.

    So he wants to burn F451 so that no one will discover that books can be burned.

    Les confronts him, and tells him, “You know, my wife died of cancer.” And Ed relents and vows never to use fire ever again.

    1. He should at least be a suspect. Hell, every arsonist in Ohio should leave a trail of accelerant to Ed Crankshaft’s house. He’s the perfect person to frame. Not only is he a serial arsonist in his own right; the authorities stop giving a shit once they find out it’s him.

      “There’s a book store on fire? What’s the address again? Oh, there. Yeah, that’s just that wacky bus driver again. Please don’t call 911 unless you’ve got an actual emergency.”

    2. Les confronts him, and tells him, “You know, my wife died of cancer.” And Ed relents and vows never to use fire ever again.

      I think that Crankshaft would just ignore Dick Facey and set him ablaze

  19. The northern dust blew all the time in Ohio. They squinted and adjusted their masks over their faces. One nodded, pointed at the horizon, and whispered; “We may have company.”

    <i>click-clack</i>

    “Christ, they gimme a rookie with a cowboy gun?!”

    “Um, HELLO, am I supposed to make my own from STICKS? Nothing wrong with my granddad’s old Winchester 76 these days.” Mindy glared. “Do you even know what that thing DOES?”

    Cindy paused, and looked at her…gun-like thing she’d taken from the dead Burner… The alien-made one with all the weirdly blinking buttons. “It kills!”

    “Yeah, last one blew HOLLY up REAL GOOD.”

    Cindy shrugged. “She always knew she’d go up in flames.”

    Mindy–or possibly–Candy? Squeaky? She was blond, as all women were now. “Listen, BITCH–We are SO going shopping to get NORMAL USA! guns when these Burnings end, and they reopen the mall!”

    Cindy doubled over, and screamed! “OH MY GOD, call a Montoni’s car!”

    “GASP!” gasped Mindy. “You’re giving the first birth of the BURNINGS! At the young age of 75!”

    Cindy said “I think pressing this blinky gun button calls 911!”
    The weapon reacted. The crater it left was talked about for years. “It’s still a-Burnin’,” some say. If you kids wanna check, go ahead. I’m stayin’ here.

  20. I saw him die. I watched. Laughing! After all this time! He was dead at last! My father. The rot-nosed, bus-based child killer.

    But was I alive? I strapped a piece of metal to my right leg. Was it broken? It hurt like fu–

    “I GOT A ROCK!”

    “YES! I am aware of–your ROCK!”

    A tiny voice came from the same mouth. “I got a NICE rock!”

    I propped myself up on the…thing. Christ, the Burners leave all this crap–we don’t know what these are. It could be a weapon, which, you know, are good when they don’t ex–

    “JEFF! This could EXPLODE!” I hoisted myself up on–oh, Christ, blinky buttons, we do NOT know what these do. “And for God’s sake–IT’S JUST THE TWO OF US! There is no imaginary friend!”

    “RICTUS HOMUNCULUS has a ROCK!” He then pitched his voice weirdly high. “It’s from MURANIA!”

    I couldn’t take it anymore. Ever since–The BURNINGS–he had become an insane man-child, convinced he was both himself at age, God knows what age he thought he was now, 75, 35– and also an 8 year old. A very, very, FUCKING STUPID EIGHT–

    I held my breath. Yes, I thought, just say it. Just say “WHATCHA DOIN’ DAD?” But for all I knew, he’d split into ED as well. Deep breaths, Pam, deep breaths. You killed what…was left of your own father. You can NOT cry now! That…was not your father.

    “We need to get to Bryce Canyon for shelter!’

    “BRONSON Canyon!” the 2 Jeffs chorused.

    “I–DO NOT FUCKING CARE! I–can’t do this! My leg–and we don’t know what this staff is…” Oh God. A bunch of them are coming! The BURNERS! Their horrible, scrabbling roach-like legs! I’ve seen them! Seen them FEED!

    Desperately I screamed “MURANIA! It’s in the caves! Jeff, Rictus, GO TO THE CAVES AND…get help! From the QUEEN!”

    “An ADVENTURE!” Jeff yelled, looking into the eyes of a child who wasn’t there. “We can get GENE AUTRY!” They scampered like the children they were–and weren’t.

    I…thought I heard the thunder of Muranian cavalry hooves, coming from all sides–No, still just–the BURNERS, everywhere. swarming me.

    I stood as high as I could on the staff. “Don’t touch the blinky buttons” they all said. Ha ha, my GOD this hurts. Oh, get CLOSER, Burners, I want to see what happens when I do THI–

    “Yeah, that explosion was REAL big! The Burners didn’t care for that, I’ll bet! That’s another valley you should never go into. The Valley of the Shadow of–PAM.”

    We hope you have enjoyed this installment of “Tales of The Burnings.”

    1. We hope you have enjoyed this installment of “Tales of The Burnings.”

      I most assuredly did.

  22. “I don’t get it,” said Detective Poe Leesman. “Firebug like you, setting fire to all those bookstores…”

    The suspect, slumped over the table, absentmindedly held the styrofoam coffee cup, and seemed not to even be listening.

    “What I don’t understand is why you never tried to burn anything inside the bookstores. Why you only poured enough accelerant, in just the right places, to damage the façade of the bookstores, but never the books or anything inside.”

    “Façade…” muttered the suspect slowly. “Façade of a bookstore…” The words sounded like a seductive caress.

    “See,” continued Detective Leesman, “We had you figured as a classic book-burner, but not one book was ever burned.”

    “Book?” the suspect spat. “Why would I want to burn a book, of all things? Are you some kind of sicko? Now bookstore façades… burning, on fire… oh, ohhhh….” And the suspect’s eyes rolled up in orgiastic ecstasy.

  23. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Day 23 of the Byrnings

    Day Two of The Village Booksmith Burning Down To Ashes,

    I’ll bet that the fire truck passes Lillian’s house

  24. The drama is once again defused by the artstyle. Little actual spread seeming noticeable to the fire beyond what surrounds the steps. I’m not going to research the physics of fire just for my snark, but certainly others across the web have been lampooning that this is a pretty lukewarm arson attempt with so many flammable surfaces. Like expecting those wood stairs to act like the wick of a bomb. And that firetruck panel; just feels like the same basic formatting of the snowmobile/school bus convoy of Christmas 2022.

    Someone in the comments yesterday mentioned the idea that this whole turn of the story could be pulled out from under us by being revealed as a nightmare Lillian is having. That’s a particularly frustrating notion to think about, though I think maybe the pacing today doesn’t suggest that? I feel like a nightmare would be Lillian being consumed by the flames or the whole building going up in flames instantly, but we have been surprised before. Just gotta wait for how the rest of the week will progress then.

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