Tom Batiuk’s latest blog post Match To Flame 219 starts with one of the most bizarre sentences I’ve ever read.
It was another one of those road to Damascus–double down–who’s your daddy moments.
I have so many questions about this. What life event could possibly be described by all three of these cliches at the same time, especially when the first two contradict each other? A “road to Damascus” is a sudden, major change in one’s beliefs. To “double down” is to increase your commitment to something you’re already doing. So, it’s one of those “change while emphatically not changing” moments in life? And how often does this happen to Tom Batiuk? It must be a lot, because he introduces it with the phrase “it was another one of those” moments. As if he’s rolling his eyes from the sheer boredom of it all.
I want to rework George Carlin’s “fine and dandy” bit to be about these three phrases instead. “I never use the phrase ‘road to Damascus–double down–who’s your daddy moments.’ Why? Because I’m never all three of those things at the same time! Sometimes, I am indeed on the road to Damascus. Just the other day, I was flying from New York to change planes in Dubai. But I never double down during those trips! In fact, I’m pretty sure blackjack is illegal in Muslim countries. And I never use the phrase ‘who’s your daddy?’ Unless I find a lost little girl at the park, and I’m trying to find her parents. Then I might ask, ‘who’s your daddy?'”
This may be the ultimate example of what I’ve previously called a nothingism: a turn of phrase that seems clever on the surface, but conveys no meaning. Whatever this is, it’s even worse. It’s not even superficially clever, and it’s so confusing that it destroys any meaning the sentence might have had.
Sheesh, writing is not this difficult. Just say what you mean, be precise, and be concise. If you do all three of those things, you’ll be fine. (And I note that this morning’s Crankshaft adds yet another award-winning professional writer to the Funkyverse.)
Batiuk loves trying to impress you with his vocabulary, but he fails to use the words he should. The actual subject matter of the blog post contains an example of this.
…this ephemeral thought passed through my brain like some sort of cosmic ray. It was less of a thought and more of a feeling, a peaceful-happy feeling that came wrapped in a warm diaphanous glow. I’ve learned to pay attention to ideas that come packaged that way. As I mentioned in a prior introduction, for whatever reason, my ideas for the strips generally come with some sort of color-coded rating attached.
He never uses the word synesthesia, which is the actual name for this condition. It’s not a disorder, or a symptom of one. It’s the just the way some people’s brains are wired: they perceive senses in a mixed way. The most common form of this is associating letters or numbers with colors.
I want to break the fourth wall here for a moment, and say that I’m uncomfortable speculating on anyone’s mental state. I know I’ve done it in the comments, and I stand by what I said at those times, but it’s begun to feel a little out of bounds. Some have expressed discomfort at my past remarks of this type, so I’ve tried to focus my venom on the Batiuk’s writing content only. This isn’t a blog rule or anything, just my own feelings. Feel free to comment as you see fit, but I want to keep this part brief.
Apparently, Tom Batiuk is a synesthete:
(If) I forget to write (an idea) down and can’t recall it later, I know it’s no big deal because the idea wasn’t color rated that highly to begin with. When those rare one-off neural connections come gift wrapped with that aforementioned glow, you fail to write it down at your own peril unless you want to find yourself living with eternal regret.
This sounds like colored sequence synesthesia, where sequences or concepts can have colors associated with them.
Which raises an immediate question: does he know? Has he ever discussed this phenomenon with friends, family, colleagues, doctors, or book signing attendees? Has no one ever said “hey, I’ve heard of that thing you were talking about in the beginning of Volume 14”? This seems like something he should know. Because I’ve heard of it! It jumped off the page the first time I read it.
Batiuk doesn’t seem to realize that not everyone’s brain works exactly like his does. This is an ongoing theme in the Funkyverse. All the characters love and hate exactly the same things Batiuk does, in exactly the same ways.
I am not a synesthete, even though my thought process is similar to Batiuk’s. I learned early in life to write down ideas I realize are good, lest I lose them. But this feeling doesn’t have a glow or color associated with it. It is a learned behavior on my part. Because I know Batiuk’s feeling of eternal regret. This has actually happened to me: “Dammit, this morning I thought of something that was so funny I actually made myself laugh. Now what in the hell was it?” If creative writers or comedians could have a superpower, having your best ideas come color-coded would be a damn good one. I’m jealous.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me step away from the opening long enough to explain how I came to be on that couch and the circumstances that had brought me to Chapel Hill (North Carolina).
Who cares? I omitted the location from the “ephemeral thought” comment because it was irrelevant to the more interesting topic, which is Tom Batiuk’s thought process. Maybe this “idea glow” thing was an aside in a larger story about being in Chapel Hill, which presumably had some kind of point. But the blog excerpt is structured around the thinking, not around the trip to Chapel Hill. “Idea glow” is a complete thought. The trip isn’t. In fact, the blog post ends right in the middle of setting the trip up:
In the spring of 2012, Funky Winkerbean celebrated its 40th anniversary just as Cathy and I had celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary the previous year.
That’s it. He never explains why he was in Chapel Hill or why this matters. I guess we have to wait for Match To Flame 220, or go out and buy the latest Funky Winkerbean collection. Or we can just assume it had something to do with visiting the University of North Carolina, the only institution of note in Chapel Hill.
Which is something else I’ve noticed about Tom Batiuk’s writing: it struggles with scope. At the very end of the strip’s run, when Summer was pointlessly wandering around town in a snowstorm, Batiuk showed off the house he and his wife once lived in, which was the model for Fred and Ann Fairgood’s first home in the comic strip.
But this location simply wasn’t that important to the world of Funky Winkerbean. Les and Funky’s homes appeared far more often, especially in Act III. We see Dinkle’s house, even though few of his shenanigans took place there. We see other long-forgotten locations like the original Westview High School (it moved at one point), and the juvenile home Crazy Harry came from. If this was meant to be one last tour of Westview before the strip ended – an indulgence Batiuk has every right to – he sure didn’t hit the high points. Judge for yourself at Batiuk’s blog post on that tour.
This blog post should have been about the “idea glow”, or about his trip to North Carolina. It appears that he just randomly grabbed two paragraphs from the middle of a long, rambling narrative and called it a blog post.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Crankshaft
SKIP RAWLINGS HOW THE HELL DID YOU NOT KNOW THAT WAS AMEILA AND NOT EMILY
Eh, it’s not like he needs to be observant like a reporter should be or anything.
Either that, or now even the characters, like the readers, can’t tell all the Generic Blondes apart.
If you’re going to trade places with your identical twin as a prank, why would you would abandon the prank WHEN YOU’RE BEING HANDED A CHECK? Just walk out the door and cash it, “Emily”!
This is a dream outcome for this prank. You want other people to mix you up in funny ways. It’s also a hilarious backfire on Emily, since Amelia can credibly take her reward, and Emily can’t do anything about it without revealing the prank.
To paraphrase the late, great Bob Uecker: this joke was juuuuuuust a bit outside.
Oh my goodness, Emily won the contest but got Amelia to take her place! I never saw that plot twist co…wait a minute. What contest? When did the twins switch? Why did they switch? The last time we saw the Sentinel office was back in late November, when Emily was “shadowing” Skipper for a school report. Was there some thrilling contest storyline going on in Batiuk’s other strip, “Skip Rawlings: One-Armed Newshound,” that we missed? How dare TB distract us from these exciting goings-on with all that nonsense about the crotchety school bus driver!
Why is the other twin even there? Only one of them works for the newspaper. This prank makes more sense in a place where both twins have a reason to be. Like, a high school. If only the Funkyverse had a setting like that.
The execution of this joke makes it a lot more mean-spirited than it should be. Not that I’m against bad things happening to Skip. Especially now that we can add “running a rigged essay contest” to his list of crimes against decency. I’m sure Les Moore is furious that there was a writing contest he didn’t win. If the rest of this week is about him suing the newspaper, I will apologize for every nasty thing I’ve ever written on this blog.
They probably have different odors.
One of them should smell like gunpowder, since one of them was shown to be into shooting once. And if Emily’s been hanging around Skip all day, she should smell like urine stains, Aqua Velva, and mothballs.
That has to rate as one of the strangest TB post I’ve ever read. The post just stops in thought and process. “I’m in North Carolina. Read my Book.”
I attended school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of my fondest memories was seeing Jeff McNelly (prominent editorial cartoonist, creator of Shoe, and UNC alumnus). It was a fascinating talk. He had an overhead projector, and performed live cartooning, explaining how he caricatured the public figures of the day. Anyway, I’m guessing Tom’s stop in Chapel Hill was for a similar purpose? Or maybe he was just there to watch a basketball game? For me, I sometimes had such ephemeral thoughts when sitting on a sofa in Chapel Hill, but usually it originated from the bong on the coffee table.
I wonder if it was to do this TV interview I wrote about once. The interviewer was from UNC’s Pembroke campus, which is about 100 miles south of Chapel Hill. But the main campus of any state university tends to have the better equipment. And Chapel Hill is only 20 minutes from RDU airport, so it would be much easier for out-of-state visitors to get to.
Regarding Tom’s Blog Post: It’s confusing, even compared to the ones where he says that comics “re-arranged his molecules”
My browser keeps a random date stored on it when i first (?) went to GoComics, so everytime i start typing it out it fills in that particular date and goes to that strip, where i just hit the ‘most recent’ button and move on.
This really confused me today because my Crankshaft link is to November 19, 2024, and going to the ‘today’ button really showed me that today’s comic is 2/3 of the art from that strip, only 2 months old.
Really, if we had crowdsourced the strip amongst ourselves and only used clip art from the series, how could we have done any worse?
Tbh i’m also a little disappointed that we aren’t staying on Crankshaft, i was developing a theory that GoComics had held TB to a line in his contract specifying that “a strip named Crankshaft has to contain a character named Crankshaft, not a random assortment of old characters from a cancelled strip.”
Possibly Tom found a loophole? I know the Shining Twins turned up in FW, but I think Skip and Lillian began in CS. Sort of how Batton Thomas came from nowhere to just be the strip’s Les. They’re not Ed, but distant enough from Funky as to be less legally actionable.
If there’s a loophole, Batiuk will immediately find it and exploit it. He’s good at that. The guy really should have been a politician. This week is a good example of how that might work. These are all native Crankshaft characters, but it’s a self-indulgent Act III-style “famous writer” story.
<i>I want to break the fourth wall here for a moment, and say that I’m uncomfortable speculating on anyone’s mental state.</i>
I agree that speculative discussion about someone’s mental state is something we want to keep under control. But when discussing the writing of Tom Batiuk, it’s almost impossible not to note that something is wrong. There are just too many instances of “What on earth was this guy thinking?”, or “How could someone be so lazy and/or forgetful?”, or “How could someone be so utterly clueless about how actual human beings talk or behave?” or “Geez, how narcissistic and self-involved can one guy be, and yet be completely unaware of it?” The very nature of these questions are all linked to the mental state of the person who created the work being commented on…
But yeah, I appreciate the reminder to focus on the work, not the (perceived) mental state of the writer. Might be tough sometimes, but it IS the decent thing to do.
I know it was hypocritical of me to say that, when I’ve long speculated on Batiuk’s mental state in the comments. I do regret some of it now, though, and seek to tone my hostility down a little. Honestly, I wanted to just write the guy and ask if he knew about synesthesia. But given my past behavior, I’m sure my genuine concern would lack credibility. I also don’t want to reveal my real name and contact info to someone who’s historically been a teensy bit litigous.
His problem seems to be that he has no clue what people think of him.
What a gobbledygook of phrases slammed together… To think, TB would have been less inconsistent had he simply gone full Crankshaft and said “the road to Damascus is paved with good intentions”.
Nothingism is a perfect description of Batty’s writing and in my mind, it only started showing up when he retooled the strip to focus on cancer and comic books.
I unexpectedly met a Pulitzer nominated author last week in my Italian language class. One of my classmates is a writer (with a day job) and has written a few novels. One of her works was recently nominated. She was quite modest about it and remarked that lots of people get nominated and that she writes because she enjoys it. I asked her if she read Crankshaft or FW and she said no.
That double down Damascas nonsense would have worked coming from someone who makes a living off of carefully presenting himself as kind of silly and also stupid, Dave Barry comes to mind. His columns were full of earnestly broken turns of phrase for comedic effect.
From Batiuk, it’s just baffling. Like he’s slowly becoming Crankshaft.
There’s always been that huge, gaping disconnect between how he describes his work, and what he actually churns out. He spews forth that annoying flowery glurge about his artistic process, and the genesis of ideas, like he’s harnessing some great creative force he himself barely understands. Then, he cranks out six strips about old ladies complaining about choir practice, or a fat guy wheezing on a treadmill.
He’s kind of implying here how his unique color-coded idea genesis process kind of culled the herd, and weeded out the dull mauve and earthy brown ideas in favor of the really bright red and orange ones. Which, in theory, means that the ideas we saw running in the local paper for a hundred years were the pick of the litter. I mean, wow. Just imagine the ideas in that man’s head that never came to fruition. I bet there were several dozen of them, at least.
“The glowing ideas are rarely something specific, but more of an open-ended invitation to make a leap of consciousness into another state of development that will be new, creatively vital, and fulfilling.”
This is what I was talking about above. The guy’s consciousness is leaping into other states of development and new, creatively vital and fulfilling places, apparently on a regular basis, and it’s manifesting itself into stories about comic books and pizza boxes. With Batiuk, the tedium is the medium, and no one does that any better, but I’m not sure if he knows it or not.
Batiuk is the Uncle Rico of literature. The gap between his boasts and his demonstrated ability is so wide that he should be a laughable figure. Especially considering how condescending he can be about it sometimes. But the Funkyverse seems to lack that lolcow quality that things like The Room and The Eye Of Argon have. Even when Batiuk is unintentionally funny, you still have to penetrate the dense, confusing backstory of the Funkyverse to see the humor. Tommy Wiseau’s knack for unintentional comedy was immediately apparent to anyone who watched his movie.
It’s totally insane. He carries on like he’s a massive furnace of artistic ambition and creativity, endlessly sifting through mountains of ideas of varying brilliance. Then, he spends eight weeks on Wally eventually inviting Adeela over for dinner. I often seriously believe he himself believes no one is actually reading the strips at all, thus he’s free to make up these wild claims, and no one notices the difference. Which is kind of true, in a way, I guess. Like the puff piece interviews, where the author had no idea what FW actually was, and mostly just nodded politely. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons why I spent over a decade sniping at his stupid comic strip. I just hated seeing him getting away with it.
If it was all a bit, it’d actually be kind of funny. But, sadly, I just don’t think it is. It’s what makes Batiuk so fascinating. He’s a complete paradox. Super nice, sincere and often downright kindly, yet he carries lifelong grudges like nobody’s business. A vivid imagination, but one that inevitably distills every single idea to its dullest common denominator. It was almost as if he was deliberately trying to minimize FW’s cultural impact as best he could, and succeeded. He had the absolute perfect skill set for it. What are the odds, you know?
“He can’t keep getting away with it” is part of my bile fascination too. And, I’m fascinated by how gobsmackingly awful Batiuk is at the most basic writing tasks. 50+ years of content creation experience, and he can’t even mine a coherent blog post from things he’s already written.
He failed to recognize the most interesting part of the foreword. He didn’t know the condition had a name. He wasn’t curious enough to learn more about it. He tried to frame the excerpt around why he went to North Carolina, as if this were the annual “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” writing assignment the first day of middle school. Then he couldn’t even do that right, because the blog post abruptly ended when he was about to explain why!
Even the most writing-phobic D student in English class would do better than this. At least they’d be *trying* to say something. You’d detect some effort. And most people can write reasonably well when they’re passionate about something – which Batiuk never is. Even his own interests don’t interest him. He started writing this elaborate backstory for Atomik Komix, got bored with it and never finished, and proudly posted it on his blog. He doesn’t know anything about comic book grading. He doesn’t know the “comic book bullpen” was a marketing construct and didn’t actually exist. He doesn’t know or care anything about comic books outside of his personal preferences. He’s still bitter about the Comics Code, which has been irrelevant for decades now.
He seems to hate his job, despite having complete editorial control over his work, and a reserved spot in America’s daily newspapers to indulge himself however he pleases.
You couldn’t create a writer this bad.
CS, 1/20/25: (Yes, this is a reprint of my GC comment. At least I can fix the formatting I screwed up there)
Rod Serling, holding lit cigarette: “Imagine, if you will, a world where one adores a minuet, the Ballet Russe, and a crepe suzette. But Emily loves to rock and roll, a hot dog makes her lose control—” (stares at cue cards) “What, that’s it? THAT’S the ‘big twist’?! They’re twins? A town with 20 people, and no one’s noticed before? They have color-coded outfits! Who wrote this?!” (M. Night slowly sinks into his chair) “‘Loses control over a hot dog?!’ Did Emily just learn those are made of floor sweepings and pig rectums?!” (storms off set) “Golly, what’s the next big twist? We find out Emily’s stupid essay about lord knows what, because we’ll never be told, is on the front page?!”
(This was followed by 2 of the 3 people who do nothing but complain about others’ comments complaining, because they don’t like negative comments like the ones they endlessly make.)
I saw your post there and it was fantastic. Yeah I like how they are allowed to complain but you are not. Your post was relevant and funny. I stand in line.
Tom Batiuk never was, isn’t now, and never shall be anything other than an utterly terrible writer. And yeah, I include Act I and early Crankshaft.
In fairness to Batty, in act 1 he didn’t claim nor try to be a fancy writer. He was just trying to crank out a daily strip. When it debuted, FW was unique and appropriate for the times. But once he got a little attention for mis misery porn, he morphed into the lord of the language. And instead of trying to do something interesting, FW and Crankshaft became a place where he could brag and show off is imaginary skills. Suddenly everyone was an award winning writer and into comic books. Funky and Bull were marginalized and made fun of while Les and Lisa could do no wrong.
The praise Batiuk got for the Lisa pregnancy arc in 1991 really went to his head. It made him think he was the new Sherwood Anderson. Not just a legendary writer and storyteller, but the voice of Real Ohio People.
I forget a lot of good ideas, which obviously has nothing to do with my getting older, so I was curious if I had that condition. I took the test but didn’t want to pay for the results, which obviously has everything to do with my being cheap.
Anyway, i thought about the whole connecting numbers and colors thing. The first number to pop into my head was 5. Then, I thought of the color red.
5 and red. Red and five. Red Five, Luke Skywalker’s call sign in “Star Wars.”
Is there a condition where your brain immediately comes up with an old pop culture reference for everything? Because I’m pretty sure I’ve got it.
“Is there a condition where your brain immediately comes up with an old pop culture reference for everything?”
ME, nervously getting ready for lasers being shot into my garbage eyes, and my eyelids get strapped open: “Hey, Ludovico Technique!”
Her, highly trained laser-eyeball doctor with a diploma from the fucking Mayo Clinic on the wall: “What?”
Me: “You know! A Clockwork Orange! ‘Don’t play Ludwig Van!'”
Her: “I have no idea what that means.”
Me: “Umm…thinking about it, that’s probably for the best.”
(That eye works)
Of course, a doctor who’s strapping your eyelids open would say that….
That sounds like my old dentist, who knew I was into long-distance running, and would ask questions about that — but he claimed to be unfamiliar with the Dustin Hoffman (et al.) movie “Marathon Man”.
Today’s Crankshaft
Emily Mathews: WHY DID YOU IMPERSONATE ME FOR A WHOLE DAY, AMELIA!?
Amelia Mathews: Because why the fuck not?
It’s odd how our brains work sometimes. Does the following happen to anybody else? It’s gotten more noticeable as I’ve gotten older.
This morning, I thought of a coworker I shared a cubicle with 35 years ago. He was a huge Notre Dame fan, and we worked side-by-side for over two years. His name should be easy to remember, but for the life of me, I could not think of it. Later on, after a meeting, I returned to my office. A split second after I sat down, his name popped into my head. Just like that. I wasn’t even trying to think of it. Isn’t that weird?
It’s like my brain fired off one of those pneumatic tube capsules to my deep memory. It just took the deep memory a while to find it in the archives.
Brain: Here’s that name you wanted.
My brother, who works with computers, jokes my processor is slowing down. 🙄
I wrote something similar once. “The other day I was trying to remember the name of a college hangout from decades ago. I said it was something like ‘Thirsty Turtle.’ I remembered later it was Purple Porpoise. I couldn’t remember the name, but I remembered Adjective Marine Animal, and also that it was alliterative. That helped my brain find the right answer. I figure this is just how your brain works when you get older. Your mind can’t make the direct connections it used to, and you have to take roundabout paths to find pieces of information.”
Oh, wow. What a coincidence. I commented about the same issue in the discussion of that blog. I even used the same “processor slowing down” quote from my brother. Holy déjà vu, Batman. I’m living in the past.
I’ve been informed the inability to remember the right name is called “lethonomia”.
With me, it always seems to be a name that should be easily remembered. Recent examples like Drew Carey, Pete Rose, Phil Collins, or Denny (the fella who worked in the same cubicle with me for 40 hours a week for two and a half years). It’s just bizarre how some time later the name pops into my mind while not even trying to recall it anymore.
It’s funny how the human mind works, and how little science actually knows about that.
I often think about colorblindness, because it’s a useful metaphor for the failings of the human mind. I’m not colorblind – that “identify the number” test was always the easiest part of my eye exams – but i know people who are. And it gave me insight into what life is like for such people. My mind percieves information that they simply can’t. I can look at a Mexican-themed food label, and appreciate what the red and green colors mean. People with red-green colorblindness don’t even see this. It’s a blind spot to them.
Another example: our pets can percieve way more information from scent than humans can. Humans can understand food ingredients, flowers, death, “that reeks” and “who farted?” But that’s about it. Common dogs and cats can gather all kinds of information from scents. They can identify friendly or unfriendly lifeforms. I daresay that scents are like names to them. It”s a type of information humans can’t percieve the existence of.
Today’s Crankshaft
Skip: Since you fooled me, Ameila, You’re going have to do all of the work that I was gonna do and nobody is helping you.
Which could have been the actual joke.
Quite often when reading TB’s blogs, I fail to understand his point for all his embellishment and unnecessary prose. Sometimes I simply lose interest. Just for giggles, I asked ChatGPT to write TB’s ‘Match to Flame 219’ blog in a simpler and more conversational tone. Here’s what I received.
Much easier to read than TB’s verbose mode, don’t you think?
A briefer version:
Oh, God, yes. Unlike Tom Batiuk, artificial intelligence has some concept of what “the point” is, and the programming to realize that getting to it is a sign of good writing
he’s like Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda: he knows big words but doesn’t use them correctly
Let’s hear Wanda and Otto in their own words:
So…Emily and Gothily fraudulently faked their identities and illegally recorded Skip in order to get an unpaid job at a “newspaper” that covers up stories (the Burnings) and otherwise publishes just puff piece “interviews” with local egomaniac Batton Thomas? What’s their first assignment going to be?
“Here’s our autobiography! It’s called ‘A Million Little Pieces’!”
They really did set those fires, didn’t they? Once in a position of power, no matter how small–the REAL Burnings will begin. Civilization will fall. When the mobs come to find them, they’ll throw away the white and black shirts and wear red and green sweaters and the morons of Centerville will say :”You strangers must be new round these parts! Seen any blond girls with your hairstyles in town?” They’ll cackle with cruel delight as half the female population is lynched.
“As planned,” hisses Lillian, removing her false skin to reveal the KillBot underneath.
A “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” reference, TB? That’s the lowest form of humor…
Today’s The Strip Formerly Known As Crankshaft
Apparently, in the Batiukverse, writing for a newspaper is like working on a essay for high school
Banana Jr. 6000: All snark aside, and being totally objective about it, I seriously believe BatYam is one of the worst writers and storytellers I have ever seen. In his prime, he was pretty damn good at delivering some semblance of a snappy, light gag every day. It was his niche, and he had a knack for it. Then he decided to go in a different direction and so forth, and it was IMMEDIATELY obvious how much he sucked at it. And he never got any better at it, either.
Was there EVER a “dramatic” FW story arc that delivered ANY kind of genuine twist or real surprise? When Lisa revealed she was pregnant, it was painfully obvious she’d have the baby and surrender it for adoption. When Boy Lisa began searching for his birth mother, it was painfully obvious it’d be Lisa. When Lisa got the cancer, it was painfully obvious she’d die. And by “painfully obvious”, I mean by the second or third panel of the first Monday strip. Like the Zanzibar arc. I didn’t need to look ahead to know the chimp did it.
And just on a purely compositional and grammatical level, how many times did he crank out some oddly-worded, peculiar turn of phrase? It had to have been hundreds, if not thousands. Awkward, clunky dialog, weird slang no one uses, it was frequently a big babbling mess. I don’t care how many Pulitzer nominations he’s collected, the guy couldn’t write his way out of a soggy paper lunch bag, even if it was perforated.
And he proudly brags how he sits on his scripts for 11 months (not a year! That’d be WEIRD) without rewriting them at all, and how he has no editor. Yeah, no shit you don’t. You also don’t have Mommy serving you cookies every hour just because she’s washing the dishes every time you show her.
Is Tom on the spectrum? Who cares? Is Tom senile, and trapped in an eternal 1962? (shrugs) My lack-of-editor has no comment. (I fired her) (WHY does no one want to draw my amazing, prize-unwinning creative effort any more?! It can’t be because of me!) (AYERS! It’s a Lorain Ohio house, and you drew a SHINGLE wrong! DO IT AGAIN)
I don’t have an editor either. And I don’t think this post proves that’s a good thing.
Oh, I completely agree. Batiuk shifted away from his strengths, and went all-in on his weaknesses. And nobody told him to stop. It’s as if the Spin Doctors made 20 more albums just like Turn It Upside Down.
In fairness, that was known right from the initial story. After Saint Lisa gave Boy Lisa up for adoption, it was shown that the Fairgoods adopted him that same week, so we the readers ALWAYS knew about it. The only “real” question was whether or not they’d be reunited before Saint Lisa became Dead Saint Lisa, but… really, the other option would be too dark and depressing for even Batiuk to do to his characters, quite frankly.