What kind of insane irony is it, that just days after I carefully copy pasted Batton’s head onto George Keesterman’s body so he could sit in a booth at Dale Evans, we’re treated to Batton being served by Angie the waitress in the same guacamole shit green booth?
I can’t even call Batiuk and Davis evil stalking hacks for this. Because knowing both their work cycles, this obnoxiously autobiographical arc was written over a year ago and pasted together weeks if not months ago.
Instead I can only attribute this to some sort of terrifying Nietzschean ‘He Who Fights Monsters’ scenario where I’ve stared into the abyss for so long I’m being sucked into the very mindset of the monster I have come to slay.
Strange as it may seem, I do believe that Dan Davis, the copy pasta master, does put more effort into Crankshaft than the other strip he supposedly ‘draws’. This is out of pure necessity. Look at today’s strip, he had to find all those backgrounds to trace and paste together. He had to attempt to smoosh Batton and Skip into a panel with Angie that was originally drawn for the normal Dale Evans trio.
The two tone voids of Garfield these days can be generated like a sticker book with ‘fill in the blank’ word bubbles, and no one will ever bat an eye if the exact same dog drawing is used three panels in a row.
Heck, are people even going to notice if he doesn’t change a thing from panel to panel? It’s for comedic effect, not laziness. Promise.
But you know what? It could be worse. It could be so much worse. At least this copy pasted line art is coherent enough.
Of course we all know 9 Chickweed Lane has become nothing but a badly scribbled humiliation fetish, with cheap computer gradient backgrounds. But today it seems the first panel was so graphic that a giant misshapen blob of a digitally painted grand piano lid was necessary to conceal the depravity.
We could also be poor georgekatkins commenting over at The Daily Trail, where the lovingly traced beauty of The Lost Forest of Mark Trail has been taken over by gaping maws, jagged black lines, and insufferable hipster hair.
Makes you long for the days of badly proportioned 60 year old panels clumsily traced by the similarly artistically inept ‘artist’ from the opposite side of the political horseshoe.
And really nothing these days compares to the drunkenly scribbled nightmare of Gil Thorp. The ‘artistic’ team behind that strip, having tired of trying to shock their readers with abortions, lesbians, non-binary bulimics, and hijabs, has taken to horrifying their hatedom with some of the most hideous and nonsensical art I’ve ever seen.
How the commenting team over at This Week in Milford manages to even understand what is supposed to be happening is beyond me. We thought trying to tell the endless army of bland Batiuk blondes apart was bad? Try imagining a human name to go with these eldritch abominations!
Maybe they should all take a page out of Mopped up Thorp and simply rewrite the strip entirely.
Infinitely funnier. Great job MopMan!
Son of Stuck Funky 
ComicBookHarriet,
Compare *Pearls Before Swine* to Crankshaft. Pastis has done his own copy and paste for years. But he manages to include funny plots, and clever writing. Tom could learn. Tom could try harder.
Yay, I’m honored to have my strip featured here! My only question is, when can I expect my royalties check?
Sure thing, MopMan. You are definitely entitled to a fair portion of everything I get from today’s post.
Not sure how I can send you a check for 20% of my smug self-satisfaction, and 15% of my feelings of parasocial camaraderie. But we’ll figure it out.
XKCD is a worthwhile comic, and it’s literally stick figures.
Funky Winkerbean was a reasonably funny comic once, and at the time that was true, it was drawn by Tom Batiuk, who — I’m sorry — was marginally talented as an artist at best.
Of course, a whole extra dimension can be added if excellent writing is combined with excellent art, a la Walt Kelly or Bill Watterson. But a well-written comic with serviceable art? I’ll be there for it.
I love XKCD, and also Allie Brosh. Both do stick figure art, but they manage to capture real human feelings. Especially Allie Brosh. Her writing about depression is amazing.
Wow! Thanks for Allie Brosh! I’d never heard of her. I just read this:
https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/
WOW. I wouldn’t call that art “stick figures.” There’s more perspective than Davis can scrape (look at any time Pam & Ed are in a car–even Cozy Coupes ain’t that small). Her version of herself as a weird kid looks totally feral, as is fitting for the story. You can tell the emotions from it, despite not having Tom describe them and his molecules.
It reminds me of the 80s, when I bought a giant art comic. It had a minicomic stapled inside, thematically both in the issue and outside of it. Just scribbles of cats and mice. A few pages in, and I was hooked. I ordered every available back issue, despite my “part time minimum wage gas station slob” employment status. A note came saying that all they had was a store-damaged copy of one of the early issues. It looked like they’d used it as a skateboard. And a refund check for the 2 issues they didn’t have! It was signed by the EDITOR, the same guy who wrote that minicomic.
Art fuckin’ Spiegelman. The magazine was “RAW”. The comic was “Maus.”
I’d love to know what Tom thinks about the cartoonists who do win the Pulitzer. We know that he thinks Schulz is “over-rated,” but he only won an HONORARY Pulitzer!
Guess I have to read a lot of Brosh now! Click that link, and compare it to Tom’s nostalgic reverie about his nonexistant DC comics career this week. Writing beats art. As I saw in “The World’s Worst Comics,” a funny 90s comic book that talked about “Skateman.” “But it has Neal Adams art!” “Yes, but you can put a pink bow on a pile of manure, and it’s still going to stink.”
Of course, the art is important. But if the art is more important than the writing, explain why after 20 years one of the funniest strips online is “Dinosaur Comics.” It’s just clip art!
If any of you have recommendations for strips, I’d be happy to hear them.
Brosh has a couple of books out as well.
Hyperbole And A Half (2013): Best Sellers Rank: #15,222 in Books
Solutions And Other Problems (2020): Best Sellers Rank: #194,982 in Books
The Complete Funky Winkerbean, Volume 14 (six weeks ago): Best Sellers Rank: #760,927 in Books
Bill:
If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend the new documentary about Art Spiegelman, “Disaster Is My Muse.”
(Give yourself a gold star if you can figure out why I laughed at the sight of a Spiegelman cartoon showing himself in a Superman uniform with the boast of “It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s boring.”)
While Summer Moore will one day write a book, Spiegelman’s daughter Nadja has already seen a memoir published in *I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This.*
I recommend that as well.
There’s also Dinosaur Comics, which has used the same exact six panels of clip art for over twenty years running. (And whose writer is getting jobs from Marvel and DC now as well. Don’t tell Tom!) Technically, the art may take even less effort than Dan Davis puts into any given strip, but the writing is on a whole different level than anything Batiuk could ever think about doing. (Even though almost every strip is self-contained.)
In my list of items which I dislike from Tom Batiuk’s work, the art content – post Act I at least – is the last thing I’ll cite.
Once Tom stopped with the abominations like the beady eyes, having both of them peer through one lens of glasses, the cyclops glasses, Krazy’s eyes falling below his nostrils and his incredibly misshapen skull if you were to remove the hat, and so on, it was fine. Late Act II through like 2012 or whatever was fine. Current day Crankshaft is relatively fine. Lazy copies and spider cobwebs everywhere, sure, but it’s basically fine. It beats the hell out of anything from Crock or whatever Mell Lazarus has ever drawn, I’ll say that much.
Lazarus’ artwork was certainly not impressive, but I did think it served his humor well. TB’s did at one time as well, but it really began to stray from serving his gags when he and Ayers started moving the artwork closer to what John Byrne did in his guest artist stints. Byrne’s artwork does not serve humor well, which I suppose was just as well as TB began to write gags less and Les often.
On the subject of Mell Lazarus… he once got to live out what was surely a TB fantasy: hosting a fictional comic book awards ceremony on Bob Newhart’s short-lived early 90s sitcom Bob.
A murder’s row of comic book legend gust stars… Jack Kirby! Sergio Aragonés! Bob Kane!
Sergio Aragones was also a voice in a comic book-themed episode of Futurama. Fry makes a comic book and gets feedback on it. A skippable episode, unless you’re the kind of person who would read this blog.
They probably call it a clever shortcut.
If you do a search for the Gil Thorpe artist, you’ll find that she’s very capable of doing good art.
I suspect the reason she doesn’t draw Gil Thorpe well is because nearly everyone working on a comic strip has come to the conclusion that the only people who read comic strips are reading them to criticize them. “If I draw it poorly, I get more comments!”
I will now recap Tom’s ultra-fascinato story of how he was potty trained.
My 3 sisters and I took my mom to her 92nd birthday dinner! Our waiter was kind and probably eastern European from his slight accent, but clearly he was always thinking of something else; possibly he was Ukrainian and had bigger worries. My mother is so Irish that she’s named “Mary Louise” and always thought, in her 1930s childhood in Fall River Mass, where the Lizzie Borden things happened and my grandfather once did a prank in Lizzie’s old house involving chicken blood and an ax, Mom thought every kid in the greater Boston area had a grandfather and his brothers who had crates of rifles in their basements to smuggle to the IRA, and she ordered the cod.
That’s all true. Is there a point in that random non-story where you said, “WHAT? GO BACK! Who CARES about the cod?!” I would hope so. Is there any point in Tom’s Origin Story where you said, “OOH, tell me more about ALPHABETIZING!”
Tom can’t write shit. Or, only writes shit. We really don’t need any detail he gives us, and it’s a COMIC STRIP, the literary format with the least amount of words, and the greatest amount of images. Delivered with the show-also-tell velocity of “Maus,” it’s a horrifying but ultimately inspiring masterpiece. Batton and Skip and floundering word zeppelins? It’s some flabby old man talking to some senile fart about nothing. Narrative drive is for SUCKERS!
Given his expression, I guess we tipped our waiter well. Then, me readed encyclopedia, read about KOOMIIIX in KLEEEEVELAND, naught else in this mad world matters now
Today’s Boring Crankshaft
Day 4 of the Most Boring Interview, Ever (2025 Edition)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
At least today we get a classic moment of TB/Batton completely discombobulated storytelling… yesterday’s “Superman was created down the street from where I live?!” bit actually made some sense. But this?
Scholastic published a program on CD-ROM that did just that. Perhaps Davis is putting together Garfield these days on a Packard Bell?
Or maybe he’s moved into the 2000s and is running the Flash program that used to be on the Garfield website…
AMAZING find, BtS!
And now that AI can do fairly advanced coding, Davis can create a similar interface, reducing his time spent on each daily strip from 15 minutes to 5!
And you wouldn’t believe how much it would speed up Harriet and I’s work!
While those aren’t my photos, I actually do own that CD-ROM. I expect it is in the attic next to my copy of Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego?
Hey, did you guys know that when I was little, I really liked the book “Go, Dog, Go!”?
Pretty moving, huh? I’m just indulging you, because I know you care a whole lot about what I liked to read when I was a kid.
And get this! When I was a little older, I read “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Multiple times!
WOW, am I unique or WHAT? I know, I know, you’re simultaneously gasping in awe at my fast-moving, thrilling “secret origin” story and reaching for a tissue because you’re so affected by this list of print media I consumed as a child.
But it gets better! I will be illustrating the above thrilling revelations with a poorly-drawn talking-head illustration of an avatar that looks a little like me.
What’s that you say? Actually illustrate myself reading the above-mentioned books and reacting to them? ARE YOU MAD, SIR? HAVE YOU TAKEN LEAVE OF YOUR SENSES?
Yes, but if you were Batton Thomas, what you loved about “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” might not have been the fantasy world, the talking animals, or the children who become kings and queens of a magical country.
It might have been the copyright notice, the ISBN, or the UPC on the back cover.
(Seriously, in the last two strips, the guy has talked about putting encyclopedia books into alphabetical order and seeing the Comics Code Authority seal on a comic book.)
Remember, Batiuk was thrilled that he could use the genuine Flash Gordon font in his reprint book. That’s a good example of what engages him.
He’s hyper-fixated on all the wrong things. But people who are like this (such as myself) tend to realize this about themselves. What’s really telling about this week’s strips is how Skip is sitting there with a huge smile on his face, eagerly gobbling up every word of this drivel. When it’s of no interest to anyone, and useless to his task of writing a newspaper interview.
The question that occurs to me is “Who among his readers will even notice that he used the Flash Gordon font?” In my own stuff I tend to fix things that bother me, but that’s because I think it might potentially bother others.
I can’t imagine getting bothered by an “incorrect” typeface. (Logo is something different.) Is it legible? That’s all it needs to be.
@beckoningchasm Batiuk’s trying to imitate the style of comic books, but there’s nothing about his work that benefits from that. He just does it because he’s obsessed with comic books. Batiuk’s not even good at things comic books do well. Like having a brisk pace, a fun tone, and clever artwork. Not even after he hired real comic book artists to work on his strip.
Today’s Boring Crankshaft
Day 5 of the Most Boring Interview, Ever (2025 Edition)
This feels it’s gonna drag out for another week
“I liked comic books as a kid and I wanted to make my own.” That’s the entire week right there.
New TB post yesterday. He talks about how he switched his characters from being losers to winners, using a handful of examples–including this baffling item: “Crazy Harry getting riffed by the post office,”
Did he mean “fired”? Or did MST3K do an episode on Crazy Harry, and they invited some post office folks along?
RIF = Reduction In Force, i.e., downsizing. It is, surprisingly, an actual business euphemism. (Though perhaps Batiuk could stand to take a course in writing with clarity?)
He also opens with the phrase “I had built churches cathedrals on top of a lot of running themes and tropes that had served me very well but that I now continued to tear down and leave behind”. Ugh.
He compares his characters “losing” to Peanuts, but doesn’t seem to grasp the difference in scale. Charlie Brown might always pitch a losing game or get tricked into trying to kick the football, but those are very low-stakes losses. Batiuk’s idea of “lovable losers” means having Wally become a POW, return home, find out he’s being called back into service for a completely nonsensical reason, then get taken prisoner AGAIN and declared dead. Funky becoming an alcoholic, Lisa getting cancer due to gross medical malpractice, Bull getting CTE and killing himself. That’s not “lovable losers”, that’s just DEPRESSING. Act I had “lovable losers”; Les might get stuck climbing the rope or get shot down by every girl he asks out, but… those are pretty different than the atrocities Batiuk visited upon them in Acts II and III.
And then he decided to let them win… but they couldn’t just win, they had to win BIG. You can’t just land your dream job, you have to be the BIGGEST, MOST SUCCESSFUL, MOST ACCLAIMED writer in both comics AND Hollywood! It’s replacing one extreme with the other (and actually having both going on at the same time, really), and even when the characters “win”, they STILL seem utterly miserable. If even the characters can’t be happy in success, why should the readers feel happy for them?
Okay, rant over (for now).
He clearly doesn’t understand “character” at all. He seems to think in terms of “events.” Events are when Charlie Brown tries and fails to kick the football. Character is, in the case of Charlie Brown, the fact that his continuous failures don’t shake his determination to keep trying.
Your examples illustrate this perfectly, I think.
He also fails at the “lovable” part of it. Act I Les was reasonably sympathetic, if only because he was relatable. We all went through high school humiliations like being unpopular, unable to climb the rope, or getting shot down by girls. Les felt real to us, because we’d been in his shoes. But the more Les succeeded, the more insufferable he became. It felt like Batiuk was trying to redefine who he was, as if they guy who couldn’t climb had never existed.
Match to Fart (it’s the pumpernickel’s fault):
“(the ongoing story would be informed, of course, by the aforementioned great room incident. I waste nothing.),”
“Aforementioned” what incident? The church cathedrals? WTF are you talking about? There’s no “great room incident”! You wasted both my time and a period and parentheses to refer to something you didn’t talk about.
“a piece that was written sitting by a bay window in a coffee shop in Chapel Hill while waiting for my bus ride.”
Wow. Thanks. The whole story makes so much sense now–WAIT! What kind of coffee?! Did cars drive by, was one red?! Don’t leave us hanging, Damocles!
“In an artwork aside, which I’m intrusively inserting here since I don’t know where else to put it”
When’s that ever stopped you? None of your rambling “stories” are edited. You just tell us what kind of bread you ate, as if it mattered. Wait–Were you in the cafe on a Thursday, or was it a Wednesday, because I can’t go on never knowing! What was the weather like? On both Thu and Wed? When you say “cloudy,” do you mean “partially” or “mostly”? Cirrus or cumulus?
And, as always, it just stops. Not “ends,” but “stops,” like in a Python routine when they run out of jokes. Remember when he gave us a whole backstory about the milk he didn’t have for his cereal? If there ever really was a “Lisa’s Story” screenplay, I hope he posts it. Because, if he did
Sorry, ended now.),
There IS a screenplay for Lisa’s Story.
Well, okay, there’s a COVER for the screenplay of Lisa’s Story.
But it’s really, really good. Really! It says “Lisa’s Story” and “Written by Tom Batiuk” on it and uses 12 pt Courier New Font and everything! It looks real professional on white paper and there are hardly any typos on it at all (“based on the Pulitzer Prize nominated stry by Thomas M. Batiuk”) and you can tell it’s the cover of something really important and award-worthy.
Also available by Tom Batiuk: covers for the screenplays “Starbuck Jones” and “My Dinner With Batton”.
Movie tagline: “Never has pure evil been so DULL!! (This film has not been rated)”
(because that would require us to actually, y’know, watch the damned thing)
There was a snippet of the script’s dialog during the “Hemingway in a Toolshed/THE KILL FEE!!!” arc. Something like “CINDY: ‘No matter what, Lisa, I will always be your friend!’ (CARE BEAR STARE)” Even whatever drone who has to read Hallmark holiday scripts rolled their eyes.
Rifftrax wouldn’t touch that shit. Even the people who did “Manos” and “Birdemic” would pass. I may be alone in admitting I’m very possibly the only human alive who watched “Foodfight!” twice without being paid lawyer’s wages. (It was not so much a movie as it was a legal settlement, so there was likely some suit muttering to himself “Beachhouse, Chad! This is for the 2nd beachhouse!”) (I posted about it on my blog, where my unfortunate readers liked “The Swarm” and “Gymkata,” and they all reported not being able to watch more than 10 minutes of “Foodfight!”–it’s BRUTAL)
I imagine watching “Lust for Lisa” (that title being the only good joke that endless arc had) would be less interesting than waiting for the animated McArnold’s menu display to change.
Ah, yes, the “No matter what, I’ll always be your friend” bit. Followed up by Les smugly (even for Les) complimenting himself for “hitting it out of the park”. Which gets even worse when you realize it was something Cindy actually said to Lisa in an earlier strip. So Les was taking pride in something he didn’t even write, and which was so painfully trite that it wouldn’t have deserved the self-praise anyway.
Ultimately, the actual writer of the line was Batiuk himself… and Les’ satisfaction in “writing” it was Batiuk congratulating HIMSELF (even more so than the usual praise heaped upon Les). Yeah. Because that scene wasn’t nearly obnoxious enough without the context.
Anyhoo… I like to think Lisa’s Story would have spawned memes like “Finally, a WORSE love story than Twilight!”.
The “aforementioned” incident was in a previous Match to Flame, but he’s just copying and pasting his intros to the Complete Funky Winkerbean collections, without regard to the fact that he’s splitting them up into multiple columns. So he’ll reference something earlier in the same book intro, but which is now a blog post from, like, three weeks ago, and not bothering to re-edit the blog post to reflect this fact (or link to the previous post).
(The incident in question was when he was introduced to a service dog and, in typical Batiukian cluelessness, asked if it bites people.)
I’ve heard of RIF. I’ve never heard of ‘riff’ as a verb, though,
Eh, I’ve heard it used that way before. Probably not as common as Batiuk thinks, I guess.
Oh man, an MST3K of Crazy’s job at the Post Office might have rivaled the “Manos” The Hands Of Fate riff.
So, let’s look back at this week’s lessons, shall we?
MON: “I ate farty bread.”
TUE: “My coloring book was printed near the house where I farted!”
WED: “I put books in order.”
THU: “I read a comic that buttressed me. Buttressed me right up my CASE!”
FRI: “My best friend Butch has nothing to do with this.”
SAT: WHAT MAN CAN TELL THE COSMIC SECRETS TO COME?! WHO CAN DARE TO SAY WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS?! Tom: “I farted.”
“Clarity in Writing,” my white farty ass. Is there no meaningless detail he won’t leave in?
Today’s Crankshaft
This week is like the scene in Dragon Ball Z where Goku transforms into his SSJ3 (Super Saiyan 3) form except he takes 6 whole episodes to transform instead of five minutes
Actually, I think this week is very simple. When he was “newsworthy” he really loved doing those softball interviews where he could pre-submit answers and just talk about himself. He’s finally realized those days are gone. If he wants to be interviewed now, he has to do it himself. So he will. Over and over.
When GC cancelled comments on the political comics, I thought “Wow, with this country now, it probably became all death threats.”
3/22, from DonkeyKong1: “Here Billsplut. I have a drink for you. The fact that it has cyanide in it means absolutely nothing. lol”
This, over CRANKSHAFT.
I got a 3 month ban for suggesting that “Tommy” and “Tom” might be the same person. Think they’re going to do a damn thing about her? I flagged it, but likely the most they’ll do is remove a comment. Probably mine!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Batton Thomas Creator Of The Comic Strip Three O’Clock High already regale Skip Ethicsclass with the tale of how he tried (and failed) to get hired at Marvel and DC? Wouldn’t you tell this riveting story about what made you decide to become a cartoonist BEFORE you talk about your attempts to do just that? You know “this is what made me want this career”, “this is how I prepared for this career”, “this is how I attempted to achieve this career”, “this is how I got this job I’m known for”, “this is how I decided to throw away any goodwill I had among readers by chasing awards that I could never win”, “this is how the syndicate showed me the door but I totally chose to end the strip myself”… that sort of thing? Or am I just assuming a minimal level of competence in storytelling that’s obviously not present? (From Batton, Skip as an interviewer, and/or Batiuk himself?)