May Flowers

Boy, I am telling you I am glued to the edge of my seat watching ol’ Eugene buy flowers to decorate Lucy’s grave with. So absolutely glued that my ass has permanent crease, and my sciatic nerves have been half severed, leaving me as a six legged, part chair, abomination of wood, flesh, and agony hopping around the house on pins and needles.

If any of you notice the florist looks a little off, there’s a good reason. She’s copied from Burchett lines. Hence the tiny flat face on a big round head. Ah, the good old days of 2018.

In the Archive Dive, I’ve got a potential Chien I’d like to put to the jury.

She’s in pink. But that could be a colorist error.

Her hair is just like Chien’s.

But she’s not wearing a choker.

We don’t know of Chien ever taking acting classes, and it doesn’t seem to suit her personality or character.

Vote in the comments now! Chien or Naw.

Now…back to 1999

I am realizing that Act II was truly the high effort era of Funky Winkerbean. Where plot lines on arson mysteries, marital strife, cancer recoveries, and Star Wars could all interweave in the space of a single month.

And where Batiuk and Ayers weren’t afraid to confront their audience with the gruesome sight of a corpse burning for comedy.

Remember when Darin and Pete were originally pitching a serious sci-fi superhero strip to be run in the Scapegoatzette? Well now they’re just turning out gag-a-day three panel strips on whatever strikes their fancy. Kinda reminds you of the artistic trajectory of someone else.

The harm, Ally, is if a student hates the strips so much they’re driven by rage to do something drastic and destructive. Like start a fire.

Or start a blog.

But I would think that even the worst Star Wars adjacent media wouldn’t drive someone to go full Zodiac Killer. Then again, I haven’t watched The Acolyte yet.

Is it stupid that we’re given Pete and Darin as red herrings for this arson mystery? Yeah. Kinda. But, man, at least the Batiuk of 25 years ago trusted his readers enough to show-not tell-Ally’s suspicion. As an older sister myself, immediately suspecting your brother of arson with no evidence is the most real thing Ally has ever done.

But of course, it was Mooch.

I miss Mooch.

58 thoughts on “May Flowers”

  1. My vote is Chien Chien CHIEN!

    CS, 5/21:

    Angry man on phone: “Only said five times in 2 days?! Listen up, you penny-ante PUNK! Once you take money from the Wisteria Mob, it’s WISTERIA all the time! Unless you wanna sleep with the fishes in Lake Erie!” (slams phone down)

    Tomorrow, “Crankshaft” is renamed “Wisteria Hysteria!” It’s like “Marvin,” except with wisterias instead of doodies.

  2. And of course, Ally’s concerns point to Batiuk’s idiotic mommy issues.

  3. I vote for Chien; before this series, I’d have always voted for Chien, but I still am here.

    Did anyone else have a reader in school named “Mysterious Wisteria”?

  4. That 2018 strip is a great contrast to today’s strip. A young man trying to buy flowers for his first love interest is a wonderful thing. A 97-year-old man buying obscure flowers because they share the name of an ancient ballroom, for a long-dead woman who rejected him decades ago, is not. So, I have to disagree with the man in the last panel: yes, it does get old. It gets old well before you turn 30.

    Buying flowers to try and impress a seemingly unattainable woman gets old. Endlessly mourning a loss gets old. Maintaining high school grudges gets old. Acting out in class gets old. Endless fanboy squeeing over 1930s movies and 1970s comic books gets old. Which may be the central thing Tom Batiuk simply doesn’t understand. All the things he loves to depict aren’t cute now that his characters are all 50-plus. They’re signs of severe immaturity.

    1. They’re not realistic concerns nor do they advance the plot. Really being a quarter of an inch from reality would lead to the taxpayers finally getting the chicken-and-egg thing that explains why Big Walnut eats Westview’s lunch: they don’t punish their team for losing by voting down the school levy.

    2. Tom is what I call the Perpetual Victim. Literally nothing bad has ever happened to him his entire life. But like a toddler, it’s a war crime when everything doesn’t go his way 100% of the time, 100% NOW!

      What’s his trauma? A guy made fun of him reading comic books when he was 12? Bull dies a brain-damaged loser, and Les mocks him at his funeral, 50+ years later. Mom didn’t appreciate his prattling about comics, when she was working her damn fingers to the bone and he wanted cookies? Hates her, 60 years later. (While in the background, his emotionally distant Dad stares into space while holding a can of beer. Dad’s cool though!) Cindy/Mary Lou Sweetwater didn’t want to go to the prom with a needy weirdo? Susan and Marianne want to commit suicide over their lost love Les.

      Why do some people want to be the Perpetual Victim? They choose to live in a world where everyone hates them. They’re like a toddler who doesn’t get to eat a bowl of M&Ms in chocolate milk for breakfast. But they’re the victim.

      No one exists but him. Tom, I agree: Nobody loves you, everybody hates you, go out in back and eat worms.

      1. Considering Eugene rented a boat and rowed himself into the middle of a lake, you can add him to the list of Funkyverse residents who’ve attempted suicide over getting their widdwe heart bwoken. And considering what we’ve seen this week, he’d have a lot more dignity right now if he’d done it.

        If anyone’s the victim here, it’s Lucy. Eugene’s poor communication jerked her around as much as Lillian’s cruel hiding of the (one) letter did. But like Tom Batiuk’s precious Lisa, Lucy is just a prop so other characters can throw a lifelong pity party for themselves. It’s disgusting.

      2. He might as well be one of the Pattersons from FBORFW. Mike is asked to go on break to get it outta his system? He’s a bug and his girl’s a windshield!

    3. It gets deranged though. When did Eugene, if he even did, find out that his letter to Lucy was never delivered? Since he erroneously determined that she received it and decided not to marry him, (otherwise he wouldn’t have just left it at that) why was he so hung up on a woman he thinks rejected him? How many years did he live believing she had rejected him? How many years did he spend actively not moving on from a woman who he thought had moved on from him? I mean, it’s one thing to be hung up on an old relationship, but at some point you have to acknowledge reality. As it is, it’s as if he respects her decision to reject him, but does not respect HIS decision to prompt her to make that choice. He didn’t acknowledge the choice he made going with the whole stupid letter scheme in the first place.

      Thinking about the Cow Tools discussion we had recently, and things like Shaggy Dog jokes and getting too self-involved or indulgent in your jokes as a writer of a medium with a broad audience like a comic strip, I saw something weird about this plot.

      Batiuk does these sequences that could be darkly funny if he wasn’t hung up on his “1/4 inch from reality” kick – that they could be amusing if the reader just generally doesn’t have sympathy for his characters’ humanity, because they’re real enough to provoke that sympathy. A guy who sends a marriage proposal in the mail with the message that “if you never reply I’ll know that means you rejected me”, only for the letter to never be delivered, is darkly humorous. The idiot sets himself up to be screwed and he gets screwed. There’s Wally having his discharge paperwork messed up, leading to him having to go on another Tour of Duty, where things go real bad for him, isn’t really darkly humorous, but it’s the same principle. It’s a ridiculous premise that can’t be taken seriously, taken to its logical, absurd conclusion. Batiuk’s big problem is that he wants you to take it seriously. He doesn’t want you to see Eugene as an idiot.

      You know, if this sort of dark humor was his intent, where it’s increasingly absurd and ridiculous as he spends a day with Funky constantly dumping increasingly terrible news on him, later to reveal that it’s Funky’s birthday, it’d probably be the most effective humor he’s done in twenty years.

        1. Krankenschaaften doesn’t have on his standard Woody Hayes outfit? He’s got a fedora, a trenchcoat AND a bow-tie?? And he doesn’t have his usual scowl? What the hell is going on here??

          Excuse me, because this is the first time I’ve seen him wear something different!

      2. @Charles Well said. Batiuk has an additional problem: he’s a zealot. And zealots have no sense of humor, because they’re blind to their own absurdities or contradictions. He sees Eugene is some kind of noble Byronic hero, and can’t see how pathetic he is. Or that he, Lillian, and Lucy all contributed to this problem, through their own failures to act.

        The Funkyverse’s all-consuming obsession with comic books should be a source of humor, if only the occasional self-deprecation. But Batiuk is a zealot. So the war he keeps fighting for the dignity of comic books is DEADLY SERIOUS to him. Even though comic books have been acceptable mainstream entertainment for three and a half decades now.

        Ditto for all his Mary Sue characters. Nobody ever calls out Les, Funky, Pete, Crankshaft, Dinkle, Lillian or any of the others, even when they’re being an obvious jackass (in what is supposedly a realistic world). Their behavior is 100% correct at all times, and Batiuk will not tolerate the slightest suggestion otherwise. Not even from other characters. No interviewer has ever asked him such a question, even it’s a common topic to ask any content creator about unexpected audience reactions to their work. And other comic strip creators don’t shy away from such questions.

  5. I don’t have an opinion on the Chien-or-not question. But I will vote YES for that strip being one of Les Moore’s best lines.

    1. If Chien’s #1 Fan says it’s Chien, I believe him. I vote Chien, too.

  7. I vote naw. Or rather, I think TB originally did intend for the girl to be Chien but reconsidered after reading the gag and deciding acting class and begging Les for a hall pass didn’t suit her character. Then he slightly modified her outfit into some sort of waistcoat over t-shirt ensemble that Chein would never wear and called it a day (natch!). For all of TB’s faults as a writer, I recall Chien being a very consistently-written character throughout Act II.

    If Pete and Durwood didn’t get in a Jedi Joke about a Sith shopping at the Darth Mall (where everything is half off) then they deserve Ally’s suspicion and scorn.

    1. “Pass for acting class”… Now I get it. I had first understood it to mean that the student was asking for a written referral to join acting class. This made Les’ response meaner, but it didn’t seem out of character to me.

  8. CBH, you mean you don’t remember Chien’s sister Perra? A short-lived character, she and Sadie Summers were assumed to have left Westview after high school to do something not comic-book-related. Consequently, their eventual fates have never been discussed by any other character.

  9. I used to angrily hurl Act II FW strips into the fireplace all the time. You gotta be careful doing that, though, as the fumes are hazardous to breathe, and can cause terminal wryness. And you definitely don’t want that.

    2. Murania is almost an anagram for “Uranium.”

      Do you think someone worked from that, or is it just a happy coincidence like the Pigeon Sisters in The Odd Couple having the same names (Gwendolen and Cecily) as the heroines of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest?

      1. The underground empire Murania, an anagram for “Uranium,” was decidedly deliberate. 👍

  12. If any of you notice the florist looks a little off, there’s a good reason. She’s copied from Burchett lines. Hence the tiny flat face on a big round head. Ah, the good old days of 2018.

    Regarding the first panel, I didn’t know Buck Bedlow had a daughter. Did she play fullback for Big Walnut Tech? What a moose.

  13. Today’s Crankshaft

    (walks away for a minute and comes back to looking at the strip, pulls up a chair and falls asleep, this arc is dull)

    1. csroberto:

      I’ve referred to us snarkers on Crankshaft as “bitter exes.” People who loved Funky when it was new, and then just watched it turn into…whatever it is now. And, as far as I can tell, most of us are old. Like “I daresay, my good fellow! Hast one seen the tele-gram published in the Picayune-Intelligencer to-day? Appears to my eyes that President Taft hast gotten himself trapped in his bathtub–AGAIN! HAW HAW H–oww! The musket ball I took in the Spanish-American War is aching! Again.”

      But you’re 19. You’ve never lived in a world without a 9/11, or even Pop Tarts. Just curious, but how did you get into the Funkyverse?

      1. It all started in late 2019 when my newspaper replaced one of the sunday strips with Beetle Bailey, which led me to both the Comics Curmudgeon and the now defunct Dean’s Comic Booth, which led me to getting more interested in the Batiukverse after this Pearls Before Swine strip:

        Masky: So you’re gonna hold on to my hand or not? I’m on a deadline for your souls.

        Rat: YOU’RE OVER 8 FEET TALL! I HAVE TO STAND ON TOP OF TOON BOY’S *#&@ING HEAD!

        and also this strip that didn’t run because Stephan be a part of the “Lisa’s Story” controversy

        I think Funky’s “fatal disease” is referring to his alcoholism

        1. something I forgot to mention: I also got more interested in FW because of nuless.org (a site that contains strips like Big Nate, Calvin and Hobbes and Hägar the Horrible), which only contained the Funky Winkerbean strips from November 2006 to February 2012 and from June 2012 to September 2012

  15. On Tuesday I went to an event at the Akron Public Library and I saw Chuck Ayers there! I did not speak to him, although there was ample opportunity after the event. I guess I could have asked him about labyrinths.

    He only lives a few miles from me, and now that I know what he looks like, I may see him more often.

  16. 5/23:

    A WEEK of buildup, and we get this crap?

    Who cares about this, Tommy? The random readers of your strip that haven’t memorized every molecule of your lore that even you don’t remember? We obsessives who spent several days deciding if this was Eugene or Dinkle or any other fat-nosed old weirdo eternally living in the past that this strip is populated with? No one has any feelings for people you just drop into random arcs. Nothing arcs, about nothing.

    Tom, you write for you. And I’ll bet you blame your declining sales on….Who knows. That bully who laughed at you in middle school, probably.

    Sorry, but this is the song I identify with “Eugene.” Him, and his drunken skinhead friend. I picture him as Young Dinkle. Are you there, Eugene?

    https://youtu.be/PDUZrcdZ9_M

    2. The story is so badly conceived that knowing the lore wouldn’t help anyway. What does Eugene think happened? Does he think Lucy rejected his proposal, or does he know Lillian diverted it? Neither one makes him look good. He’s either pestering a woman who openly rejected him, or he’s pestering a woman rather than reaffirm his love for her.

      I’ve read real-life stories where people had to re-woo their spouse after the spouse had a major injury and couldn’t remember the relationship. In comparison, this story is goddam pathetic. It is not touching or poignant. It is stupid, and they deserve exactly what they got.

  18. So based on Lucy’s 1920 birth date, confirmed on her gravestone, we now know that it’s *still* canon that Lillian and Eugene are about 100 years old, presumably older. Wasn’t Lucy Lillian’s younger sister? And surely Eugene wasn’t *younger* than Lucy when they were courting.

    1. Basically, yes. I think Lillian and Eugene were the same age, and Lucy was younger. Ed Crankshaft was also in Lillian’s grade IIRC, which is consistent with the 1919 birth year I assigned him based on his baseball career. So all four characters are well over 100.

    2. I’m glad that you addressed this.

      Among the creator and its target audience alike, it seems that they all want the world to permanently remain in a past year. That whimsical longing isn’t incomprehensible in and of itself, but it is fully incompatible with a storyline that’s explicitly stated to not be fixed in time.

      At this point, I’m convinced that he knowingly puts concrete dates on things just to get people to talk about how wrong they are.

      1. You make me think of Ray Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven!” where it seems to be 1926 on the Red Planet for the Third Expedition.

        (Wally Wood did a great adaptation of it for EC.)

        If I have to have a permanent year, I’d like to be 1895. Tell the SOSFers why, Vincent Starrett:

        221b

        Here dwell together still two men of note
        Who never lived and so can never die:
        How very near they seem, yet how remote
        That age before the world went all awry.
        But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
        Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
        England is England yet, for all our fears—
        Only those things the heart believes are true.

        A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
        As night descends upon this fabled street:
        A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
        The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
        Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
        And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

        Doesn’t hurt that “eighteen ninety-five” is the year of “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.”

        1. I liked when Holmes would send a letter by the morning post and get a reply the same day in the afternoon post. Of course, the population of London was only about 5 million at that time.

        2. The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge took place in 1892. There is nothing about wisteria except the name of the place.

          Here is a quote: ““We are moving in exalted circles,” said he.

          The telegram was a list of names and addresses: “Lord Harringby, The Dingle; Sir George Ffolliott, Oxshott Towers; Mr. Hynes Hynes, J.P., Purdey Place; Mr. James Baker Williams, Forton Old Hall; Mr. Henderson, High Gable; Rev. Joshua Stone, Nether Walsling.””

          https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Last_Bow/The_Adventure_of_Wisteria_Lodge

    1. Unforgettable as Charles Halloran, the campaign manager for Judge Henry Harper in “Miracle on 34th Street,” who didn’t know a habeas from a corpus.

      And he was Bub O’Casey on “My Three Sons” before William Demarest came aboard as Uncle Charley.

  21. This may be just me and my hyperfixation on details. But when one of TB’s Prestige Arcs (aka “I’M RIGHT HERE, MR THE PULITZER!”) falls flat on its face, like this week’s “Hello Eugene” or “The Borings,” around midweek we get a comment from someone we’ve never seen before and never will see again praising how wonderful the arc is? From a commenter who has one comment, and it’s just that one? Followed by a group of other commenters we’ve never seen before and never will see again repeating praises of The Tom? Someone compared this drivel to Robert Fucking Browning. I know TB described Les as “Hemingway in a toolshed!” but it’s almost like he throws out an SOS to his buddies on MyFacebookagram or whatever he calls it to come to his defense.

    There seem to be 2 types of narcissist: The big stars who just don’t care what people think, and ones who just obsess over it. With little if any evidence, I think TB creates sock puppets, and then gets people to back him up–who all vanish instantly. Until the next Prestige Arc falls on its face.

  22. RE: Sat. 5/24’s Wisteria Lodge;

    Okay, now that ending got me to smile. Almost made the whole week worthwhile…almost. Of course, in real life no caretaker would remove flowers that had obviously been placed there just in the last day or two. At most cemeteries a weekly disposal would be considered a luxury.

    By the by, how short was Lucy? Judging from the distance between the pathway and her headstone, she must have stood about 2 1/2 feet tall and given Pauline Musters a run for her money. And why was Eugene shown walking from the pathway to her grave yesterday? A little consistency, if you don’t mind.

    1. A little consistency, if you don’t mind.

      Don’t-Care Dan can’t even keep the tractor same size from panel to panel. P1: “Hey Kids! It’s the Little Tykes Cemetery Tractor!” P2/3: “And when you grow up you can drive the full size one! You’re goddamn TEN, get a job already, you bum!”

      Maybe Lucy is 20 feet tall. Just because the Wisteria Ballroom was in Akron (and apparently racist, look it up and wish you hadn’t), doesn’t mean she wasn’t buried in Hong Kong or one of those places where stiffs are buried vertically. Maybe Akron does “sky burials.” Guy working the literal graveyard shift: “Sorry. Wisterias scare the vultures away.”

      1. My interpretation is that the cemetery has a standing order to remove anything Eugene puts on Lucy’s grave. And Eugene’s gifts are easy to identify, because nobody else on earth leaves wisterias on a grave. It wasn’t even a flower relevant to them in life, it was just the name of the stupid and long-extinct ballroom. Thank goodness they didn’t meet in Shaker Heights, or he’d be throwing salt and pepper on her grave.

  23. (In my last post I was referring to GC comments, not any here. Clarity in Writing!)

    5/24:

    So the moral of this story is… What? Eugene’s obsessive love for Lucy for 85 dang years was just garbage? True enough. Coulda picked the damn phone up, Eugene.

    The GC commenter who compared this to Robert Browning was close. It’s really Robert Burns:

    “O my Luve’s like a purplish wisteria,
    It fills me with an odd hysteria;
    O my Luve’s just like the trash is.
    On your tombstone the groundskeeper takes a whiz.”

  24. And here we are, ending it on the same stupid note we always get. Batiuk wants to wail about an uncaring world standing in the way of his love for Lucy but that’s just a load of nonsense. The groundskeeper sees wilting flowers and does what they pay him to do, no more and no less. Besides, Lucy’s force ghost probably saw him place them there anyway so it doesn’t matter how long they were there!!!!

  26. This is probably too long to post to GC, so…

    Tom really hates bullies! For those new to the Funkified Crankshaft:

    Bull Bushka was a high school bully to Tom, er, I mean Les. TB gave him CTE, had him drive his car off a cliff so his wife would get his life insurance, but she didn’t because it was an obvious suicide, so she died penniless, or didn’t, TB didn’t care about her after that, but he did spend AN ENTIRE WEEK of her not opening the envelope denying his claim, just to drag her pain out. We already had seen Bull (GET IT ITS ONE LETTER FROM “BULLY”!) groveling to Tom–um, Les begging forgiveness for his past sins from 60 years ago. Tom, er Les then spent AN ENTIRE WEEK mocking his death DURING THE FUNERAL.

    Also, Bull wore a football helmet so they could decapitate him and dissect his brain. His wife was then given the helmet by a guy who wanted to have sex with her.

    Ha ha! Funny gag-a-day strip!

    What’s Lena’s unforgivable crime? Her brownies and coffee are bad? Is rust belt Ohio such a desolate wasteland that they don’t have a Dunkins? But our “heroes” can brutally mock her to her face, like…bullies?

    Tom hates bullies. Unless they’re him.

    1. It’s almost as if Lena exists solely to set up Ed’s rude behavior. Lena, and any normal functional being, would know by now that gifts from these cretins aren’t a sign of endearment. Especially when they can’t even be bothered to remember her birthday month! But Lena dutifully performs the script, so Crankshaft can have his “funny” punchline. She looks methed-up in Panel 2. And in the last panel Andy and Mary side-eye Crankshaft, as if they’re somehow surprised at this behavior.

      Batiuk’s no theory of mind shows itself once again.

  27. Also, Bull wore a football helmet so they could decapitate him and dissect his brain. 

    Oh, don’t get me started on that.

    1. Oh, don’t get me started on that.

      I ain’t gonna stop you if you do!

      The best and worst times are when TB writes about stuff he knows nothing about, and has no desire to learn. Best: Anything about Hollywood! 1930s newsreel announcer voice: “The year is 1940! When movies were silent, and monkeys talked!”

      Worst: Anything about mental health issues, especially suicide. We’ve had 3 people (Susan, Marianne, Bull) decide that they can’t Live Without the Love of Les.

      Not sure how to count Crusading Lawyer Lisa, who literally rolled over to die when she saw the massive malpractice that killed her rather than fight it. “Doing nothing” is the greatest courage anyone can show in the Funkyverse.

      1. Bull’s death was a good example of Batiuk’s shallow ripped-from-the-headlines-but-never-read-the-story approach. It starts with a grain of truth: former NFL players who suffered from CTE have killed themselves, and donated their brains for study. But they don’t choose a cause of death that depends on head trauma! That would completely defeat their own purpose. On top of that, Bull wore a helmet, which would be more likely to keep him survive an auto accident. Which means he defeated both his own purposes!

        You could argue that Bull was so confused that he took this self-contradictory course of action. But the story never says that, or anything else. The story has nothing to say about Bull, except that his life was trivial compared to Les and Linda’s “suffering.” The local police reports his death as accident to cover up his suicide, for no coherent reason, and in violation of basic police procedures. Which means his desires were defeated a third way. We never find out if Bull at least got to donate his brain for research, because Batiuk didn’t think it was worth tying up.

        Then we found out Bull was giving money to the Dead Lisa Foundation, even though he and Linda were having financial problems. Les somehow didn’t even know this, or pretended he didn’t. Then, as we know, Linda and Les used the police’s lie to commit insurance fraud, Les made the funeral about himself, Bull’s own children couldn’t be bothered to attend, and Funky Winkerbean began the several-month process of handing Les a fucking Oscar.

        It was practically a humiliation conga for the only character in the Funkyverse who showed any growth in adulthood. And a final victory lap for the character who aggressively refused to grow up. Disgusting, disgusting story.

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