Well, at least Batton got something out of it. 🙂
Use this space to react to the Batton Thomas interview, or talk about something less excruciatingly boring. Again, I’ll do this bullet point style:
- Batton Thomas has now been talking for well over two hours, finally gets to the part where he gets the cartoonist job, and… skips over it. Absolutely stellar.
- Is this how Tom Batiuk thinks interviews are supposed to work? That they just let you drone on for hours and hours and hours about whatever you want? Highlighting Skip’s lack of journalism skills is belaboring the obvious at this point. But sheesh, he could try interjecting a question.
- It’s no wonder Tom Batiuk always gets ripped off in his syndicate contracts. Apparently he just signs whatever they mail him.
- Finally: have you looked at any other comic strips this week? Batiuk is being out-Batiuked all over the place right now.
Luann is doing a rerun about selling comic books door to door. Rex Morgan, M.D., has spent the last six weeks on a story where an unknown adult man thinks country singer Truck Tyler is his father. SPOILER ALERT: he’s not. Mary Worth is spending a week packing to go to New York to hang out with a 14-year-old. Who knows what Gil Thorp and Mark Trail are even about anymore.
It feels like every drama comic strip is trying to duplicate Batiuk’s lazy, tedious, self-indulgent, exposition-heavy, character-shilling, skip-over-anything-interesting writing style.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Any time I see a Metro Cleveland story that reads like a bad Funkyverse plot, I think of y’all…
https://fox8.com/video/ex-north-ridgeville-city-schools-teacher-sentenced-to-jail-for-stalking-ex-boyfriend-a-westlake-city-schools-teacher/10900485/
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 5 of Most Boring Interview, Ever (July 2025 Edition!)
At least there’s one more day of this shit with Boring Batton (i hope)
This sorry sort of mess makes me wonder why the medium is permitted to exist at all.
Yeah, that Rex Morgan thing really broke me. Who the hell approved that story? Why do the newspapers of America grant space for these tired old people to just drone on about whatever they want to? They’re not even trying to entertain anymore.
That list of current (for lack of a better term) storylines is pretty damning. It’s probably why i gave up on Comics Curmudgeon as well–there’s only so much you can derive from these things even second-hand with snark.
Is there hope for the medium? The promised renaissance of webcomics fizzled out. Commercially there’s no market, no audience, and only hobbyist creators.
At least Luann got a shot in the arm from Greg’s daughter’s involvement. That’s also pretty sad now that i think about it.
Something something Picard in Best of Both Worlds, wondering if the world is ending… “Turn the page.”
And even with his daughter lambasting an unsympathetic parody of the child she used to be, Luann lacks any real vitality. Time for the funnies to vanish.
Broadly, that’s true, but I think there are exceptions. Chris Onstad seems to be productive with his subscription-tiered Achewood access, and I’d bet he’s making good money (as he should).
But Achewood is, y’know, actually good. Like “people will pay actual money for it” good.
Meanwhile, I gave up on Comics Kingdom — I was willing to pay (largely for the great vintage strips, and my TB fix), but they made the site more unusable and more expensive so I gave it up and switched to the very very paltry “free” tier of GoComics. And one day they blocked my login and told me they’d send me a link for a new password, and despite half a dozen tries over a week and a search of my junk mail folder, they didn’t.
I’d say these two syndicators are stuck in 1998 Geocities-tier service, but in 1998, if you could stand the cursor animations, most Geocities sites actually worked. So they’re far worse, and getting worse with every iteration.
So it’s no wonder the strips are dying off; there’s nowhere to read them that doesn’t feel egregiously, aggressively hostile. Eventually the juice ain’t worth the squeeze any more.
And memo to Tom: Print newspapers ain’t coming back, and for someone who weeps buckets every day about the plight of Mother Earth, it’s weird how fixated you are on the energy-hogging throwaway daily newspapers.
Good, new comic strips do exist – they’re just all on the Internet now. You mentioned Achewood; there’s also Penny Arcade, Gunnerkrigg Court, Cyanide & Happiness, xkcd and plenty of others. They are all making money for their creators. Newspaper syndicates have no interest in them, and the feeling is mutual.
Ha, Achewood was the first one on my mind as well. I’m afraid i got tired of whatever Onstad was doing a long time ago, and the same with xkcd and even hark, a vagrant. I wish the various creators well (well, maybe not the xkcd guy) but the days and dreams of mass success are gone in most mediums, and this more than most. It is a bad sign when your medium stops being its own mass market (the public used to be really invested in strip storylines and artists were technical marvels back in the ~50s) and needs external validation by becoming a TV show, or a movie, or something else.
There is a process i noticed where a genre becomes a single character, such as the detective pulps being remembered only as The Shadow or perhaps Batman. It’s possible an entire medium will see the same process, and comics and their major strips become only remembered as the forgotten source of merchandizable IP characters. Hello Kitty never needed a show or a strip.
Batty talks a lot about artistic freedom and how contracts hold creators back from producing quality work. But that is BS, especially for Tom. He could have an online comics publishing house and create whatever he wants, no limitations. The fact that he doesn’t is proof he’s not capable of producing an interesting comic book.
Achewood is an incredible body of work, but I think Onstad was crushed by the success of The Great Outdoor Fight arc and was trapped thereafter. Every other new arc seemed like it wanted to try to surpass the grandeur of The Great Outdoor Fight and lost the plot, and the various one-offs didn’t resonate with the audience in the same way.
Still, I think that Onstad had the self-awareness to know when to pull the plug.
The excuse used is that some old dude would complain if the tripe vanished. To that, I would answer that the world got along just fine after they stopped making crap like Phantom Empire.
What’s left of newspaper readership must demand comic strips. Cutting the comics entirely would be an easy choice for contracting newspapers if it had little repercussion.
Personally, while it is sad to see the medium in such a diminished state, I would rather see it continue on the possibility that new blood produces something worthwhile (as it occasionally has in the past decade) than to confine it entirely to memories. It is hard to see a future for the medium, but I’m not someone who sees a dim future to be better than none at all.
PJ is right. But newspapers are far too sensitive to that kind of feedback. The number of responses to newspaper’s “comics page polls” is trivial. In the 1980s, I remember such events getting thousands of votes.
Newspaper comics are a vestigial organ of a vestigial organ. Sooner or later, newspapers will figure out that they really don’t need a comics page at all. Or they can limit it to just the top-shelf classics. But by the time that happens, no one will be reading any part of the newspaper. So the comics page will probably persist as long as newspapers do. Which is good news for people like Batiuk and Moy. As long as they can keep filling space, they can keep making money.
That is largely the point I was trying to make, but I don’t think the papers are sensitive, the quality of comic strips is simply not relevant to the business now. The folks who own newspapers largely don’t know how to make them viable long-term, but they have mostly figured what they can and cannot successfully cut as they squeeze what value is left out of their banners. Comic strips are cheap content that continues to have some reader demand regardless of the quality, and they persist even as other content continues to be cut or downsized across the industry. At worst, they are cut at the same rate as other aspects of the papers. This is indeed good news for aging creators and even for younger writers and artists who find have been able to use legacy strips as low-effort side income (if this is not what the Gil Thorp team is currently doing… then yikes!), at least for a few more years.
I don’t, however, despair this sad state of affairs to the point of refusing to enjoy the strips that are worth reading. There is no longer a lofty place in pop culture for the comic strip, but I think there will continue to be a place.
I think the “package deal” nature of comic strip content helps prop it up. You want Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin & Hobbes? Okay, but you have to buy all this other shit too. The newspapers figure they might as well use it.
The real irritation is that people think these people are trying.
@BJ6K–the “package deal” is probably what has been going on here already for too long, much as the cable package floats a lot of cable channels that no one watches anymore. Another similarity is that eventually people are going to cut the cord, and only want to pay for the one or two things they actually want.
And as a famous investor apparently says, when the tide goes out, you see who was not wearing any pants.
You can see cable’s thinking, though. It takes a lot of infrastructure to run cable into every house in town, so they have to earn it back over time through subscription fees. Content syndicates have no such genuine reason to demand bulk purchases. They do it because they’re the only game in town.
BJ6000,
Mary Worth has a slightly hidden bit of humor. She asked (I guess) her boyfriend Jeff, if he would go with her to New York. His answer, “Ugh, Mary! These 2 young guys need me, an old man, to help them move. I would much rather do that than go with you to New York. I can be romantically frustrated here and save me some money.”
Yeah, today’s strip really fueled the “Mary is Jeff’s beard” theory. Because this is the lamest cop-out I’ve ever seen. First, who even are “Adrian and Scott”? They sound like another gay couple. Second, Jeff is about 60 years old; old people are not so useful moving heavy objects. Third, he’s a doctor who owns a pleasure boat, so he’s got plenty of money to hire movers. Fourth, this is a cross-country trip to stay at Mary’s friend’s house; another person can’t just invite themselves along. My only question is why Jeff and Mary (and the strip) even bothered with this charade, since no other characters are there to watch it.
Karen Moy has her own level of Batiuk. This might be the day I read MW COMMENTS.
who even are “Adrian and Scott”?
Adrian is Jeff Cory’s daughter who hasn’t appeared since 2011, and Scott is Adrian’s husband who is a cop (who also hasn’t appeared since 2011), who was seriously injured in a shootout in 2009
You are truly an encyclopedia of comics knowledge.
Being familiar with the original Olive story, I was thinking that Jeff would get in trouble and Olive would save him. Ah well, at least no Wilbur for awhile, I hope!
Who knows what Gil Thorp and Mark Trail are even about anymore.
the current storyline in Gil Thorp is that Mimi is taking Keri and Jami with her to Berlin on vacation (which Keri and Jami do not want to go and want to stay home for the summer)
while in Mark Trail, the titular character’s dad (Mark “Happy” Trail III, AKA James Allen era Mark Trail) comes to Mark’s home to talk about a new golf course that’s being made, while Mark is concerned about the pollution, all of a sudden Happy Trail decides to rope Mark, Cherry and Rusty along with him, much to Mark’s dismay
I believe you. Gil Thorp looks like a rough draft of itself, and Jules Rivera’s style fits Mark Trail like a concrete glove.
As @csroberto2854 says, Mark “Happy” Trail III has returned to the strip. Instead of letting Mark, Cherry, et al. know he’s coming by calling or texting ahead, like a Batiuk character, Happy shows up unannounced.
Surprise, Marky!!!
As I’ve stated in the comments of ‘The Daily Trail’ blog, I think Rivera is more interested in surfing than creating a decent comic strip. The drawing is sketchy, the jokes are out of place and painfully unfunny. The strip has become as campy as hell. Rivera’s target audience appears to be middle school-aged children.
Joolz: All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz– and I’m fine…
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Whatever happened to that Mary Worth parody you and @SorialPromise were discussing several weeks ago?
Does Gil Thorpe still have in its cast a teenager whose favorite writer is Kurt Vonnegut, jr? Because that’s where I left it for being wildly, ridiculously implausible.. Teenagers do not read Vonnegut anymore.
Banana Jr. 6000 wrote: “It feels like every drama comic strip is trying to duplicate Batiuk’s lazy, tedious, self-indulgent, exposition-heavy, character-shilling, skip-over-anything-interesting writing style.”
I’m guessing at this point, the payscale for most comic strip activity has gotten to the point that if you have any drawing and storytelling talent at all … you find some other medium in which to work.
Maybe a few legacy properties such as Garfield or Family Circus still make money on a combination of merchandising, book reprints, and licencing. But the actual comic strip itself may be the least important component of the current financial enterprise. It essentially serves as a daily reminder to the public of the property’s existence. If it manages that, mission accomplished.
Other strips carry on almost as a retirement hobby for aging writers and/or illustrators. Keeping the strip going isn’t enough to make anything resembling a living, of course … but on the other hand, as long as they can hit a deadline, no one’s expecting then to deliver anything beyond marginally competent filler. (If that.) So what the heck … it keeps ’em busy and it adds a nice boost to their Social Security income.
But anyone with REAL talent?
They’ve self-selected out of the comic strip biz. They’ll find other storytelling avenues that actually have a hope of some sort of career path.
Look at Norm Feuti. He shut down the moderately successful Retail after about 15 years … because it just wasn’t really successful enough to continue with. And I’d argue it was a fair bit more successful than at least 50% of the comic strips that were going at the time.
The upshot of all this? The only people writing comic strips now — aside from a very few people who are talented and can also AFFORD to work in a medium where you can’t make a living — are those without the talent to make it in any other medium. Which is why you get so much comic strip work that is “lazy, tedious, self-indulgent, exposition-heavy” schlock….
That’s my theory, anyway. Haven’t really seen anything out there yet that disproves it!
And let’s remember that Michael Crichton must have gotten the idea of having dinosaurs roam the landscape from watching the old soaks at the National Cartoonists Society be Goldwater Nation.
OK, a belated comment on the past week: 1) Never heard of any other hotel? a) Never heard of the Plaza or the Waldorf-Astoria? How about: “Well, the only hotels in New York I’d ever heard of were the Plaza and the Waldorf, and I knew they were outside my budget…” b) Never heard of Hilton or Holiday Inn? They were in Manhattan in those days. 2) THERE WAS NEVER A HOWARD JOHNSON’S HOTEL IN MANHATTAN! That was only a restaurant, legendary for its terrible service. I went there in the early aughts when I briefly lived there, along with a visiting friend, eager to have the full retro experience…which we did, as we waited at least 20 minutes for a waitress even to come to our table to offer coffee, at which point we bailed. Tom has seen a lot of photos of that legendary Times Square restaurant and assumed that the building above must have been a hotel. Nope. Fun fact: in the same building, around the corner, up a very steep and narrow stairway, was one of the last porno theaters in Times Square – in this case, a gay one. Now THAT would be a fun story… “I fondly remembered the Bijou back home in Ohio, so of course I wanted to see what was playing at this Bijou. I thought BOYS IN THE SAND was that movie with Paula Prentiss…it turned out to be…different….”
I hate to fall into the “wistful nostalgia about New York City” trap, but there was indeed a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Midtown Manhattan (8th Ave. and 51st St.) back in the ’60s and ’70s. One of my fondest childhood memories (see, there I go) was staying there with my parents during our 1965 visit to the New York World’s Fair, where I walked through the Sinclair Dinoland exhibit nine times.
No, I did not get fried clams at the restaurant.
Nah, you’re good. You aren’t writing a comic strip, you are not trying to puff yourself up. Batty could have made his interview story interesting, but instead he focuses on the mundane stuff.
Too bad The Muppet Show hadn’t been created yet. That show would have taught him the names of two New York hotels.
I should have Pbotoshop-parodied that too. And the one about Darin finding out who his birth mother was.
Today, we see what drives him: a refusal to see when he’s being a jerk. He’s not a selfish and oafish brat who saw his mother as a servant, she hated good things for no reason.
A refusal to see when he’s being a jerk.
Or possibly, an inability.
Or a bit of both. He sure can’t see when other people find him hard to take. He tends to whimper about being bullied when called out on being insufferable or insensitive.
RE: The Sat. 7/19 ‘Shaft:
“Years later, that struggling young rock musician turned out to be none other than the singer/songwriter of the million-selling 1975 hit ‘Chevy Van,’ Mr. Sammy Johns. And now you know…the Rest of the Story!”
Regarding the 7/19 strip, nice thesaurus work Batty. My English teacher corrected one of my papers with similar words many years ago. I then went to the local HoJo’s and drowned my sorrows in a butterscotch sundae. I haven’t been able to find that flavor since, modern butterscotch just tastes different.
07/19 Crankshaft is a perfectly Batiukian cap to the week. The text is as if it were lifted straight from one of his FW forewords, prolix with superfluous language that obfuscates the implied intent of the statement, and makes an overall presentation of his action that he wants to put in public while seemingly completely ignorant of how it makes him look like an asshole.
“A barely perceptible look crossed his face like the nictitating membrane in a bird’s eye” is a sentence that any editor would immediately extricate from a comic strip panel, and it’s likely exactly the kind of thing that an editor cut from his strip many years ago, and Tom still holds a grudge over it.
I can empathize with the neighbor’s envy. “That putz is going to have a job and be paid for his work, and I can’t earn anything for what I do?” You should have become a writer, dear neighbor!
Good lord what an insufferable fuckwit.
“Why, oh WHY couldn’t my musician friend have been content to bask in the warm glow emanating from my obvious greatness? My artistic abilities just ooze from me, like the predator-deterring adhesive slime that is secreted by certain types of North American salamanders!”
You know, I’ve always thought Batty was a decent person, but after yesterday’s strip I’m starting to question that.
Please tell me that rock musician was Akronian Mark Mothersbaugh and he went on to write countless witheringly sarcastic songs about TB, including “Mongoloid.”
Does Bats have any idea how terrible this strip makes him look in every possible way?
No. No, I suppose he doesn’t.
No. He has no idea at all that he looks like a pompous fist magnet and a self-important creep. When people react to his antics the way he deserves, it confuses him no end.
The remark “An line had been drawn and there was now an impercptible line between us” is Batton failing to realize that he’s a pompous fist magnet.
Because that line is called “I’m famous and you’re not, neener neener.” He went to his “friend”‘s apartment to draw it on the floor with a Sharpie, and that friend understandably told him to fuck off. Which Batton interpreted as an affront to him.
It gets even worse when you think about how litte respect Batton has for his own success. He spends more time talking about the comic book job he didn’t get than the csrtoonist job he held for 50 years. Even though most people in the 1970s would consider cartooning the more impressive career.
Being a smug git rubbing it in that he gets to do something he feels beneath him is why I think he should re-enroll in third grade and jolly well stay with his people.
And what’s worse is that his friend’s chance did come. Not as a rock star, but (after a haircut) as Doug Funnie.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 6 of Most Boring Interview, Ever (July 2025 Edition!)
FINALLY this week is over, just give us the Winnipeg Blue Bombers storyline please I can’t take any more of the “Batton Thomas Yapping About His Life” bullshit
You just HAD to assume we were done with Batton Bellesfrey with Saturday’s strip, didn’t you?
I don’t think we’re done with it with Sunday’s strip. Current odds:
Comic books -10000
More Batton Thomas interview -200
Lillian McKenzie -150
Ed Crankshaft -110
Pete/Mindy wedding +150
Winnipeg Blue Bombers +200
Something good +40000
And the Blue Bombers win! Redeem all winning tickets at the window.
I’m guessing a football storyline will wait until the fall. Unless there’s a secret Canadian schedule i wouldn’t be familiar with.
The CFL is currently in Week 7 of its 21 week regular season (each team plays 18 games), which runs into October. So, topically, the Blue Bombers story arc could come at any time between now and Halloween.
Lol, shows what i know! I follow one sport (haphazardly) and football is not it.
RE: Sunday 7/20’s ‘Shaft:
I don’t get it.
Seriously, it’s like he wrote this specifically for the snarkers. There’s just no way any self-aware person writes that “punchline” without seeing how it’s going to get mocked. (Yeah, I know, one shouldn’t use “self-aware” and “Batiuk” in the same sentence…)
How about the one he usually gets: “I get it but it just ain’t good.”
Re: Today’s Crankshaft: What is so terrible about the words “I don’t get it”? Not everyone is going to “get” everything.
If you are a creator of any kind, you have two choices:
1 — Accept that there are some people who won’t understand (or like) what you have to offer. That’s okay; some will get it, and those who don’t will simply move on. Your work isn’t for them. There are 8 billion people on earth and you don’t need the accolades of every single one.
2 — Dumb down your work until it’s so bland and anodyne that *everyone* gets it. This is the “Garfield” method. Even then, you’ll have some haters. You can cry all the way to the bank.
Of course, if you’re Batty, you choose option 3:
3 — Create an avatar to humblebrag and vent your anger and frustration that you don’t get the applause you want for being, in your opinion, both subtly brilliant and highbrow-intellectual AND easily comprehensible to everyone everywhere.
“It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.” — Karl Popper.
4 – Get offended on behalf of an industry that rejected you. “Batton” isn’t even a comic book creator, a fact he’s been droning on about for weeks. So nothing anybody about says comic book publishing decisions has anything to with him.
Gah! Losing power while crafting a reply. Fortunately, the power was out for only a minute. It just takes my archaic machine several minutes to reboot. One of life’s minor inconveniences.
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Up at the top of this page is a link to a blog dedicated to comic strips people don’t understand, literally titled Comics I Don’t Understand. Commenters discuss current comic strips they don’t quite understand.
Batiuk fails to realize the issue isn’t he creates comic strips people don’t understand. His issue is he creates comic strips nobody wants to read. Case in point, any strip featuring Bloviatin’ Batton Thomas.
Batiuk: People want to know my origin story.
Sorry, TB. You’re not a superhero. Nobody cares.
Sorry, TB. You’re not a superhero.
He’s not even a guy who draws or writes superheroes. He’s a comic book Walt at age 76. Which may be the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.
Okay, you got me.🤷♀️ Who, or what, is a comic book Walt?
A “Walt” is anyone who claims membership to a group they’re not actually a member of. Most often used to describe military fanboys who act like they’re ex-servicemen, but wouldn’t last five minutes in boot camp.
That’s a handy vocabulary word I didn’t know! Any idea of the etymology?
The character Walter Mitty.
Makes sense. Thanks!
The irony is, Batiuk’s devolved far past creating work people don’t get. Everyone who still bothers to read it ‘gets’ it — they clearly understand that it’s simply the narcissistic ramblings of a man in a state of steady cognitive decline.
Far from creating material people don’t get, Batiuk now creates work that people don’t care about.
The artwork on Sunday’s strip, because it was limited to swiped-from-previous-strips artwork, utterly failed to communicate what was happening in the strip. Since Davis didn’t have a “Batton suffers from a heart attack” panel, he couldn’t have a panel where Batton’s supposed to be having a medical emergency where he actually looks as though he’s suffering a medical emergency. Instead, it looks as if Batton is a bad actor who missed his cue and Crazy is there to yell at him to get him back into performing the scene.
Today’s Crankshaft
The good news
The bad news
7/20: You don’t need to be a genius to see what they’re going to do to resolve another Ed-related catastrophe. Instead of ordering a new T-shirt online, Jeff is going to go on a big, stupid pilgrimage that reminds us why you Yanks come up with that fifty-first state crap. You aren’t taught your own geography so we’re going to watch a dumbass get jugged for speeding because he doesn’t know that signs are in metric.
Taking big stupid pilgrimages instead of making a phone call or sending an e-mail is pretty much standard practice in the Batiukverse. I suspect Jeff will figure metric out just fine (you just double it and add 30), it’s the driving on the same side of the road as in the US that will confuse him…
Batiuk gets America all wrong and he lives there. Good luck wrapping his brain cell around red mailboxes and French on cereal boxes.
Today’s Crankshaft
Day 1? of Winnipeg Blue Bombers Storyline
I guess this is how the Canadian Football League Storyline starts
It’s always a little jarring to me to see Batton like this, because if you remember how he was introduced in Funky, he was originally presented as a chump intended to gently poke fun at Batiuk’s own idiosyncrasies. In his first appearance he was doing a signing at the Komix Korner on Free Comic Book Day (of course), and was wailing at the children who were the focus of the strip about forgotten history of comic strips. The kids who, again, were the focus of the strip, shrugged him off as a silly old man. Granted, the point could have been that the kids were stupid, but because they were the focal characters, it didn’t come off like that. It definitely came across as making fun of the silly old man who cared way too much about ephemeral and negligible trivia.
The second time Batton’s brought in, Les has invited him to speak to his class and it’s abundantly clear that none of the kids give a shit about him. Again, the whole week showed him as a hapless chump. It was, broadly speaking, Batiuk gently poking fun of himself and his relative irrelevance.
But then, (and this did show up in small bits in Batton’s second appearance) it’s as if Batiuk realized he’s a narcissist who doesn’t feel he’s gotten his appropriate due. So he keeps showing up, and the deference shown to him grows and grows. He now has comic book writers and artists and sellers prostrating themselves at his feet when he goes to a comic book store. He can walk in to a comic book studio and is welcomed with open arms by everyone, even 60+ year veterans in the industry, and is allowed to hang out, be privy to what they’re doing and even frequently asked about his opinions on what’s they’re doing He’s made one of the group despite the fact that he doesn’t work there, isn’t anyone’s friend and contributes nothing beyond his mere presence.
And now he’s got his own pet newspaper reporter, who interviews him regularly about his life story, because of course it’s so fascinating and interesting that everyone would want to know about it, or at least should want to know about it. The reporter just sits there in rapt attention as Batton regales him with his mundane life story, featuring anecdotes that have no relevance to anything beyond the fact that they happened to Batton.
Batiuk really needs some self-awareness, and for a guy who works in a supposed “comedic” industry, a sense of humor about himself and his ego would be good too.
7/22: Wow, starting off a strip with “So again I ask…”? Subtle exposition there, Batty, real subtle.
Many questions will be asked, but will anyone ask Jff the most obvious questions: Why are you a fan of this relatively obscure foreign team when you almost certainly grew up rooting for the Browns? What is your connection to Winnepeg or the Blue Bombers?
I assume TB is a fan because someone related to the team paid him a tiny bit of attention and he glommed onto it desperately. Think he’ll bother to make up a story about why Jff’s a fan?
So, on Batiuk’s blog, he once again honors Siegel and Shuster by refusing to learn how to spell Joe Shuster’s name. Despite the fact that it appears twice in the graphics he chose to illustrate his thoughts. What a fan.
Panel 4
Skip: I’m from Yonkers and I never heard anyone say that.
Batton: Oh, not in Yonkers, no. It’s a Brooklyn expression.
PANEL-BY-PANEL BREAKDOWN OF 7/22’S ‘SHAFT:
Panel One: “So again, I ask”? Just how long have the three of you been standing there, Jff’s original shirt query hovering like a ghost between you? I’ll bet it’s been a literal 24 hours.
Panel Two: “It’s been in the wash for a month now!”? No, it hasn’t, Jff. You were just seen wearing it on July 6th.
Panel Three: Is that supposed to be the punchline, or are my eyes’ nictitating membranes acting up again?