I swear a Chien post is coming. Harvest has sapped half my energy and the other half was thrown away pitch by pitch watching the Cubs flail their way into the post-season only to trip and fall in a heartbreaking game 5 in the NLDS.
Now all I have to cheer for is anyone beating up on the Dodgers. Bummer.
In my drained malaise, I thought about Batiuk and his silly obsession with the ‘melancholy beauty’ of fall leaves. Last year I posted the first Existential Leaves arc of 1975. While I scrape together the energy to clean out grain bins and tackle Les Moore on Trial (With the School Board), I thought I’d treat you guys to 1976’s week of Fatalistic Philosophical Foliage.
Such an outdated Quercuscentric outlook. The Pinaceae were here before that, bigot!
“Climate damage means we won’t have any snowmen!”
“When a staminate and a pistillate are stirred up by great wind…”
Serious question. How is one leaf older and wiser than the other leaf?
Why is the younger leaf a buckaroo? Why didn’t he see the branches snap? How do leaves see? This is like Toy Story logic all over again!!!!
So the leaf prefers the prospect of death to continued interaction with an out-group? There’s a political joke somewhere in there I’m too lazy to construct.
He’s a regular Bud Belichick.
Son of Stuck Funky 
He seems to be stealing from a pre-religious nut Johnny Hart.
10/13: So begins a week that will somehow end in flames.
Batty would eventually retcon the exestential leaves early in Act II to be Les imagining what they would say if they could talk while he was bored in class. No idea if that also, by inference, extended to the talking furniture, the ball return machine that played in Wimbeldon or the other inanimate objects.
Because he was made ashamed of the quirky touches people chuckle at by a bullshit artist. John Byrne is Josef Weeder to Batiuk’s Michael Patterson: a nonstop shop for inapplicable advice sold with pompous verbiage.
I don’t know if he was necessarily ashamed. The entire reason for Squarein and Mopeman’s school paper comic in Act II seemed to be as a vehicle to allow Batty to do the more whimsical style of Act I comics since they would include things like abusive almost-Nazi Dinkle, the sentient inanimate objects, the Cheers for Losin Football Teams and other elements that had otherwise vanished.
At some point though, he started ranting about how making people laugh was misleading them. When I read that, I saw him as another denizen of the Byrne ward.
Also, there’s the gnawing tendency to adopt Byrne’s worst failing: self-indulgence. Granted, Batiuk isn’t as bad as Joephisto but he’s getting there.
I was going to say that at least Batiuk doesn’t have Byrne’s propensity for adult male/teen girl relationships but I did find John’s initial pining for Becky when she was fresh out of high school kind of iffy. But I guess they’re both at least legal adults at that point, though I’m not sure how old John is intended to be. I’ve assumed around the same age as the class of ’88 or slightly younger.
I’d say two years on her tops.
@Narshe: Skunky John is about five years older than Becky. At least according to the “Meet the Cast” portraits Byrne did for Act III, which gave Becky’s age as 33 and John’s as 38. The Class of 1998 or 1972 or whenever Batiuk decided they graduated (Les, Funky, Cindy, Bull, Crazy, etc.) were 46, so John’s 8 years younger than that crowd. The Mopey/Boy Lisa/Chien class were 28 for comparison as well.
So Skunky and Lefty aren’t as bad as some of Byrne’s questionable choices, at least.
What’s iffy is Byrne boasting about robbing the cradle.
@Green Luthor: Yeah that’s about what I figured as far as his age in relation to the others. It really is a toss up between him and Dinkle as to who I can’t stand more.
There’s nothing about John that’s likable or interesting and maybe it’s hindsight but once the John/Becky teasing starts with their online flirting you can tell what’s going to happen with him, Becky and Wally. Terrorism in slow motion, if you will. I get that John, like most of the writers/comic fans, is likely partly a TB insert but it just distinctly feels like Batiuk loves him and hates Wally for whatever reason. Did a rebellious kid insist to him Quicksilver could beat the Flash?
Dinkle is just a joke that even in Act I I didn’t find funny and got more and more annoying as it went on as it was the same couple of jokes (Band Camp is prison, flutophones, fund drives) repeated ad nauseum and none of them are all that good. Come Act II he’s just out of place. I did kind of like Kara as someone who was actually willing to push back against him but I guess that’s why she went away.
1) It’s probably something worse: a rebellious kid might have told him to join the human race and lose the fairy tales about people moving at Body-Liquefying-And-Then-Incinerating Speed.
2) He was almost bearable as a lampoon of the teacher who took himself too seriously but Batiuk forgot what he was.
Wasn’t Mopey Pete skeeving on Summer in an age-inappropriate way, when the latter was still in high school? I don’t remember exactly.
I think he was. That’s who Dick Facey should’ve cussed out and left in tears!
@Narshe I don’t think Batiuk hates Wally. But I think he views a lot of his characters as being expendable. There are characters who need to be the stars (Les and all the other Mary Sues), and other characters who exist just to suffer so the preferred characters can benefit from it.
Lisa and Wally are the big two victims. But a surprising number of characters were dealt random temporary misfortunes that were later retconned away. Dinkle’s deafness, Mort’s dementia, and Funky’s business failure are all examples.
Plus what happened to Bull Bushka, but I think Batiuk genuinely did hate Bull Bushka. This character was the embodiment of the high school jock Batiuk never got over his bitterness towards. Even though Bull went to great lengths to atone in adulthood.
Batiuk/Les is too small a man to accept it and that makes him wonderful.
Chirst! What an asshole!
There’s another thin-skinned and petty incompetent idiot named Thomas who won’t let high school bullshit slide off like the irrelevance it is: a Frenchman named Thomas Astruc who perpetrated the CGI kiddie soap Miraculous Ladybug. His idea is that a high school mean girl is irredeemable but an omnicidal maniac is A-Okay if his wife’s in a magic coma.
@Narshe It is my contention that John Howard is the most undesirable male in the entire Funkyverse. By far. I know that’s saying a lot, but I stand by it.
In any situation actually a quarter of an inch from reality, Becky would dump his ass. Since getting women means getting what he did to repel them, Batiuk screwed the wrong man over.
In any situation within a quarter-parsec of reality*, Becky would have dumped John the second she heard Wally was still alive.
* – 4,800,000,000,000 miles
Batiuk’s understanding of women never progressed pasr “Iris ashamed of slowpoke fiance because he hides his secret identity.”
What an unbelievable retcon too. That Les would be capable of coming up with anything half as clever as that Leaf Erikson joke…
Happy Leif Erikson Day!
The Act I leaves are like Bart Simpson’s crank calls to Moe’s Tavern. They were a symbol of the show in its early days, but nobody ever thought they were that funny.
We’re thus dealing with a stopped clock moment with them being a figment of a very weird kid’s imagination then. If you’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, make sure it’s Rosemary’s baby.😀
I beg to differ with you.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine. Last name Jass, first name Hugh.”
Okay, that one was good. Especially when Bart actually got Hugh Jass on the phone. But most of them were forgettable. It’s an example of a joke that didn’t really land, but it did help give the show a unique personality.
The 10-15 strip is very clearly signed “BATIUKS”.
Perhaps an acknowledgment that his wife came up with that joke?
The talking leaves were the best part of Funky Winkerbean’s Homecoming (unless you really like Ed Crankshaft).
Today’s Crankshaft
(Suddenly, Garfield shows up and whacks Lillian and Ed in the head with a cartoonishly heavy mallet, before getting crushed by a piano)
Garfield: I hate Mondays, especially Monday the 13th
10/14: Did an acronym tell Batiuk that Superman could outrun the Flash?
So Lillian doesn’t like acronyms? OK. She can STFU and FOAD.
LMAO.
Technically, an acronym is an abbreviation made of initial letters of a phrase that’s pronounced as a single word. NATO and NASA are acronyms; OMG or CBS are not. If Crankshaft is saying “Woo-ey”, then it’s an acronym. But if (as the periods in “W.U.I.” would indicate) he’s spelling out W-U-I, it’s not.
In my journalism days, we had a standard called “explain acronyms at first use.” If your news story is full of acronyms that aren’t known to most readers, like WUI, you need to explain what they mean the first time you use them in the story.
Lilllian has no reason to know or care about what a WUI is. So it’s reasonable that she wouldn’t recognize the acronym. But Crankshaft is really being a dick here. Look at his face in Panel 2. He’s acting like he’s talking to a slow child. Then Lillian reverses it by employing a even bigger, smugger, wearier, more vacant smirkface in Panel 3. As if “Is there anything anymore that doesn’t have an acronym?” was the most devastating comedy insight in decades.
The Funkyverse would work a lot better if it adopted Seinfeld rules. “These people are all horrible, they all barely tolerate each other, and they’re all trying to insult and backstab each other every chance they get.” In that framework, today’s strip works. Ed gets smug with Lillian for not having specialized knowledge of his chosen hobby. She replies with a lame, misaimed joke, and even more smugness. Ed’s face in Panel 3 seems to be saying “is that the best you could come up with?” as if they’re constantly jabbing each other like this. The real narrative is the meta-narrative as the squabble escalates. But Batiuk can’t comprehend any narrative more sophisticated than “Flash run fast, then punch bad guy.”
It’s half not knowing anything else and half not wanting to.
Today’s Crankshaft
(yawn)
Having finally finished up with Act II and just starting on the Dick Facey era, I figure I can finally give some more complete thoughts on it.
Overall I think it’s… fine? Maybe acceptable is a better word. The first few years of Act II really just feel like a retread of the weak middle years of Act I. The same old gags (Dinkle stuff, the weeks where characters are just interchangeable props for definitions, etc.) and whatot continuing in a very ho hum fashion. You can almost ignore the years 1992, 1993 and 1994 and not really lose much of anything beyond the initial class reunion that brings back Lisa. It’s not really until 1995 when Funky Winkerbean becomes closer to what everyone knows with the Susan Smith storyline and Les’ journey across Europe. I don’t think a lot of the attempts at stories in Act II are necessarily told or executed well, at least they’re far less than they should be, but it’s done at least semi-competently enough to have kept my interest. I generally know the broad strokes of where a lot of stories go but it was at least nice to see the nus and bolts of how they played out, even if said nuts and bolts were kind of cruddy and rusty a lot of the time.
That really changes in 2003 with the Byrne guest drawn strips and the switch to Ayers’ art style. I said it before but it’s like a switch is flipped and immediately the whole thing becomes a lot more dour and miserable and whatever storytelling ability Batiuk may have had vanishes into thin air. Did the prostate cancer diagnoses that inspired him to do Lisa’s cancer storyline just give him an existential crisis or something? In a way, Lisa is the definitive Funky character because for a lot of Act II it’s like “yeah, things have been rough for her but she pulls through” and then the cancer comes back and she just immediately gives up and consigns herself to oblivion which mirrors the way the strip’s tone goes. From rough but positive in outlook to a place where dreams go to die.
Way, way too many underused characters as well. Wally’s class never even gets developed until they’re out of high school. I can’t even think of any real characters introduced during it beyond him, Sadie, Becky and Monroe. The ’98 class has it slightly better but again, barely any development there either beyond Dick-Nosed Darin, Mopey Pete, and Jessica Darling and her Trampstamp in the final year or so. It makes me wonder why Batty kept introducing high school classes when it’s blatantly clear he never had any interest in any of the characters or doing anything with them beyond having the teachers constantly denigrate the students for being lazy and dumb. And in some cases, like Ally, they just flat out vanish out of existence.
I guess if I had to pick any characters who I felt were the most underused though I’d go with Donna and Sadie. So much that could have been done with these two and it’s just squandered because Batty hated Sadie and Donna, after being introduced as Crazy’s cool and hot motorcycle riding foil, becomes a literal prop. She barely ever even speaks and just exists to fill out crowd scenes, it’s absurd.
I’ll just include an addendum as I think the lack of/misused characters is what bugs me the most. I get that at times a character just doesn’t work out even if you like the initial concept but I’d say it’s better to try and salvage them by really looking and thinking about the character. This is why Sadie is, for me anyway, the biggest missed opportunity and a glaring example of how shallowly Batiuk seems to approach characters and stories.
Sadie at the end of Act I was honestly pretty funny. The non-chalant way she antagonizes Cindy into a murderous way is actually entertaining. But she exists to be Cindy Jr. and then Batiuk got bored of that and reduced her to nothing, I guess feeling like she had nothing to offer. But he showed that she did in the story where Wally ships off. The two of them start to connect a bit and you see that she’d attending peace protests at campus and it’s like… right there! You have the hook for the character right there! The shallow mean girl who’s lived in her sister’s shadow 180ing into a character who metamorphoses in the opposite direction as she’s in college and tries figuring herself out, finding more empathy and devoting herself to, I don’t know, hippiesh or liberal causes. Not as a means of pushing this or that political position but simply showing a character evolving.
Instead of doing the eyerolling Wally/Becky/John love triangle, it could have been Wally, Becky and Sadie as Wally grows closer to her because of his inability to deal with his guilt over Becky and finds himself able to confide in Sadie. Or maybe there’s no love triangle, maybe all that time spent in college and working next to a hottie like Rachel causes Sadie to realize she bats for the other team which would be wholly different from both her high school self and Rachel. Just… anything! This is stuff that occured to me basically the second I saw those strips so it can’t be that hard, can it?
All that said, I did largely think that Act II is reasonably fine up until 2003 in spite of some other weird or annoying writing decisions. Chien’s big story about her story for the paper turning out to actually be a Les wank piece partway through, for instance and the post office bombing which basically seems to a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment done to add some absurd drama to Les and Lisa’s wedding being particularly egregious.
Well, lots of people who had cancer never got over having had cancer. He’s literally one in a million but not in a good way.
Have you ever seen Tom Batiuk’s blog post about Sadie Summers?
God, what a tool: “I tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.”
This one still infuriates me. TB’s navel-gazing over his poor perception of his own mistakes is bad, but what angers me is the shots he takes at Gould and Schulz at the end. The “Dumb Character Phantom Zone”? Please. It’s not self-reflective or endearingly self-deprecative when you slag two legends’ (admittedly less well-received) work alongside the lightly-used character that you were way way too happy to write out of your own strip, it’s arrogant and self-aggrandizing.
It’s the TB we all know and love…
It’s a non-apology apology, isn’t it? “Yeah, I’m sorry about Sadie Summers. I created her because I needed my time skip to work*. Lord knows I couldn’t just have Cindy become an adult, like every other character did*. Besides, Peanuts and Dick Tracy did it too.”
It’s also an under-apology, like he’s trying to plea bargain. “I’m sorry I created a dumb character who was just a clone of Cindy Summers. If I admit that, will you get off my back about Mindy, Donna, Jessica, Hannah, and all the other indistinguishable blonde high schoolers and/or middle-aged potato women walking around?”
*- note that this makes no sense
He doesn’t want to really admit he’s wrong.
It’s like Lynn Johnston calling Watterson a quitter for leaving before we got sick of him or Amend for scaling down before he started to repeat himself.
Yeah, I’ve seen that and it was part of what prompted me to keep an eye out on her specifically to see what was so bad. Again, I get that some times a character doesn’t work or you struggle to really think of what to do with them to grab the reader or yourself as the writer. For example, as I read the earlier portion of Act II, I couldn’t really see what hook there was to Monroe that could have made him all that interesting so him just fading away is understandable. And not every character needs to be deeply developed if there’s not a reason to. Crazy Harry is perfectly fine just existing to add some levity to counter the increasingly miserable lives everyone else leads. But Batiuk stumbled onto a good thing for Sadie and then did nothing with it because it was seemingly only thrown in to add one bit of last second tragedy to Wally’s disappearance.
And that gets into a problem I mentioned before too where characters just change and the explanation is “I changed” with nothing else. We could have seen a story that runs throughout Act II of Sadie (or whoever) changing but it feels like he’d just always rather opt for the lazy route of not having to actually explore the characters or give them spotlight from the ones and things he actually wants to focus on or explore how these changes happen. No room for a character like Chien in Act III because I guess it would mean not seeing John getting rewarded for being a twat.
I can only imagine how smug John must feel internally actually. Everyone is happy to see Wally back but he’s sad and resentful because Wally is stealing “his” girl by having the temerity to not die. But now? Oh, how the tables have turned for John has taken everything from Wally although they should have rightfully been John’s the whole time. I will just imagine that Becky only did everything out of convenience and she spends a lot of time complaining to Kara about how she was too rash and probably could have done much better.
Regarding Pedoskunk Johnny Howard: I would’ve LOVED to see John actually suffer (I hate him due to both his marriage with Becky and also his shitty behavior towards his customers), whenever it be either Becky taking custody of Rana and Wally Jr. from him and giving that custody to Wally Sr. or Chris Hansen pulling up and asking him to have a seat (and then John gets arrested)
The galling thing about his trial is that he was completely guilty but got let off on a ridiculous technically that doesn’t hold water.
Batiuk created that whole tragic love triangle, then did absolutely nothing with it. All he had to do was copy the end of Cast Away. Helen Hunt still loves Tom Hanks, but she justifiably thought he was dead, and made other commitments she can’t just walk away from. Becky never even faced the question. It was just “I’m married to John now, bye. Town is that way. Say hi to Dinkle for me.”
This after Becky and Wally were so in love that Becky instantly forgave him for crippling her and destroying her music career (another story point Batiuk created and never actually dealt with), Wally used Becky as the thing that kept him alive and sane during a lengthy POW stint. And all Becky had to say was “okay, whatever, bye.” This is appalling bad writing.
The worst of it is, Becky and John are completely incompatible, and don’t even seem to like each other very much.
But a skeevy loser who’s too shortsighted to let his mother’s concerns mean anything doesn’t get blown up or kidnapped trying to redeem himself so he’s the better choice.
Of course, I meant to say “appallingLY bad writing.” How embarrassing.
characters just change and the explanation is “I changed” with nothing else.
And Lisa was the gold medal winner. She went from an ugly, neglected, anxious high schooler to a teenage mother/retconned rape victim to a lawyer. That’s one hell of a transition! How did she even pay for college, much less law school? How did she succeed in law school, an environment that favors loud, extroverted, theatric, brainy people, the exact opposite of everything she was? And after she improved herself that much, why would she ever set foot in Westview again? She now had much better prospects in life?
Lisa is probably the most misused character in the Funkyverse. But Batiuk needed a Lost Lenore to give Les a writing career, so here we are. Which is the root of all the underused/misused characters you mention. Batiuk is far more concerned with appeasing his Mary Sue characters; all his other characters are just a means to that end. Batiuk would throw Gandalf into a volcano, if would give John Howard a high-grade copy of The Flash #123.
Because the 14-karat gilt-edged dough-head doesn’t understand what’s really happening when Flash run fast, Punch Captain Cold.
And Lisa was the gold medal winner.
I’d say a lot of the women are damn near equal. Cindy goes from vapid mean girl to suddenly being generally courteous, professional. The whole ridiculous Eliminator retcon for Donna. Holly the grinning bimbo who blows herself up now world weary and kind of bitchy.
But it’s just one of those things that makes it hard to really get invested in what’s happening after a point because Batiuk can and will change characterizations, past events and such on a whim. He can’t even be bothered to keep the timeline straight of course with the ten year time jump in Act III occuring in 2007 or The Coming Reunion being their 30th except it’s 2008 and not 2018 so everything that happened in Act II now I guess happens ten years earlier which means some things now make no sense (Skunky John and Becky’s initial connection being in chatrooms, Wally being in Afghanistan, Chien’s bullying story which explicitly is written because off Columbine, Clinton visting Motoni’s, etc.). But I guess given that the ’98 class stayed in school for nearly 10 years maybe I shouldn’t think about it too hard.
What I do think about, though, is why Batiuk keeps introducing new high school classes when he has no interest in writing teenagers? Like a big appeal of Act III was supposed to be seeing Summer et al in high school but I’m now in 2009 and they’re all really just props for Les, Funky and the other geezers. Dinkle moping about retirement has gotten about equal or more focus than Summer or Jinx or any of the kids. Then there’s everyone looking and acting a good 10-15 years older than they actually are. Batty seemed completely incapable or uninterested in writing about anyone who wasn’t a guy (always a guy) the same general age as himself so high schoolers/young adults get less and less important (except for comic geeks Darin and Pete) and everyone else has to be 46 going on 62.
This is a whimpering simpleton with a zero sum view of the world and a victim complex: being asked to think about what he’s doing to other people when he’s gratifying his stupid and cheezy ego is seen as persecution.
@Narshe: Once again, I ask why Tom Batiuk simply dind’t turn Funky Winkerbean into a drama strip after Act I ended. Drama was what he wanted to do. He had decided, correctly in my opinion, that he couldn’t go back to Les-hanging-from-the-gym-rope jokes after the whole teen pregnancy story. But Batiuk uses the beginnings of Act II and even Act III to recommit the high school hijinks environment, then promptly walks away from it.
@pj202718nbca: What was Skunkhead John charged with? I’m not familiar with that story. (I just searched the Act III plot descriptions on this site and couldn’t find it; maybe it was from Act II?)
What was Skunkhead John charged with? I’m not familiar with that story.
Dead Cat Head John was arrested for owning a adult manga inside his store (where teenagers go to)
10/15: This joke makes no sense because you’d expect a man in his 100s to know what they call a male deer.
Today, Crankshaft doesn’t know the word for “male deer” when he’s trying to solve a problem that is only caused by male deer. And that word is part of the name of the problem.
And yesterday Lillian was mocked for not knowing what a WUI is, when she has no reason to know that.
It’s called writing, y’all.
Self-indulgently bad writing.
It’s worse than that. Both Ed and Lillian have forgotten that a male deer is called a buck.
Don’t worry, they’ll know it again next week.
Doesn’t “WUI” mean “Writing Under the Influence”? Or does it just seem that way?
Today’s Crankshaft
Ed: I’m still waiting for Mindy and Mopey McMopester’s wedding to happen.
I can’t decide if the Mindy-Mopey wedding will be a relief, or one of the worst arcs ever. I’m guessing it’ll be a rehash of the Corey-Rocky wedding, with comic books and Montoni’s pizza being pulled out of every orifice.
Plus it being in Crankshaft. I’m baffled why FW spent some of its last weeks marrying off fourth-tier characters Corey and Rocky, and ignoring the more important relationship between Pete and Mindy. Apparently, it’s called writing.
Today’s Crankshaft
I don’t understand today’s strip
It’s not you. Here’s the key to understanding it:
– Tom had a deadline. This is all he could come up with.
– Dan doesn’t get paid enough to do anything other than copypasta the quickest possible illustration.
– There is no editor.
If you were somehow expecting today’s Crankshaft to feature a joke, or some wordplay, or something dimly recognizable as ‘vaguely interesting’ … review points one to three, and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Ed is saying normal hand soap doesn’t smell strongly enough to repel deer.
10/16: If Lizard Woman isn’t seeing them, she isn’t looking.
Sorry: 10/17. Still, though, deer are really easy to spot.
Today’s Crankshaft
Ha ha it’s funny because neither Ed or Lillian can see deer even if they’re standing in front of one (that’s what i’m guessing today’s strip is about)
RE: 10/17 C’Shaft:
“Oh, see the deer. Has the deer a little doe?”
“Why, coitenly! Two bucks.”
The Three Stooges, Hoi Polloi (1935)
10/18: Oh fer……