92 thoughts on “Deerest Readers”

  1. 10/18: If he’d caught that, she’d’ve been walking around with soap on a rope Tuesday.

  2. Buongiorno tutti! Im back from Italy and catching up on the comics crap I missed. I wish CBH were writing this strip, her strips made me laugh! Well Mary Worth made me laugh too, but it was due to the stupidity of the writing. Moy/Brigman win for crappiest story.

  3. Funnier than Batiuk is an insultingly low bar … these were genuinely funny. Change those signatures to “CBH & Davis”!

  4. The real problem I have is wondering why a nuisance is framed as a panic. He orders online nonstop so just order repellent!

  5. Today’s Crankfuckery

    (Crankshaft walks out into the driveway after putting the bar of soap on Lillian, where he gets ran over by Truck Kun yet again)

    (Crankshaft wakes up in the Kunio-kun universe, this time he’s in a casino, and walks upstairs, where he notices a middle-aged man named Sabu holding a pistol and someone who resembles Kunio walk out a room where Ed notices that Kunio and Riki Samejima are rushing towards a pair of girls that Sabu has shot, one of them having short dyed blue hair and the other having reddish-brown hair in a ponytail)

    Ed: What the fuck is going on here?

    (Ed is then shot in the back of the head by Sabu)

    1. Thanks Moppy! And congrats on your strip getting a guest artist just a fraction less horrifying than Merrill.

  9. “Continuity Error” would be a good title for BatYam’s autobiography. What, me continuity? And this “canon” word everyone keeps throwing around…what could they mean by that?

  10. 10/19: Another reminder that while Batiuk loves watching sports because it’s something he shared with his dad, boy, does he hate athletes. He hated them so much, he killed Bull.

    1. Batiuk’s real contempt for sports reveals itself when his stories put some random person into the game. He thinks anybody can do sports just as well as a trained team of highly conditioned athletes. We’ve seen high school football games won by cheerleaders and costumed mascots. We just saw Crankshaft win a CFL game, when he should have been arrested. And now he’s looking down his nose at a football coach, for not being very descriptive with his words. We get it, Tom. You’re smarter than all those dumb jocks. Even the genetic freaks who can make the pros in football.

      2. I’m reminded of how Lynn Johnston thought she could be a pilot if people she looks down on can fly. Since she’s bad at math, she blames chauvinism and not herself for being told she’d be a menace to commercial aviation.

        1. Yeah she really went off the deep end for awhile there. Lots of unresolved anger issues in that one.

          1. That’s an understatement. She’s nearly eighty and she still resents her mother for making her do math.

      3. There’s also Les coaching Westview to their one legit championship using a trick play because Bull was sick, in spite of the fact Les was a loser whose understanding of football even in a pickup game context was bad. The implication, of course, is that Bull probably would have bungled it while brilliant and wise Leslie and his outside the box thinking was what they needed the whole time.

        1. What irritates me is that when this sort of thing happens in movies, the writers know it’s an absurdity that couldn’t happen, the actors hope they can avoid breaking character because the scenario is wackydoodle and most audience members laugh at something completely ridiculous. A man would want locking up if he thought a farce is How Things Work but instead, he gets a contract to write idiocy about the Pizza Monster winning the Superbowl.

          1. Batty seems to more or less think that if something works in a movie or TV show then it’s good to use in his strips. Sure, you can do a little bit of unreality in fiction for dramatic purposes but there’s times where it works and times where it’s eyerolling. Mickey Lopez getting the big touchdown so Westview wins its homecoming game is absurd but works because at least Mickey was on the team, was established as the team’s best and/or only competent player, the storyline was built around her and having to decide between homecoming court and the game, and gave a nice moment for both her and Coach Stropp before they effectively disappeared from the strip.

            Les coaching the team to a championship just sort of comes and goes, is dumb because it’s established Les is a joke when it comes to sports and feels like it was done simply to reward Les for being a loser in high school the way the everything in Act II and Act III does. Les’ geneal treatment of Bull after Act I is probably the most insufferable thing about him in a long list of insufferable things because it exemplifies how much of a petulant, self-obsessed asshole he is. It’s not enough for him that his old bully admitted that he actually envied Les for coming from a good home and opened up to him about the abuse he suffered. It’s not enough that Bull seemed to have genuinely grown and was a generally nice guy who made every effort to be his friend. I get that bullying can stay with you but there’s a point where you have to let go and Les never seemed to hit that point as most of is adult life seems to be him wanting to spite everyone who ever—real or perceived—wronged him and do it with a pithy, condescending remark and a douchey smug smirk plastered onto his face. The embodiment of “It’s not enough that I should succeed, others must fail.”

            I didn’t even mean for this turn into a Les rant but here we are.

          2. Batiuk doesn’t realize it but Les is what his “Hapless and mistreated outsider” looks like to the people who have to contend with him: a raw nerve overly eager to be a punitive creep to people in his way.
            It’s like how the goomba in the Batman T shirt went out of his way to be an ass to his comics hating mom.

          3. It’s not just sports. Cindy walks straight out of Kent State into the ABC News national desk, despite having zero journalistic skill, or even any desire to learn it. She also gets dumped into the middle of an Iraqi war zone to do live reporting when one of her high school buddies goes missing. Funky gets on the cover of Pizza Mogul Magazine or whatever it was, despite Montoni’s being a bloated, incompetent mess, and his idiotic New York City expansion. Then he somehow “sells” it to Mopey Pete, despite having nothing of value beyond the name. Speaking of Pete, he goes straight to the top of the comic book profession, an writes this world’s Star Wars. Darrin? Straight to the top of the comic book profession.

            And we haven’t talked abut the writers yet! Les? Straight to the top, with a brief detour to “Fallen Star” to give him some phony humility. Lillian? Straight to the top, with interviews, awards and book signings. Her only skill is thinking up snowclone book titles, and those aren’t even any good. Summer takes a “gap year” between her 16th and 18th year of Kent State undergrad work to write the book that “made humanity our nation.” Crankshaft gets to call a play in a CFL game when he should have been arrested. On and on it goes.

            It reminds me of the end of my senior year. We were all starting our own adult lives soon, and we all believed each others’ stories about how we’d soon rule the world. The problem is that once yopu get out of high school, the competition gets a lot tougher. Every single high school in Amrica has a Cindy, a Bull, a Les, and a Pete, every single year. And when you want to make a career of your passion, talent starts mattering a lot less than passion, effort, people skills, and willingness to learn. Tom Batiuk never discovered this. He went straight to a national comic strip at age 25 with little effort on his part, so he figures anyone else can do it too.

          4. It’s why this is so familiar: people just handed stuff to Lynn Johnston because they either felt sorry for her or because they needed a diversity hire and she thinks she clawed her way to the top too.

          5. @BJ6K: Yeah, one of the first bits of Act III being Mopeman showing up and everyone glazing him as the top writer at Marvel at the age of 28 is absurd. Usually writers in comics toil away for years and it’s not really until they’re well into their 30s where they’ve moved beyond doing work for low tier publishers, toy tie-ins and C-listers that they’re hitting the point where they’re writing the ongoings for Spider-Man or Superman or the other top characters. Back in the day when the industry wasn’t as big, maybe that was a possibility, but unless you’re preternaturally talented ala Jim Shooter you’re going to be toiling and grinding for a long time.

            And given that Ol’ Mopey’s ideas seem to be stuck in the realm of Formulaic Silver Age DC Comics, I don’t think he’s preternaturally talented. Actually, the entire reason Shooter even got the job was because he obsessively studied Marvel and DC’s comics to figure out why DC’s sucks and Marvel’s were more appealing, then applied what worked for Marvel’s books in the context of DC’s. The comics that Batiuk holds up as the crowning glory of the medium were recognized 60 years ago as shitty and formulaic by a 13-year-old who realized that writing about actual characters made for more compelling reading than Mort Weisinger demanding a story based on his 50th iteration of a cover where Superman or Flash fight gorillas.

          6. Writing about real people with actual problems didn’t appeal to a gloomy little boy who wanted to escape from reality.

          7. @Narshe: Before Tom Batiuk moved his website from funkywinkerbean.com to tombatiuk.com, there was a blog post about his attempt to get a comic book job that said “I was certain Marvel would make me the head writer of Spider-Man once they saw how good a writer I was.”

            So yes, this is how he actually thinks the world works. He has no clue that companies aren’t going to give their most glamourous job to a man off the street, even if that person is an exceptional talent. And Marvel might have initially seen him as such, since he was a successful national cartoonist in his mid-20s. He had an impressive portfolio for his age.

            Jim Shooter is an interesting comparison. Yes, some people get their foot in the door at a job by showing how passionate they are about it. But Tom Batiuk is not that man. He probably compares himself to Jim Shooter, but he’s doesn’t have anywhere that level of comic book knowledge or self-motivation. I’m sure thinks he does, but his interest in comic books is extremely narrow. And we’ve seen how his fictional comic book creators act. All they do is goof off, have elementary school arguments, invent new covers and series, win awards, and get paid obscene amounts of money.

          8. I remember his history of his fake comic book company and how they whined to be allowed to plagiarize their betters because coming up eith new ideas people like is haaaaaaaaard.

          9. @PJ Batiuk has no clue when his characters are clearly in the wrong, and that was one of those times.

            He tried to tell a “big company picking on a small company” story when that was irrelevant to the proceedings. The big media company had every right to protect its intellectual property, and IP law forces such companies to do so (or they risk their creations being declared public domain). And the small company was a bunch of no-talent hacks who couldn’t give their comics away outside of the $1 bargain bin.

            I’ve long felt that Atomik Komix was a “mockbuster” company, like Asylum Video. All they do is make comic books that are exceedingly similar to much more popular titles, in hopes that some confused person will buy them. It would explain while they’re always starting new, lame titles and never supporting them. That lawsuit was about “Arachnid Man”, aka Not Spiderman. They’ve also got Not Fantastic Four, Not Wonder Woman, Not Peabody And Sherman, and Not Star Wars, But It’s So Lame You Would Never Think It Is.

          10. As Ebert said, you can’t have good guys and bad guys if the bad guy is making more sense. This is why I don’t give a rat’s hat about Siegel or Schuster. They knew what they were getting into.

          11. Narshe’s Law:

            As an SOSF discussion grows longer, the probability of a rant involving Les approaches one.

    1. Accent on the “little.” That thing should tower over them, not look like Rudolph’s anorexic brother. But you get what you get when you cut&paste old art.

      1. To be faaaaair, the city deer around where I live are about that size, so it didn’t look off to me. On the other hand, I live on an island, and there’s some natural law about that.

  13. 10/20: Shouldn’t the person whose job it is to clean the buses be the one imposing the ban?

    1. Isn’t this story a re-run? I know I’ve seen Crankshaft bitching about glitter on his bus before.

      1. There was a “Cleaning Glitter Off the Bus” arc back in January of 2023. The drivers announced a ban. Hilarity ensued.

        1. Learning their lesson ensued for most of them. The exception hides under his bed because people are sick of his shit.

  14. Today’s Crankshaft

    Ed: I’m not letting any kid go on my bus due to the glitter inside my bus!

    Andy: You’ve already been doing that for almost 40 years!

  15. Responding to Narshe: Don’t worry-Les rants are always welcome here. It’s so easy to veer into one! His behavior at Bull’s funeral was reprehensible. If he had said something along the lines “Bull and I didn’t always get along, but he ended up being a great friend”, that would have been acceptable. But no, he had to focus on things that were no longer accurate and prove that he himself hadn’t grown up at all.

    2. The thing is that even knowing about Dick Facey and how hated he was, I didn’t really hate him all that much in Act II. He was annoying and eye rolling but really didn’t become loathesome until the timeskip. But Act III Les really is the dirt worst and the transition to him being an egotistical jackass basically comes with his book deal. And you know, that might have been fine if there was a story around it how finally finding some success caused his head to swell. You can even tie it into the start of the timeskip where Funky was being a douche because of Montoni’s success because in Westview into some kind of moral lesson about how success can take the best of us (because Les is the best of us of course).

      He doesn’t come off as much of a father to Summer either. Summer may as well just be some girl who lives happens to live in his house and exists to play basketball and ship him with Cayla.

      Actually, I’m kind of amazed at just how nonexistant the kids are. I guess Summer has some accomplishments and I like her smart-ass tomboy personality well enough prior to graduation but everyone else? There’s really nothing there because Batiuk didn’t have any interest in or ability to write teenage girls. There was some potential to do a gender-flipped take on the Act I crew but instead he just fell back into his go-to of low social status nerds with Danky Stonerbean and Not-Les.

      1. The only thing that the Delicate Genius knows about teenage girls is that for some reason, they act as if they are people too and don’t admit that he is entitled to their affection and worship. They didn’t have the word incel yet but if they put it in the dictionary, we’ll see Batiuk’s stupid face.

        1. I’ve also argued that Funky Winkerbean is an incel paradise. Not because of anything malicious, but because it’s the only place on Earth (even in fiction) where the Niceguy act actually works. John Howard convinced Becky to pass on the love of her life after he rose from the dead, by doing nothing but hanging around her until she finally fell in love with him. The same could be said of other people like Les and Mopey Pete.

          1. I wonder what his wife thinks of this. I’m goddamn sure he doesn’t understand or care. He’s still the little dope pissed off at some big meanie named Friedan who wanted to take his milk and cookies away.

          2. I take the implication of a few of the strips as Rana preferring being around Wally, even with all of is problems, over John and that she never actually viewed him as her dad; just the weird, skunk-haired man living with her and her mom. Becky throws herself into her band work because it means not having to be home around him. The Howards’ happy home life is mostly a sham.

          5. I would ask the same question about Summer and Keisha. They were best friends, and became step-sisterts when their parents married. But you wouldn’t know this from the strip. I don’t think Les ever communicated with Keisha, despite being her stepfather for many years. He didn’t acknowledge her existence at Rocky and Corey’s wedding. Which was the final time Keisha ever appeared. But Maddie Klinghorn recognized Keisha for some reason, and talked to her about Summer, who wasn’t even at the wedding for some reason.

            A lot of the alleged families in the Funkyverse certainly don’t act like families.

          6. @BJ6K: Keisha in general seemed to have basically only been invented for the whole twist of her being the daughter of Les’ new girlfriend to trip Summer up a bit and once that got resolved after a few months she no longer had any real purpose. That does give her more characterization than her mother has though and it means she’s more prominent than the other Funky Kinderbeans.

            Rana’s basically Neo-Cindy until Wally shows up and basically any interaction with him causes her demeanor to completely 180 which, you know, could have been interesting. How much of her attitude is rebellion against her dweeb father versus missing the guy who brought her out of a hellhole after her family died? Does she still, all these years later, feel more loyalty to him than her stepdad and does she feel any resentment towards Becky for quickly abandoning Wally in favor of Skunky? How much of her snooty popular girl shtick is an act? Actual interesting soap opera drama to mine for a character with one of the high schoolers at the center instead of “Les get book deal!” or “Student copy paper from internet!”

            Although I guess that’s better than what poor Maddie ever got. She was a glorified background character who basically seemed to exist only to be Option C for when Batty didn’t want Dick Facey turning his douchegaze onto Corey or Owen.

          7. Aw hell, only right after I hit Reply do I realize I missed the opportunity to call it Medouchea’s Gaze.

    3. Someone needed to take him aside and explain that forgiveness doesn’t mean he’s vulnerable to further assault.

  17. I know I reference FBorFW too much but the same thing can be said about the Patterson family. They act like distant housemates instead of a family too.

  18. 10/22: Now this is the Ed I’m familiar with: the irritating old jerk who’s a terrible judge of character.

  20. Ed appears to uniquely ill suited to be a school bus driver owing to his projecting his own malice on the children he thinks are entitled little brats. Thus, arcs like this.

  22. 10/23: We get it. The nasty old coot is going to get bad guy lawyers to screw over children WHO AREN’T TRYING TO HURT HIM.

  23. Today’s Crankshaft

    csroberto2854.exe has run into a error and needs to be rebooted due to how much of a asshole Ed is lately over glitter inside of his bus

    1. And for the most deranged interpretation of guilt by association ever. Driving a school bus was his fallback in case he didn’t make the Majors so by jamming it to kids, he’s getting his own back at Beanball Bushka, an obscure figure beating his son because the highlight of his career was screwing over an illiterate rival.

  24. 10/25: Once again, Batiuk fails to see the difference between grouchy old fart and grouchy old fart themed supervillain.

  25. RE: 10/24 ‘Shaft:

    So, now it’s a health concern instead of simply not wanting to clean the glitter up? Nice how that changed midstream. Pray tell, did it ever occur to Ed to wear a facemask, the way lots of school bus drivers are doing post-COVID?

    Also, the firm of Scrooge and Marley was a financial counting house, not a law office. Batiuk’s big joke is not just an unfunny reference but an innacurate one, to boot.

    1. Of course he isn’t going to mask up. That would mean the brats win. I’ve always had the impression that he sees the children he mowed down as being out to get him.

  26. I don’t get the tone of this week’s strips. Glitter can be extremely messy and difficult to clean up. Yet Ed’s attempt not to have glitter on his bus is presented as being an eccentricity that his employer can’t tolerate, rather than one of the few appropriate and sensible decisions he has made in a long time.

  30. RE: 10/25 ‘Shaft:

    Well, a law firm handling both sides of a case? That’s certainly “a quarter-inch from reality” if ever I’ve seen it.

    By all means, Ed, trust the attorneys who are also working for the plaintiff in your civil law…hey, wait a minute. WHAT civil lawsuit? Just yesterday you were inquiring about legal help in forcing the school district to back your “glitter on the bus” ban due to health concerns. NOW you’re talking about some mother suing you? And EARLIER in the week the problem was cleaning glitter debris off your bus?

    Ye Gods, Batiuk is just tossing every nonsensical angle to this arc against the wall to see what sticks, isn’t he?

    1. It seems to me Batty looks down on lawyers, much like he does on businessmen. He has no issue using lawyers to bully his critics, he has no issues cashing checks from the syndicate. But he looks down on both of them. They aren’t engaged in the morally superior profession of writing.

      1. What makes him hard to swallow is his reaction to being on the other side of being a sneering prick: whining about being bullied.

      2. Businessmen and non-writers are okay(ish?) if they’re not too successful. Funky Winkebean, owner of small local restaurant/gathering place/wedding venue Montoni’s Pizza, is a smart and successful businessman having helped transform the struggling(?) pizzeria into a beloved local institution.

        Funky Winkerbean, owner of regional and aspiring to be national pizza chain Montoni’s Pizza, is a Grade-A prick neglecting his family and friends and being all around arrogant and self-absorbed. Only after having his business venture fail and being reduced to the original restaurant has he been sufficiently humbled to learn his lesson.

        Hell, this is even something approaching the Batiukverse’s one hard rule with multiple characters lamenting being happy or successful lest Godtiuk realize it and punish them for their apparent hubris. After all, just look at what happened to the Fairgoods for the crime of Ann helping to coach the Westview girls to a state championship.

        1. Now that I say that and think about it, I wonder if this isn’t another instance of Batty projecting. Batty had a level of success and yet couldn’t maintain it. In the late ’80s it seemed as if he was really going places: three strips, a (high school) stage play… things really seemed to be moving for Batiuk. But then everything kind of dropped out and he’d never again reach those heights leading to an endless parade of prestige arcs and smug smirks trying in vain to recapture the magic. He’d seen the mountain top but couldn’t reach the summit but damned if he wasn’t going to keep trying despite each attempt coming up shorter than the previous one.

          So the problem, then, is that he’d reached for the stars and come up emptyhanded which wasn’t an indictment of him. Actually, he never wanted the success in the first place. Editors, businessmen, lawyers (who failed him in his lawsuit against his syndicate), the truly successful… they were all jerks. Hollywood was for jerks. New York, though home to his beloved DC and Marvel, was for jerks. Why strive to be a jerk? Batty had all he needed as a mid-level cartoonist never leaving his mid-sized town in a mid-level state. Yessir, being a ten isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; aiming to be a five, maybe even a six, with pretensions to ninehood just to check off that elusive award he should have gotten a long time ago and deserves for all of his hard work. Who needs success when you can settle into a life of comfortable mediocrity?

          1. Funny that that late 80s’ “peak” coincides with the strip ownership dispute with the syndicate that ended in John Darling biting the bullet. And amusingly enough that’s not far off from the period where Bill Watterson had his famous fight over Calvin and Hobbes’s syndicate that famously put him on the verge of losing the stirp, only for him to come out on top with the prizes of long breaks, better creative freedom, big Sunday strip canvases and ultimately ending on his own terms when he felt done with his one strip.

            Guess if one could look at it charitably it serves as a reflection of the two Ohio cartoonists’ careers and how they handled the struggles of administration and the desire to make the strip more meaningful. One of them, nearly 20 years of work in after getting great-enough business for two spinoffs, felt enough clout to do serious message stories and also take the reigns more strongly, cutting off an excess strip and focusing on his two moneymakers. Yet despite a fleeting chance with George Kennedy as Crankshaft and getting the friendship of John Byrne, big-deal fame slipped him by beyond a Simpsons reference and general “Oh that’s touching” comments on a cancer storyline. Meanwhile, a newcomer with a little more than five years of success that was far more cynical about the comic business and was caring more about art for art’s sake, fought tooth and nails for his rights and ultimately capitalized on his reputation, allowing him to get a generous final few years before putting down the pen and saying goodbye even before Schultz, riding off into the sunset with one of the most legendary comics in history.

            Also both strips have in common that you’ll never find merch of them in stores, especially not plushies. Though not from a lack of trying, as most Funkyverse merch was mail-order mugs and shirts.

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