Twilights Last Gleanings

After ten hours on the tractor today. And eight hours yesterday. And running calves the day before that…I have no brain meat to smash into a coherent Funkyverse adjacent post.

However, it seems I’m still awake, watching to see if my new favorite Mexican Dinger Bean, Alejandro Kirk, can waddle his way to another victory over the Evil Empire (the Dodgers BOO) in game 2 of The World Series.

So in order provide a new comments column for you beautiful people, and since some have enjoyed them in past: a collection of farm photos from this month.

59 thoughts on “Twilights Last Gleanings”

  1. Girl! How did you know I love your farm pictures?
    That is definitely Twilight’s last gleaming.
    Cattle look content. Were you moving them to a new pasture? I helped my in-laws with that. Very enjoyable. We didn’t lose a one!
    Total change of subject: I found this old note as I cleaned up my computer desk.
    The note was folded in a very small plastic bag. I opened the bag and read the note:
    🖲️🖲️🖲️ I.0.U. $100!
    To be paid on the 12th of never!
    And that’s a long, long time!🖲️🖲️🖲️
    I have no memory of when my spouse gave me the note. I do not know why I kept it. But there it was this morning. After 50 years of marriage there are times to play a long con!
    So on our family group text, I asked, “Everyone,
    please text back and tell me today is the 12th of Never. It’s a simple request.”
    My daughter wrote back, “It’s the 12th of Never.”
    My son wrote back, “It’s the 12th of Never.”
    I texted, “Mom, how about you?”
    She texted back, “It’s the 12th of Never.”
    BINGO! I posted the note, and said, “Mom owes me big time!”
    She tried denying it. She said I forced her to! I did kinda admit there was some slight coersion. But she was hoisted on her own petard!
    I gave her an out. I said, If you say with conviction that my plan was brilliant, that would count as the $100! She did it! With conviction, she said, “SP, your plan was brilliant!”
    Priceless!!!

  2. To get back to August’s mess, there’s a fourth scenario I didn’t mention: “Do the Bombers need to win in order to avoid crossing over to the Eastern Conference Semifinals?”

    You see, the way it’s set up is that if the two teams at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings at the end of the regular season have a 5-10 record, the fourth-placed team in the West crosses over……like the Bombers did this year.

  3. Yesterday’s Crankfuckery

    (I genuinely didn’t have anything to say about yesterday)

    Today’s Crankfuckery

    (Napoleon walks up to Ed and shoots him in the head, before taking off his mask revealing himself to be Arthur Fleck)

    1. Notice how Ed is Ed when he does something Jfffff likes and Pmm’s dad when he’s worried? The animosity is still there.

  4. I had nothing to say about the last two weeks. because I already said it. “A comedy disconnect happens when the person is trying to be funny rather than communicate ideas. Reality is sacrificed in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs… never sacrifice a character’s reality for the sake of a laugh.” Nothing more to say.

    It also turns into an anti-Les rant, if you enjoy those.

    1. But reality is something Batiuk can’t face. It’s why he had to be strong-armed into telling us who shot John Darling.

      1. Not having been around for this — is this true? Was there actual pressure on Batiuk to reveal this? I mean, seriously … John Darling was a the third-best Batiuk strip, which is kind of like being the third-best Stallone brother. Someone actually cared?

        2. Batiuk never cared who killed John Darling, because its only real purpose was to end that comic strip. Only when Les started writing a book about John Darling, did Batiuk have to explore who did it. (Which I think is more effort than he would put in nowadays.)

  6. I’m in the middle of 2015 now in my readthrough and jeez, has it ever fallen off a cliff. I’ve seen others around here point out that it feels like a different comic after Les and Cayla marry and while that’s true I think that the actual dividing line is the Frankie story in 2013. The Frankie story is at least connected to things that have happened previously and characters that go back to Act I. I guess you can also argue that the town (or most of the main cast at least) coming together to save the day by helping Lisa’s son drive off Bio-Dad’s big attempt at villainy provides some kind of closure to the whole Lisa stuff in its own goofy way which, for Batty, is an accomplishment.

    After that, though, it’s like it really is an entirely different comic. Most of the cast gets consigned to minor appearances or week long gags with no real story to them while a bunch of new and interminably shitty and dull characters like Chester Hagglemore and Mason Jarr(e) the Movie Actor pop up to take everything over. The only real constant is Les and even then he may as well be a completely new character. I guess technically he’s still a teacher but you’d never know because all of his time is spent working on book manuscripts, comic book (sorry, graphic novel) manuscripts, movie scripts and dicking around in Hollywood. Maybe Nate’s fine with the seeming part time status of Les because it means not having to round a corner and get greeted by that smirk?

    I don’t want to say the writing in the first part of Act III is good because it’s not. But it at least seemed like Batiuk was putting in a modicum of effort in trying to tell a story, even if the story wasn’t really good or competently told. After mid-2013, though, forget about it. It reads like something made by a guy who was bored and disinterested but not willing to end it because it was still a regular paying gig. I get the impression that by the mid-2010s, Batty would have rather just written a new series about Pete and Mason and whatnot and entertainment as he defines it (making comic books and movies and probably the comic book to movie pipeline). Maybe with Funky characters like Les still popping in but largely its own thing. But the clout he’d had to be able to sell another strip to the syndicates was long gone so all he could do was turn Funky into what he was more interested in until it died and then when that happened, transplant it all into Crankshaft (I assume; I don’t have, and have never had, any interest in Crankshaft).

    If there’s one positive I can say about the post-Cayla marriage/Bio-Dad stuff, it’s that Owen and Alex are probably the best couple in Westview by virtue of them being so insignificant as characters receiving storyline that Batty has no interest in giving them any attention. They just always hang out and sit next to each other, he takes her to the dance, he sticks up for her, they just do their own thing and seem pretty content like that. And a couple being the best and most tolerable one in the strip entirely because the writer isn’t actually writing them is a pretty damning indictment of Batiuk’s skills.

    1. It’s entertaining to read your thoughts about FW as you’re going through it all for the first time. Your reactions have been largely similar to mine.

      Batty would have rather just written a new series about Pete and Mason and whatnot and entertainment as he defines it

      Batiuk *did* write a new series about Pete and Mason and entertainment as he defines it. After his last editor died, he realized that nobody cared what he submitted anymore, so he repurposed Funky Winkerbean to be what he wanted: The Pizza, Comic Books, And Writing Awards Show. And now he’s doing the same thing to Crankshaft.

    2. This is a keen observation indeed.

      TB brought a coherent ambition to the first half of Act III, an ambition that was often enraging for us here (egged on by the cease-and-desist letter incident as much as Les’ insufferable antics in the strip, to be fair)… and then he just kinda got bored with that and the whole strip turned into, perhaps, the most baffling wish-fulfillment tale ever told.

      I would argue, of course, that while his more ambitious early Act III strips were much more coherently told, they weren’t really any better than late Act III’s scattershot movies/comics/movies/comics/Dinkle-adjacent media industry dreck. It has been my opinion since 2021 or so that Owen and Cody were the most competently-written characters in all of Act III, which… yikes.

      1. Ah Dinkle… that just reminds me of one of the other annoying parts so far: remember when Becky was actually a major character? After Wally’s return, it seems like all she shows up for are just re-running all the same old tired band jokes Dinkle had been doing for the last 40 years. Except 3/4 of the time she also has Dinkle shoved up her ass. I get that Dinkle was the closest thing that Batty ever had to mainstream normie recognition but there had long reached a point where the character should have been retired. But, like with Funky Winkerbean itself, Tom just couldn’t let go.

        The post-Act I characters that do continue hanging around in semi-prominent roles are often the worst. Darin, Pete and Jessica are awful. Jim, I thought, was actually pretty funny at first when he was written more as a weird, pompous schizo who seemed to believe more in goofy conspiracies than actual science. But then he just became a pompous jackass who seemed to be kept around to allow Batiuk to harangue the readers about climate change. John, of course, just allows Batiuk to go off about comic books.

        And John tangents into another thing that’s bugged me. Batiuk goes on and on about his love of superhero comics but I never get the sense that he likes the actual comics and stories themselves because for all of his rambling about them and CGC grades and story ideas… the stories of the comics (both real and fictional) are never really talked about. When we see Pete, the comic book writer, fretting over stories it’s always a high concept but never anything more than that. I know that Batty loves the early Silver Age DC comics of his childhood (he seems to be a DC guy more than a Marvel one) and those comics had a general process where the editor would come up with an idea for a cover and then have a writer write a story based on that cover. What I’m getting at is that I think Batiuk’s liking of actual superhero stories was second to what he really loved: the covers. After all, the cover was what drew you in with its imagery and proclamations and questions so all you could do before buying it was imagine what type of story was goig to be in there which means the cover itself was the most valuable part of the entire comic.

        At least, I think that’s how Batiuk looks at it.

        1. Dinkle should have been retired at the end of Act I, except as an antagonist to later high school students. His behavior would not be tolerated outside of a high school, or even inside a high school by the 1990s. The first time St. Spires’ church found out he was forcing elderly ladies to practice until 1:40 in the morning, he would have been fired, and probably reported for elder abuse.

          You know what could have been a good Act II story? A parent complains about Dinkle’s normal behavior, and the school takes it seriously. This was very plausible by the mid-90s, since schools were becoming more aware of this kind of absuive behavior. He could have been forced to adapt, retire, or start working at the kind of schools that would let him use his usual methods: alternative schools, military schools, prison music programs, places like that.

          1. Batty just seemed completely incapable or unwilling to retire an Act I character for the most part. Well, he did retire Coach Stropp until, of course, randomly bringing him back a dozen years later with an offhanded mention of cancerdeath. But everyone else who wasn’t already effectively written out during or with the end of Act I just kept getting trotted back out. Poor Fred doesn’t even get to suffer the dignity of dying.

          2. Batiuk often says says he’s going to retire characters, but he keeps bringing them back if he needs them. He cured Dinkle’s deafness and Mort Winkerbean’s dementia. He needed Phil Holt back to join his Silver Age comic book dream team, so he retconned away dozens of strips where he was unquestionably dead. Phil was once dead enough to talk to Dead Lisa in heaven, and had left the Atomic Comics crew a significant inheritance (which Phil would probably want back). None of these changes were ever addressed or even talked about.

          3. The Mort thing is just so odd because he wasn’t even a character until Funky had to put him in a nursing home. He was as unseen as Les’s parents and the story seemed less about him and more about driving home the blues Funky had been feeling about his bad day and getting older. There was no real reason to keep showing him afterwards. It’s just another example of how little Batty actually seems to care in the strip’s last decade. Time is spent on these big stories and then it’s wiped away for a gag. The timeline makes no sense at all because the dates of everything are constantly changing. Characters can be important for years and then effectively disappear.

            It goes back to Batty’s writing influences being, seemingly, the biggest slop comics of the Silver Age. I enjoy supehero comics and I like reading old ones too but I find a lot of Silver Age DC to be close to unreadable simply because 99% of the stories don’t matter (Legion of Super-Heroes seemed to be the one real exception). You get a cover promising a big revelation, a shocking twist, an amazing villainous scheme and by the end of the issue everything is back to normal because the hook on the cover to draw in the younger readers was the most improtant aspect, the stories by and large didn’t actually matter.

            That’s what he tries to capture with his own writing. The stories are only important in hooking the reader and once the story has finished, then who cares? The whole thing can be retconned, ignored, or called back to as Batty sees fit but only in regards to any effects it might have on the current story. If the current story completely contradicts the previous one, well what does it matter? It shows a complete lack of respect for the readers but Batiuk doesn’t really know anything else because he was raised on comic books that, by and large, didn’t respect its readers either.

          4. Batiuk’s ambitions are at odds with his behavior. How many times have we heard the phrases “a quarter inch from reality”, “the only comic strip that ages its characters realistically”, and “Pulitzer nominee”? He’s condescending about “gag a day strips” and considers himself above them, but he’s completely dependent on mimicking the style of gags (even though he can’t actually write gags anymore, or even stories that have a beginning, middle, and end).

          5. Also:

            You get a comic (book) cover promising a big revelation, a shocking twist, an amazing villainous scheme and by the end of the issue everything is back to normal because the hook on the cover to draw in the younger readers was the most improtant aspect, the stories by and large didn’t actually matter. That’s what he tries to capture with his own writing. The stories are only important in hooking the reader and once the story has finished, then who cares?

            That’s a really good observation. It does seem like Silver Age comic books are the only things Batiuk ever learned from, but he also never learned to view them from a distance. He doesn’t seem to understand the marketing aspects of it all. Sometimes he grumbles about comic book covers being misleading, like he’s almost pieced it together. But he never quite to the Covers Always Lie level of understanding.

            It’s one thing to love comic books as a 9 year old, and then get interested in writing them after you grow up. But Batiuk never grew up. He still consumes comic books like a 9 year old would. He approached his DC and Marvel interviews like a 9 year old. He still has the preferences of a 9 year old. You’ll notice he never has anything to say about Watchmen, or any of the 75,000 comic book movies that have been made this century. And he detests alternate universes, because he has no clue why they exist. Obviously, they exist so publishers can do stories about characters dying, or at least being at risk of dying or other life-altering outcomes. That Batiuk doesn’t get this says a lot.

          6. @BJ6K: Batty’s devotion to the STORY THAT WILL SHOCK YOU TO YOUR CORE (until the next story) is pretty well exemplified in one particular story: the death of John Darling (the Father of Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered). We all know the story about the argument and lawsuit with his syndicate and the fact that the strip was dropping in circulation like a rock. And we know the way he tells the story is as some final, spiteful act of burning the whole thing down to maintain his control of the character and strip. But of course, what would the syndicate want with a failed character and his series?

            The answer, of course, is nothing. But what Batty, presumably, actually got out of it was the shock and notoriety of having the strip end with the title character getting gunned down. Who did it? I doubt he actually thought about it at the time because that wasn’t the point, the act was, which is why it takes 7 years for it to eventually be addressed in Funky. Even when it is addressed, though, it doesn’t feel like it happened because he wanted to close out that lingering mystery, rather he just wanted to write a story where Les plays detective (anything to not write Les the Teacher as doing his actual job). The eventual revelation as to who did it just comes out of left field because it ultimately didn’t matter, as if Batty pulled a name out of a hat and went “Yeah, okay.” Or maybe Moss was picked because he already had a name and costume which meant he could be a slid into the role of comic booky supervillain for Les (actually Lisa and Jan Darling, Wife of John Darling Who Was the Father of Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered) to bring to justice like a real hero.

            And does this amount to anything? Nope. All that time spent on the mystery and Les writing his book and then the book is a flop and nothing about it is brought up again. Jess (I’m not doing the bit again) enters high school and spends most of it as not important or barely appearing until Batty decides to pair her up with Darin, maybe because he thought putting the Dead Parent Kids together was neat or something.

            But it really just speaks to how devoted he is to the immediate shocked reaction. Everything else is secondary to his imagining someone going “Wow, he really did that!? I can’t believe it!”

          7. @Narshe John Darling isn’t even the worst one. Or the second-worst. That would be Becky’s car crash, and Dead Lisa Who Died.

            When Becky lost her arm in Wally’s car crash – when she was 18 years old, and had to forfeit a Julliard music scholarship as a result – all she did was march into Montoni’s and tell Corey “eh, tell your brother I said no big deal” while Batiuk revealed her stump. This was an absolutely devastating life event that should have prompted a lot of followup stories. But once Batiuk got the cheap shock, he was done with it.

            Later, Batiuk inadvertently retconned Becky’s forgiveness of Wally by having her choose John Howard over Wally, after Wally practically rose from the dead for her. Then he walked away from that story too.

            Batiuk also spent years killing Lisa. Even though Stage 4 cancer shouldn’t have taken long, especially after it went untreated for a spell. When Batiuk finally put her out of our misery, what did he do? Skip ten years. So he could right to the parts where Les writes the book, Les remarries Replacement Lisa, Les gets to decide how the movie goes, and Les wins all the awards. And skip all the parts where Les has to mourn, Les has to tend to Lisa’s affairs (such as suing the hell out of that hospital), Les has to figure out how to survive without Lisa’s lawyer income, Les has to learn how to parent a girl by himself, and Les has to grow the hell up for once.

            So, yeah, you’re spot-on with that comparison.

        2. Well, given that the payoff was always them reacting to a cover, that is exactly how he sees it. It’s why he acted as if someone ran over his dog with a tank when someone showed him what Ray Lichtenstein was doing.

          1. I will say that in and of themselves I don’t mind the comic book cover Sundays. If you asked me if I’d rather see a cool Frank Brunner piece or Jim haranguing teenagers about climate change or Les smugly calling his students idiots, the cover wins out. The issue with the covers is that they’re usually tied up with a preceding week taken up by insipid strips where Holly is collecting comics or Pete is imagining what it was like to work at Batom Comics or whatever.

          2. What irritates me is that part of him thinks that he’s thwarting people who read his material online, little realizing that it’s just as awkward to hold a newspaper sideways too.

      2. the most baffling wish-fulfillment tale ever told

        Tom Batiuk is simply not affected by anything that happens outside his own head. And he has no concept that other people don’t see the world exactly as he does. If I had to write a comic strip with those two limitations, my wish fulfillment tales probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone either. (SEE ALSO: McEldowney, Brooke.)

        There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of narrow, strange, dorky, childish interests. I certainly do. I just have enough sense to know that other people don’t want to hear them, and wouldn’t enjoy stories about them as much as I do.

        1. There is also a way to make narrow interests and wish fulfillment relatable to an audience, mix them in to something relatably human (one of TB’s great weaknesses, naturally). I recall Francesco Marciuliano doing a Sally Forth story arc several years ago about a Godzilla/kaiju-themed amusement park that was absolutely drowning in hyper-specific references… but it worked regardless of one’s level of Godzilla fandom because he brought those references into a story built around the kinds of situations that anyone who has been to an amusement park can relate to.

          Of course, TB even has a knack for taking very relatable situations, such as watching television or visiting a retailer, and focusing on the most inhuman details of them. It’s remarkable.

          1. Take that bandbox toy: there’s a way of making people kind of sorry it didn’t catch on but he doesn’t know it.

          2. Making narrow interests and wish fulfillment relatable is actually pretty easy. You just have to realize that not everyone will share your passion about it. And that’s what Tom Batiuk simply can’t do. He has no theory of mind.

            Fandom should be inclusive, open to anyone who wants to join, or just learn a little more about it. Batiuk’s idea of fandom is highly exclusive. You have get a 100% score on his How To Comic Book Corrrectly test, or he’ll dismiss you. Like in the movie Diner where Steve Guttenberg won’t marry his (unseen) girlfriend unless she passes a quiz about the Baltimore Colts. Nowadays we’d call this a red flag.

        2. Also Johnston, Lynn. Her narrow interest is tin toy robots from the fifties. Her new big thing is about a suburb loaded with ineptly designed robots.

          1. I think Lynn Johnston needed some counseling after her marriage ended. Because everything she produced after to that was about forcing her characters into heteronormative marriages that mirrored her own desires, while ignoring all the problems of said marriages. Needless to say, what she did to Liz was the Ur-Example.

          2. It’s even worse than that. A group of us pierced it together and came to the conclusion that she was asking people to praise her for cheating on her first husband with the man who became her second.

  7. Whatever happened to Chester Hagglemore? Or Mason Jarre?

    (If your answer is anything but “found at the bottom of a crocodile-infested ravine wrapped in a carpet filled with pointy rocks with a Pixie Stix up their noses,” I’m not super interested)

    1. Honestly, I don’t think we’ve seen Chester since the “Lost Finale” in Funky Winkerbean. Also honestly, I don’t think anyone cares what happened to him since then. We’ll just go with the crocodile-infested ravine, it’s a pleasant thought.

      As for Mason, I’m pretty sure the last time we saw him was when we found out he knocked up his 70+-year-old wife, but we’ve not seen him, said wife, nor their presumably genetic abnormality of a child since then. I’m kind of torn between the desire to not ever see any of those freaks ever again, and the desire to see how ridiculous Batiuk makes the entire thing. (I mean, we know it’s going to be ridiculous, but if there’s one constant in Batiuk’s output, it’s that he always finds a way to make things both more ridiculous and more inane than anyone can ever predict.)

  9. Also, if Barry Balderman is still alive, he’s Pizza Monster, come to punish Funky for nominating Les as valedictorian.

  10. “I’ll come back for lunch when things aren’t busy.”

    So you’ll just be staying here all day then?

    2. He comes by his dread of unmasking people honestly. The last time someone got unmasked, he found out that he was The Lord Of The Late.

  13. We’ll never find out who PBM is, because that would require effort on the writer’s part. I doubt even TB knows. This isn’t “Who killed Laura Palmer” here. Or even “Who Killed Mr Burns”. Even “NOT ME!” from Family Circus doesn’t care. One would think it’d be easy to figure it out in a town of like 12 people–“Who here smells like bad pizza all the time? Well, I mean, besides Funky. Okay, all of us, that’s all we eat. That’s why we’re so skinny! That, and the rickets.”

    (It’s Les. All of Everything Comes From LES. One day, he will come out of the Pizza Monster closet, and all will love and adore him! For being a total asshole! THIS IS THE WAY)

    Or it’s Lisa. MAYBE SHE AIN’T SO DEAD AFTER ALL, EVER THINK OF THAT, PULITZER GUYS?!?!

    1. It’s a stupid consistency so of course, he’s going to keep on doing it. He missed the point Schulz thought he was making with the blockhead and the football: the nasty little girl got off on him humiliating himself.

    2. Also, we have to remember the idiot nine year old in the driver seat who fears some vague doom if common sense prevails and we find out who this goof is. Idiot nine year old children don’t know about money laundering or being a front for the Russian Mafia.

      I mean, it’s not like in Ray Billingsley’s Curtis where the moonshiner at the junk yard spreads a rumor about a head stealing monster to frighten dumb kids with surgically attached hats away. This guy could be up to something nefarious and Pete is too chicken to want to know.

  16. 10/29: You can’t have Mindy being a killjoy when she’s the one making actual sense. They’re in business with the man and they need to minimise risk.

          3. Batiuk peoples his world with dimbulbs…..

            Mindy was a dimbulb even by that standard. She was shocked to get into Kent State, even though every other character did, and I suspect their real-life admission standards aren’t much beyond “high school graduate.”

          4. She’s engaged to a meatsack who doesn’t realize that his business partner could be Wilson Fisk.

          5. And speaking of dumb people, it’s just as moronic of the jerk in the Halloween costume to hide his identity. It’s like when Parker was starting out and expected them to write out a check to Spider-Man.

      2. More like strawman but yeah, that’s what Batomiç Comic Cover Obsessive doesn’t get.

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