Remember when Lisa was told she was cancer-free when she wasn’t?
Today, we learned where Lisa’s radiology scans went!
A British woman had part of her lung removed following a suspected cancer diagnosis, only to be told two weeks later that she didn’t actually have the disease.
The mother of three recalled to the BBC, “I had to go home and tell my children and parents that I had cancer. I tried to be strong for them, but I just fell to pieces,” adding, “You hear the word cancer and you automatically think you’re going to die.”
Erica Hay ended up having an operation in September 2020 to remove the lower lobe of her right lung. However, two weeks after the surgery, she was told that she didn’t have cancer, and the mass in her lung had been caused by pneumonia.
She claimed that the operation has left her with breathing difficulties, saying: “I’ve had asthma since I was 17, but my respiratory problems have increased unbelievably since the surgery. It’s completely floored me. Just talking or walking into the kitchen can set my symptoms off.”
“I am so very, very grateful that it wasn’t cancer, but I had to go through all of that and know this is probably never going to get any better now. It affects my work, my daily living, and at times it makes me feel inadequate as a [mother] and a wife.”
Hay has since pursued a clinical negligence claim. The case was resolved with a settlement. The hospital trusts involved haven’t admitted liability or causation.
You’re probably wondering how Lisa’s test results were given to someone who lives in Doncaster, England, thirteen years after Lisa died. And was diagnosed with a completely different kind of cancer than Lisa had. But we all know the answer to that!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Erica Hay, further proving she’s Lisa’s complete spiritual opposite, pursued a clinical negligence claim! And — I’m speculating here, but I feel pretty safe with this statement — probably also hasn’t made a series of videos to be played on almost every conceivable occasion to guide all of her relatives through the upcoming decades.
Oh, and almost certainly has better taste in men. (For her sake, I certainly hope so!)
Erica Hay did other things that Lisa didn’t:
On that last point… As Cancergeddon unfolded back in 2007, the old Stuck Funky crowd did not make nearly enough jokes about Lisa using her disease as her ticket away from Les.
Hey, tasteless is as tasteless does.
Most of you seemed focused on how he stupidly got in the way.
Haha, what can I say… it was a different time. As bad as Les had been, back then it looked like Lisa’s Story‘s subject was still, largely, the beatification of Lisa, and she took much of the flak because of that.
It was damn hard to make giving up because living to see her child grow looked too much like work a viable case for sainthood.
I didn’t find SoSF until 2010, and by then, EVERYONE was already woefully tired of Lisa and her interminable story. They guy skipped ahead ten years to blow right past Les’ grieving process…or so it seemed…but alas, BatHam was just getting started. Or mindlessly continuing, either or. She was around more than she was when she was alive, for crying out loud. The whole thing was so unseemly.
A quarter inch from reality! The naysayers proven wrong once more!
Just plain old cancer ain’t really Pulitzer material, as they say. It won’t even get you nominated. So ol’ TomBan upped the ante a little bit with Lisa, and crushed all possibility of hope WHILE she first learned she had cancer. The ol’ double-whammy, courtesy of Big Medicine, an easy (and predictable) villain. “Whoops! Sorry about the faulty diagnosis there, Leese. Nah, it’s not the “good chance” kind of cancer, or even the “some hope” kind. You’re doomed. Sorry ’bout that!”.
Lisa was a textbook example of Women In Refrigerators. Which is another thing Batiuk learned from comic books, even if he doesn’t realize it. I’ll let one of Batiuk’s heroes, Jim Shooter, explain:
I’d chalk most of [the Women In Refrigerators trope] up to lame writing. In desperate search of drama, and unable to obtain it any other way, some writers will resort to obvious emotional triggers/easy pickin’s. The biggest crime is that many of these stories are unfolded badly, baldly and pathetically, by writers who don’t have a clue.
Most of these writers sweated cannonballs trying to think of something SO SHOCKING that it would evoke a response from readers, and violence to women was the most horrifying thing they could come up with. Usually, the response to these badly told tales is boredom. Sometimes, they succeed in mobilizing folks like [Gale Simone], who wonder if these writers are sick. Nah. They just suck.
That’s so on point, it’s frightening. I mean, what can I say that he hasn’t?
He COULD have told a compelling cancer story, one where maybe the reader learns something, or maybe even one where (gasp) Lisa lived! Imagine that! Lisa, along with Les and a team of dedicated medical professionals, SAVE Lisa, who goes into full remission in a big spectacular Sunday strip. But alas, where’s the cheap shock value in that? How do you work dying leaves into such a tale? Would the “Lifestyles” Sunday supplement in the Akron Daily Herald have even bothered covering a happy story like that? Sadly, we’ll never know.
Related to this is another rabbit that bad superhero writers like to pull out of their hats when they want to humanize a villain and explain their anti-social behavior: child abuse (and its close friend, bullying). Superhero writers love playing the “they were abused when they were kids that’s why they’re so bad” card because it’s a shocking, and perceived (and lazy) way to give instant dept and sympathy so that your villain doesn’t appear two-dimensional. Off the top of my head Doc Ock, Bullseye, Kingpin, Carnage, half of the Flash’s Rogues, just on and on.
Really, the quest to shock readers, viewers, gamers, or whatever with plots leads to a lot of really terrible stories from people who think the shock and the twist is the entire point in and of itself. If the entire crux of your story is its twist, there’s a very good chance that it’s going to be a bad story because most of the time the writer(s) seem so hellbent on that twist that everything else surrounding it is neglected.
Batom is definitely one of those writers who follows the idea that the twist in and of itself is the whole thing. The story doesn’t even need to properly build to or hint at it, it’s all about shocking the reader. Lisa gets cancer… shocking! The cancer goes away because it’s done its job. But it comes back after not having been mentioned in 7 or 8 years… shocking! And Lisa dies… double shocking! Just call him BatRaiden, he’s shocking the readers so much! And after the shocking twist… eh, who cares? Time for a non-sequitur about old farts producing comic covers or Dinkle or something.
Because utimately Funky Winkerbean is to comic strips what Goosebumps is to literature.
This would thus make For Better Or For Worse Sweet Valley High.
The capper is that the stupid twists aren’t necessary. I remember one guy who wanted to kill some of the X Men simply because he hated them. No grand scheme, no tragic back story, just plain old hatred.
Superhero writers love playing the “they were abused when they were kids that’s why they’re so bad” card
Batiuk did exactly this with Bull Bushka.
To be fair, most everyone loved it when Norman Lear played that card with Archie Bunker. To be more fair, in the most emphatic way possible it must be stated that Bull Bushka is no Archie Bunker.
Like all tropes, Freudian Excuse can be done well or badly.
And after he went out of his way to humanize Bull, he quickly turned him into a comical punching bag, and made him the butt of the joke whenever he could. He even turned his retirement, terminal illness, and death into slapstick buffoonery. And THEN he had Les needlessly desecrate his dreary funeral, AND had Bull’s pal Buck attempt to bang Linda, too. He just never stopped making Bull pay the price for those old high school transgressions. It’s like he humanized him specifically to beat him down. Which, to me, seems kind of odd.
When you tell the victim of your meddling that her suffering is for the greater good, don’t be so blase, Idiot.
11/13: All this to set up a stupid gag….and it’s not even Saturday.
No, this strip is not setting up a stupid gag.
This strip is the stupid gag.
Tomorrow we’ll be on to another random stupid gag, and Crankshaft going bowling after choir practice (which is completely out of character for Harry “practice until 1 AM” Dinkle) will never be followed up.
I had thought that Ed was going to bowling before choir practice, but looking at the strip again, it’s not clear which activity comes first. Either he put his choir robe on and went bowling before choir practice, or he went to choir practice and didn’t take off his robe before going bowling.
I also thought choir practice was first. But I couldn’t figure out how Ed could go bowling after that, since practice is routinely held until 1 AM.
What I see is a man who jusr doesn’t get what time travel stories are for. A child can be entertained by setting things right but big kids understand that altering things to set up a preferred outcome either makes things worse or doesn’t even matter. After all, the Doctor never met John Frobisher, last descendant of Caecilius.
What really bothers me is that tomorrow, today’s strip won’t seem so bad after all.
Tomorrow, Today’s Strip Won’t Seem So Bad After All would be a great alternate title for Funky Winkerbean. It works as part of the sardonic tone of early Act I and as the gospel truth for Acts II and III.
We used to give FBORFW a lot of alternative titles based on the bizarre focus on making a virtue out of behaving like troglodytes.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Dinkle Week
(sound of crickets)
I finally managed to reach the end of Funky and boy… I actually don’t really know what to say. I’ve already said it earlier but the thing that immediately stands out is Batty’s propensity for writing twists when he’s not writing about frivolous banality. He’s so obsessed with doig these being dramatic twists and turns that he thinks will blow everyone’s socks off and then follows it up with a week of strips where Funky and Les complain about being old, or Les and the other miserable roll their eyes at students, or Dinkle teaches Becky’s class more than she does. I get that some times, maybe often times, you might want to give people a chance to catch their breaths after being presented with something big, but that’s not what happens.
Because Batiuk never builds up to story, he just presents it having started and then when it concludes that’s it. No follow up, no nothing. It served its purpose and it’s done. You can see this in how often time is spent on things that are then forgotten about or retconned. Mort is basically a drooling and barely cognitive vegetable thanks to dementia? Well, he is until he isn’t because Batiuk thought it would be funny to have him be an immature ladies man obsessed with being a rock star because who would expect that!? And what’s funnier than old people not acting like old people at all!?
Or maybe I’m reading it wrong. Maybe Mort got better because Batty didn’t get the praise he wanted for writing about Funky having to deal with his dad’s decline. Mort had a purpose, failed to fulfill that purpose, so screw it, find something else for him, who cares if it makes sense?
I hate Morton. Really, really, really hate him. He’s symbolic of everything terrible about Act III and especially Act III after Summer’s class graduates. He’s a grating old fool who’s long outlived his purpose, offers absolutely nothing, whose dramatic story was hokey and trite and whose gags are moronic and anti-funny. It’s really hard to find anything to like about Act III. Bad writing, bad jokes, lazy and deteriorating art, so much time by Batty spent on his own personal bugaboos and hang ups whether it’s his desire to be recognized as a great writer, his obsession with comic book covers, whatever. Picking a least favorite Act III character is close to impossible because almost every one brings the opposite of joy.
Morton, everyone associated with Atomik Komix, Les, Jessica Fairgood… they all suck. If I had to choose a favorite Act III character, I guess by it’s Summer because I think the stuff with her, while she’s in high school, is as close to decent as Act III ever gets. High school Summer is fairly inoffensive which is the best that can be said about it. Summer in the final year or two isn’t Summer but a weird skinwalker who’s replaced her. Funky’s unnamed trainer is up there simply because she doesn’t put up with his shit and screws with him any time he tries to give her dumb excuses and jokes. Anyone getting their kicks from lightly torturing these aging dopes gets marks as far as I’m concerned.
And the stupidest twist of all is Time Mop. The man wreaks havoc on the timeline because he’s too stupid to question a history gleaned from old sugar packets, the nonsense stories of the unobservant and urban legends.
Giving a little more of a broader overview on the series, I won’t say that I regret taking a few months out of my life to read it simply because it’s certainly memorable. Maybe not for largely good reasons but its flaws and foibles mean that it wasn’t boring at least half the time. Even later on when it does become more of a slog, every so often you’re greeted with gun-toting chimps or a woman having her husband melt down the gun that murdered her husband (John Darling, he was murdered) as a toy for her son of fluctuating age. Being memorably bad is better than being dull and forgettably bad.
I was talking about this with a friend actually. Reading something like Funky is interesting too for me because it’s such a glimpse into the personality of the person creating it. Those same hang-ups that Batty has that made me roll my eyes anytime Les’s writing career or Atomik Komix came up offer an insight into the man behind the Funky felt tip or at least allow you to speculate and try and figure him out. Trying to read a strip like Garfield or a webcomic like Questionable Content would offer me anything because they more or less openly exist in a state of “I’m only doing this to make money” and there’s nothing really fun about trying to dissect things so shamelessly sterile and soulless. Batty is too stubborn and proud and simultaneously insecure to reach that point though. Even when he’s in a “just cashing in” phase he’s never just cashing in because his desire to be seen as a great author and comic creator will never subside.
So Funky Winkerbean is a bad comic but it’s never necessarily an unintersting one even when it’s doinf stuff that should, by all rights, be uninteresting.
But I wouldn’t even say that it’s horrible until Wally Comes Marching Home in 2003. Act I is genuinely amusing and even funny a lot of the time. The first few years when characters like Roland, Livinia or Jan have presence especially as Batty still feels young and impetuous and has a little bit of youthful cynicism to him. Once they leave, it falls off for a while until around the time Al retires and Cindy is introduced. Cindy, especially in the first few years before the jokes started to turn solely into “lol malls” was so mean and vicious but in the context of a comedy with limited continuity that made her funny to me. I can see why TomBa was reluctant to drop her going into Act II even if she’d lost a lot of her edge by that point.
Act II has a lot of problems but it still feels like Batiuk is trying, even if the execution always leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t necessarily hate that 1992-2003 period even with all of its flaws for that reason. It was at least interesting enough in the stories he was trying to tell to make me want to keep going for reasons other than obligation. But the Wally/Byrne story is where the real shift happens and it’s where the strip sinks into the mire of being depressing and miserable; where every character is forced to just depressingly accept the crappy hands they’ve been dealt. This continues into Act III up until Les marrying Cayla, Summer graduating and Frankie’s return. The tone shifts again to one that seems superficially lighter but is mostly a bunch of dullards having to come to terms with their dreams either never being reached or not what they thought they were. In other words, the big theme of the last decade is resignation. You tried, it didn’t work out like you thought so all that’s left is to resign yourself to trudging along until the end comes.
That strip where Funky’s making the toast and proclaim “Here’s to the death of hope and our slow shuffle into oblivion” more or less sums up where the strip inevitably ended up and, like everything else, likely reflects Batty’s own feelings on his career as he was moving from middle aged to elderly. He’s successful but not in the way he wanted and has to resign himself to that even if he doesn’t want to. Which, again, means the strip isn’t dull even when it’s filled increasingly with dull, unlikable characters.
As I said, it’s really hard to pick a single character I dislike the most. Dinkle is an easy choice because there was never much of a time where I did enjoy him. DSH John, Act III Crazy Harry, Les, Darin and Pete in general… they’re all awful. I might just go with Darin though because he’s not only bad, he’s boring. The others, even the Mopester, have personalities but not Darin. He’s like the default template in a character creator. So yeah, least favorite overall character is Darin.
Favorite overall is a much easier choice: Coach Stropp. He’s the most consistently funny character even during Act II and even when he’s pushed into retirement. His jokes almost always work and he manages to be about as likable as any Funky Winkerbean character can be from start to finish. There was never really a time where he showed up and I went “God, not this putz!” In fact, him being a putz is why I liked him. That storyline where he’s smug about winning the championship because every team forefeited is probably the most genuinely funny one in the entire series and I’m fine with him going out a bozo since that’s what he was. His retirement coincides with the descent into more melodrama and is death with the last bit of hope the strip might have had.
>Being memorably bad is better than being dull and forgettably bad.
Funky Winkerbean is both forgettably bad and memorably bad. It has the veneer of a mediocre, banal comic strip. You have to really dig into the lore to understand what’s so memorably bad about it.
That “prom dress shopping” strip is a great example. On the surface it looks like a harmless sitcom scenario, where dumb dad inadvertently hurts his daughter’s feelings. But that strip doesn’t tell you:
I agree, 100%. One of my favorite strips from Act I is when Coach Stropp is standing in line for class schedule drop/add day. A dour woman behind the table tells the coach, “I’m sorry coach, you can’t drop Big Walnut Tech from the football team’s schedule.”
The final indignity for poor Coach Stropp is when Bull drops his urn and spills the ashes on the football field before the end zone, the location Stropp wished in his will. Batty is a cruel man.
The high school kids in in general, and particularly Summer, Owen, and Cody, are probably the characters TB wrote best for in Act III. Or at least, the characters he was clearly the most comfortable writing for. I didn’t much care for Owen or Cody, but TB clearly knew what he wanted to do with them and then he did it (a situation that benefitted Crankshaft compared to FW for most of the Act III years), and most of it was better than the rest of his output… more than can be said for most of Act III.
I think of Chien as Tom Batiuk’s last genuine character. He tried to give her a personality and interests that were her own. Everyone since then has been a Mary Sue built on Batiuk’s own hobbies and self-image.
Chien is maybe the one time that Batty tried to create a high school kid who was fundamentally different from himself and also was one of the good kids—as opposed to the jock boys and popular girls who existed to demean and bully the smart and put upon nerdy males—and the end result is that she basically gets one storyline that’s hijacked by Les partway through and then takes a backseat to Dopey and Mopey through the rest of her time in the strip.
She not only was a girl, who Batty always had trouble writing, but wasn’t a geek obsessed with comic books and other nerd pop culture minutiae which basically made it an uphill battle for her. By that point Batty was middle aged and firmly entrenched in his seeming inability and lack of desire to write about anyone who wasn’t similar to himself or who could be easily twisted to be similar to himself. It’s disappointing on the one hand she never showed up in Act III (Byrne’s design for her is actually really good) but on the other hand it means she avoided becoming Mopey’s trophy wench like what happened to poor Mindy.
Well, at least we know what Time Mop means by humanity’s nation: dumb white men who think Gardner Fox is the best writer ever.
I said it previously but it says a lot that the best relationship (or what the reader can interpret as one) in Act III and maybe in the entirety of Funky Winkerbean is Owen and Alex and it’s entirely because Batiuk never actually writes it. The last two high school generations benefit immensely from the fact that Batiuk after Summer’s graduation, Batty more or less dropped all pretenses of actually caring about the school setting beyond a vehicle for a couple of gags every quarter or so. Owen, Cody, Malcolm and them don’t necessarily have much in the way of personality which means there’s less opportunity for them to grate on the reader.
He still managed to find a way with Bernie though because Bernie is so over the top that he feels like a parody of Batiuk’s obsession with comic books. He’s Act I Les but stripped of the context (gag strip with limited continuity or story) that made Act I Les bearable.
I don’t think that the high school kids were characters he was comfortable with though, at least not in the sense of them being characters he thought he could write well. If he was comfortable with them it’s because they were a crutch. All he had to do is slap some variation of the Act I gang’s personality onto some blank templates and he was good to go. Even in Act I though, before the ’70s is up it’s clear that he was losing interest in the actual students because more and more of the actual writing was focused on faculty as the students were mostly relegated to repeating the same series of gags, many of which weren’t specific to the characters.
You can actually see Batty’s struggles to write characters who weren’t similarish in some way (age or interests) to himself even back then because of that. When the strip started he was a fresh-faced 25-year-old who was still teaching. He got out of teaching pretty quickly and by the time he was coming up on 30 it was more apparent that he was more comfortable with the characters who were closer in age to him (Fred was pretty obviously his self-insert before Les was) and this continued throughout the rest of its run.
Oh yes, TB’s comfort with his Act III high schoolers (especially the Owen and Cody generation) was must definitely as a crutch. It speaks to the quality of his other efforts that his crutch came across as his best work during that time…
11/14: I’m guessing that Ed will get bounced.
Oh look, Crankshaft won another fucking award. That hasn’t happened since he got that CFL game ball three months ago!
To someone as award hungry as Dinkle, seeing one of the little people get a trophy has to hurt.
In fairness, Ed winning a trophy for a bowling league is more-or-less warranted. He didn’t just stumble into getting it like with the CFL game ball, or like Les having an Oscar. He and his teammates have been bowling for years, and they were actual entrants in the bowling league who had intentionally showed up to compete.
True, but when was the last time we saw Ed bowling? They just got declared champions out of nowhere.
Priorities, man! We’re not gonna see Ed bowling when there are important Skip/Batton interview strips to run!
I think that what comes closest to explaining the grandstanding blowhard growling that every venue is for band practice is that he doesn’t know that Claude Barlow isn’t a role model. Sane people see a cautionary example. He doesn’t. He sees a misunderstood hero.
I don’t think Dinkle is trying to emulate Claude Barlow. I think Dinkle is obsessed with awards and recognition, just like everyone else in this universe is. He’s also way too attached to his own obscure fandoms nobody else cares about, just like everyone else in this universe is.
The problem is Batiuk sane washes destructive behaviors like this. I see a foolish man who let everything important slip through his fingers in a degrading race for glory. Batiuk sees a colorful old man.
The thing is that Dinkle absolutely does know that Barlow is supposed to be awful. Most of the jokes in the Barlow biography gags are about Dinkle explaining how bad his music is and how much of an affront it is to anyone with hearing and possibly the deaf as well. Which makes the fact that Funky’s ending is a friggin’ Claude Barlow concert dumb.
Also I find it kind of lame that Funky ends not in Westview but in Centerville and the last real characters to speak in the strip are Crankshaft characters, not Funky characters. It ends on a dumb gag about how everything is just being shifted over to Crankshaft. Yes yes, I know there’s the whole Lisa Jr. ending but until anything is shown otherwise I’m just taking that last week as a metaphorical thing and not the actual future of the Funkyverse.
I know Crankshaft had a story about The Burnings but from what I can tell from reading SoSF it’s just a couple people trying and failing to light a bookstore on fire so until something happens to say otherwise and Westview/Centerville is a ruined apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland, Lisa Jr. never happened.
I could not have hated the FW ending more, and time has not softened my stance on that, at all. Even a boring “life goes on” ending would have beaten the hell out of whatever that was supposed to be. BatYam is at his very worst when he’s trying to be clever in any way that doesn’t involve a punch line or wordplay. And that was hit-or-miss enough as it was.
I likewise always hated how he was always trying to make me read Crankshaft, by squeezing those stupid characters into FW whenever he could. I mean, I wasn’t going to read it anyway, but his pitiful attempts to coerce me into it only strengthened my anti-Crankshaft resolve.
I thought that the damn thing would end with Westview High being folded into Big Walnut because the city couldn’t support two high schools any longer. End of an era and all that.
There’s definitely no excusing how the ending went. Funky still, in some way, had value (I guess?) and history to draw from but Batiuk seemed to have zero respect for that or for its readers (shocking) when he cobbled together that trashfire. I’m a sucker for firsts and lasts when it comes to long running stuff: when a character first or concept first appeared, when they last did, when their last line was, etc. Funky’s last line is at the start of November, Les’s just before Summer sets off to meet TimeMop (and it’s just filler to set things up so his last real line is back at the end of October).
You know who gets lines in the last week before the Lisa Jr. jump? I went and double checked and it’s the Bedside Manor geezers (who get two strips of focus), Summer, Wally, Phil the Forecaster, Cayla, Chester, Max, Ed and Pm. Only two of those characters have any real importance to Funky Winkerbean prior the mid-2010s; I guess Ed does too but his run in the strip was short.
I think the better way to end things would use that week with Mary Sue Sweetwater’s funeral where Les and Funky realize that could be them sooner rather than later and Les decides to tell Funky he appreciates his friendship while he still has the chance as a springboard to begin wrapping things up. Funky decides to do like Tony did in Act II, move into semi-retirement and sell at least partial ownership of Montoni’s to Wally. Give some final storylines to Becky and DSH John and the WHS characters to close out those characters and settings. Have the post office bomber return to blow up Atomik Komix (no survivors, tragically). Have Summer become the girl’s basketball coach at WHS while Keisha becomes Big Walnut Tech’s coach. Reveal who was behind the Big Gay Castle (it was Summer; her and Maddie are living together). You know, actually give the reader some closure before sending everyone off.
But despite using its history as a crutch for random and obscure callbacks, Batty seemed to have no real respect for it or the reader so it’s “Here’s a bunch of assholes you don’t care about, read Crankshaft! Thanks for fifty years, suckers!”
I think inflating how bad The Burnings were makes the whole thing worse. The interference is based on a great big lie.
“DAMN!” she thought, wiping blood from her temple. “She fights good! Should we recruit her?” Then she blacked out. When she awoke…
“EXCUSE ME! I’m the principal here! Why are you barging in my office?! And bleeding from the temple?!”
She shook it off as best she could. And stupidly, groggily, said what happened. “Your secretary–beat me in the head–with a stapler! And…and…shot me with…” wincing, she pulled the tranquilizer needle out of her head. No, in the fight to get her, Chien herself misaimed. Shot herself! Her thoughts began to clear.
He smirked. “That’s her job. Keeps the riff-raff out. And your name is who?”
She tried to regain her senses. The secretary was shot with a tranq, so she wasn’t fully coming to anytime soon. She’d just have a headache.
“I would like…” she padded her sleeve against her bloody temple. “…to enroll in your fine, fine school.”
He sneered. “Your NAME?!”
Pulling the dart from her head, she said “CHIEN!”
“Ha! Funny, we have a student here who insists on being called that! Looks like you, except you’re much older.”
The tranqs weren’t done with her yet. She slumped in the nearest chair. Still confused, she said what she’d been trained: “There…is no…time travel….”
“Thanks, Scharwzenegger!” he laughed.
“…that you know of.” she said.
Would these drugs ever clear her brain?! “We…can…save people who died in the past…”
“HA! Who would I ever care about the past–” Then he sat bolt-upright. “…ANYone?!”
She could not get the fog from her brain. “Well…not HITLER, duh!”
He stared. “L-Lisa?!”
“…Yes…yes, of course, if that’s what you want…”
He paused, for a long time thinking.
He finally said “Do I have to give my Pulitzer back?”
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of Dinkle Week
Dinkle: GODDAMNIT, WHY COULDN’T HAVE BEEN ME INSTEAD OF ED WINNING A TROPHY!? I’M THE GREATEST BAND DIRECTOR WHO HAS EVER FUCKING LIVED!
Ed: YOU’RE JUST A PATHETIC LOSER, DINKLE! (throws a rock at Dinkle’s head, killing him instantly)
THAT IS AWFUL!
Who wants Dinkle to die instantly?!
Everyone.
Not all of us!
Some want him to die slowly, listening to Claude Barlow.
Which would also work.
To be fair, the farts and smugness could have come from anyone in town.
11/15: And thus we end the week with Crankshaft reminding Dinkle whose strip this is.
In the main, Batty is a horrible writer. Why does he always use that awkward phrase?
Because he thinks that saying something awkward makes him sound educated.
That being said, there are degrees of being pompous and unnecessary. Solo car date reminds us that Les wouldn’t know a social norm if one bit him. “I stand in line” is just baffling.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of Dinkle Week
(Ed grabs one of Dinkle’s trophies and beats him over the head with it)
11/16: When in doubt, sneer at children. That’ll teach them for not knowing the subject matter in advance and ask questions.
Maybe I am just dumb but I don’t see what Fletcher Hanks has to do with wandering around a mid-level comic convention in a dying Rust Belt city. Maybe Fletcher Hanks being an alcoholic who abandoned his family and froze to death on a bench is, like, poetically analogous to the Rust Belt milieu? Maybe because a guy whose works were mainly liked or read ironically because of the bad writing and incompetent art is analogous to a certain comic strip creator?
I just don’t know. Glad Batty enjoyed himself though.
He doesn’t see a drunken, abusive incompetent who people see as a joke. He sees a misunderstand genius ignored by a bullying world of bullies.
That is awkwardly expressed. I guess he meant that there was a panel or display for Fletcher Hanks, but “a la” suggests that he was behaving as Hanks did. (Did Hanks ever appear at a Comic Convention? My feeling is that he didn’t.)
I have this urge to hear Joni Mitchell sing “Free Man in Paris” all of a sudden. It’ll be a while before I can wander down the Champs-Elysees, alas.
I would parse this as his seeing a number of ‘outsider art’ types at the artists’ tables, perhaps webcomics or alternative styles or startups or something, that he associates with the last thing he read in that vein—perhaps the Fletcher Hanks collection from Fantagraphics ?10? Years ago. I mean, his frame of reference is not exactly Zap Comix, so he probably thinks all of those off-the-wall types as cute, but not real art. Still, give ‘em a pat on the back, tell ‘em to keep going…
Lol at all of us trying to decode his rambling.
Fletcher Hanks died in 1976. Maybe Timemop brought him back for 2025 Akron Comic-Con.
I have both Fletcher Hanks books from Fantagraphics. Weirdly, neither of them have copyright dates. (Although the 2nd one has a bookmark that’s my cable bill from 2016! On Page 17. Out of 230 pages. I’ve never tried to read it since.)
I’ll just open one at random:
“BIG RED McLANE
KING of the NORTHWOODS
Big Red is wandering alone in the togging country.”
He meant “logging country.”
The reason I never got further into it 10 years later, is because there’s FUNNY Bad, and this is BAD Bad. A single story is funny! A whole two books of them is not.
Again–the bookmark’s from 2016.
You remind me of one of my favorite entries in the Shade’s Journal in DC’s *Starman,* in which the Shadowy, Shadowy Man wrote of “social morays.”
Much as a one-l lama is a priest and a two-l llama is a beast, according to Ogden Nash, which means that someone should have sent doggerel along these lines to James Robinson:
A moray is a fish akin to an eel sister and brother
Moeurs refer to how we should act with one another..
Here’s Nash’s poem:
The one-l lama,
He’s a priest.
The two-l llama,
He’s a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn’t any
Three-l lllama.
“The fuckin’ Moon!” he whispered.
Chien held up her hand. As always, to shut Pete up, but this time she could agree. This was amazing!
She jumped 12 feet in the air, weightless even in the space suit. She repressed a giggle, but she’d always repressed laughter, even as a child.
The third one leapt into the air like the gymnast she once was back in high school, and did the Earth’s first octuple somersault. “WHEEEE!” came the girlish shriek. “HI! I’m Cindy Summers, and I’m on the MOON, on a SECRET COMMANDO MISSION!”
She abruptly stopped. Chien was holding a bolt pistol–designed for spacecraft repair, but not a lot of fun if fired in your nose. Chien hissed–the only way one could talk in a space helmet–“Could–you–not?”
Cindy said “I’m TRYING to make this RELATABLE to CLEVELAND!” She turned towards the floating space camera, then turned again, as it too was floating in space. Turning a bit green, she thought “Oh god, homecoming queens never barf on camera!”
Pete shrugged. “News 5 Cleveland wouldn’t run it.”
“I’m long past the Dog Walking Forecast!” Cindy said.
Chien, obviously, rolled her eyes. “A bit of focus, please? MOON?”
She rolled her eyes in turn. “Like, I’ve SEEN it, Dog Lady! I have a car window!”
Chien resisted the urge to pull Cindy’s oxygen cord. NASA knew Chien was expendable, but…?
Instead, she pointed and said “Is…that it? Opinion, Comic Book Guy?”
Pete squinted, but if you’ve ever seen Pete, that’s all his eyeballs can do. He adjusted the focus on his visor. “It’s small for a moonbase–Hell, it’s small for anything, except–“
Pete paused, Chien looked, Cindy checked her makeup. Pete said “This is NOT possible!”
Chien focused the scope.”No…no!”
Cindy pushed her out of the way. “I’m a JOURAMALIST” She squinted and gasped. “It’s–MOONTONI’S?!”
The viewscreen crackled on. A fat bald guy read from a cue card. “Umm–MWAHAHAaaa …umm–FOUL SCUM CREATURES OF EARTH! What is your order please!?”
Cindy stared. ‘F-Funky?”
“YES, EARTH TOILET WASTE! Once, I was called that on your pathetic planet–” The alien paused. “Cindy?”
“…Funky? Your hair grew back?”
“The Overlords of the MAD VICIOUSLON EMPIRE, determined to conquer the oddly-odored Earth, made me a COMMANDER! Free Hair Club For Humans included! So…umm…still working at ABC?”
“I’m hoping for Fox.”
Funky nodded his bald and wattle-chinned head.”Cool, cool.” He paused. “And Wally?”
“In prison. War crimes.”
“And who didn’t see THAT coming?!” They both laughed hysterically, nodding all the while.
Chien whispered to Pete “We have escape pods, right?”
He nodded. “Only room for two, if you get my drift.” They quietly began to float to the back of the ship.
It’s simple. He thinks French phrases are “fancy” — we’ve seen him misuse French many times before — and therefore “a la” (which should be à la) is “fancier” than “such as” or “e.g.” But à la means “in the manner of,” not “for example.”
He’s using the phrase totally wrong, and that’s why we’re all confused. He’s allergic to plain English. Too bad. It’s a nice language; he should give it a try sometime.
Pretentious and ill understood English seems to be a comic strip artist’s nation. I remember Brooke McEldumbass smugly confusing weigh station and way station and Lynn Johnston using vindicate to mean validate.
Things do sound nicer en francais.
Think of Gomez Addams passionately embracing Morticia whenever she said something in French. (I think he even kisses himself when he says something French.)
My particular pet peeve with the language is when people use “bienvenu” for “you’re welcome.” The proper response to “merci” is “de rien” (it’s nothing).
Then again, John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” wouldn’t be as memorable were it “La Belle Dame Sans Misericorde.”
Vive le roi et sans gabelle!
As much as his comic-con posts allow us to enjoy Batiuk’s awkwardness as a writer, we should not forget that they also allow us to experience his unique visual sense. Someone should compile a gallery of Batiuk’s photos of Funky Winkerbean tables, each pristinely devoid of any humans checking out the volumes assembled thereon. Even while other tables are seen in the background sullied with actual people at them showing some sort of interest, Batiuk’s table thankfully remains pure, untainted by interactions with the unwashed masses.
It says a lot about the poor donkey that he thinks he’s too elevated to get. The idea that he’s alienating people seems to have always been alien to him.
It’s charming that he enjoys taking photos of cosplayers that I guess he finds cool by his “Cover Me” metric. Furries, a Call of Duty guy, and even Amazing Digital Circus cosplayers, that’s quite a variety of highlights (I’m sure folks like csroberto might find it fun to cross streams and imagine the torment Funkyverse characters would suffer in the Circus, or vice versa. At most on my end I wonder if that premise would give Holtron some ideas).
And yes, Tom, I am open to doing comic conventions myself, but not quite the traditional ones as I’m more lured by cons where I can get celebrity autographs. Plus I don’t feel too attracted to the comic-con comic searching experience, the prospect of shifting through unsorted longboxes feels terribly tedious to me).
Noting too that there’s still raw Funky/Cranky pencil art available at his table, hmm.
Today’s Crankshaft
Ha ha it’s funny because young people in the Batiukverse don’t know what ping-pong is
Stranger things have happened, though mostly in the poetry of Robert W. Service:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee…
Do you think Les ever taught that?