This points to the big issue I have with band turkeys: Dinkle’s refusing to think things through. The average person is going to down to the local Kroger to buy their turkey and not take a chance on something being shoved under their noses by real life Max Klinger.
SOSF, Happy Black Friday!
50 years of Turkey. I wonder what the oldest turkey that Dinkle ever sold past its expiration date?
There is strip that CBH included. It was probably originally a sideways strip. It shows Funky and Holly serving turkey to a table of eager friends and family:
1. Is that TB himself on the bottom right?
2. About half way up on the left, who is the girl that has Mort growing out of her chest? It’s kind of disturbing. Inquiring minds want to know.
Good shopping. Be Ware of Eve Hill, I prefer sapphires and especially emeralds for Christmas.
1. Is that TB himself on the bottom right?
It’s Wally Winkerbean (Batton Thomas wasn’t introduced until 2019) 2. About half way up on the left, who is the girl that has Mort growing out of her chest? It’s kind of disturbing. Inquiring minds want to know.
Rachel Winkerbean, Wally Winkerbean’s current wife
Thank you!
Your tastes have changed. A couple of years ago it was rubies and emeralds. Emerald nuts and Bombay Sapphire Gin it is.
I concur with csroberto2854’s answers. I love when comics do a mock-up of Norman Rockwell’s painting ‘Freedom of Want’. Working Daze did it every year for a while.
Be Ware Of Eve Hill,
As you know, I have a friend with expensive tastes. Rubies no longer make the cut. It has to be sapphires. We will see if Bombay Sapphire Gin is acceptable. I can only hope!
A belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here. I am thankful for all the laughs you guys provide on a daily basis. Thanks CBH for the retrospective, it shows that Tom was once a competent joke a day author.
Here’s my version.
Maybe Ian will let out a low belly laugh and say: ho ho, oh Toby, that’s not a Turkey, but we may as well cook him up. Maybe a little mango salsa on the side?
Wait until Ian discovers that he can’t curse or watch R-rated movies in his own house anymore because the parrot might drop an F bomb.
Also, the bad luck they have with parades isn’t the end result of outsiders bullying them. The reason they got booked when the car ad came on rests firmly on the shoulders of a pompous rube in a monkey suit who doesn’t know what the parade organizers meant when they questioned his insistence on where his band is in position.
This year’s Thanksgiving story reminds me of the 2020 arc at Dinkle’s house. At the time, I said:
This is the Thanksgiving of a family that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. And it’s a common theme in Funky Winkerbean. If this year’s Thanksgiving story wasn’t about Dinkle and his band, it would be about Funky and Montoni’s, Les and dead Lisa, Cindy and her popularity, or somebody and their comic book collection.
…or Ed and his stupid leaf.
This is another Thanksgiving that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. There were 8 adults and 1 child at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday (which appeared to be burritos), and Ed’s upset because a stupid leaf hasn’t fallen yet. Ed’s making Dinkle’s workaholism seem reasonable by comparison. Way to ruin Thanksgiving by making your problem everyone else’s problem, Ed.
The kicker is that Batiuk has no damn idea how repellent these creeps are. That would require him to ask what people see when they look at him.
Interesting. You can pretty much pinpoint the actual day the strip went from a reasonably solid, mildly amusing effort to utter sludge. (Looks like November 28th, 1996.)
I was thinking 2003 myself.
2003 in general is the point where the strip goes completely over the cliff.
It’s pretty much also when he realized that the writing staff of The Simpsons asked “How do we hammer home how boring and out of touch Marge is?” and his strip was the first thing that came to mind.
Ha ha, every time I watch the Macy’s parade I think of that Simpsons bit. I also think of “hooray for everything “.
That was back when the show was funny.
That’s the stuff.
Batiuk apparently thought it was a compliment.
Yeah.
I think it figuratively went off the cliff when Becky’s car literally did. That’s also the point I realized “There’s only one credit on this strip, but Tom clearly did not draw the underside of that flying car.”
That’s also when it went from “comic strip” to “maudlin tragic strip.”
It really is interesting as a condensed timeline of how the strip evolved over its run in terms of art, wrting style, character focus, etc. Like it starts out with Funky and Les a lot of the time, then you get to the ’80s and it’s just an endless stream of Dinkle hawking band turkeys which Batiuk seemed to think was the funniest damn joke he ever cooked up (it’s not even close to the best Dinkle joke, that would be his fundraising having the power to make or break the economy). Then it evolves into a mix of Dinkle running old jokes while the Class of ’88 is moving forward with expanded social circles, careers, etc.
Then it hits the 2000s and it starts to just become characters replaying their greatest hits, reusing old jokes, all of the older characters start getting shoved aside for ones like the Atomik Dopes except for Dinkle who is long past his expiration date, only to finally end on TimeMop babbling on about nonsensical garbage nobody cares about. You can really trace the strip’s decline solely through these alone, including missed opportunities (why was Becky’s younger sister not part of the ’98 class again?), terrible attempts at solemnity, or the fact that like 50% of the Howards’ appearances as an actual family occur in two of them despite the fact that Batiuk blew up one of the few things people reasonably liked to make it happen because “it’s called writing.”
Oh well, at least there’s a Kara appearance in there, small as it might be. I’m guessing this is where she started mentally reminding herself to jump the first time a school not staffed by self-important lunatics had an opening.
What truly annoys me is the praise heaped on the gutter-dwelling sleazeball in the Batman T shirt. Roberta Blackburn happened to be right about the fact that actually mattered, he rebuffed his mom’s concerns for his well being and he got in the way of the natural endgame for Wally’s return.
There’s no way on Earth Becky rejected Wally after everything they went through together, which included Wally’s resurrection from the dead. Imagine Cast Away if Helen Hunt saw Tom Hanks after he comes back and says “eh, whatever.”
And even if Becky did rejected Wally, there’s no way on Earth Becky stayed with John, since she’s a hard-working obsessive and he’s a lazy, sloppy manchild. They are so fundamentally unaligned that they wouldn’t stay together for long. They couldn’t stand each other. Unless their relationship had some heavy physical component, which Lord knows isn’t in evidence.
Becky and John feel like a forced marriage. Because it’s what they are.
The reason Batiuk did the forcing shows us that his ability and willingness to understand women came to a screeching, shuddering halt when a big, mean selfish woman named Betty Friedan said he didn’t deserve his milk and cookies.
It’s like how DSH being seen as the very model of the modern major human pustule baffles and angers him because he’s simply not capable of understanding what he looks like to the people blighted by his presence.
TB did it because shocking the reader with a twist is all he cared about when he’d do these dramatic stories. So he thought he was really blowing minds when Becky shows up after the jump but oh, no she’s married to John! How can this be!? Well, I guess the readers will just have to keep reading to find out, won’t they? And boy were they shocked, just not in the way that he wanted them to be which lead to his passive-aggressive “it’s called writing” post. He wanted to shock readers with the revelation that Becky and John were married, that Wally had been captured again and the soap opera dramatics that would come from Wally returning to see DSH John having stolen his family and becomes the classic cuckold; so cucked that he doesn’t even protest, just pathetically turns around and walks away.
All that really happened was that Batiuk annoyed them instead and he didn’t really have any plan for what to do after that anyway so Wally just floats along until Rachel comes along. But the Wally and Rachel thing never really works because Rachel was never really a character prior to this and even during it she’s not much of one either, she just a living plot device to fix Wally’s problems for him. There was plenty of drama to be mined from the Wally/Becky/John situation and IMO it really only needs two simple fixes. Becky and John aren’t married (they’re a long term couple but have yet to actually get engaged) and Sadie is used instead of Rachel. Becky and John not being married leaves Becky more coflicted and free to possibly return to Wally, Sadie knew Wally and had started connecting with him prior to him getting shipped out the first time when he was unable to face Becky which gives her reason to be interested in helping him upon his return. Two changes and the story immediately has more dramatic possibility to string the readers along with; complicated love triangles/rectangles/other shapes are why people enjoy soap operas after all.
But Batty has always been unable to see the forest for the trees. He’s so focused on surprising the reade with plot twists that he doesn’t pay attention to anything else. Thoughts like “I’ve surprised them, now what?” never seem to enter into his head because he basically seems to think that the mere act of surprising the reader should be the goal in and of itself. Wally got his life upended, isn’t that enough? Lisa got cancer and died, that’s shocking right?
His sassy borax about calling it writing tells us that the macaroon thinks it is enough. It’s a damn sight like how Lynn Johnston is butt hurt because people saw the end game for FBorFW coming a mile away. We were supposed to be surprised by Liz marrying Anthony despite being beaten over the head with the idea that the only things she should want are the things Elly wanted her to have.
As bad as Foob got and as bad as the Liz/Anthony relationship was, I’ll maintain that while Batty is funnier than Lynn (Act I Batty at least), Lynn is a far better actual writer than he is. She was willing to set storylines up, actually let them play out over longer periods of time and the stories would usually have some kind of consequences. Even the bad stuff from the last few years of the strip isn’t inherently bad. Anthony and Liz, as a concept, is fine and April and Becky’s deteriorating friendship could have been good. The problem was always the execution because by that point Lynn had seemingly lost a lot of interest and, like Batty, got too focused on her personal vision and needing to counter (real and perceived) critics.
Lynn was definitely much better at keeping her stories more interesting than Batiuk was and better at making it feel like more big ongoing narrative. She was better at wringing out emotion too and stories like Elly’s mother dying or even April’s rabbit dying are a lot more competent and genuine in their emotion than Lisa’s cancer.
I’m maybe a bit biased though. My local paper had Foob but never had Funky… or a lot of other strips; it was a lot of Momma, Garfield, Cathy, Zits, FoxTrot and things like that (never Luann though, surprisingly). Foob was basically the only serialized non-gag one so it was always the one that stood out to me and I read it off and on up through probably high school. So I at least have some nostalgic attachment to it and am willing to be slightly more forgiving of its faults. But I also read through it in full about a year or two back and the ’80s and ’90s stuff geuinely holds up, even if it’s a bit schmaltzy.
Also Lynn actually won real awards and stuff. Batty can only ever claim to have been nominated for them.
Anthony and Liz could have been better if Lynn didn’t set up so many romantic false leads. April and Becky could have been better if it were just a harsh truth Aesop about people drifting apart. Lynn’s issues got in the way of a story about a long distance relationship and another about friends unfriending.
Narshe, you’re not biased. Lynn J is, by every possible objective measure, a better storyteller than Tom B. Sure, Tom had funnier strips in the early days … but if he wanders away from humour, he can’t even grasp the concept of what a story IS, let alone tell one. A reader may well have disagreed with Lynn’s story and character decisions, but it’s still crystal clear what the story is.
She does have one bad habit: she had an elaborate backstory we were supposed to know despite not showing any sign of it in the strip.
I think what gets me is the incessant need TB has to pat himself on the back over his story decisions. The pregnancy was so brave and daring (and I guess maybe it somewhat was in 1986), the decision to age his characters was unprecedented and so on. By the time he jumped forward in time, Michael had gone through puberty, started dating and broke up with his first girlfriend, started high school and gotten his driver’s license. Elly got pregnant and had a kid. There was a story about child abuse.
Batty likes to act as if he was some kind of trailblazer but he was largely just walking the path that Lynn had been walking for about a decade going back to when she’d decided to start aging the characters in real time. And he couldn’t keep ages or the timeline consistent. He wanted the plaudits of having made the gutsy decision to age his characters but still wanted to keep things in an amorphous cartoon time except for when it wasn’t and the characters aged except for when they didn’t and then the years they were in high school would change almost from story arc to story arc in Act III.
He congratulates himself on doing a story about a gay prom 20 years after Foob did Lawrence’s coming out story. And unlike the Funky version it involved a character readers knew, was about the gay character and peoples’ reaction to it, you later on see Lawrence’s boyfriend. While in the prom arc, Batty invents two nameless characters simply to act as a Macguffin. He heavily implies a known character is gay but lacks the guts to show them and then forgets the plotline entirely. Lynn dealt with papers dropping her strip over the storyline but stuck to her guns and made something that people remember. Batty danced around the whole thing so he could, using Nate as a mouthpiece, say “I think gay people are gay-ok! *thumbs up*” but faced no risk whatsoever in doing it.
Batty was too busy chasing praise to ever really seriously sit down and work out stories. If he did, when he realized that Sadie was just a clone of Sadie he would have used that to re-examine the character and think of how that can be used to work on her and give her an arc about finding herself or something. Instead he just went “NOPE, BAD!” and consigned her to oblivion. He expected yelling “I’m talking about important things!” was all he needed to do, like a bad comedian who mugs at the crowd to get a laugh. Stuff like that is why when people remember Foob, they’ll fondly remember something like Lawrence coming out but when people think of Funky it’ll be bemused snickering as they remember the title character lying in a gutter or Wally staring stonefaced while telling Becky he’s thinking about Afghanistan.
They’ll also remember the time Lynn’s sister in law goaded her into killing off Farley in the manner she did.
Another thing they’ll remember is that he’s not smart enough to anticipate what LISA looks like in block capitals.
I suppose it’s debatable whether Batiuk was patting himself on the back for copying Lynn Johnston or Garry Trudeau, although it probably doesn’t matter in the long run. Personally I think he might have been more influenced by the attention Trudeau got, especially since he pulled basically the same exact trick. Doonesbury started out as a gag-a-day, always-in-the-present strip about a group of college students. After a time skip, the students had all graduated and were now in their adult careers, and events would proceed in real time. Funky Winkerbean started as a gag-a-day, always-in-the-present strip about a group of high school students. After a time skip, the students had all graduated college and were now in their adult careers, and events would proceed in real time. Granted, For Better or For Worse also did the “events proceeding in real time” thing, but Doonesbury seemed to get a lot more attention and coverage for it (likely due to Trudeau taking an extended break from the strip that coincided with the change), whereas FBoFW just kind of started doing it without much fanfare. (Of course, the only way to ever get a definitive answer would be for Batiuk to give it, and since he acts like he was the first one to ever do such a thing, obviously that’s never going to happen.)
(Also, Gasoline Alley did the “events proceeding in real time” thing even earlier, but since Walt is canonically a veteran of World War I and somehow still alive despite being well over 120 years old… sometimes you really have to decide if the gimmick is worth keeping…)
I also think Doonesbury made a more overt pivot from gag-a-day to politics. Which makes me wonder why Batiuk didn’t just re-invent Funky Winkerbean as a drama strip after Act I ended. Batiuk acknowledged that he couldn’t do stuck-on-the-gym-rope jokes anymore after Les went through the Lisa pregnancy arc. And drama is what he said he wanted to write anyway.
There’s probably some universe where Batiuk did this, then ended the strip after Lisa died, and Funky Winkerbean has a positive, and unique, legacy.
If he did that, he’d actually get what he wanted. Can’t be a misunderstood genius like his idols if he’s valued in this life.
The art style changing, settling in, sort of plateauing and then grinding through changes are weird to me, perhaps it maps to assists from Ayres but… there’s a clear line up to maybe 2003 attempt at realism, then a discontinuity between 2004-5, like the backgrounds disappear and he’s somehow forgotten how to draw faces. Did he mention having a stroke at some point?
Ayers took over penciling duties in 1993 or 1994; his first strips were appeared in ’94 but Batty said that Ayers penciling is what allowed him to be able to get the year long buffer so maybe those ’94 strips were drawn in ’93? The big difference really is that Ayers was still trying to draw in a close approximation to Batty’s style. 2003 is when Byrne takes over for the Wally story so the big change in art was just Ayers aping Byrne’s style. I’d imagine that trying to be more detailed with the characters meant sacrificing the backgrounds, especially given that Ayers was getting older and was still drawing two daily strips.
I’m willing to be a little more forgiving of lack of backgrounds in comics, possibly because I read plenty of manga where a lot of times backgrounds are just omitted if it’s not important for a panel. Comic art is time consuming and I’ll give always Ayers credit for being an absolute workhorse in being able to draw two daily strips simultaneously for as long as he did.
The actual issue with the art, from reading Batty’s blog, is that he’d had his car accident so a certain person took over the inking while he was unable to do it and switched to doing it digitally insead of physically. He’d also been doing the digital gray tones. That man? Why none other than “Dangerous” Dan Davis! As soon as he gets on the strip, even just doing the gray tones, the art nosedives tremendously.
That talks about it a bit and includes what I believe are the Batty inked original (on the bottom) and the Davis inked one that actually saw print (on the top). While Batty gushes on about how great Davis is, and while I’m not going to say the bottom is some great work of art, it’s sure as hell much better than Davis’s slop job. Look at how mangled Summer’s face is on the top compared to the bottom. He somehow made Les look even douchier. The gray gradient blobs in every panel make the whole thing look colder and more depressing. Granted I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life so I can’t give a more thorough analysis of how bad it is but it’s bad enough that I can realize that Davis absolutely sucks and definitely plays a role in the degeneration of Funky’s art. It’s amazing he’s gotten as far as he has considering how little talent he seems to possess. But taking a quick look at Comics Curmudgeon, the standards for art on newspaper strips nowadays must be so low that scraping the bottom of the barrel would be an improvement.
Thanks for the details! I belatedly realized the start of the tones coinciding with a sort of ‘smoothness’ must mean when he started using a tablet directly instead of scanning a drawing. Probably. Not a fan myself, that hand-drawn look is much preferable.
The way he still works at, piles his books on, has his picture taken at and blogs about a “drawing” table, when he hasn’t drawn anything in years — decades? — is becoming a real annoyance to me whenever i see it now. Even an IBM Selectric would be more honest.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of Leaf Holding On Tree For Dear Life Week
Pam: DAD, NO!
Ed: DAD, YES!
I am happy we got 2 decent strips from TB this week. Both today and his midnight call on Wednesday qualify for strips of the year. Today’s strip really describes Crankshaft at his most humorous. But my money is still on Midnight Caller.
I cannot imagine what it felt like to slough through a half-century of Turkey Day strips like that. Many thanks, CBH.
One question about the 1996 entry: Why does it look like Lisa has one eye in the middle of her forehead?
Because back when he drew it himself, he was terrible at drawing eyes.
Eyes drawn way too close together. Especially disturbing is when the character had both eyes on one side of their face, i.e the csroberto2854 effect.
The prototype had the too close together eyes too.
Oops, sorry about that, csroberto2854. It was supposed to be “the Picasso effect”. It was a clipboard issue. I copied and pasted your name in an earlier response to Sorial Promise. I’m sure your eyes are not on the same side of your face. Shame on me for not editing better. Sorry again.
My kingdom for an edit or a delete button.
And right at the end, Puff Tommy is whining about people enjoying things wrong despite the multiverse being a Flash Fact.
11/29: Funny….I expected the flamethrower.
That’s Tom Batiuk for you. The big reveal is…. the thing that should started the story, not ended it.
We see this a lot: Batiuk taking too long to tell his joke.
That’s the problem. He wasted six days on what should have been a one day example of Ed not knowing what restraint is
Okay, this is a small thing, but… why is the copyright text upside down in the 11-28 sideways strip?
I get why it’s not at the bottom; because you don’t want black text on a dark brown background. (Not that Batiuk observes this principle on his own blog.) But shouldn’t it be right side-up in terms of how the sideways strip is printed in the paper? As much as Batiuk rails about dead tree newspapers being the preferred way to consume comic strips, why can’t he take the time to get this right for people who actually do?
Or is it like coloring? Comic strip coloring is done by low-paid, uninformed drones in post-production, who often make errors that undermine the strip. Which indifferent editors never catch until it’s too late.
And of course, what escapes Batiuk is that showing us what makes Crankshaft do insane nonsense makes him look worse.
I think we can all agree the Thanksgiving Day 2022 strip was the worst.😝
Thank you, Comic Book Harriet. Your FW research and compilation skills are second to none.
Bombed again
On Bombay gin
Spectacular. That gag in the 1990 strip was one of those Batiuk gags that would send me into a blind, newspaper-flinging rage. I mean, I like good wordplay as much as anyone, but come on.
And 35 years later, a gag at this level would be under serious consideration for Crankshaft of the Year.
Lord knows I’ve tolerated plenty of TomBan “groaners”, but sometimes he just plain crosses a line. Then again, I rage-quit reading FW dozens of times back then. Then, I’d check back in, and get mad all over again.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of Leaf Holding On Tree For Dear Life Week
(Crankshaft cuts the tree, causing it to fall on to him)
And nothing of value was lost.
Still Today’s Crankfuckery
Ed: Can this day get any worse?!
(It suddenly starts snowing 8 inches per hour of snow, suffocating Ed)
What did Cindy and Funky wish for? I mean, neither of them spontaneously combusted, so I guess not that.
I’ll guess “an ugly, spite-filled divorce,” so they both got their wish.
Probably a child. You’ll notice he’s firing blanks.
Cindy wished to escape Westview and marry a movie star. Funky wished to marry Cindy. They both got their wish but the soul sucking nature of Westview turned that wishbone into a monkey’s paw for Funky.
That or Cindy wished for immortality which is why she stopped aging at 35 and at about double that age is going to have a child. I can never think of that without also thinking of the Patton Oswalt bit about the horrifying image of an elderly woman giving birth.
I’m surprised that it looks like the Funky + Cindy arc starts here (still flirting) and is already falling apart only 3 years later (she’s leaves the party to go to “work”)? That’s … pretty fast by TB rates.
11/30: Why didn’t he remember all the junk he bought online earlier?
11/30: With all the garden implements he bought in bulk, why wasn’t this Monday’s strip?
I’m guessing Tom Batiuk thinks he invented the idea of the extendible tree pruner, which explains why his looks totally impractical and nothing like the actual ones you can buy in any hardware store.
If you listen to Tom Batiuk then Tom Batiuk invented serialized storytelling and dramatic, hard hitting stories covering controversial material in the funny pages (BECAUSE COMICS DON’T HAVE TO BE FUNNY HAR HAR) and rescued the teenage comic from the doldrums of Archie. So why can’t Tom Batiuk’s inventive and forward thinking genius extend outside of the creative realm and into the practical world of the home? Tom Batiuk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, after all.
This is why we refer to him by a German expression meaning a face seeking to be slapped.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 7 of Leaf Holding On Tree For Dear Life Week
(The tree pruner breaks and then vanishes into thin air)
Ed: SON OF A BITCH! (slips and shatters like a vase that’s been thrown at the ground at 90 MPH)
Who’s the jailbird in that one strip?
A guy who served with Nate in Vietnam who was in jail for a murder he may or may not have committed. This was Lisa’s first client as a public defender, his case went to the Supreme Court and failed and he was executed. Lisa then went on to defend DCH John for selling hentai from Roberta Blackburn, the most incompetent antagonist in the series.
in jail for a murder he may or may not have committed.
And Batiuk will never tell you. Nor is he capable of writing a story around the ambiguity of it.
Lisa’s ONLY client as a public defender no less. She quit after Danny Madison’s appeal options were exhausted, stating that she believed that the State of Ohio had used her work on the case specifically to speed up the appeal process so they could execute Madison as soon as possible.
I think it is pretty clear during the Danny Madison story that TB intends for readers to see Madison as innocent, with Lisa digging up all sorts of ridiculous reasonable doubt (the prosecution’s star eyewitness was an agoraphobe with poor eyesight, Madison’s “confession” in prison was given to a snitch who got out early for his testimony, and especially the considerable ado made of Madison’s Vietnam flashbacks) and Madison being shown as a sad-eyed, even-keeled fellow who makes gifts for little Summer and sings Christmas carols while receiving the lethal injection. But TB needed Madison to die to make the story hit the downbeat he wanted it to, so Madison’s innocence had to remain implicit.
The strip where DSH got arrested will never not make me laugh, though. Was that one strip worth the insufferable trial that followed? I say “maybe”. John Byrne says “yes”. Jim Mateer said “I’m not putting my appearances in those strips on my website next to my other Funky Winkerbean cameo“.
[Lisa] stating that she believed that the State of Ohio had used her work on the case specifically to speed up the appeal process so they could execute Madison as soon as possible.
And Lisa and her entire law firm couldn’t do anything about that? That’s Lawyering 101. There are all kinds of appeals and procedures you can file that serve little purpose beyond delaying a case, when it’s in your interest to delay.
Then again, this is Lisa we’re talking about. It wouldn’t be the first time she threw up her hands and went “oh well, somebody screwed up, guess it’s time to die now.” It’s practically foreshadowing her own death.
The story is basically the real-life Cameron Todd Willingham case, especially the “dubious testimony from a jailhouse snitch” part.
Lisa’s entire approach to hardships in her life, be it getting teen pregnant or facing an uphill battle to prevent an execution or getting cancer, was to throw up her hands and act like there was nothing she could do. In that respect, she really is Westview’s patron saint.
Trying and failing means you still fail. Best not to try. This is why Foob is better. If Lynn Johnston had written it, we’d be talking about pulling an acquittal out of her butt.
You know what would have been a good story? If Lisa had learned anything at all from Madison’s death, and vowed to not give up so easily in her own cancer fight. That could have redeemed both stories.
Ah, yes, the delightful story where Lisa worked on appeals for capital cases. When she first gets to the office, her new coworker treats her dismissively because he thinks she doesn’t have the fortitude to stick with such work, given how draining it can be, particularly since such appeals don’t have a particularly high success rate. We, of course, are supposed to think this guy is just some sexist jerk for not seeing Lisa’s true strength and capability, except that when the appeal fails… Lisa promptly quits the job because she, indeed, didn’t have the fortitude to stick with such a disheartening job when her slim-to-none chance didn’t pan out.
Another fine character study from Tom “Mixed Messages” Batiuk.
And he’s too much himself to boast about his nifty harsh truth Aesop.
The best part about the cameo Mateer does shout-out is the fact that Funky trudged on after that touching tribute to the real-life Luigi’s murals he painted by forgetting about that whole story and having Ayers stop remembering to sketch it and the colorists ignoring it entirely by going back to painting the walls the droll red/brown shades they had before. That and also forgetting the restaurant even has side wings like that story reminds us about.
12/1: The week writes itself, doesn’t it? Lena will get bent out of shape if she isn’t allowed to witlessly hand Axelrod another victory because nobody dares say “You can’t cook, you can’t make a decent cup of coffee, you can’t play golf and you’re utterly clueless and inept at the bowling alley too and making Batiuk ‘I Don’t Understand Women’ Rage Face will not change that so if you wanna help, don’t.”
There was that one Christmas(?) sequence with Crank as the Jimmy Stewart character from It’s a Wonderful Life, (so I guess a dream and not canon) where the other drivers realised that without Ed around to sway them, Lena’s cookies were actually pretty good.
I wonder if Crankie projects a field of negativity that warps the perceptions of those near him?
Maybe that’s why Time Mop hasn’t killed him yet.
I think that Ed Crankshaft being alive negatively affects Lena’s cooking, which reminds me of when Squidward’s mood affects his clarinet playing (when he’s in a bad mood, his playing is horrible, and when he is in a good mood, his playing is great)
Interesting theory. I wish the strip would explore that kind of thing.
Hey, look, everybody! There’s Mary, Ed’s “steady girlfriend” who suffered a school bus trip nervous breakdown in April of 2023 and now turns up once or twice a year! Hello, Mary!
In other news…”I’ve just been told”? Weren’t the other bowling team members there when you all won the semi-final round? Wouldn’t they already know this? Wasn’t there a less clunky way for this exposition to take place?
My money’s as to their opponents’ identity is on a St. Spires squad, although a Montoni’s team with Pizza Box Monster on it wouldn’t surprise me.
Apparently November 14 was the “bus drivers bowling league championship”, but December 1 is the “holiday tournament.” With exactly the same team. Which… Ed’s going to win another trophy! That’s three in five months (including the CFL game ball)!
CORRECTION: Okay, I don’t think it’s exactly the same team, because Mary Marzipan is there.
Happy belated Thanksgiving you all! And what an archive dive, CBH!!! As discussed by many above, it is a fascinating microcosm of the entire history of the strip… from the hard turn into maudlin “importance” in mid-Act II to the complete unravelling that took place during most of Act III.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Now we’ve shifted from the Leaf That Would Not Fall to Crankshaft Bowling
Yesterday I said, “A Montoni’s team with Pizza Box Monster on it wouldn’t surprise me.” God, I hate it when Batiuk proves me right.
How can Montoni’s have an employee-comprised bowling team when that would require at least three or four participants during various evenings when the restaurant is open, and the only people we’ve seen working there since it reopened in late 2023 are Mopey and Mindy (with PBM hanging around)? No Wally, no Adeela, no Rocky…you get the point. Maybe in exchange for free food Skip Bittman can lend them a hand…oops, sorry, Skip.
Also, Ed was unaware the pizzeria his own granddaughter co-owns had a team taking part in this latest tournament? Makes perfect sense.
One time Mindy ordered a pizza from Montoni’s, and went there to pick it up, apparently forgetting that she owns the place.
Nothing more sobering than realizing you’re starting to follow the Batiuk thought process.
Anyhoo… it’s their “busiest time of the year”? What does that mean, you get TWO customers a day? I think the only people we’ve EVER seen getting food there were Mindy picking up a pie and the Pizza Monster a few weeks ago. Both of whom own the place. It’s not like Batiuk has ever bothered to show it being anywhere close to as busy as it was when Tony and/or Funky owned the place. (And despite there always being customers there, the “thin-crust profit margins” still weren’t enough to keep them open. How are these chuckleheads still in business?)
GL, you’re forgetting their two steadiest patrons: Skip Bittman and Batton Thomas, Creator of the Defunct Syndicated Comic Strip “Three O’Clock High.” The Sunshine Boys are there at least once every other month, and I’ll bet dollars to doughballs they’ll show up again before the year ends.
Ah, you’re right, I did forget about those two. And such a glorious feeling it was.
You can learn more from J.J. O’Malley than the delights of a cold lamb sandwich or the usefulness of a Havana magic wand.
You can learn that an apparent error in a surname — calling Tom Batiuk’s Skip Bittman when his name is Rawlings — is meant to lead you to learn of “SCTV’s” Skip Bittman, who yearns to be like his brother Bobby.
Which is pretty horrifying, because if the insufferable Skip models himself on his brother, then Batiuk’s Bob must a veritable (no pizza boxes) monster, albeit most likely one with a couple of Pulitzer Prizes to his credit.
Cushlamochree, but the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder & Marching Society can be proud of you, J.J. O’M!
Pay no attention to Jane Schultz’s slurs on “dopy fairy godfathers.”
I assume they’ll just get Not-So-Crazy Harry and DSH John to fill out the roster. Has it even been said what happened to the Komix Korner or did Batty forget that Montoni’s owned that space too?
We’ve seen the Komix Korner in Crankshaft after Funky ended, although it’s not entirely clear who Skunky is paying rent to these days. Funky owned the building when he owned Montoni’s, but it’s not clear if he sold the entire building to Mopey/Blandy/Pizza Monster, or just the Montoni’s space, or just the Montoni’s name and the current Montoni’s is paying Funky rent, or what the deal is, really. (Them having bought the entire building would probably make the most sense, since Mopey moved in to the apartment over the restaurant, so he then wouldn’t need to pay rent or anything, which means that’s probably not what actually happened.)
Funky owning an entire building and then selling it to a guy who writes comic books who was somehow able to afford it would line up with Funky somehow screwing up a pizza franchise in the matter off a year or two after the start of Act III. Probably gave Mopey a “good deal” since they’re pals and all that would be way less than he could have gotten if he’d sold it to someone else or just maintained ownership of the building and rented out the space.
Funky had also completely shut down Montoni’s, and auctioned off all the decor. (And presumably equipment like the refrigerators and pizza ovens, but who cares about that?) The name was the only thing of any value, and it made sense that Pete would want to buy it. Why Batiuk didn’t make that the story is totally beyond me.
Especially when hoarding intellectual property is common in the comic book world. Big companies buy up small, failed ones just to take over their roster of characters. And sometimes they do that just to prevent anyone else from owning those characters.
They’re both going to win an trophy, aren’t they?
It makes as much sense as the bus driver games.
The worst part may be that TB had actually, perhaps accidentally, had naturally set up Funky’s successors in Wally and Rachel… only to pull that ridiculous closing up story in a vain attempt to punch up the closing months of FW.
Rachel was the longest-tenured Montoni’s employee not named Funky or Tony, Wally was Funky’s cousin/nephew and had gotten his life back on track working at Montoni’s (serving as a manager for his last several years there), and the two lovebirds met at Montoni’s. Having them assume control of Montoni’s from a retiring Funky is an easy and satisfying story beat to hit. It all made sense to sensible people, but alas the author is something else entirely…
But weren’t you shocked when Montoni’s up and closed out of nowhere? And that they somehow remained open after closing only to close again so Mopey could buy it from Funky a year or so later?
The closing of Montoni’s really just goes along with everything else regarding Funky and its history and how TB treats it. Batty loved talking about how central a space Montoni’s was and it was arguably the central location of the strip after awhile or at the very least on par with the high school. It’s such an important and integral part of the strip both in universe and on a meta level and then with only a few months left he just casually has Funky go “oh yeah, it’s closed because of the pandemic” (a takeout business like a pizzeria should have thrived during that time) because, well, Funky was ending so Montoni’s had to close. Except it’d be back a year or two later with Mopey now owning it and Batiuk always planning to integrate Funky into Crankshaft thus making the whole close down important.
But I guess it was supposed to be symbolic or something because Funky was ending and, you know, it’s called writing. Really, all the history of the strip or the importance of locations and characters are only venerated in an illusory way and ultimately I think the readers, either the genuine ones or the snark crowd, had more investment in that than Batty ever did. Because Batty’s entire sense of storytelling is Silver Age comic books from when he was a kid and it’s not like those books ever had much in the way of continuity. The history only existed when it could be dragged out to get off another month’s worth of stories to make them feel like they had more depth than they actually did.
Actually, it’s kind of telling that whenever old Silver Age comics come up in the strip, Batty never talks about ones like Spider-Man or Fantastic Four or other Marvel books where part of what made them appealing was the sense that there was an underlying story you were following from issue to issue which led to history that could be drawn from in a more meaningful way or that informed the ways characters acted with one another or reacted to things that happened. It’s all DC stuff and even then it’s not maybe the one group of DC characters of the time that also generally had a good sense of ongoing continuity compared to most of DC’s Silver Age output (the Legion of Super-Heroes), it’s all the stuff that was basically just episodic and used continuity in a more flippant way.
Ed and his teammates were apparently unaware that they had won a semifinal match of the tournament. (See Monday’s strip: “I’ve just been told that our bowling team has made the final round in the holiday tournament at Margo Lanes!”)
So expecting Ed to know who else was playing in the tournament would be implausible. If he doesn’t follow his own team’s progress, he’s not going to follow any other team’s progress, either.
As I said before, this particular running gag is not funny. Having an economy based on fundraising for a high school band from a bedroom community of Cleveland is funny. Them never knowing who the refugee from The Masked Singer is not.
Today’s Crankfuckery
I’m betting that this week just shows only the prelude and the aftermath of the Bowling Match between Crankshaft and Montoni’s
Keep forgetting to comment and missing out on the fun. Good news is I’m here now early in the morning, finally!
So the new Montoni’s Bowling team is made up of… half Montoni’s and half the Valentine? I don’t care to review whether those two used to work at Montoni’s under Funky or not for technicalities but damn is Batiuk really that okay with letting the idea that the pizzaria is literally just run by two people now? All these homeless Westview characters adopted back into the flock and yet none of the 2020s Funky regulars are given work again.
What do Max and La Hija del Asesinado John Darling have to even do with Montoni’s? Could Mindy not get Dopey, who used to actually work thereand is/was her coworker (twice!) to come or is he too busy drawing comic book covers and swooning over Phil Holt and Flash Fairfreefieldman?
I think that particular Generic Blonde is Hannah, Max’s baby mama, not Jessica Darling Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered.
I think.
(On the other hand, I thought Mindy was one of the Shining Twins at first, so who even knows.)
12/03: This means one thing: Mindy and Max have to deal with the jackass main character being the unpalatable, unsympathetic and unapologetic jerk who, as Santa, sees small children as greedy monsters who need slapping down.
Also as a side note: The Komix Thoughts blog has only been doing the John Darling Sunday strips for the last few weeks, and per the most recent post we’re apparently in the home stretch of the strip now when Tom was in his famous fight with the syndicate over the strip, and also artist Bob Vojtko took over. It’s shown that he captured Gerry Shamray’s style down pat (“without missing a beat” in Tom’s words), and I can observe that there is more signs of individual illustration and variance compared to the early-Davis tactics Shamray seemed to have been using. So props for that, slight improvement.
Guess this makes me wonder what the final Sunday will be, since I don’t think John’s death was part of that slot.
Of marginal interest was the assertion that Gary Shamray “wanted to move on”.
You think he’d have wanted to move on if the strip was doing well? I’m guessing perhaps that what with JD losing paper after paper and sinking fast, Shamray could see the end was near anyway, so why not jump ship now? Or possibly a pay cut had already been proposed, and Shamray felt continuing with this deadweight wasn’t worth his time…
Incidentally, those Sunday John Darling strips continually prove that Batiuk simply NEVER could write in the longer Sunday format. Three panel gags? Yeah, that he could do. Anything else….not so much.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Ed: Hey, Pizza Box Monster Guy! At the end of the match ya have to reveal yourself!
Son of Stuck Funky 
This points to the big issue I have with band turkeys: Dinkle’s refusing to think things through. The average person is going to down to the local Kroger to buy their turkey and not take a chance on something being shoved under their noses by real life Max Klinger.
SOSF, Happy Black Friday!
50 years of Turkey. I wonder what the oldest turkey that Dinkle ever sold past its expiration date?
There is strip that CBH included. It was probably originally a sideways strip. It shows Funky and Holly serving turkey to a table of eager friends and family:
1. Is that TB himself on the bottom right?
2. About half way up on the left, who is the girl that has Mort growing out of her chest? It’s kind of disturbing. Inquiring minds want to know.
Good shopping. Be Ware of Eve Hill, I prefer sapphires and especially emeralds for Christmas.
1. Is that TB himself on the bottom right?
It’s Wally Winkerbean (Batton Thomas wasn’t introduced until 2019)
2. About half way up on the left, who is the girl that has Mort growing out of her chest? It’s kind of disturbing. Inquiring minds want to know.
Rachel Winkerbean, Wally Winkerbean’s current wife
Thank you!
Your tastes have changed. A couple of years ago it was rubies and emeralds. Emerald nuts and Bombay Sapphire Gin it is.
I concur with csroberto2854’s answers. I love when comics do a mock-up of Norman Rockwell’s painting ‘Freedom of Want’. Working Daze did it every year for a while.
Be Ware Of Eve Hill,
As you know, I have a friend with expensive tastes. Rubies no longer make the cut. It has to be sapphires. We will see if Bombay Sapphire Gin is acceptable. I can only hope!
A belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here. I am thankful for all the laughs you guys provide on a daily basis. Thanks CBH for the retrospective, it shows that Tom was once a competent joke a day author.
Here’s my version.
Maybe Ian will let out a low belly laugh and say: ho ho, oh Toby, that’s not a Turkey, but we may as well cook him up. Maybe a little mango salsa on the side?
Wait until Ian discovers that he can’t curse or watch R-rated movies in his own house anymore because the parrot might drop an F bomb.
Also, the bad luck they have with parades isn’t the end result of outsiders bullying them. The reason they got booked when the car ad came on rests firmly on the shoulders of a pompous rube in a monkey suit who doesn’t know what the parade organizers meant when they questioned his insistence on where his band is in position.
This year’s Thanksgiving story reminds me of the 2020 arc at Dinkle’s house. At the time, I said:
This is the Thanksgiving of a family that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. And it’s a common theme in Funky Winkerbean. If this year’s Thanksgiving story wasn’t about Dinkle and his band, it would be about Funky and Montoni’s, Les and dead Lisa, Cindy and her popularity, or somebody and their comic book collection.
…or Ed and his stupid leaf.
This is another Thanksgiving that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. There were 8 adults and 1 child at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday (which appeared to be burritos), and Ed’s upset because a stupid leaf hasn’t fallen yet. Ed’s making Dinkle’s workaholism seem reasonable by comparison. Way to ruin Thanksgiving by making your problem everyone else’s problem, Ed.
The kicker is that Batiuk has no damn idea how repellent these creeps are. That would require him to ask what people see when they look at him.
Interesting. You can pretty much pinpoint the actual day the strip went from a reasonably solid, mildly amusing effort to utter sludge. (Looks like November 28th, 1996.)
I was thinking 2003 myself.
2003 in general is the point where the strip goes completely over the cliff.
It’s pretty much also when he realized that the writing staff of The Simpsons asked “How do we hammer home how boring and out of touch Marge is?” and his strip was the first thing that came to mind.
Ha ha, every time I watch the Macy’s parade I think of that Simpsons bit. I also think of “hooray for everything “.
That was back when the show was funny.
That’s the stuff.
Batiuk apparently thought it was a compliment.
Yeah.
I think it figuratively went off the cliff when Becky’s car literally did. That’s also the point I realized “There’s only one credit on this strip, but Tom clearly did not draw the underside of that flying car.”
That’s also when it went from “comic strip” to “maudlin tragic strip.”
It really is interesting as a condensed timeline of how the strip evolved over its run in terms of art, wrting style, character focus, etc. Like it starts out with Funky and Les a lot of the time, then you get to the ’80s and it’s just an endless stream of Dinkle hawking band turkeys which Batiuk seemed to think was the funniest damn joke he ever cooked up (it’s not even close to the best Dinkle joke, that would be his fundraising having the power to make or break the economy). Then it evolves into a mix of Dinkle running old jokes while the Class of ’88 is moving forward with expanded social circles, careers, etc.
Then it hits the 2000s and it starts to just become characters replaying their greatest hits, reusing old jokes, all of the older characters start getting shoved aside for ones like the Atomik Dopes except for Dinkle who is long past his expiration date, only to finally end on TimeMop babbling on about nonsensical garbage nobody cares about. You can really trace the strip’s decline solely through these alone, including missed opportunities (why was Becky’s younger sister not part of the ’98 class again?), terrible attempts at solemnity, or the fact that like 50% of the Howards’ appearances as an actual family occur in two of them despite the fact that Batiuk blew up one of the few things people reasonably liked to make it happen because “it’s called writing.”
Oh well, at least there’s a Kara appearance in there, small as it might be. I’m guessing this is where she started mentally reminding herself to jump the first time a school not staffed by self-important lunatics had an opening.
What truly annoys me is the praise heaped on the gutter-dwelling sleazeball in the Batman T shirt. Roberta Blackburn happened to be right about the fact that actually mattered, he rebuffed his mom’s concerns for his well being and he got in the way of the natural endgame for Wally’s return.
There’s no way on Earth Becky rejected Wally after everything they went through together, which included Wally’s resurrection from the dead. Imagine Cast Away if Helen Hunt saw Tom Hanks after he comes back and says “eh, whatever.”
And even if Becky did rejected Wally, there’s no way on Earth Becky stayed with John, since she’s a hard-working obsessive and he’s a lazy, sloppy manchild. They are so fundamentally unaligned that they wouldn’t stay together for long. They couldn’t stand each other. Unless their relationship had some heavy physical component, which Lord knows isn’t in evidence.
Becky and John feel like a forced marriage. Because it’s what they are.
The reason Batiuk did the forcing shows us that his ability and willingness to understand women came to a screeching, shuddering halt when a big, mean selfish woman named Betty Friedan said he didn’t deserve his milk and cookies.
It’s like how DSH being seen as the very model of the modern major human pustule baffles and angers him because he’s simply not capable of understanding what he looks like to the people blighted by his presence.
TB did it because shocking the reader with a twist is all he cared about when he’d do these dramatic stories. So he thought he was really blowing minds when Becky shows up after the jump but oh, no she’s married to John! How can this be!? Well, I guess the readers will just have to keep reading to find out, won’t they? And boy were they shocked, just not in the way that he wanted them to be which lead to his passive-aggressive “it’s called writing” post. He wanted to shock readers with the revelation that Becky and John were married, that Wally had been captured again and the soap opera dramatics that would come from Wally returning to see DSH John having stolen his family and becomes the classic cuckold; so cucked that he doesn’t even protest, just pathetically turns around and walks away.
All that really happened was that Batiuk annoyed them instead and he didn’t really have any plan for what to do after that anyway so Wally just floats along until Rachel comes along. But the Wally and Rachel thing never really works because Rachel was never really a character prior to this and even during it she’s not much of one either, she just a living plot device to fix Wally’s problems for him. There was plenty of drama to be mined from the Wally/Becky/John situation and IMO it really only needs two simple fixes. Becky and John aren’t married (they’re a long term couple but have yet to actually get engaged) and Sadie is used instead of Rachel. Becky and John not being married leaves Becky more coflicted and free to possibly return to Wally, Sadie knew Wally and had started connecting with him prior to him getting shipped out the first time when he was unable to face Becky which gives her reason to be interested in helping him upon his return. Two changes and the story immediately has more dramatic possibility to string the readers along with; complicated love triangles/rectangles/other shapes are why people enjoy soap operas after all.
But Batty has always been unable to see the forest for the trees. He’s so focused on surprising the reade with plot twists that he doesn’t pay attention to anything else. Thoughts like “I’ve surprised them, now what?” never seem to enter into his head because he basically seems to think that the mere act of surprising the reader should be the goal in and of itself. Wally got his life upended, isn’t that enough? Lisa got cancer and died, that’s shocking right?
His sassy borax about calling it writing tells us that the macaroon thinks it is enough. It’s a damn sight like how Lynn Johnston is butt hurt because people saw the end game for FBorFW coming a mile away. We were supposed to be surprised by Liz marrying Anthony despite being beaten over the head with the idea that the only things she should want are the things Elly wanted her to have.
As bad as Foob got and as bad as the Liz/Anthony relationship was, I’ll maintain that while Batty is funnier than Lynn (Act I Batty at least), Lynn is a far better actual writer than he is. She was willing to set storylines up, actually let them play out over longer periods of time and the stories would usually have some kind of consequences. Even the bad stuff from the last few years of the strip isn’t inherently bad. Anthony and Liz, as a concept, is fine and April and Becky’s deteriorating friendship could have been good. The problem was always the execution because by that point Lynn had seemingly lost a lot of interest and, like Batty, got too focused on her personal vision and needing to counter (real and perceived) critics.
Lynn was definitely much better at keeping her stories more interesting than Batiuk was and better at making it feel like more big ongoing narrative. She was better at wringing out emotion too and stories like Elly’s mother dying or even April’s rabbit dying are a lot more competent and genuine in their emotion than Lisa’s cancer.
I’m maybe a bit biased though. My local paper had Foob but never had Funky… or a lot of other strips; it was a lot of Momma, Garfield, Cathy, Zits, FoxTrot and things like that (never Luann though, surprisingly). Foob was basically the only serialized non-gag one so it was always the one that stood out to me and I read it off and on up through probably high school. So I at least have some nostalgic attachment to it and am willing to be slightly more forgiving of its faults. But I also read through it in full about a year or two back and the ’80s and ’90s stuff geuinely holds up, even if it’s a bit schmaltzy.
Also Lynn actually won real awards and stuff. Batty can only ever claim to have been nominated for them.
Anthony and Liz could have been better if Lynn didn’t set up so many romantic false leads. April and Becky could have been better if it were just a harsh truth Aesop about people drifting apart. Lynn’s issues got in the way of a story about a long distance relationship and another about friends unfriending.
Narshe, you’re not biased. Lynn J is, by every possible objective measure, a better storyteller than Tom B. Sure, Tom had funnier strips in the early days … but if he wanders away from humour, he can’t even grasp the concept of what a story IS, let alone tell one. A reader may well have disagreed with Lynn’s story and character decisions, but it’s still crystal clear what the story is.
She does have one bad habit: she had an elaborate backstory we were supposed to know despite not showing any sign of it in the strip.
I think what gets me is the incessant need TB has to pat himself on the back over his story decisions. The pregnancy was so brave and daring (and I guess maybe it somewhat was in 1986), the decision to age his characters was unprecedented and so on. By the time he jumped forward in time, Michael had gone through puberty, started dating and broke up with his first girlfriend, started high school and gotten his driver’s license. Elly got pregnant and had a kid. There was a story about child abuse.
Batty likes to act as if he was some kind of trailblazer but he was largely just walking the path that Lynn had been walking for about a decade going back to when she’d decided to start aging the characters in real time. And he couldn’t keep ages or the timeline consistent. He wanted the plaudits of having made the gutsy decision to age his characters but still wanted to keep things in an amorphous cartoon time except for when it wasn’t and the characters aged except for when they didn’t and then the years they were in high school would change almost from story arc to story arc in Act III.
He congratulates himself on doing a story about a gay prom 20 years after Foob did Lawrence’s coming out story. And unlike the Funky version it involved a character readers knew, was about the gay character and peoples’ reaction to it, you later on see Lawrence’s boyfriend. While in the prom arc, Batty invents two nameless characters simply to act as a Macguffin. He heavily implies a known character is gay but lacks the guts to show them and then forgets the plotline entirely. Lynn dealt with papers dropping her strip over the storyline but stuck to her guns and made something that people remember. Batty danced around the whole thing so he could, using Nate as a mouthpiece, say “I think gay people are gay-ok! *thumbs up*” but faced no risk whatsoever in doing it.
Batty was too busy chasing praise to ever really seriously sit down and work out stories. If he did, when he realized that Sadie was just a clone of Sadie he would have used that to re-examine the character and think of how that can be used to work on her and give her an arc about finding herself or something. Instead he just went “NOPE, BAD!” and consigned her to oblivion. He expected yelling “I’m talking about important things!” was all he needed to do, like a bad comedian who mugs at the crowd to get a laugh. Stuff like that is why when people remember Foob, they’ll fondly remember something like Lawrence coming out but when people think of Funky it’ll be bemused snickering as they remember the title character lying in a gutter or Wally staring stonefaced while telling Becky he’s thinking about Afghanistan.
They’ll also remember the time Lynn’s sister in law goaded her into killing off Farley in the manner she did.
Another thing they’ll remember is that he’s not smart enough to anticipate what LISA looks like in block capitals.
I suppose it’s debatable whether Batiuk was patting himself on the back for copying Lynn Johnston or Garry Trudeau, although it probably doesn’t matter in the long run. Personally I think he might have been more influenced by the attention Trudeau got, especially since he pulled basically the same exact trick. Doonesbury started out as a gag-a-day, always-in-the-present strip about a group of college students. After a time skip, the students had all graduated and were now in their adult careers, and events would proceed in real time. Funky Winkerbean started as a gag-a-day, always-in-the-present strip about a group of high school students. After a time skip, the students had all graduated college and were now in their adult careers, and events would proceed in real time. Granted, For Better or For Worse also did the “events proceeding in real time” thing, but Doonesbury seemed to get a lot more attention and coverage for it (likely due to Trudeau taking an extended break from the strip that coincided with the change), whereas FBoFW just kind of started doing it without much fanfare. (Of course, the only way to ever get a definitive answer would be for Batiuk to give it, and since he acts like he was the first one to ever do such a thing, obviously that’s never going to happen.)
(Also, Gasoline Alley did the “events proceeding in real time” thing even earlier, but since Walt is canonically a veteran of World War I and somehow still alive despite being well over 120 years old… sometimes you really have to decide if the gimmick is worth keeping…)
I also think Doonesbury made a more overt pivot from gag-a-day to politics. Which makes me wonder why Batiuk didn’t just re-invent Funky Winkerbean as a drama strip after Act I ended. Batiuk acknowledged that he couldn’t do stuck-on-the-gym-rope jokes anymore after Les went through the Lisa pregnancy arc. And drama is what he said he wanted to write anyway.
There’s probably some universe where Batiuk did this, then ended the strip after Lisa died, and Funky Winkerbean has a positive, and unique, legacy.
If he did that, he’d actually get what he wanted. Can’t be a misunderstood genius like his idols if he’s valued in this life.
The art style changing, settling in, sort of plateauing and then grinding through changes are weird to me, perhaps it maps to assists from Ayres but… there’s a clear line up to maybe 2003 attempt at realism, then a discontinuity between 2004-5, like the backgrounds disappear and he’s somehow forgotten how to draw faces. Did he mention having a stroke at some point?
Ayers took over penciling duties in 1993 or 1994; his first strips were appeared in ’94 but Batty said that Ayers penciling is what allowed him to be able to get the year long buffer so maybe those ’94 strips were drawn in ’93? The big difference really is that Ayers was still trying to draw in a close approximation to Batty’s style. 2003 is when Byrne takes over for the Wally story so the big change in art was just Ayers aping Byrne’s style. I’d imagine that trying to be more detailed with the characters meant sacrificing the backgrounds, especially given that Ayers was getting older and was still drawing two daily strips.
I’m willing to be a little more forgiving of lack of backgrounds in comics, possibly because I read plenty of manga where a lot of times backgrounds are just omitted if it’s not important for a panel. Comic art is time consuming and I’ll give always Ayers credit for being an absolute workhorse in being able to draw two daily strips simultaneously for as long as he did.
The actual issue with the art, from reading Batty’s blog, is that he’d had his car accident so a certain person took over the inking while he was unable to do it and switched to doing it digitally insead of physically. He’d also been doing the digital gray tones. That man? Why none other than “Dangerous” Dan Davis! As soon as he gets on the strip, even just doing the gray tones, the art nosedives tremendously.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/match-to-flame-207/
That talks about it a bit and includes what I believe are the Batty inked original (on the bottom) and the Davis inked one that actually saw print (on the top). While Batty gushes on about how great Davis is, and while I’m not going to say the bottom is some great work of art, it’s sure as hell much better than Davis’s slop job. Look at how mangled Summer’s face is on the top compared to the bottom. He somehow made Les look even douchier. The gray gradient blobs in every panel make the whole thing look colder and more depressing. Granted I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life so I can’t give a more thorough analysis of how bad it is but it’s bad enough that I can realize that Davis absolutely sucks and definitely plays a role in the degeneration of Funky’s art. It’s amazing he’s gotten as far as he has considering how little talent he seems to possess. But taking a quick look at Comics Curmudgeon, the standards for art on newspaper strips nowadays must be so low that scraping the bottom of the barrel would be an improvement.
Thanks for the details! I belatedly realized the start of the tones coinciding with a sort of ‘smoothness’ must mean when he started using a tablet directly instead of scanning a drawing. Probably. Not a fan myself, that hand-drawn look is much preferable.
The way he still works at, piles his books on, has his picture taken at and blogs about a “drawing” table, when he hasn’t drawn anything in years — decades? — is becoming a real annoyance to me whenever i see it now. Even an IBM Selectric would be more honest.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of Leaf Holding On Tree For Dear Life Week
Pam: DAD, NO!
Ed: DAD, YES!
I am happy we got 2 decent strips from TB this week. Both today and his midnight call on Wednesday qualify for strips of the year. Today’s strip really describes Crankshaft at his most humorous. But my money is still on Midnight Caller.
I cannot imagine what it felt like to slough through a half-century of Turkey Day strips like that. Many thanks, CBH.
One question about the 1996 entry: Why does it look like Lisa has one eye in the middle of her forehead?
Because back when he drew it himself, he was terrible at drawing eyes.
Eyes drawn way too close together. Especially disturbing is when the character had both eyes on one side of their face, i.e the csroberto2854 effect.
The prototype had the too close together eyes too.
Oops, sorry about that, csroberto2854. It was supposed to be “the Picasso effect”. It was a clipboard issue. I copied and pasted your name in an earlier response to Sorial Promise. I’m sure your eyes are not on the same side of your face. Shame on me for not editing better. Sorry again.
My kingdom for an edit or a delete button.
And right at the end, Puff Tommy is whining about people enjoying things wrong despite the multiverse being a Flash Fact.
11/29: Funny….I expected the flamethrower.
That’s Tom Batiuk for you. The big reveal is…. the thing that should started the story, not ended it.
We see this a lot: Batiuk taking too long to tell his joke.
That’s the problem. He wasted six days on what should have been a one day example of Ed not knowing what restraint is
Okay, this is a small thing, but… why is the copyright text upside down in the 11-28 sideways strip?
I get why it’s not at the bottom; because you don’t want black text on a dark brown background. (Not that Batiuk observes this principle on his own blog.) But shouldn’t it be right side-up in terms of how the sideways strip is printed in the paper? As much as Batiuk rails about dead tree newspapers being the preferred way to consume comic strips, why can’t he take the time to get this right for people who actually do?
Or is it like coloring? Comic strip coloring is done by low-paid, uninformed drones in post-production, who often make errors that undermine the strip. Which indifferent editors never catch until it’s too late.
And of course, what escapes Batiuk is that showing us what makes Crankshaft do insane nonsense makes him look worse.
I think we can all agree the Thanksgiving Day 2022 strip was the worst.😝
Thank you, Comic Book Harriet. Your FW research and compilation skills are second to none.
Bombed again
On Bombay gin
Spectacular. That gag in the 1990 strip was one of those Batiuk gags that would send me into a blind, newspaper-flinging rage. I mean, I like good wordplay as much as anyone, but come on.
And 35 years later, a gag at this level would be under serious consideration for Crankshaft of the Year.
Lord knows I’ve tolerated plenty of TomBan “groaners”, but sometimes he just plain crosses a line. Then again, I rage-quit reading FW dozens of times back then. Then, I’d check back in, and get mad all over again.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of Leaf Holding On Tree For Dear Life Week
(Crankshaft cuts the tree, causing it to fall on to him)
And nothing of value was lost.
Still Today’s Crankfuckery
Ed: Can this day get any worse?!
(It suddenly starts snowing 8 inches per hour of snow, suffocating Ed)
What did Cindy and Funky wish for?
I mean, neither of them spontaneously combusted, so I guess not that.
I’ll guess “an ugly, spite-filled divorce,” so they both got their wish.
Probably a child. You’ll notice he’s firing blanks.
Cindy wished to escape Westview and marry a movie star. Funky wished to marry Cindy. They both got their wish but the soul sucking nature of Westview turned that wishbone into a monkey’s paw for Funky.
That or Cindy wished for immortality which is why she stopped aging at 35 and at about double that age is going to have a child. I can never think of that without also thinking of the Patton Oswalt bit about the horrifying image of an elderly woman giving birth.
I’m surprised that it looks like the Funky + Cindy arc starts here (still flirting) and is already falling apart only 3 years later (she’s leaves the party to go to “work”)? That’s … pretty fast by TB rates.
11/30: Why didn’t he remember all the junk he bought online earlier?
11/30: With all the garden implements he bought in bulk, why wasn’t this Monday’s strip?
I’m guessing Tom Batiuk thinks he invented the idea of the extendible tree pruner, which explains why his looks totally impractical and nothing like the actual ones you can buy in any hardware store.
If you listen to Tom Batiuk then Tom Batiuk invented serialized storytelling and dramatic, hard hitting stories covering controversial material in the funny pages (BECAUSE COMICS DON’T HAVE TO BE FUNNY HAR HAR) and rescued the teenage comic from the doldrums of Archie. So why can’t Tom Batiuk’s inventive and forward thinking genius extend outside of the creative realm and into the practical world of the home? Tom Batiuk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, after all.
This is why we refer to him by a German expression meaning a face seeking to be slapped.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 7 of Leaf Holding On Tree For Dear Life Week
(The tree pruner breaks and then vanishes into thin air)
Ed: SON OF A BITCH! (slips and shatters like a vase that’s been thrown at the ground at 90 MPH)
Who’s the jailbird in that one strip?
A guy who served with Nate in Vietnam who was in jail for a murder he may or may not have committed. This was Lisa’s first client as a public defender, his case went to the Supreme Court and failed and he was executed. Lisa then went on to defend DCH John for selling hentai from Roberta Blackburn, the most incompetent antagonist in the series.
in jail for a murder he may or may not have committed.
And Batiuk will never tell you. Nor is he capable of writing a story around the ambiguity of it.
Lisa’s ONLY client as a public defender no less. She quit after Danny Madison’s appeal options were exhausted, stating that she believed that the State of Ohio had used her work on the case specifically to speed up the appeal process so they could execute Madison as soon as possible.
I think it is pretty clear during the Danny Madison story that TB intends for readers to see Madison as innocent, with Lisa digging up all sorts of ridiculous reasonable doubt (the prosecution’s star eyewitness was an agoraphobe with poor eyesight, Madison’s “confession” in prison was given to a snitch who got out early for his testimony, and especially the considerable ado made of Madison’s Vietnam flashbacks) and Madison being shown as a sad-eyed, even-keeled fellow who makes gifts for little Summer and sings Christmas carols while receiving the lethal injection. But TB needed Madison to die to make the story hit the downbeat he wanted it to, so Madison’s innocence had to remain implicit.
The strip where DSH got arrested will never not make me laugh, though. Was that one strip worth the insufferable trial that followed? I say “maybe”. John Byrne says “yes”. Jim Mateer said “I’m not putting my appearances in those strips on my website next to my other Funky Winkerbean cameo“.
[Lisa] stating that she believed that the State of Ohio had used her work on the case specifically to speed up the appeal process so they could execute Madison as soon as possible.
And Lisa and her entire law firm couldn’t do anything about that? That’s Lawyering 101. There are all kinds of appeals and procedures you can file that serve little purpose beyond delaying a case, when it’s in your interest to delay.
Then again, this is Lisa we’re talking about. It wouldn’t be the first time she threw up her hands and went “oh well, somebody screwed up, guess it’s time to die now.” It’s practically foreshadowing her own death.
The story is basically the real-life Cameron Todd Willingham case, especially the “dubious testimony from a jailhouse snitch” part.
Lisa’s entire approach to hardships in her life, be it getting teen pregnant or facing an uphill battle to prevent an execution or getting cancer, was to throw up her hands and act like there was nothing she could do. In that respect, she really is Westview’s patron saint.
Trying and failing means you still fail. Best not to try. This is why Foob is better. If Lynn Johnston had written it, we’d be talking about pulling an acquittal out of her butt.
You know what would have been a good story? If Lisa had learned anything at all from Madison’s death, and vowed to not give up so easily in her own cancer fight. That could have redeemed both stories.
Ah, yes, the delightful story where Lisa worked on appeals for capital cases. When she first gets to the office, her new coworker treats her dismissively because he thinks she doesn’t have the fortitude to stick with such work, given how draining it can be, particularly since such appeals don’t have a particularly high success rate. We, of course, are supposed to think this guy is just some sexist jerk for not seeing Lisa’s true strength and capability, except that when the appeal fails… Lisa promptly quits the job because she, indeed, didn’t have the fortitude to stick with such a disheartening job when her slim-to-none chance didn’t pan out.
Another fine character study from Tom “Mixed Messages” Batiuk.
And he’s too much himself to boast about his nifty harsh truth Aesop.
Great example of Jerkass Has A Point.
The best part about the cameo Mateer does shout-out is the fact that Funky trudged on after that touching tribute to the real-life Luigi’s murals he painted by forgetting about that whole story and having Ayers stop remembering to sketch it and the colorists ignoring it entirely by going back to painting the walls the droll red/brown shades they had before. That and also forgetting the restaurant even has side wings like that story reminds us about.
12/1: The week writes itself, doesn’t it? Lena will get bent out of shape if she isn’t allowed to witlessly hand Axelrod another victory because nobody dares say “You can’t cook, you can’t make a decent cup of coffee, you can’t play golf and you’re utterly clueless and inept at the bowling alley too and making Batiuk ‘I Don’t Understand Women’ Rage Face will not change that so if you wanna help, don’t.”
There was that one Christmas(?) sequence with Crank as the Jimmy Stewart character from It’s a Wonderful Life, (so I guess a dream and not canon) where the other drivers realised that without Ed around to sway them, Lena’s cookies were actually pretty good.
I wonder if Crankie projects a field of negativity that warps the perceptions of those near him?
Maybe that’s why Time Mop hasn’t killed him yet.
I think that Ed Crankshaft being alive negatively affects Lena’s cooking, which reminds me of when Squidward’s mood affects his clarinet playing (when he’s in a bad mood, his playing is horrible, and when he is in a good mood, his playing is great)
Interesting theory. I wish the strip would explore that kind of thing.
Hey, look, everybody! There’s Mary, Ed’s “steady girlfriend” who suffered a school bus trip nervous breakdown in April of 2023 and now turns up once or twice a year! Hello, Mary!
In other news…”I’ve just been told”? Weren’t the other bowling team members there when you all won the semi-final round? Wouldn’t they already know this? Wasn’t there a less clunky way for this exposition to take place?
My money’s as to their opponents’ identity is on a St. Spires squad, although a Montoni’s team with Pizza Box Monster on it wouldn’t surprise me.
Apparently November 14 was the “bus drivers bowling league championship”, but December 1 is the “holiday tournament.” With exactly the same team. Which… Ed’s going to win another trophy! That’s three in five months (including the CFL game ball)!
CORRECTION: Okay, I don’t think it’s exactly the same team, because Mary Marzipan is there.
Happy belated Thanksgiving you all! And what an archive dive, CBH!!! As discussed by many above, it is a fascinating microcosm of the entire history of the strip… from the hard turn into maudlin “importance” in mid-Act II to the complete unravelling that took place during most of Act III.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Now we’ve shifted from the Leaf That Would Not Fall to Crankshaft Bowling
Yesterday I said, “A Montoni’s team with Pizza Box Monster on it wouldn’t surprise me.” God, I hate it when Batiuk proves me right.
How can Montoni’s have an employee-comprised bowling team when that would require at least three or four participants during various evenings when the restaurant is open, and the only people we’ve seen working there since it reopened in late 2023 are Mopey and Mindy (with PBM hanging around)? No Wally, no Adeela, no Rocky…you get the point. Maybe in exchange for free food Skip Bittman can lend them a hand…oops, sorry, Skip.
Also, Ed was unaware the pizzeria his own granddaughter co-owns had a team taking part in this latest tournament? Makes perfect sense.
One time Mindy ordered a pizza from Montoni’s, and went there to pick it up, apparently forgetting that she owns the place.
Nothing more sobering than realizing you’re starting to follow the Batiuk thought process.
Anyhoo… it’s their “busiest time of the year”? What does that mean, you get TWO customers a day? I think the only people we’ve EVER seen getting food there were Mindy picking up a pie and the Pizza Monster a few weeks ago. Both of whom own the place. It’s not like Batiuk has ever bothered to show it being anywhere close to as busy as it was when Tony and/or Funky owned the place. (And despite there always being customers there, the “thin-crust profit margins” still weren’t enough to keep them open. How are these chuckleheads still in business?)
GL, you’re forgetting their two steadiest patrons: Skip Bittman and Batton Thomas, Creator of the Defunct Syndicated Comic Strip “Three O’Clock High.” The Sunshine Boys are there at least once every other month, and I’ll bet dollars to doughballs they’ll show up again before the year ends.
Ah, you’re right, I did forget about those two. And such a glorious feeling it was.
You can learn more from J.J. O’Malley than the delights of a cold lamb sandwich or the usefulness of a Havana magic wand.
You can learn that an apparent error in a surname — calling Tom Batiuk’s Skip Bittman when his name is Rawlings — is meant to lead you to learn of “SCTV’s” Skip Bittman, who yearns to be like his brother Bobby.
Which is pretty horrifying, because if the insufferable Skip models himself on his brother, then Batiuk’s Bob must a veritable (no pizza boxes) monster, albeit most likely one with a couple of Pulitzer Prizes to his credit.
Cushlamochree, but the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder & Marching Society can be proud of you, J.J. O’M!
Pay no attention to Jane Schultz’s slurs on “dopy fairy godfathers.”
I assume they’ll just get Not-So-Crazy Harry and DSH John to fill out the roster. Has it even been said what happened to the Komix Korner or did Batty forget that Montoni’s owned that space too?
We’ve seen the Komix Korner in Crankshaft after Funky ended, although it’s not entirely clear who Skunky is paying rent to these days. Funky owned the building when he owned Montoni’s, but it’s not clear if he sold the entire building to Mopey/Blandy/Pizza Monster, or just the Montoni’s space, or just the Montoni’s name and the current Montoni’s is paying Funky rent, or what the deal is, really. (Them having bought the entire building would probably make the most sense, since Mopey moved in to the apartment over the restaurant, so he then wouldn’t need to pay rent or anything, which means that’s probably not what actually happened.)
Funky owning an entire building and then selling it to a guy who writes comic books who was somehow able to afford it would line up with Funky somehow screwing up a pizza franchise in the matter off a year or two after the start of Act III. Probably gave Mopey a “good deal” since they’re pals and all that would be way less than he could have gotten if he’d sold it to someone else or just maintained ownership of the building and rented out the space.
Funky had also completely shut down Montoni’s, and auctioned off all the decor. (And presumably equipment like the refrigerators and pizza ovens, but who cares about that?) The name was the only thing of any value, and it made sense that Pete would want to buy it. Why Batiuk didn’t make that the story is totally beyond me.
Especially when hoarding intellectual property is common in the comic book world. Big companies buy up small, failed ones just to take over their roster of characters. And sometimes they do that just to prevent anyone else from owning those characters.
They’re both going to win an trophy, aren’t they?
It makes as much sense as the bus driver games.
The worst part may be that TB had actually, perhaps accidentally, had naturally set up Funky’s successors in Wally and Rachel… only to pull that ridiculous closing up story in a vain attempt to punch up the closing months of FW.
Rachel was the longest-tenured Montoni’s employee not named Funky or Tony, Wally was Funky’s cousin/nephew and had gotten his life back on track working at Montoni’s (serving as a manager for his last several years there), and the two lovebirds met at Montoni’s. Having them assume control of Montoni’s from a retiring Funky is an easy and satisfying story beat to hit. It all made sense to sensible people, but alas the author is something else entirely…
But weren’t you shocked when Montoni’s up and closed out of nowhere? And that they somehow remained open after closing only to close again so Mopey could buy it from Funky a year or so later?
The closing of Montoni’s really just goes along with everything else regarding Funky and its history and how TB treats it. Batty loved talking about how central a space Montoni’s was and it was arguably the central location of the strip after awhile or at the very least on par with the high school. It’s such an important and integral part of the strip both in universe and on a meta level and then with only a few months left he just casually has Funky go “oh yeah, it’s closed because of the pandemic” (a takeout business like a pizzeria should have thrived during that time) because, well, Funky was ending so Montoni’s had to close. Except it’d be back a year or two later with Mopey now owning it and Batiuk always planning to integrate Funky into Crankshaft thus making the whole close down important.
But I guess it was supposed to be symbolic or something because Funky was ending and, you know, it’s called writing. Really, all the history of the strip or the importance of locations and characters are only venerated in an illusory way and ultimately I think the readers, either the genuine ones or the snark crowd, had more investment in that than Batty ever did. Because Batty’s entire sense of storytelling is Silver Age comic books from when he was a kid and it’s not like those books ever had much in the way of continuity. The history only existed when it could be dragged out to get off another month’s worth of stories to make them feel like they had more depth than they actually did.
Actually, it’s kind of telling that whenever old Silver Age comics come up in the strip, Batty never talks about ones like Spider-Man or Fantastic Four or other Marvel books where part of what made them appealing was the sense that there was an underlying story you were following from issue to issue which led to history that could be drawn from in a more meaningful way or that informed the ways characters acted with one another or reacted to things that happened. It’s all DC stuff and even then it’s not maybe the one group of DC characters of the time that also generally had a good sense of ongoing continuity compared to most of DC’s Silver Age output (the Legion of Super-Heroes), it’s all the stuff that was basically just episodic and used continuity in a more flippant way.
Ed and his teammates were apparently unaware that they had won a semifinal match of the tournament. (See Monday’s strip: “I’ve just been told that our bowling team has made the final round in the holiday tournament at Margo Lanes!”)
So expecting Ed to know who else was playing in the tournament would be implausible. If he doesn’t follow his own team’s progress, he’s not going to follow any other team’s progress, either.
As I said before, this particular running gag is not funny. Having an economy based on fundraising for a high school band from a bedroom community of Cleveland is funny. Them never knowing who the refugee from The Masked Singer is not.
Today’s Crankfuckery
I’m betting that this week just shows only the prelude and the aftermath of the Bowling Match between Crankshaft and Montoni’s
Keep forgetting to comment and missing out on the fun. Good news is I’m here now early in the morning, finally!
So the new Montoni’s Bowling team is made up of… half Montoni’s and half the Valentine? I don’t care to review whether those two used to work at Montoni’s under Funky or not for technicalities but damn is Batiuk really that okay with letting the idea that the pizzaria is literally just run by two people now? All these homeless Westview characters adopted back into the flock and yet none of the 2020s Funky regulars are given work again.
What do Max and La Hija del Asesinado John Darling have to even do with Montoni’s? Could Mindy not get Dopey, who used to actually work thereand is/was her coworker (twice!) to come or is he too busy drawing comic book covers and swooning over Phil Holt and Flash Fairfreefieldman?
I think that particular Generic Blonde is Hannah, Max’s baby mama, not Jessica Darling Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered.
I think.
(On the other hand, I thought Mindy was one of the Shining Twins at first, so who even knows.)
12/03: This means one thing: Mindy and Max have to deal with the jackass main character being the unpalatable, unsympathetic and unapologetic jerk who, as Santa, sees small children as greedy monsters who need slapping down.
Also as a side note: The Komix Thoughts blog has only been doing the John Darling Sunday strips for the last few weeks, and per the most recent post we’re apparently in the home stretch of the strip now when Tom was in his famous fight with the syndicate over the strip, and also artist Bob Vojtko took over. It’s shown that he captured Gerry Shamray’s style down pat (“without missing a beat” in Tom’s words), and I can observe that there is more signs of individual illustration and variance compared to the early-Davis tactics Shamray seemed to have been using. So props for that, slight improvement.
Guess this makes me wonder what the final Sunday will be, since I don’t think John’s death was part of that slot.
Of marginal interest was the assertion that Gary Shamray “wanted to move on”.
You think he’d have wanted to move on if the strip was doing well? I’m guessing perhaps that what with JD losing paper after paper and sinking fast, Shamray could see the end was near anyway, so why not jump ship now? Or possibly a pay cut had already been proposed, and Shamray felt continuing with this deadweight wasn’t worth his time…
Incidentally, those Sunday John Darling strips continually prove that Batiuk simply NEVER could write in the longer Sunday format. Three panel gags? Yeah, that he could do. Anything else….not so much.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Ed: Hey, Pizza Box Monster Guy! At the end of the match ya have to reveal yourself!
Loser gets stoned to death with bowling balls!