After Act I ended, Tom Batiuk said that he couldn’t use Les for hanging-off-the-gym-rope gags anymore, after his involvement in Lisa’s difficult pregnancy.
So why doesn’t he realize that Pizza Box Monster gags don’t work anymore either?
Many of us have said that we miss Act I’s sense of sarcasm, absurdity and wonder. The PBM’s annual visits to Montoni’s were probably the closest thing we got in Act III. Tom Batiuk wrote himself into a pretzel to avoid solving the easily-solved problem of who the PBM really was. But it was still fun to watch him get Funky’s goat every year.
The story wasn’t at odds with the oh-serious-tone Batiuk adopted when he decided he was the new Sherwood Anderson. Because PBM was an obviously unserious character, who existed only for a recurring joke. Like Family Guy‘s Evil Monkey, and at least a dozen Simpsons characters (Troy McClure, Gil Gunderson, Hans Moleman, the Spucklers, etc.)
But now we’re supposed to take PBM seriously. He’s essentially Pete and Mindy’s boss now. This “young” couple we’re supposed to be rooting for has their life’s savings tied up in a person they can’t be bothered to identify. Even after he tried to reveal himself to them. All they had to do was walk into the dining area with their eyes open!
Montoni’s in Crankshaft feels like the beginning of an identity theft horror story. Except that you wouldn’t have a drop of sympathy for the victims, because they brought it on themselves. And there’s nothing LifeLock can do, if you willingly choose to enter into a financial agreement with a sentient pile of cardboard. To “buy” a restaurant that closed and sold all its equipment months before. Then again, we’ve never seen Pete or Mindy do any actual work, so I have no idea who’s ripping off who here.
PBM butting heads with Ed Crankshaft should be fun, but it isn’t. Instead, it just adds more layers to “why don’t Pete and Mindy know who this person is?”
Son of Stuck Funky 
He can’t even write a competition that makes sense. He’s not going to understand that this is like having the Adam West Batman show up in the 4077’s OR. As Robert Reed said, the new character would have to adjust himself to the setting. In the case mentioned, Adam would be a victim of PTSD who somehow found a Batman costume. In a coherent Act III, PBM would unmask and buy Montoni’s lock, stock and barrel.
Does Tom Batiuk think that when you throw one strike, you gloat in your opponent’s face? Has this man ever gone bowling?
Also, how the hell does PBM bowl in that costume? Look at the last panel. The pizza boxes in his upper arm are parallel to the ones that make up his torso. If that were true, he’d have to hold his upper arms straight out. This would make it impossible to bowl, unless he leans way to his left and lets his right arm hang straight down. Which in turn would make his posture atrocious.
I don’t think he has. It’s why Mason is in that awkward costume. I think you said he was Mason.
That was Comic Book Harriet’s theory, here. I’ve never taken a stab at who the PBM really is. I don’t think it matters anyway, because there’s never going to be an unveiling. If Tom Batiuk was the lead writer for Dallas in 1980, he would have shot J.R., and then never addressed it again. Larry Hagman would be back in the cast without a scratch on him, in front of 83 million very confused TV watchers.
Because it’s all about the shock. Following through is a bad thing bullies expect to bully him
Tonight! On a special two-hour presentation of “TOM BATIUK’S DALLAS“:
J.R. Ewing, multimillionaire owner of Ewing Comics, was shot several years ago. But now, it’s time for your favorite Dallas character — yes, the one who has been the focus of the last seven years worth of episodes — to solve that mystery! (The shooter was some rando, who cares, we’ll deal with that in the first minute of the episode.) Followed by a book tour! (The remaining one hour and fifty-nine minutes.)
CAST
The Ghost of J.R. Ewing Who Was Murdered ………… Larry Hagman
Jessica Ewing, the Daughter of J.R. Ewing Who Was Murdered ……… Some Blonde Actress
Les Moore …………. Tom Batiuk
Autograph Seeker #1 ………. Stan Lee
Autograph Seeker #2 ……….. Cary Bates
Autograph Seekers #3-25……… Phantom Empire Cast and Crew
That too. I doubt Batiuk has ever worked out who’s in the costume, for the same reason that he never bothered working out who shot John Darling until he invented a later story that needed it. And there weren’t any good suspects, so he went with Plantman who was probably the least bad suspect.
Being told that he himself needs to know this would not go well.
Does Tom Batiuk think strikes are a rare event in bowling? Crankshaft gloated about throwing one strike, and Pete/Mindy are in awe that their teammate threw one strike. Emphasis on ONE. I suck at bowling, and I can throw maybe 2 a game. People in a competitive league should be much more skilled.
This may be the clearest indication ever of the level of incompetence that exists in Westview/Centervile.
I’ve barely bowled in my life. Usually it was work-related bonding thing. I’d generally get a bunch of gutter balls, or hit 2 pins, and get 1 or 2 strikes per game. Pure random chance. I was once accused of being a ringer. Pretty sucky ringer then!
(One job we def had a ringer. She almost had a pro bowling career, but the money didn’t justify the constant travel. She more than balanced out my chaos)
12/4: Shut your pouthole, Mindull. Anyone who just gives up on knowing who this guy is has no standing to object.
“Pouthole” is great.
I stole it from Archer.
I should probably watch that show more. It’s pretty funny from what I’ve seen.
You’ll never look at Kenny Loggins, possible maker of Faustian bargains, the same way again.
It’s the Dinkle Problem: something that works in one context being used in a different and ill-fitting one. PBM worked to lighten up the dull weariness of Act III in goofy holiday stories. PBM as a character outside of that is just nonsensical but he was success so Batty can’t help but shove him into places where he doesn’t belong.
It’s like he’s trying to combine serious and humorous stories, by throwing them a blender and pushing the frappe button.
Which leads me to my idea of how Act III should have ended. When Funky announced his retirement plans, PBM should have unmasked, explained why someone who treated his wife like trash because reasons deserved being messed with and bought the restaurant to run it properly.
I still like the idea that PBM is Cindy, so salty that she let Funky and Lisa talk her in to relinquishing her half of Funky’s Montoni’s stake in the divorce that she annoyed Funky for years and then was willing to to partner with Pete and Mindy to buy the stake in the restaurant that she let go.
Why would she do this? Well, you see, she felt left out in high school even though she was rich and popular and explicitly had good friends and stuff…
There was that extended sequence where she tried apologizing to a punching bag only to be told high school got over.
That story was SUCH bullshit. You know who else felt excluded in high school? Everybody. And do you know who was the cause of most of that feeling of exclusion at Westview High School? You, Cindy. She was the Mean Girls Queen Bee Alpha Bitch before those terms were invented.
If this bitch showed up at my high school reunion and tried to declare herself the victim after all the shit she pulled, I’d be downright salty.
Cindy cannot admit to being a selfish idiot bitch. It’s like Dinkle admitting to going too far
He should have reminded her that she was a stuck up nitwit with a ridiculous hairdo who treated everyone like garbage.
If this bitch showed up at my high school reunion and tried to declare herself the victim after all the shit she pulled, I’d be downright salty.
I would either yell at Cindy and tell her that she is a horrible person and demand her to leave immediately or just beat the everloving shit out of her
If someone had a real sense of humor, the last part of Act I should have them making her run the gauntlet like a French woman caught being arm candy for Harry Hun.
Cindy she was a stuck up nitwit with a ridiculous hairdo
It was the 1980s. We all had ridiculous hairdos.
And totally not because he was a whiny infant who made his feeling like a fraud her fault. That’s a real world answer, not a Batiuk answer.
I hope it’s Frankie, on some sort of ill-advised redemption trip, in the hope of reconciling with Pete’s best friend, Boy Lisa aka Son Of Pizza Box Monster. Then, BatYap could bring back Boy Lisa’s weird adoptive half-sister, and everything will have come full circle.
There was a funny comment on Comics Curmudgeon a few days ago that said something like “all the plot lines in the Funkyverse should crash into each other.” Like, “Lena’s bad cooking makes an unbeatable bowling ball that lets Ed win the bowling tournament.” I need to find that comment.
Here it is: “Eventually, all Crankshaft running gags will cancel each other out. A mom will catch up with Crankshaft’s bus when he gets hung up on Keesterman’s mailbox, Lena will win the league championship by bowling with a ball made from her own brownie batter, and Crankshaft will launch a grill into the chimney, causing an explosion that obliterates everyone in the strip forever.”
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed gets two gutter balls in a row, causing him to throw a bowling at the PBM in anger)
12/5 He appears to have designed his costume for ease of movement.
Yes, but it contradicts what we usually see. There’s no way both yesterday’s pose and today’s pose can be done in the same outfit. Today’s upper arm pizza boxes wouldn’t be able to return to the default position (parallel to the torso pizza boxes) that we saw yesterday.
It’s Batiuk wanting things both ways.
I wonder when we’ll see the Miraculous 24-Months-Gestated Baby of the Elderly Cindy Jarre, or the MinMope nuptials.
Theory: These two blessed events are being held back for the eventual spectacular blowout ending of the Funkyverse, when TB wraps up Crankshaft and retires.
Nah, that’s too well thought out. He had the 50th Westview High reunion just a few months before he ended FW, and never thought to use that as a satisfying wrapup to the strip. Instead, he invented the Mopman Prophecies.
That would have been the best place to end it. Say what you want about Lynn Johnston but at least the Settlenuptuals made sense as a final arc.
Settlenuptuals… hahahaha, love it.
Back when it became really obvious that Anthony and Liz would have a cringe inducing proposal, engagement and wedding, a comm I post on called it the Lovepocalypse. In short order, that became the Likepocalypse because the kids from Family Circus have a greater tolerance for romance than Lynn. Finally, since it became even more obvious that they saw one another as the best each other could do and because Elly approved, the Settlepocalypse. After the Fauxposal (them glumly stating that they guessed they were engaged followed by Liz yelling like Howard Dean), the teal and lavender kitsch abomination wedding.p
Today’s Crankfuckery
Ed Crankshaft’s reaction after seeing the PBM get a perfect strike in bowling after assuming that he’d be horrible at the sport:
I was reading another blog that mentioned that Kent State University Press had posted a retrospective on its website titled “Six Decades of Publishing What Matters.” https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/about/six-decades-of-publishing-what-matters/
I wanted to see if they mentioned publishing Lisa’s Story, and in fact they did. It is listed among 14 books and one journal that the press published. Each of the entries consists of the title, author, date, an image of the cover, and a two-sentence description. The entry for Lisa’s Story says:
The illustration shows the cover of the Lisa’s Legacy Trilogy edition.
The strip’s evolution into serious themes like comic books, talking murder chimps, comic, Oscars, books, CTcomic booksE, time traveling janitors manipulating everything from the shadows and comic books.
Because for all of his big talk, he can’t handle serious subject matter.
And he’s forgotten how to handle unserious subject matter.
The recent bus drivers mind screw games proved that.
Hey now, you don’t like the implication that one of Batty’s better (by his standards) attempts at doing a serious story was undermined by having Time Janny imply that he mentally nudged Susan when her actions threatened Les and Lisa getting together which could be interpreted as meaning that he may have also nudged her to try and kill herself since that would put her in the position needed to feel the shame and guilt she’d need to come clean about what she did?
I’m just looking at that ridiculous story again and I don’t know how it didn’t hit me the first time through that it’s not at all about Summer and time travel, it’s just Batty jerking himself off. The whole “writing a book about small town households that connects them to important stuff and inspires everyone” although Summer won’t write another book implying that she never quite achieves glory in her lifetime followed (minus the St. Spires interlude) by a final shilling of Lisa’s Story makes it so damn obvious in hindsight.
“They won’t appreciate Tom Batiuk now but in the future, after I’m gone, they will! Then I’ll have the last laugh and I’ll do it by pulling off a Darth Vader mask and revealing that I was never actually dead!”
We’d appreciate him more if he had the sense to quit.
Yeah, that story gets REALLY nasty if you think it through. It implies that all the awful things that happened to Lisa – date rape, pregnancy, cancer, being married to Les Moore – were part of some cosmic plan to create the world’s most banal book. Written by a 13th-year sophomore at Kent goddam State. It’s practically Powered By A Foresaken Child.
“It’s called writing” is Batiuk’s “I didn’t use the whole thing.”
@BJ6K: It gets especially vile when you remember that Timemop said he was prepared to “nudge” Les and Lisa together, but didn’t have to since they got together on their own. HE WAS PREPARED TO EFFECTIVELY RAPE HER PARENTS TO ENSURE THAT BOOK HAPPENED. (Which, given that Lisa was retconned to be raped already, is particularly distasteful, especially since Girl Les is listening to this story with a pleased smile.) (Like, this would be Avengers #200 levels of gross, except that not enough people were reading Funky by the end to really notice, I think.)
(I’m probably going to need to explain that Avengers reference, aren’t I?)
The kicker is the disappointing motive: to ensure that a mediocre book that sanctifies mediocrity is written.
12/6: Here we are at the intersection of two unfunny jokes that wore out their welcome when people started dying of Alzheimer’s: “Ed must lose in a ridiculously humiliating manner” and “competitions must be won by ringers who’d get the team disqualified in real life.”
Today’s Crankfuckery
I think that the score was 300-299 Montonis, and Ed is throwing a tantrum off-screen over losing by one point
12/7: We leave off with Ed channeling Doctor Smith and PBM using Batiukese to ask what his deal is.
“Does he workshop those?” “Nope, they just roll out by their unedited selves.”
Are they talking about Ed, or is Batiuk describing his own writing process?
At least we can add entries to the Batiuktionary.