This week in Crankshaft:
Hmm, that second panel looks familiar:
This is a photo I dug out of the image folder at the old funkywinkerbean.com in 2022. At the time, I didn’t know who this man was. The only thing I knew was that he was too young to be Hal Foster, who would have been about 80 years old. This came up during the “Hal Foster rips off Phil Holt’s work and publishes it in Prince Valiant” arc, during which Batton Thomas himself applied for the job. I wondered if Tom Batiuk had ever auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in real life, and if this photo was evidence of that. It’s not.
This week, an Anonymous poster on Comics Curmudgeon explained:
Dick Sherry was the president of PUBLISHERS-HALL SYNDICATE around the time Funky Winkerbean was picked up.
I’m glad for that explanation, because Lord knows Tom Batiuk didn’t provide one. And it seems to check out. Wikipedia says “some of the more notable strips syndicated by the company include Pogo, Dennis The Menace, Funky Winkerbean (snort).” So this company would have been Batiuk’s first publisher, and Sherry his employer’s president.
Apparently Batiuk liked Sherry, since Batton went out of his way to call his visit “thoughtful and considerate.” Why is that even noteworthy? A meeting with an employer, especially a one-time visit at the start of an agreed-upon work-from-home arrangement, is courteous by default. Considering the absurd level of consideration Tom Batiuk routinely expects, I wonder what Sherry did to earn this honor. Did he bring Luigi’s pizza and fresh comic books?
Information about Sherry is scanty. The only thing I could find was in an interview with comic book writer Rick Marschall. He says that Sherry was still in this job in 1977, and that he liked hiring international artists so he could take “trips around the world at the syndicate’s expense to have creative conferences with these cartoonists.”
One wonders why he bothered hiring a comic strip creator from Akron rather than Las Vegas or Orlando. Maybe he didn’t have enough clout within the company yet. Maybe that’s the entire reason Funky Winkerbean ever existed at all! Maybe Dick Sherry wanted to hire a cartoonist from Honolulu, but the company refused to reimburse the travel, so he had to take his vacation in Ohio instead. And 50+ years later, here we all are.
Son of Stuck Funky 
This is the same sort of decision making process that inflicted Lynn Johnston on us.
1/25: It’s good to see Ed being Ed.
I think it’s obvious why the syndicate picked up Batty’s strip. His strip captured the spirit of the times and I suspect the syndicate thought it would draw in younger readers. Sure, his strip wasn’t ground breaking in any way but it was solid and had a good premise. Then Batty proceeded to ruin the strip. I get that he got bored of the original premise, but he just wasn’t capable of writing something interesting after he changed things up. He should have just let FW run on fumes like other legacy strips and then used that income to fund his own comic book projects.
For someone who talks so much about comic books, he should have just produced his own. He had the means, but not the talent and I think that his why he never did.
This galls me too. He still, to this day — and he’s nearly 80! — laments that he never got the chance to write a comic book.
But we know he can’t. Evidence?
Exhibit A: He proudly proclaims that most of the ideas he’s used were things he came up with before puberty. Like “The Amazing Mr Sponge and Absorbing Jr.” And, to be honest, when you see this work, it does scream “eleven-year-old boy.”
What comic book concepts has he come up with since then? Well… The Elementals Force. He’s that rare comic book creator who’s even *less* productive than Phil “I faked my own death and lived in isolation for years, so I could create… this one pencilled layout for one spread. BEHOLD!” Holt.
Exhibit B: He could have easily created a “comic within a comic.” He always teases it with covers, but never do we see a spread or even a splash page, let alone any semblance of plot, no matter how flimsy. It’s always concept (and weak, derivative concept at that).
It’s as if I proclaimed myself a screenwriter, and produced this: “A mismatched pair of buddy cops, Mish and Mosh by name, take on a criminal syndicate run by the mastermind Sinnis Terrguy. Thrills and laughs ensue! Actually write a script? Eh, I don’t want to get bogged down in details. No real screenplay writer bothers with that stuff.”
Exhibit C: Today, pretty much anyone can publish an online comic. He’s got his own webpage, and some kind of unironic fanbase, which is already much more than most comic creators start with. Today, with AI, I’m pretty sure you could write a comic and instruct the image generator, “Illustrate this in the style of Jack Kirby” and get something moderately passable. A touch-up in Illustrator and you’d be good to go. OR you could hire some up-and-coming kid for a little cash, and have a human do it.
But that would require coming up with a plot, not just retelling one beat for beat as he does for Flash Fridays.
And he’s not capable of that.
And all his excuses have vanished with time and he’s left contemplating the naked fact that he just couldn’t hack it.
You’re right, of course. But Tom Batiuk only wanted to become a comic book creator. He never actually wanted to create comic books.
He wanted Marvel or DC to recognize him as Guy Who Makes Comic Books Correctly, and bring in the royal sceptre to anoint him The Next Stan Lee. At which point his life would become like Pete and Darin’s: screw around all day; have stupid elementary school arguments with each other and their heroes; dream up comic book covers; get paid gigantic amounts of money; and be recognized as an important cultural figure like Stan Lee is. He couldn’t stomach the actual work of it.
Especially considering how delusional Batiuk was about his prospects. He thought they would instantly make him the head writer of Spider-Man “once they saw how good a writer I was.” Of course they wouldn’t. Even if they did hire him, he would have started at an entry-level position. He would probably have to do a lot of the low-end tedious work that goes into producing printed content, and would have no editorial control. It wouldn’t be long before Batiuk started lecturing his co-workers that they’re not comic booking correctly. And doing his work the way he thinks it should be done, not what the script calls for. He’s not a team player.
If he had gotten hired by Marvel or DC, he would have been fired before the probationary period ended. I’m curious how Batiuk would have reacted to that. He’d probably pout and go home, and take the attitude that the major companies had lost their way. Maybe that would haver gotten him interested in independent companies, since Lord knows he isn’t in our timeline.
But I wonder what it would have done to his juvenile idea of how the industry works. He would have seen that the bullpen doesn’t exist, his idols won’t hang out with him, his work is boring and tedious, he has no say in anything, and they won’t let him anywhere near the properties he likes. Batiuk would have started working on Weird Western Tales , Swamp Thing, and other less glamorous properties. And he’s not paid nearly as much as he thinks he’s worth.
I wonder what his job interview was like. His own retelling portrays one of his interviewers as dismissive, and one of them as pretty nice, giving him some tips and examples of real work. As if he were a 9-year-old child who’d applied for a job. Like I said about Dick Sherry’s visit, Batiuk expects so much consideration that anyone who qualifies as “nice” in his eyes was probably over-the-top pandering to him.
And we don’t know what process Batiuk went through to get these interviews. I doubt he was responding to a public job posting. Batiuk might have pestered DC and Marvel into giving him an interview, and one of his interviewers might have been annoyed he had to spend some of his day on it.
Because Batiuk should have been a good prospect. He had an active comic strip, and was a young, talented guy who was passionate about comic books. But his passion is so misaimed that it probably puts other people off. I imagine Batiuk’s own behavior revealed that he was completely unhireable.
I think the biggest indicator that he was never serious about actually creating or writing comic books is that he never approached any of the myriad independent publishers that exist or have existed. We bag on Batty a lot for good reason but do you not think that a small publisher like Comico or Eclipse wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to publish some work by him at the height of Funky’s popularity which also happened to coincide with the big indie comic boom? Or a publisher like Oni, Slave Labor Graphics… just anyone really?
But maybe the point is that he would have had to approach them in the first place. He basically just walked into a job doing a panel for his local paper, then within what seems to be two or three years he had Funky Winkerbean. Things kind of falling into his lap very early on combined with the rejection from Marvel and DC basically seemed to instill in ol’ BatTum that these kind of things just happen and there’s no need to really hustle. Hell, by the ’80s he shouldn’t have even had to do even the minimum amount of stuff he did early in his career, publishers should be the ones approaching him.
That is to say he got too much too fast and with minimal effort that it gave him a distorted view of how all of this works. He could have gone to indie publishers at any time if he truly wanted to write a comic book and one of them likely would have been more than happy to work with him. Hell, I’ll even be very generous and say that at from the ’80s on he very likely could have approached Marvel or DC and they would have had some interest in working with him but it likely would have been a miniseries on a lower tier character which most people still would have jumped at (Genndy Tartakovsky did a Luke Cage mini, R.L. Stine did a Man-Thing one for example). But Batty wouldn’t have wanted that, he would have wanted to be put right on as the writer of The Flash or Amazing Spider-Man and he wanted publishers to approach him for the opportunity. The indies weren’t good enough, lower tier characters weren’t good enough, and having to make first contact and pitch the idea from his end was a non-starter so Batty will go his whole life never being the comic book writer he supposedly always wanted to be.
Even assuming he DID approach them — and hey, perhaps he did! — the whole thing would collapse as soon as they reviewed what he was pitching. His ‘stories’ would be premise-only doodles that would practically slide off the page as you looked at them. In any given month, any comics company with a publication schedule would review dozens of submissions of marginal quality that were still more solid than what Batiuk could deliver. He wouldn’t get past a polite “thanks for your interest but your submission does not meet our needs at this time”.
Whatever skills TB might have, dreaming up and telling an actual coherent and involving story that lasts over three panels is not one of them.
Well said, as usual. I think it’s also noteworthy that Batiuk seems have made no further attempts to get hired by DC or Marvel after those initial interviews in the 1970s. Either they told him “absolutely not, and don’t apply again”, or he lacks the ability to market himself.
When I was younger, I failed some job interviews that I really wanted, and I interpreted it a permanent insumountable obstacle. But jobs open and close all the time. As I got older (and applied for better jobs), I saw the value in leaving a good impression; I would get hired on a later attempt, or they’d reach out to me later and say “our first choice didn’t work out, are you still interested?”
Having industry contacts is also a big help in getting hired. Batiuk has made friends with comic book artists, and has gotten some talented people to do one-off projects for him (like the auctioned comic book covers). He still couldn’t get his foot in the door at Marvel and DC, and there’s no evidence he ever tried.
If Tom Batiuk truly wanted to make comic books, he should have been able to do so by any of several routes (self-publishing, independent publishing, trying for DC and Marvel again). But I still say that was never what he actually wanted.
Case in point. I made this in about 3 minutes — that’s how long it took me to write the prompt. I didn’t draw a lick of it or touch it in any editing program.
What’s takin’ you so long, Puff Batty? Join the 21st century!
Batty using AI to help develop a comic book!?! Surely you jest. That is not the proper way to make comics. But it sure is fun! My wife and I were playing with AI and wrote a “girl power” story, like the kind you would see on Lifetime Television. Having AI tweak your characters is so much fun. This should be something Batty should like, but nah.
That is top shelf.
Apologies—I meant to upvote! It’s a great post
Touch upvote, and it should change the downvote to an upvote.
How did you get it to do the exact Westview gazebo? That’s a really nice touch.
I gave it a prompt like “an idyllic small town park with a gazebo in the center” or similar, and just got lucky.
You also got what look like two Lisa benches, one of which looks like it has a marker in front of it!
Nice! I bet he could even train the AI on his own backlog and reproduce his style at any desired point. I mean that’s basically how he got his lettering style digitized.
Hmm
“I wondered if Tom Batiuk had ever auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in real life…”
Can you imagine TB with his 1972 drawing style actually putting himself up for the Prince Valiant gig? He’d have been laughed out of the room…
But FW would have been a reasonably good acquisition for the syndicate. From a business perspective, Sherry made the right call.
Yeah, I did notice at the time that Prince Valiant was beyond Tom Batiuk’s draftmanship skills. (Which is not a slam on Batiuk in any way; the artwork in PV is amazing.) But it was the only guess I could come up with at who the man in the photo was. And since Batton Thomas is a clone of Tom Batiuk in every possible way, down to living in the same buildings and working in the same high schools, I wondered if this was Batiuk announcing that he himself once auditioned in real life.
TB’s artwork (i.e, the stuff HE actually drew in the 1970s and 80s) is reasonably serviceable for a goofy, lighthearted, gag-a-day cartoon. It’s at least marginally better than Dilbert‘s artwork ever was, and also a little better than Doonesbury‘s earliest days (before Trudeau got assistants). TB would NOT be a remotely appropriate illustrator for Prince Valiant, of course — that’d be way, way, WAY beyond his skill level.
But thinking about this, TB hasn’t done his own artwork for decades. Did TB perhaps ALWAYS want to do a terribly-written “serious” comic … but didn’t have the chops to pull off the artwork it would require? And only began doing so when he realized that Chuck Ayers DID have the chops?
People were ready for a mildly cynical look at high school life.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Suddenly, three birds fly towards the birdhouse and start singing “When I Come Around” by Green Day)
I’m pretty sure you need to be able to draw horses to do Prince Valiant. Maybe he could have got a gig with Antisocial Man.
“[He gave me] some fatherly advice on what was about to happen to me.”
What was about to happen to him? The main change in Batton’s/Tom’s life was that he was going to have to make sure to have a comic strip written and drawn every day, six weeks in advance for the dailies, and eight weeks for Sundays. But he wasn’t going to become a celebrity, and that’s no slam at the popularity of Funky Winkerbean, but a realistic appraisal of how famous comic strip creators are. Comic strip creators are usually known by their work, not by their faces.
Jim Davis makes millions of dollars each year from Garfield, but outside his hometown of Muncie, Indiana, few people would recognize him. He could probably go to a screening of “The Garfield Movie” anywhere outside Muncie and pay for his ticket with a credit card that said “James Davis,” and nobody would bat an eye.
The people who need advice on what is about to happen to them are people who are about to become famous from starring in major movies and TV shows, who sign major contracts to be professional athletes, and the like. Comic strip creators, not so much.
His voice was about to get deeper and was about to start growing hair in really strange places. After all, it was the 70’s.
That “what was about to happen to me” comment made me scratch my head too. “Son, now, I know groupies are tempting. When you have a bevy of beauties lined up outside your door wating for their chance to experience the Batiuk Magic, it’s hard to resist their charms, and after all, you’re a young man with a young man’s needs. Son, has anyone ever told you the facts about… VD?”
Seriously, who would you say is the most famous and successful comic strip artist of the modern era? Charles Schultz, maybe? Jim Davis, as mentioned above? Bill Watterson? Garry Trudeau? Not one of those people at the height of their fame would be recognized walking down any random city street.
Batton loves to tell you about all the interesting things that happened to him when he became a cartoonist, but he never tells you what they were.
This is why Batton Thomas is a gigantic self-own for Tom Batiuk. Batton can’t even retell his own life story in a way that’s remotely interesting. January 23 ended with a tease: “at one point I saw (Dick Sherry) looking at my work, and it felt like we weren’t on the same page.” On January 24? He’s back to talk about the damned house again! It’s an Anti-Climax Cut. Knowing Batiuk’s say-nothing imply-everything storytelling style, I guess the point was “he looked at my newer work and it put his mind at ease.” But the story doesn’t tell you that. It acts like it’s setting up a conflict, and makes you guess what it was. And Funky Winkerbean is a no-conflict zone.
It reminded me of the trope where the story intentionally cuts away from the protagonist discussing a plan, because the audience already knows it. Or because the story would rather show the plan in action, not tell it. But there is no plan. There is no action. There is no conflict. There is no problem to solve. Just a man who demands to be interviewed, and then treats every question like he’s Number Six refusing to explain why he retired.
This is exactly why I said I could use Batton Thomas to mock Tom Batiuk without changing any of his dialog. My parody would portray “Batton” as simpering for attention, but also Les Moore levels of secretive about himself, and unable to construct a story that’s even slightly entertaining. I haven’t done a parody strip in a while, because Batton Thomas roasts Tom Batiuk much better than I ever could.
A belated thank you for this. What the hell was with that Friday strip ending on an ellipsis …which was never continued, even though an important point was obviously in the offing. I honestly thought they ran the wrong strip Saturday. Are we supposed to just know what happened – as if it were some classic pop culture moment we all understand and get the reference? “And then, Rick meets Ilsa at the airfield…” for example.
Unrelated – and apologies if this has been aired here before – but whose voice do you hear when reading Batton Thomas? I alternate between
You?
And it’s fun to randomly add “…and I was also being charged with vehicular manslaughter” at the end of BT’s ramblings…
What a great question. I hear Arnold Stang, but with a flat Midwestern accent. On a good day, maybe Wallace Shawn.
Arnold Stang! Good choice. One I forgot: Gilbert Gottfried’s impression of Old Groucho Marx.
I still envision Batiuk’s blog entries as being voiced by Ben Stein, so that works for Batton as well. Especially in light of how he loves to drone on forever about nothing.
I read a few sites and subreddits where people will ask for tea about celebrities. And inevitably people post stories like, “A very famous star who every one of you would know was staying at the hotel I work at, and he ordered 10 rent boys to his room and had a box of whips and chains delivered. He puts on a façade of being a nice family man, but leads a secret life of gay S&M. I can’t share his name, but you would be SHOCKED.”
Thanks for nothing.
“Your life is gonna change, son. Be prepared! You are now a newspaper comic strip writer. You’re working in a medium with limitless power, and with a reach and influence that will last for all eternity. Make sure you memorialize every last bit of everything that happens to you … people don’t just WANT to know, they NEED to know every last experience an Anointed One like you has had. Be unstinting with even the most trivial detail … your public expects nothing less.”
“Also, 30 or maybe 35 years from now, computers will have advanced to the point where even ordinary people will be able to fill out their computer punch cards and use them to make snarky comments about your work. Incredible as it may seem. those punch card comments will be translated by giant devices and delivered by a cable directly to people’s homes right on their personal computer ‘screen’. Be very wary of this, and try not to look at or engage with those comments. They will not represent your REAL reading public.”
“Right, then. Godspeed and remember – if you can get to about 25 years in this biz, you can pretty much write any crap you want. Excelsior!”
“
Some fatherly advice” reminds me of “Superman’s Return to Krypton,”* in which a grown-up Superman goes to work for Jor-El, his father.
Jor-El says that he hopes his new assistant won’t mind “a little fatherly advice” from time to time.
Kal-El replies that he’ll be fine with it and his thought-balloon reveals that he’s delighted to be working with his father.
Was Mr. Sherry actually a strange visitor from another planet?
*
*Superman* #141 (November 1960), reprinted in *Superman* #232 (January 1971).
Interviewing Batton seems to be like interviewing Warren Beatty during the times when Warren left his interviewers baffled by not wanting to reveal any of his anecdotes in full.
“Well, you see, there’s a funny story about that?”
“Really? Tell us about it, Mr. Batiuk?”
“Huh? Oh, no, I just mean there’s a funny story that’s all.”
1/26: We’re in for a week of setting up inducting Dinkle into the Grand Ole Opry.
Is TB exhibiting at this one? I have to think so, but looking at this year’s program, I don’t see any sign of it. I see Kent State is one of the exhibition booths, but if TB were going to be there, I’d expect to see KSU press.
It probably doesn’t matter. All we’re getting is his disdain for the people waiting in line.
I bet if we’re lucky, one of this week’s strips will be him being dismissive of Becky. She might even offer for him to come back and do some subbing for her at WHS because I’m sure Tommy Boy is itching to do some jokes abou how the marching band kids are morons.
Maybe he’ll pull Kara out of his big pile of underused characters and but the monkey’s paw curls she’ll be afflicted with some kind of physical ailment as punishment for taking the Big Walnut Tech job and beating Dinkle at the Battle of the Bands in her final appearance. Like how Mary Sue was made morbidly obese in punishment for spurning God’s Chosen Son.
Of course he’ll be an asshole. Who he’s an asshole to is what drives his arcs.
Has he ever been an “exhibitor?” I think he just rents a small space that doesn’t rise to the level of being a named exhibitor in the program. Especially since his product is only tangentially related to band directing. He just shows up again and again and entertains absolutely no one, like Spongebob ripping his pants again.
Don’t be silly. Band directors get cancer too.
I know that generally we snark on Batty and his work here but since the topic of Batty and comics came up, I’ll say RIP to Sal Buscema who passed away last week at the age of 89. One of the greats of the medium and his run on Spectacular Spider-Man with J.M. DeMatteis is one off my favorie cape comic runs ever, especially, of course, Spectacular #200.
He did work on one of the covers in the later years of Funky Winkerbean inking a piece drawn by Ron Frenz.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-korner/the-amazing-mr-sponge-with-absorbing-junior-no-57/
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Meanwhile at the convention)
(Dinkle marches up to two skeletons, the shorter one wearing a blue hoodie and the other taller one wearing boots and armor)
Papyrus: SANS, I DONT THINK THAT HUMAN LIKES THAT WE’RE AT THIS CONVENTION.
(Dinkle punches Papyrus in the face, causing Sans to deploy a Gaster Blaster and point it at him, causing Dinkle to shit himself in fear)
Sans: harm my brother and you’re gonna have a bad time.
(Dinkle runs away and then is obliterated by Sans’s Gaster Blaster)
Apropos Tom’s comic book dreams and his prototype covers—a tv executive I heard at a conference said it’s easy to come up with an idea for a program. The hard part is writing episode 10 to 22
Really, Dinkle? You’re going to waste a week explaining to roomful of people at an “educators’ convention” what a bus driver is? And for an example, you brought a 107-year-old psychopath, when you had several benign ones to choose from?
Did Dinkle lose a bet with Crankshaft on the AFC Championship Game, or something? (Crankshaft is the kind of guy who’d jump back on the Patriots bandwagon the second Bo Nix got hurt. Even if they were somehow playing against the Browns.)
It’s another example of handing Ed an award for next to nothing.
I’m guessing that’ll be Friday, so Ed can spend Saturday gloating about it.
Wait till tomorrow, when he introduces Batton Thomas, who belongs at OMEA because he “has made invaluable artistic contributions to our great home state, Ohio.”
On Thursday, he introduces Summer, who is obviously critically important to music educators in Ohio because what she writes about will eventually spark others to build on it to create a science of behavioral-patterened algorithms that will one day allow us to recognize humanity as our nation.
Friday: Lillian reads excerpts from “Murder in the Choir Loft.”
I really, really hate what he did to Summer in the last year of the strip. She’s not even the same character.
One of the things I’m wondering about is if Batty was into Spider-Girl at all and that influenced what he did with high school Summer. By that I mean both Summer and Mayday are the tomboy daughters of nerd fathers. Both of them are stars on their school’s basketball team and popular but down to earth. Their closest friend and teammate is a black girl. Summer and Dick Facey’s designs also look fairly similar to Mayday and MC2 Peter’s.
It feels way too much to be a coincidence.
I think about those books all the time and about how they must have the same victim: a thousand year old bus driver who mangles the English language.
I finally got around to reading the Jan 21 “Match to Lame” on TB’s site, and I can’t resist noting this:
Note the first word(s). The very first word! has a glaring error that he didn’t even bother to glance at! Two errors — first, the cut-and-paste error, and second, the error of just not giving enough of a damn to read your own words on the page, not even once.
And that sentence — good lord. Would anyone like to read that sentence in English, translated from Batiukese?
“… I’ve discussed how the writing changed from gags to sitcom-style setups to a more cinematic storytelling approach that allowed me to explore more complex subjects.”
I still don’t know what “edge work” is but all I can picture is the Aragonés doodles that used to festoon the margins of Mad back in the early days, or some kind of gross kink offered by ladies of the evening.
On second thought, perhaps I’m being too harsh? Perhaps the excerpt was a quote from a letter that he was addressing to the defunct English punk band, The Now.
Considering how much admiration Batiuk thinks he’s entitled to for being a writer when he is demonstrably terrible at it, I think it’s difficult to be too harsh. Sheesh, how little of a crap do you have to give to post something like that? I’ve made that mistake too – my rewording sometimes leaves stray words behind – but I always fix errors when I see them (if I can).
“Edge work” is leaving a nice, even space between the sidewalk and where the lawn starts, right?
“It’s called writing. You wouldn’t understand.”
Over on GoComics someone made a comment about how Ed gets to attend OMEA but not Becky. You would think Batty might feature her in the background somewhere. The pinned up sleeve she and Skip wear is so stupid. Has Batty ever mentioned why he thought a one armed band director or a one armed journalist would make for an interesting character?
He used a real photo for the panel art??
It was either that or Davis was going to have to actually draw something. I think we all know that wasn’t happening.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 2 of Dinkle Week
(the crowd suddenly erupts into booing)
Crowd: FUCK YOU, DINKLE! GET THE FUCK OUTTA OHIO AND NEVER COME BACK! (the crowd starts throwing rocks at Dinkle)
Is Dinkle supposed to be roasting Crankshaft?
Do I remember correctly that “99 Bottles Of Beer” is some kind of lore reference? That Crankshaft hated it when his kids sang it during long bus rides?
Do Zoomers, or Gen Alpha, even sing that any more? It’s hard to imagine. I imagine the band buses are quiet as everyone sits on their phones, or if there’s talking, it’s because people are discussing some Insta reel or TikTok.
I would love to know how the music educators at OMEA, most probably in their 30s and 40s, react to these OMEA suck-up strips at this point, assuming they see them at all. Do they scratch their heads and mutter “OK Boomer”?
I don’t think I ever sang it, and I’m Gen X. Seems like a cultural thing that died out about the same time phone booth stuffing did. I’d heard of it as a kid, but hadn’t done it myself. So this is basically a joke that no one in the audience will get. I doubt anyone at a band directors convention has ever heard a bus full of students sing “99 Bottles Of Beer”, if only because most of those people are 60 years younger than Ed Crankshaft. Nor would they be aware that the song personally annoys him.
This is like watching a painfully bad Open Mic Night. It’s actually worse than Funky Winkerbean’s “I Broke The Last Walkman On Earth” bit. At least that was pretending to be entertaining to a general audience. This is an out-of-date joke nobody gets, that triggers a pet peeve nobody knows about, in a person nobody cares about. Neither of whom have any business presenting at a band directors’ education convention.
Why does the OMEA allow itself to be insulted like this? The message seems to be that your time there will be wasted by egotistical, unfunny people who have somehow commandeered a microphone. OMEA should really tell him to stop this, once and for all.
It also feels like this is how Batiuk thinks he should be treated. “Oh wow, the great Harry Dinkle is here!” Cancel the entire program, and just let him talk about whatever he wants for three hours! And he brought an unknown person to roast with inside jokes nobody else knows or cares about? Epic!”
Glad you brought up the Penultimate CD Walkman arc because that’s another example.
Scene: a room full of people at an AA meeting, some of whom are in crisis, some white-knuckling sobriety, some not ready to stop drinking but taking tentative steps in that direction, some remanded here by the court as a condition for getting custody of their kids — but who cares about their recovery, HEEEEEERRRRRRE’S FUNKY! with an incredibly long, boring, droning story about the world’s stupidest, most low-stakes, self-inflicted accident that has nothing to do with sobriety, complete with whining, complaining, self-pitying, stinkin’ thinkin’ about how the world is against him at every turn.
Not shown: Members slinking out one by one to meet at the local bar, ’cause if this is sobriety, who the hell needs it?
That arc was extremely tasteless. Especially after Batiuk tried to mine Funky’s alcoholism for heavy drama. As a reformed alcoholic, and an “AA” group leader, Funky should know better than that. And the attendees would not have tolerated this.
I think you’re forgetting something very important which is that, while it may be like that in reality, The Funkyverse is a quarter-inch from reality. In reality, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” is simply an annoying song sung as a joke. But in the quarter-inch reality, it is the Funkyverse equivalent of “Ave Maria” and just like Claude Barlow is a composer on par with Beethovan, Mozart and Bach.
I’m more surprised that Batty actually used the phrasing real people use instead of the decades old quarter-inch equivalent “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
Gen Xer here. “99 Bottles of Beer” was certainly known to me and others my age (at least in the area I grew up in.) But it was always treated as a cringe-inducing joke. You’d be looking to do something to pass a particularly long, boring stretch of time in a confined space, and after a while some wag would sing the words “99 bottles of beer on the wall…”
It would be met with groans, and it would not go any further. I can honestly say I don’t think I ever heard the song go past one-and-a-half verses — in fact, almost never even past the opening line! It was something that was considered too stupid to be given any attention beyond that. (Even by the person making the initial reference.)
Yeah, that’s the problem with this whole “Crankshaft hates 99 Bottles of Beer” shtick: the song is just as annoying to sing as it is to listen to. The only way this kind of thing works is if it’s “yes, they went to the effort of singing all 99 verses just to irritate the bus driver.” Which is the same reason today’s strip doesn’t work. The impressive part is that Dinkle went to all the trouble of training a band and chorus to play the song just to annoy Crankshaft, in front of an audience who don’t know who he is, why it annoys him, and are probably at the convention to do something productive. But that’s just glossed over, because of the strip’s eternal laziness.
The outraged band directors should pelt Dinkle and Crankershaft with 99 bottles of beer.
You think?
Someone who thinks he’s honoring someone by playing a song everyone hates needs to be blowed up real good by GREAT EXPLOSION MURDER GOD DYNAMIGHT.