I love it. If Westview/Centerville existed, it would be the vanity press capital of the world. These people are so ignorant, lazy, credulous, and desperate to be published that half the town would sign up. And they’re so passive they won’t even do anything about being ripped off! They’re the perfect target market: sheep. And when you butcher them, they do nothing but smirk.
Who knows, maybe Atomik Komix *is* that vanity press. Lord knows they haven’t demonstrated any other functional business model yet.
(The non-literary half of the town would be pushing MLMs on each other.)
Three of the first six panels this week have mentioned the brand name Yondr. This is annoying to me in part because I had never heard of Yondr or its pouches until yesterday. But I suspect that other readers who are familiar with that brand name are annoyed by the constant product placement, too.
This week looks like it’ll be an exercise in “even when Batiuk gets it right, he gets it wrong.”
I’d never heard of Yondr before this week, so I looked it up. Batiuk describes it accurately in the strip. It’s a pouch you put your cell phone into, where it can’t be used. It has some kind of RFID technology, like those magnetic tags clothing stores use to deter theft. You can specify an area in which phones must be stored. If you want to use your phone, you have to leave the area, or use an “unlocking base” to free it from the pouch. You can still hear the phone, and you can see if the screen lights up, so you won’t miss any messages of life-altering importance. Yondr seems to have some valid uses: schools, courtrooms, live performance venues.
What Batiuk gets wrong is that he’s enforcing it during bus rides. For starters, the idea that any student is going to take orders from any bus driver is laughable. Especially Ed Crankshaft, considering his own past behavior. Second, it makes no sense to enforce this on the bus. The existence of Yondr implies that it’s also in place during school hours. Policing phone usage during the bus ride is just a dick move. And would cost the school boards more money, time, technology, and effort to set up the phones-free zone. Better try another school levy!
Using Yondr in this way would create far more problems than it solves. Let the kids catch up their overnight DMs during bus rides where there’s nothing else to do anyway! Then they can arrive at school with a focused mindset, unworried about missing any important messages. Especially considering how Crankshaft loves to accuse the passengers of being unruly, even though we never see this happen. They’d be a lot more unruly if you banned cell phone usage, during the only time of day it makes sense to allow it.
What’s really inexcusable is that Batiuk himself was a high school teacher, and has been writing about high school his entire life. But he rejects any kind of nuanced look at the problem, in favor of the cheapest, laziest, most ill-informed jokes imaginable.
I don’t think he was a very good one. It’s like how Greg Evans started out celebrating an incompetent asshole English teacher named Fogarty only to promote the grumbling dimwit’s punching bag to protagonist.
Brava, Harriet! You’ve created another fine parody strip that made exhale forcefully through my nose!
Thank you for all the work you put in on the Crankie Awards. Not to mention that you still have the unenviable task of counting the thousands of votes that will pour in.
Today’s strip really illustrates the pointless cruelty of it. Look at the “choir student’s” face. That child looks like she’s watching one of her pets die. Which I think *is* the point. And somehow, that isn’t the joke! The joke is… well, I’ve figured out what this week is actually about. And it’s honestly pretty sick.
Tormenting children because they don’t enjoy childhood ‘properly’ is on brand with this stupid goomba. He sees soft spoiled children who need Great Big Jerk Santa making them cry. I want to punch the dumb look off of his stupid face.
Batty really does give the impression of genuinely disliking teenagers. Act I with the kids being dumb, annoying and whatever was balanced out by the fact the teachers weren’t any better. The school, the whole setting really, was populated by morons, weirdos and apathetic burn outs at every level. But come Act II and it suddenly starts to shift. The teachers are more reasonable and beleaguered, their apathy and bitterness is portrayed more and more as a product of the fact that the students that they deal with are dumb as rocks.
Each subsequent generatio is treated as even dumber than the previous one. Les, Linda, Jim… they’re the smart people, it’s the kids who are annoying little idiots driving tem to hate their jobs.
I would bet that Batty is definitely the type of boomer who believes that his generation of teenages were the only good ones because they made all the good music i.e. folk and Americana and they protested for civil rights and against Vietnam while the subsequent generations are just lazy dopes taking what Batty and his generation gave them and squandering it.
As I mentioned back in Volume 1 of this series, I had purchased a book on writing gag cartoons, which I immediately abandoned and put aside as ineffectual for me. Part of that I’m sure was due to a contrarian streak, a trait I attribute to both nature and nurture. Rules tend to inordinately raise my hackles.
There’s always a bit of revelatory truth buried within the rambling word salad of his Match to Lame entries. But while I’m sure he believes that it’s an admirable bit of rebelliousness, in truth it just reinforces that he projects a constant air of “I’m right and don’t need to listen to anyone” obstinancy. It’s why getting success so fast was so bad for him, he never was forced to have to grind it out under an editor and learn a bit of humility.
It’s an elaborate justification of his laziness and narcissism. These Match To Flame book intros make it extremely clear that Tom is self-obsessed without being even the tiniest bit self-aware.
As if the eternal fawning Skip/Batton lovefest hadn’t already made that obvious….
His lack of self awareness is why he is confused and angered by how others see him. Strap grenade launchers to his wrists and he’s Bakugo from My Hero Academia.
To eat every meal, to drink every drink and to say the deprived deserve to starve, that is the way of the boomer.
I’m guessing Batiuk saw “Yondr Pouch” somewhere and it tickled his funny bone. What would happen if you sent a Yondr Pouch through the Transfer Portal?
Son of Stuck Funky 
I love it. If Westview/Centerville existed, it would be the vanity press capital of the world. These people are so ignorant, lazy, credulous, and desperate to be published that half the town would sign up. And they’re so passive they won’t even do anything about being ripped off! They’re the perfect target market: sheep. And when you butcher them, they do nothing but smirk.
Who knows, maybe Atomik Komix *is* that vanity press. Lord knows they haven’t demonstrated any other functional business model yet.
(The non-literary half of the town would be pushing MLMs on each other.)
That’s funnier than what actually happened. Too bad the bar is so low, Satan is tripping on it
Today’s Crankfuckery
Lena: (I knew it was a bad idea to implement this.)
2/10: They’ve sunk to getting kids to rat on one another.
Let’s see how stupid this week gets. I feel like there’s a big one headed our way.
Tom Batiuk: “Challenge accepted.”
Three of the first six panels this week have mentioned the brand name Yondr. This is annoying to me in part because I had never heard of Yondr or its pouches until yesterday. But I suspect that other readers who are familiar with that brand name are annoyed by the constant product placement, too.
This week looks like it’ll be an exercise in “even when Batiuk gets it right, he gets it wrong.”
I’d never heard of Yondr before this week, so I looked it up. Batiuk describes it accurately in the strip. It’s a pouch you put your cell phone into, where it can’t be used. It has some kind of RFID technology, like those magnetic tags clothing stores use to deter theft. You can specify an area in which phones must be stored. If you want to use your phone, you have to leave the area, or use an “unlocking base” to free it from the pouch. You can still hear the phone, and you can see if the screen lights up, so you won’t miss any messages of life-altering importance. Yondr seems to have some valid uses: schools, courtrooms, live performance venues.
What Batiuk gets wrong is that he’s enforcing it during bus rides. For starters, the idea that any student is going to take orders from any bus driver is laughable. Especially Ed Crankshaft, considering his own past behavior. Second, it makes no sense to enforce this on the bus. The existence of Yondr implies that it’s also in place during school hours. Policing phone usage during the bus ride is just a dick move. And would cost the school boards more money, time, technology, and effort to set up the phones-free zone. Better try another school levy!
Using Yondr in this way would create far more problems than it solves. Let the kids catch up their overnight DMs during bus rides where there’s nothing else to do anyway! Then they can arrive at school with a focused mindset, unworried about missing any important messages. Especially considering how Crankshaft loves to accuse the passengers of being unruly, even though we never see this happen. They’d be a lot more unruly if you banned cell phone usage, during the only time of day it makes sense to allow it.
What’s really inexcusable is that Batiuk himself was a high school teacher, and has been writing about high school his entire life. But he rejects any kind of nuanced look at the problem, in favor of the cheapest, laziest, most ill-informed jokes imaginable.
I don’t think he was a very good one. It’s like how Greg Evans started out celebrating an incompetent asshole English teacher named Fogarty only to promote the grumbling dimwit’s punching bag to protagonist.
Brava, Harriet! You’ve created another fine parody strip that made exhale forcefully through my nose!
Thank you for all the work you put in on the Crankie Awards. Not to mention that you still have the unenviable task of counting the thousands of votes that will pour in.
You’re a gem!
Thanks, Ians!
Your parody strips are always welcome here! 😀
Today’s Crankfuckery
(sound of crickets)
2/11: Batiuk is at least consistent in that he likes to demonize the kids affected by a misguided attempt to protect them.
Today’s strip really illustrates the pointless cruelty of it. Look at the “choir student’s” face. That child looks like she’s watching one of her pets die. Which I think *is* the point. And somehow, that isn’t the joke! The joke is… well, I’ve figured out what this week is actually about. And it’s honestly pretty sick.
Tormenting children because they don’t enjoy childhood ‘properly’ is on brand with this stupid goomba. He sees soft spoiled children who need Great Big Jerk Santa making them cry. I want to punch the dumb look off of his stupid face.
No, it’s not quite that. It’s much worse.
Batty really does give the impression of genuinely disliking teenagers. Act I with the kids being dumb, annoying and whatever was balanced out by the fact the teachers weren’t any better. The school, the whole setting really, was populated by morons, weirdos and apathetic burn outs at every level. But come Act II and it suddenly starts to shift. The teachers are more reasonable and beleaguered, their apathy and bitterness is portrayed more and more as a product of the fact that the students that they deal with are dumb as rocks.
Each subsequent generatio is treated as even dumber than the previous one. Les, Linda, Jim… they’re the smart people, it’s the kids who are annoying little idiots driving tem to hate their jobs.
I would bet that Batty is definitely the type of boomer who believes that his generation of teenages were the only good ones because they made all the good music i.e. folk and Americana and they protested for civil rights and against Vietnam while the subsequent generations are just lazy dopes taking what Batty and his generation gave them and squandering it.
If this was a seventies game show, you’d be hearing a ringing bell and Jim Perry telling you that you won the internet.
There’s always a bit of revelatory truth buried within the rambling word salad of his Match to Lame entries. But while I’m sure he believes that it’s an admirable bit of rebelliousness, in truth it just reinforces that he projects a constant air of “I’m right and don’t need to listen to anyone” obstinancy. It’s why getting success so fast was so bad for him, he never was forced to have to grind it out under an editor and learn a bit of humility.
This makes him Male Ohio Ukrainian Lynn Johnston yapping about something he doesn’t understand.
It’s an elaborate justification of his laziness and narcissism. These Match To Flame book intros make it extremely clear that Tom is self-obsessed without being even the tiniest bit self-aware.
As if the eternal fawning Skip/Batton lovefest hadn’t already made that obvious….
His lack of self awareness is why he is confused and angered by how others see him. Strap grenade launchers to his wrists and he’s Bakugo from My Hero Academia.
To eat every meal, to drink every drink and to say the deprived deserve to starve, that is the way of the boomer.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 3 of Bus Driver Random Bullshit Week
I am genuinely struggling to say something about this week of Crankshaft
2/12: Watch Batiuk insist that he’s still a young adult despite talking like a geezer.
I’m guessing Batiuk saw “Yondr Pouch” somewhere and it tickled his funny bone. What would happen if you sent a Yondr Pouch through the Transfer Portal?
It would find it triggering and would need to recover in The Blue Tent.