Would it be possible to have a post on this blog that does a deep dive into Max and Hannah’s relationship? At least the highlights, like when they met, started dating, started living together, and had a baby. Mostly, I’m trying to figure out if we were supposed to know that they weren’t already married.
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2026/03/03/in-like-a-lamb/#comment-180197
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
And, just for fun, I’ll give everyone a chance to guess each major story point as it arrives. The answer to each question will be revealed right after the poll question. So, to avoid spoilers, don’t scroll past each question. And I’d appreciate it if you did avoid spoilers, because I’d love to know how well our visitors collectively can guess Tom Batiuk’s intentions.
Our deep dive begins in 2003, because that’s the earliest Crankshaft archives are available at GoComics.com. Max’s first appearance in this time frame is November 2003, when Max arrives for family Thanksgiving. Mindy is still in high school, and Rose is still alive, as is Lucy McKenzie. Max is wearing his college sweatshirt. Which is question #1:
Seriously, answer the poll question before reading on. Try to guess!
In a stunning upset right out of March Madness, Max graduated from Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio. The college sweatshirt he often wore at the time said those exact words. So we know it’s not a school with a similar name like UNC-Wilmington, or a fictional school like Bull Bushka’s Enormous Midwestern University.
Also, Max’s graduation photo on June 3, 2006 resembles the entrance to the real-life school. And let’s be honest: the Ohio-based school was always the favorite.
The “Max is in college and Mindy is still in high school” era continued until 2006. Max would sometimes appear at the family home, and in flashbacks, but he didn’t get his own stories. During the week of January 29, 2004, Pam reminisces about a family trip to “Mouse World.” On July 5, 2005, Pam and Jeff revisit Max’s fourth birthday. Interestingly, he requested a clown:
Pam was pregnant with Mindy at the time, making Mindy about four and a half years younger than Max. This isn’t a Mindy deep dive, but we’ll mention her from time to time. Max and Min’s sibling relationship is unremarkable. They’re not close, but they seem to get along just fine. During this time, Mindy was being urged to get a job. (Unlike, for example, Luann.)
Just as March Madness is full of upsets, it’s also full of games where the obvious choice has a 98.75% chance of being correct. Mindy was hired by Montoni’s on June 29, 2004, and was seen going to work there as late as December 2007. The question included the “full-time” caveat, because Mindy also served as one of Santa’s elves during Ed Crankshaft’s then-annual portrayals of Santa Claus. She was seen in this role on December 15, 2003.
Max attended family Thanksgiving again in 2006. On December 17, 2007, Max is seen leaving for a date, but we don’t know with whom. On February 11, 2008, Max seeks romantic advice from Ed Crankshaft, but no potential partner is named. Both of these were throwaway strips rather than being part of an arc.
Max gets his first real story on March 25, 2008, when he moves into an apartment. Pam says she realized that Max would “move out”, implying that he lived in his parents’ house after college graduation. Max’s random appearances were a little more frequent in 2006-07, so this checks out. Hannah isn’t a part of Max’s life yet. And she won’t be anytime soon.
On September 8, 2008, Jeff says:
We never learn whose wedding this was, because this was just to set up a week of complaining about getting your car serviced.
December 1, 2008 is our first look into Max’s career. Max announces tells the family he “has been given a show to direct”, even though this is the first we’ve heard of him having a job in television. The show airs at 4 a.m, and is called Living With Nature, starring Channel 1 veteran Phil the Forecaster.
So we can add yet another name to the list of Funkyverse characters who instantly became professional content creators. My own college degree was in broadcast news, and getting your own TV show at age 25-ish would be very, very unusual. Even for this kind of ultra-cheap local public affairs show that runs at 4 a.m. You have to pay your dues more than that.
Mindy graduated high school in summer 2009, and she would go to Kent State that fall. Her parents planned a high school graduation party, but oh no! The caterer got the days mixed up! What can they do?
The #1 seed wins again. Ed fired up his grill, but you can guess how that went. Mindy ordered from Montoni’s. No mention is made of the fact that Mindy worked for, and maybe still did work for, Montoni’s.
In June 2009 we learn that Max has a history of smoking. Rose takes up smoking at this time, and it is revealed that she found some old cigarettes that were once Max’s.
On December 1, 2014, Ralph Meckler laments that he has to close the Valentine Theater “after this week”, setting up a predictable bunch of moping about how good things never last. Of course, this is the same Valentine Theater that Max and Hannah have operated the past few years.
We’ll answer this question in a moment…
…but you can probably guess from this next piece of information. Hannah’s first mention in Crankshaft wasn’t until February 15, 2016.
Max reveals that Hannah is “someone he’s seeing from work.” We see her for the first time two days later.
The following week, they go on a date to the Valentine Theater. They meet Ralph Meckler, who is still running the place. Which means the correct answer was “Not 2014.” And not in a pedantic way, as if the theater held out a couple more weeks and closed in early 2015. After a week of gloom and doom for the Valentine, it must have survived under Ralph for 14 more months.
Ralph is seeking a buyer, which Max and Hannah are independently interested in. On March 7, 2016, they tell Max’s parents this. Pam’s reaction:
This is the first explicit mention of Max and Hannah’s marital status. Max and Hannah went to his parents with “something we’d like to tell you.” So Pam and Jeff were making a reasonable guess about what it was.
Max and Hannah raise enough money through crowdfunding to buy the Valentine Theater. Rose finally died in May 2016 – the day Jeff was about to forgive her, of course, when she’s been feeble for well over a decade. Which also gave us this indelible flashback image:
October 10, 2016 was the first week of Max and Hannah fixing up the Valentine Theater. And that’s where our story ends for now, because this is already a long post. Part II is coming soon.
Let’s revisit the quiz questions. Two times Batiuk took the blindingly obvious path, and two times he took the story in a bizarre direction. As if this year’s Final Four will be Duke, UConn, Long Island University, and Central Arkansas. Yes, lesser teams can, and often do, go on deep runs in the NCAA Tournament. But there’s a point below which this has never happened, and is laughably unlikely.
Which is the best analogy for Tom Batiuk’s writing I will ever come up with. Half the time the story is going somewhere stupidly obvious. Half the time it’s going in a completely random direction that defeats Batiuk’s own claims to realism. Which is which? Your guess is as good as mine.
Son of Stuck Funky 
I managed to bat 1.000 on those questions.
Even having no knowledge of Crankshaft I managed to get it right but that’s maybe a result of having to cram my brain with Funky Winkerbean twice in a six month span so it’s all fresh. That said the first question did throw me off simply. I did get it correct but that was because my Funky experience had taught me that for a long time Batsam tended to avoid naming real colleges. It was always fake ones like EMU or the not at all generic State U., or characters were going to a community college where you can take tae bo classes that can, somehow, allow one-armed band geeks and pizza waitresses to beat up gangs of hoods (because Funkyverse tae bo is apparently as real a martial art like when a fighting game character uses rhythmic gymnastics).
I believe that in Funky he didn’t start using Kent State until Summer went off to college. So him using a real college years prior to 2012 surprised me, but I guess Crankshaft just rolls differently. Still, Batty’s style is unpredictably predictable. When dealing with old stories, even from a series you haven’t read, if quizzed it becomes easy to guess just based on his proclivities. But present day Batty is too wily and just when you think you’ve got him, he’ll zig when you would have expected him to zag and suddenly Soulpatch McGee and Jessimindy Summers are signing documents at the courthouse instead of doing the requisite wedding and fertility ceremony at the Sacred Temple so their union can be blessed by the pizza gods.
It’s not a zag. The point is cruelty to Pam.
Wonderful recap. Thanks for all the hard work. Looking forward to Part II.
Thanks for the fine start to the relationship recap no one ever predicted we’d need. Frankly, I’m still holding out hope that the “Wilmington College” Max attended was the one in Delaware which changed its name to Wilmington University in 2007. That still fits the timeline, and my tiny home state doesn’t get much mention in the comics pages.
I knew there was a college named Wilmington in Delaware, and that was something I genuinely considered. Unfortunately, all the evidence pointed to it being the one in Ohio.
Bats could show the Moon landing and have the Eagle land in Akron.
I believe Max is modeled after Batty’s son and that he attended Wilmington. I know his son works in the broadcast industry. Batty has mentioned this casually on his blog.
I didn’t find any confirmation of the college, but Batiuk’s son does work in TV in the Cincinnati area (Wilmington is northeast of Cincinnati). I wonder if Hannah is supposed to resemble Batiuk’s real-life daughter-in-law. I suspect not, considering how little attention is paid to her.
Thanks for posting this. This is the kind of post I was hoping for regarding Max and Hannah.
I am glad you liked it! It was a great idea for a dive, since these two and their apparently common-law marriage came out of nowhere.
3/8: And of course Pam is somehow magically stupid for wanting something that means nothing to Batiuk. It’ll be like how she’s magically stupid for not wanting whatever farce Pete wants when he and Mindy marry.
She’ll be just like Batty’s horrible comic hatin’ mother when she fails to be properly enthused by their Atomik Komics-themed wedding where they dress up as Atomic Ape and Wayback Wendy with the minister being Flash Freefield delivering something cribbed from a Stan’s Soapbox column.
She’ll have Batiuk Angry Woman Face and do something like stabbing a coloring book for a reason he can’t connect with his being an insufferable asshole.
Notice what absolutely no one is concerned about. Nobody’s living in sin. Nobody’s biological clock is ticking. Nobody’s worried about their grandchild being in an unstable family. Nobody’s pressuring their offspring to conform to the standards of prior generations (Ed Crankshaft, I’m looking at you). Nobody’s concerned about what might happen to Max’s business assets or ability to visit Max in case their non-marriage ends. Even Max and Hannah describe marriage like they’re filing for a parking permit. What’s the only problem? Mom won’t get her book of wedding pictures! Which was apparently the only point of this story: to bash mom yet again.
This is what comic books rotting your brain looks like. You never acquire the ability to write about anything but your own childish gripes, and those can’t be any more adult or sophisticated than the Comics Code allowed. Marriage pressure is one of the most basic RomCom tropes in existence, and Tom Batiuk has zero clue how to write about it.
Get help, Tom. I’m not kidding.
That should be “Max’s ability to visit Mitch.” Did I mention these cutesy themed names suck?
The other point is to reveal what you don’t see is important. He simply can’t be asked to wonder why Pam is bumming.
And as for that stabbing the coloring book, someone so doesn’t get what a pain he was to raise.
I’m envisioning that gut-wrenching M*A*S*H therapy scene where Hawkeye finally realizes what he killed on the bus.
“She killed it.”
“She killed the coloring book?”
“Oh my God… she just wanted me to be quiet…. it was a comic book! Starbuck Jones #14! It was worth millions in Gem Mint condition!”
7. Inability to understand what he does to enrage people.
Also, how exactly is stabbing it supposed to prevent coloring it? Aside from the knife mark, the page is intact.
I either had a stroke before reading today’s (Sunday’s) strip, or it gave me a stroke mid-strip. I really can’t make heads or tails of anything anyone’s saying. Oh well, off to the neurologist I go!
In other news, the Stabbing of the Holy Book is one of my favorite panels in the entire history of the Funkshaftiverse.
There’s an idea: Not just best panels of the year, but best panels ever. This might be number one — neck and neck with “USA!!!” — because it hits all the high points:
1. Comix. Nuff said.
2. Mom issues. BIGTIME.
3. Sepia tones for nostalgia.
4. Perpetual, never-forgiven, never-forgotten grievances over frankly trivial shit.
5. Inability to emotionally move past childhood (see also: 1, 2, and 4 above).
6. Did I mention comix?
7. Complete and utter inability to understand how he’s perceived.
I might have to give it to that one even over “USA!!!”, just because it’s SO ridiculously over-the-top. I mean, who cuts up a comic book with a KNIFE? Scissors, sure. Setting it on fire, or tearing it up, sure. But a knife? You could create a super-villain called the Comics Degrader, who lowers the grade of your comic books, and you wouldn’t have him STAB the comics. (His archnemesis is, of course, the Skunk-Headed Idiot, who thinks water and smoke damage don’t decrease the value of old comics.)
Being told that comics were eroding his brains cut like a knife.
That panel is like in a cartoon when you see a bad guy retelling the story of his last run-in with the hero except the hero is made to look like as cruel as possible. Jff’s mother would have had a monstrous looking face and cackled like a witch while stabbing and slicing that poor, defenseless issue of Starbuck Jones.
I wish there was an edit feature here but posting that made me go back and read the surrounding month of strips that make up that story and I’ll be totally honest. It’s very easy to clown on Batty and him being something off an emotionally stunted manchild with mommy issues, but if that story is at all indicative of the way his actual IRL mother acted then I 100% understand him having resentful and complicated feelings towards her and why he might escape into comic books.
Not that it makes the stories good or the way he portrays those issues anything but unintentionally funny. But I at least understand why he’d feel like he does about her.
You’re right that we shouldn’t mock someone’s trauma, and that physically destroying a child’s beloved object out of spite is emotionally abusive. The problem is: when it comes to crimes against his comic books, Tom Batiuk is a highly unreliable narrator.
I think the comic book-cutting was a one-time incident. Because there is zero evidence that Batiuk was ever deprived of his precious comic books for any length of time. Or that his mother was abusive in any other way.
I also tend to take his mother’s side in this argument. The man was obsessed with comic books, at ages long after he should have outgrown them, during an era when peers were likely to mercilessly mock him for it. There was no “nerd culture” at the time (because there wasn’t even any when I was a high schooler in the late 1980s). There was little knowledge of conditions like ADHD or Asperger’s syndrome, much less societal acceptance of them. So I think she was just dealing with a behavior problem in a way that a 1950s parent would have. Not saying it’s right – most Boomer parenting ideas need to die a horrible death – I’m just saying it’s plausible.
Because I’ve been in Batiuk’s shoes here. I remember times when 12-year-old me annoyed my parents so much they had to take away my access to trading cards or video games for awhile. It never rose to the level of them having to destroy these things, because that was enough to get me in line. I don’t maintain any lifelong grudges about it.
I just don’t think we can give Batiuk the benefit of the doubt here. He has spent so many years demonizing and trivializing women in his work, in ways that seem much worse than what he alleges was done to him. And his stories are so ridiculous they don’t seem based in anything real (such as stabbing the “coloring book” instead of ripping, cutting, or throwing it away). People who’ve been genuinely abused are much better storytellers than this. Batiuk’s story would barely draw upvotes in r/AwfulMothers or whatever online forums exist for victim stories about such parental tactics.
I remember the sequence when Dead Skunk Head coldly rejected his mother’s attempt to reach out because she invoked the wrong character and how we were meant to sympathize with his brainless and petty behavior.
Nice dive, into this. I’ve always found this particular family interesting as it is the obvious connection between FW.
I did go 3-1 on the trivia questions, but I can’t brag too much, anytime there was a Montonis or Not Montonis question, the easy choice was obviously Montonis.
Keep up the good work. ANd thanks for doing the dirty work, so we don’t have to.
So… I knew Max and Hannah weren’t married. But this is legitimately the first time I realized that Max and Mindy weren’t actually twins. Is it just me, or did anyone else think that, too? (I have no idea why, but I was SURE they were twins. Maybe because of the pun names? I mean, it’s bad enough to do that to your children, but when they’re several years apart in age? Who does that?) (I mean, besides Tom Batiuk characters, obviously.)
Max and Hanna are becoming just as loathsome Cranky, Les, and Batton, among others, with their passive-aggressiveness and their smuggy, smirky faces.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
(sigh) guess the storyline is gonna be the Max-Hannah wedding for the next few weeks
Thank you for the post! I think what this all shows in total is that there is no real emotional stakes that have ever been given for this relationship. Max didn’t have trials and tribulations in previous failed relationships, there wasn’t much in the way of a relationship that budded and grew between him and Hannah. He just sort of existed for years, and then she just sort of exists at some future day, and that’s it, we’re together, good smirky times for all. And then they conceived a child at some varying day. Oh and now they’re going to get married.
Over at GC, even the most charitable comments about this week have been just a platform for people to recount their personal marriage stories, and next to nobody that I’ve seen has expressed any interest in the story regarding these specific characters. I’d bet that nobody there who isn’t a “troll” could even identify them by name. Moreover, the main characters themselves who are being married are portrayed as being completely nonchalant about it all. All right, well, who among the readers is going to care when they don’t?
Meh. It’s not Dinkle, it’s not Les, it’s not Lillian.
Pam seems to be in the wrong for seeing any of this as mattering.
Given how little they matter, it would be a relief to see more idiocy at the garage.
Of freaking course Hannah’s parents are dead and she has no siblings. She’s as hollow as dollar store beach ball. She’s not a character! She’s the platonic ideal of the Batiuk blonde! No personality, no life, just a placeholder.
Even that could have been interesting. Was she a kid when she lost them and if so how did growing up without them affect her? Does she see some of what she didn’t have in Max’s family? Maybe that would give her incentive to try and connect more with Pmm and Jff or her and Max have different ideas on how to approach this because of her not having her parents around.
It doesn’t matter though because Hannah, like most Funkyverse women is not a real character. She is like Rocky or Rachel or even late era Cindy; an accessory. I wonder if that’s why Chien disappeared? Even Batty must have had enough awareness to realize there was no way the character as written would have ever settled for being Mopey’s reward.
The way it reads now is that since she has no family to impress, Pam can take a swan dive off the roof and pray to get a Quirk in her next life.
I wonder if TB got rid of Chien simply because he can’t write characters who aren’t him. I honestly can’t name another character with any personality beyond her. “Likes 60s comic books and hockey” are not traits.
I used to work in a grocery store frozen/dairy department. Ever see a tube of Pillsbury crescent rolls get dropped, and it oozes out? Grey, featureless paste. Like most of his characters.
I think Chien was the last actual character Tom Batiuk tried to create. Every one after that was either a Mary Sue, or a clone of another character. The males tend to be Mary Sues, the females tend to be clones.
Hannah’s purpose is to be a door prize for one of Batiuk’s beloved self-insert characters. She’s blonde, attractive, and has Correct Opinions About Things, in her case how to project movies. I’ve seen a few strips of her saying “the picture quality is warmer than digital” or some D-in-Film-Studies-class drivelpuke like that. Hannah’s background, desires, or anything else is irrelevant. We’ll see some examples of this in Part 2.
At least when Lynn Johnston had a designated love interest get in a car wreck, she didn’t back her arm off.
Becky at least has marginally more character than Deanna. I’ll generally put Foob over Funky but Deanna is about as dull as Dopey Fairgood.
Her two functions are to be a cheerleader for her bum husband and to complain that her mother is actually trying to be a parent.
She worships the idiot protagonist Elly.
Becky is actually one of the more tolerable characters in the Funkyverse. She’s not an oh-woe-is-me whiner like everyone else is, when she has far more reasons to be bitter. She’s still kind of an unpleasant woman, and continues Dinkle’s legacy of abusive band management more than she should. But her history makes me want to cut her some slack.
Her unpleasantness tends to point towards the author and his habit of deliberately failing to understand women. Only he would keep her married to Dead Skunk Head for the stupid reason sgygave.
3/9: More bad wordplay about how Pam is foolish and bad to complicate matters for a DUMB gorl reason.
Comics I Don’t Understand: 36 Years Later Edition
So Tom is for some reason still posting old John Darling Sunday strips. Did anyone ask for these? And if so, have we disconnected their internet to ensure they will never type out and send a request again?
Anyway, Batiuk slowed down on the John Darling posts (or just forgot about ’em) for a while, but they seem to be back. The previous one was labelled Take 512 and was dated February 25, 1990 while the most current one is labelled Take 523 and was dated February 18, 1990.
Yes, his numbering system is … eccentric. Or bonkers. Or most likely, simply poorly proof-read. And the strips themselves are consistently gags that would be marginal in a short daily format, padded out to seven glacial panels. If nothing else, the collective posts offer a clear illustration of why John Darling was getting dropped by newspapers almost weekly.
But what I’m trying to figure out here is … what the hell is this particular February 18 strip about? From beginning to end … what going on? Is there a joke? Is there a connected series of events? Is this supposed to be entertaining or humorous or bittersweet or ironic or even comprehensible? Usually the strip is just garden variety lazy, but clearly this one is trying to do something I’m simply not getting…
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/john-darling-take-523/
John heard the mirror was going to be unavailable for a time, and he can’t live without looking at himself in the mirror? That’s my best guess. Which still doesn’t make any sense. A TV studio would have a make-up chair with a high-quality mirror, so he wouldn’t need to use an ordinary public bathroom mirror like the one depicted.
John Darling’s only real traits are that he’s vain, and always looking for a more glamorous job. But that’s par for the course for TV talking heads. I’ve worked in TV production, and nobody in that world would bat an eye at John Darling. Looking good is part of a host’s job, so it’s not even fair to bash them for checking themselves out frequently. I’m sure you’ve seen amateur interviewers, or even guests on professional talk shows, that give off “that’s a face for radio” vibes.
This assumes that an incurious clod who wants being a spoiled little boy to be humanity’s nation cares what pressure is place on on-air talent.
Who uses a rattle can to paint a wall?
It’s called painting.
Okay, looking at it again, I’ve got it.
Cousin Of Timemop is, for some reason. painting the entire bathroom wall with an aerosol spray paint can. This is stupid, of course. Maybe time travel now comes in the convenient spray-on format.
He leaves part way through the job, realizing only mid-gig that he’ll need to cover the mirror. Also quite stupid.
Key detail: he leaves the aerosol paint can on the counter.
Enter John Darling. The men’s room is apparently also his dressing room. Dumb, but there you go.
John Darling sees the paint can. He, for some reason assumes it’s hairspray, because that’s a totally standard thing to find in public men’s rooms. He sprays it on his hair. It only gets on his hair and nowhere else, because that’s how spray cans work.
He goes on the air with painted hair! Ha ha ha chortle chortle!
The end.
Watching the smug rat punch down is like finding a dead walrus on the dinner table. Nobody wants it.
The gag works well enough with the character, but requires the context of regularly reading John Darling (or a full color print, perhaps). John Darling being an incessant user of aerosol hairspray was a running gag (a running gag also employed in FW with Cindy, TB seems to find aerosol hairspray inherently funny… of course he does), as was his general dim-wittedness.
The set up, as you point out, was particularly ludicrous. Repainting an entire public restroom with a can of spray paint?!
That makes sense… but the joke still doesn’t work. John’s coloring should be messier, because if he thought it was hair spray, it wouldn’t result in perfectly-filled in areas like that.
I think the joke might have played better if printed in color (as it might have been, since this was a Sunday strip).
We should have seen the maintenance man spraying the wall blue (or some other color appropriate for a wall, but not John’s hair), and then in the last panel seen that John’s hair was blue.
Would that have been a logical situation or a good joke? Not particularly. But at least we would have understood it without confusion.
Colour may have helped, but the joke as visually presented still doesn’t work.
John, vain as he is, would absolutely look in the mirror as he sprays and thus instantly see his hair is blue. I mean, c’mon. He’s supposed to be dumb, but when it comes to his looks — he’s hyperfocused and aware.
Plus the spray would go elsewhere … his forehead, the tops of his ears, all over the shoulders of his jacket…
The kernel of the sight gag (vain guy sprays himself with aerosol paint thinking it’s hairspray) is okay. In fact, you can imagine, say, Will Ferrell getting maximum comic mileage out of this premise in a ten-to-fifteen second scene in Anchorman. But here? Batiuk hopelessly botches every single step of the execution. It’s almost a master class in anti-comedy.
The amazing thing is that John Darling held on another six months.
And that’s not even the worst joke writing he’s done lately. That would be “robbing Peter to Paypal.” Which is actually a good joke. It’s just inserted into the middle of this inane Max/Hannah marriage, instead of being used in a context of online shopping. Like that “online purchasing is too hard” whinefest Jeff had about a month ago. Or any of Crankshaft’s dozens of orders from online catalogs. Sheesh.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 8 of the Max-Hannah Wedding Storyline
(sound of crickets)
Also the sound of me rolling my eyes as the menfolk remind Pam of how little they think of her.
And today we learned that it’s just the Max-Hannah wedding, because Pete and Mindy have been assigned roles. Which rules out the joint wedding many of us speculated. And makes this story the equivalent of the Rocky-Cory wedding near the end of Funky Winkerbean. Because Batiuk apparently feels it was important to tie up an irrelevant loose end between two even more irrelevant characters. Bring on the pizza and comic books!
This might mean being a refugee from Masked Singer is actually humanity’s nation.
At least we are spared the absurdity of Pete inexplicably being Max’s best man the way that Durwood was Cory’s best man despite never once speaking directly to Cory.
I suppose the double wedding is still in play, with Pete and Mindy explicitly going to be at the courthouse with witnesses present. They could call an audible and get hitched too.
I bet you’re right. I bet they go down to the courthouse, turn it into their wedding venue – which is already spectacularly rude – and then Pete and Mindy decide to go ahead and file their own paperwork while they’re there. Pam, Jeff, and Ed will already be there, and it’s not like anyone else needs to be invited, amirite? (Cut to Darren crying over his art desk.)
I hope this happens. Because that would be some peak Batiuk.
Today I learned some courthouses contain a small chapel for wedding ceremonies. So I guess you can get married at the courthouse and still have a ceremony if you want to. But this story still has a lot of problems: if they wanted a ceremony, why didn’t they plan one in the first place? Why are they doing all this just to appease Pam? (Thought I kind of know why: she bought Ed and Jeff a trip to Canada over a $30 shirt. So this seems like a small bit of appeasement in comparison.)
2/10: We come to something approaching reality that Batiuk isn’t really aware of: the mother of the groom does jack shit. This leads to Pam being treated like a child being handed a cookie to shut her up.
March 10 Ed: “My thing is malaprops, so if I only have one line today, I still need to get in a malaprop even for an easy word like ‘grandson’!”
3/11: I wonder if he knows how litigious the Tolkien Estate is. I don’t wonder if they can go five seconds without being sophomoric and stupid.
He could have just told Mitch he would be the “Ringbearer”–which is also a term used to refer to Frodo Baggins–and the “joke” would have been just as “funny.”
That would mean his understanding the book. I don’t know if he could.
So are Disney, Marvel, DC, the various comic strip syndicates, and public figures who have an image to maintain. It’s never been an obstacle before!
Suing him would risk affording him creditability he doesn’t deserve.
While I agree that paying Tom Batiuk any form of attention just enables his ego and his victim complex, it’s by far the less important concern. Big media companies are litigious because there is a principle that if you do not protect your intellectual property, it can be ruled public domain. So they’re known to sue very small entities, like grocery store cake makers and day care centers.
A business calling itself, say, “Muppet Day Care” is a business trading on the Muppet brand. which they don’t own or have rights to. The Disney lawyers would be all over that.
But it’s different in the case of a comic strip, as parody and commentary are legally protected. Unless Batiuk flat-out makes a previously copyrighted character a regular participant in his strip, a one-shot shout-out will be branded by the syndicate lawyers as a parody and a court case would go nowhere.
Just mentioning a famous intellectual property isn’t likely to get Batiuk or any other cartoonist sued. As discussed at https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2024/05/04/revenge-of-the-tshi/ Batiuk once did four weeks of strips with nothing but Star Wars puns. I doubt that George Lucas or his lawyers even blinked at that.
What prior drawing of Mitch did Davis trace today in that final panel? Or is this an original for once? Yikes!
I just want to say that whoever drew the “Uh, hey, Hannah … Hey, Max” strip did a good job of making Hannah look pretty. There are a lot of generic blonde women in the Funky-Crankverse, but that rendition of Hannah stands out above them.