Recently, the comic strip Luann has been irritating me almost as much as the Batton Death March, which begins its 11th week today. Luann‘s tedious story arc is about a “Career Paths” class, which seems to be the only class the title character is taking in her 27th semester of junior college.
I decided to improve both stories, by crashing them into each other.
Text that appears in the standard Crankshaft or Luann font is unedited from the original strip, except for minor rewording, and sometimes being paired with different artwork.
Warning: The parody story text contains lots of foul language.
NOTE: Those are parallelograms, not triangles.
The end.
Son of Stuck Funky 
BJ6000,
That was AWESOME! We need more of this. I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the halcyon days of Les Moore and those simps from FW. If I see one more Batton Thomas aka Tom Batiuk self-flagellation, strip I will puke. Just seeing him and that one-armed creepy reporter (which I just thought of, what kind of infatuation does Bathack have with one-armed people)? makes me want to go out and kick a kitten. FFS.
Also, I noticed on your plaque, with your name, it says you’re from Omaha. Sweet so am I. Well, technically Gretna, but if you live in the area you know what I mean.
Anyways, I love ya’lls work and it always puts a smile on my face and a spring in my step
Bill
Yes, I’ve lived near 40th and Dodge/Blackstone neighborhood for about 15 years.
Removing one-armed Skip from the images was probably my favorite part. It’s amazing how he manages to be just as detestable as Batton.
This is brilliant. Thanks, BJ6K!
Oh, yeah. Inner beauty: a dumb woman’s idea of how to cheer up a homely child
I mean, there’s some truth to it. Most people don’t care as much how you look as long as you’re clean and groomed. They care a heck of a lot more how you make them feel.
Luann makes other people feel bored, nervous, or a wretched combination of both.
What I find most annoying is the entitlement. Instead of the girl next door, she’s a female Nice Guy.
YES. That’s EXACTLY what Luann is. She makes up for her own lack of any positive qualities by inventing this virtue for herself, and acting like it’s everybody else’s fault for not noticing it when it doesn’t exist.
And CBH is also right that, yes, being kind to others is an attractive quality, and people will notice when you do actually have it. The problem is when people don’t actually have it. It becomes self-delusion at best, and a toxic dating approach at worst.
We’re all the time being asked to not expect things of her when she says to be kind to her.
The great big difference is that we’re actively been discouraged from sympathizing with Luann by her creators. They depict a girl with crippling self esteem issues but we’re told she needs to grow up.
I STAND IN A LINE STRETCHING BACK A THOUSAND MILES. BECAUSE I WOULD WALK A THOUSAND MILES TO READ THIS GREATNESS AGAIN.
I’m trying so hard to make these words fit that great Proclaimers song.
This is the greatest mashup ever!
That was awesome!!! Well done, my friend. Well done!
You would think combining Luann and Crankshaft would result in a toxic waste dump of a strip about awful people living cringe-inducingly pointless lives and exchanging excruciating dialogue.
And that’s exactly what happened!
But it’s very, very funny. And the Pluggers cameo was the icing on the cake. On a scale of The Biography of Claude Barlow to Lisa’s Story? This is at least a spinner rack full of Rip Tide, Scuba Cop.
The Pluggers panel is a highlight among an entire post of highlights. Tremendous use of the existing artwork.
Much as we all rightfully despise Batton Thomas and every panel he appears in… we don’t get this brilliance without him. To quote Crankshaft, truly there is a silver lining behind every clod.
I stand in line!
Fabulous. The Luann arc is both boring and stupid (as opposed to Cranky that is stupid and boring). That assignment is something that might be done in high school–in Junior College or University that assignment would involve interviewing professionals in the student’s intended profession.
Coincidence that the jerk in Luann is named Les–or homage?
I’m guessing the gun in Luann being named “Les” is just a coincidence, though that may be because I have difficultly imagining anyone being inspired by anything Batiuk’s done. Honestly, I think they’re both cases of names being chosen for wordplay purposes: “Les Moore” is pretty obvious, and the Luann character is “Lester” and he’s generally an annoying douche, i.e., a “pest”. (If any character from Luann was inspired by Les Moore, it’d probably be bespectacled weenie Gunther.)
You might be onto something. Gunther also has a Black sig ot, but Bets isn’t the doormat that is Cayla
Actually, the Les in Luann is short for Leslie. He tried to beat up Gunther for mentioning that fact.
So is the Les in Funky Winkerbean, I’m pretty sure,
Boring, stupid and a reminder that Evanses shouldn’t have bothered trying to physically age the characters.
Luann, the Funkyverse, and the deathless Gasoline Alley all teach us the same lesson: there’s no point in “aging your characters realistically” if your characters never change. It doesn’t have to be some complex Breaking Bad-level character development; just some hints that 20-year-old Luann isn’t identical to 15-year-old Luann. She can still be insecure and unsure of herself, just in a more adult way. Also, your older characters really, really need to die at some point.
To be fair, adult Luann isn’t as boy-crazy as teen Luann. But that’s only because Greg Evans realized that adult women who are obsessed with guys have sex with those guys, and Luann’s virtue needs to be more secure than Fort Knox’s gold vault. So her libido was quickly and quietly removed.
The whole world of Luann reeks of an overbearing, upper middle class, Christian community. Everybody is up in everybody’s business, and college students do early 1960s things like gamble for jellybeans. Tiffany is implied to be promiscuous, though we never see any evidence of this. She’s basically the only halfway normal person in the cast.
Adult Tiffany is a MUCH better character than adult Luann, much like adult Bull Bushka was a much better character than adult Funky or Les was. Though Batiuk addressed that by shitting on Bull in every way possible in his death/CTE story. I think the whole point of that was for Batiuk to tell his readers “no, you are NOT allowed to form your own opinions about MY characters. I’ll tell you who you should and shouldn’t like.”
Luann should have been demoted to extra like Funky Winkerbean was.
That’s the problem: the artists tend to forget that they’re going to die and what the audience sees will survive them. When they do an autopsy on his career, the phrase ‘informed attribute’ will come up a lot.
Nearly two decades ago, Joshreads compared Luann to SNL‘s recurring “Tales of Ribaldry” sketches from the late 80s, where Jon Lovitz played a Victorian era-looking fop named Evelyn Quince who hosted the “Tales”, where various salacious Victorian era-looking scenes played out. Lovitz’s host would get increasingly giddy as the corny lascivious innuendo played out… only to become a disapproving grump and shut the show down when the scenes began to turn explicit.
Anyways… It is a comparison that has aged spectacularly well and is somehow even truer today than it was in 2008. It is ALWAYS in the back of my mind when reading Luann.
Oh, I remember that, and it is absolutely spot on.
Luann loves its tee-hee sexuality and Beavis and Butt-head-grade innuendo. (SEE ALSO: Perry, Katy.) But the world of Luann is nosy and overbearing the rest of the time. A few weeks ago, Luann scheduled some canoodling with her beau Phil, which they had every right to do. Her friends interrupted, and dragged both of them into helping with a stupid art project. It reeked of slut-shaming.
PRO TIP: If your friends don’t respect you enough to let you get some lovin’ on your own terms, they’re not your friends.
It’s the same thing with For Better Or For Worse. The children get bigger but they never really grow up.
FBOFW was a lot better than other strips in this regard. Considering what small children Michael and Liz where when it started, at least they made it some of the way to adulthood. And much of the worst of it was dictated by Johnston’s own issues. (The death of Farley was pretty awful, though.)
We’re currently hip deep in an arc where she jams it to a dental hygienist who she thought lived wrong so, yeah, her issues get in the way
The assignment annoyed me too, for the same reasons. Even if you could pass this off as a college-level task, Luann wouldn’t be allowed to interview her own parents and brother. And her parents would know that, because they’re my age, and they certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to when they were in college.
Then she failed this incredibly easy assignment, because she submitted it after the deadline (which it is Luann’s responsibility to know). No worries, though: the story ignored it, and moved on to administering a BuzzFeed-level personality test. Then it moved on to third-tier character Les fudging the test to hit on third-tier character Tara.
I have to tip my hat for the latest post. Combining the insecure self-centered Luann, the astonishingly self-congratulatory in-strip avatar of Batton Thomas from Crankshaft, and then tossing in a Pluggers cameo for good measure… that’s quite a hat trick.
It takes a special kind of talent to wrangle that particular assortment of comic-strip irritants into something genuinely entertaining. Turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse is not a skill everyone possesses, but you managed it with style.
By the time *Pluggers* wandered onstage, I was mostly admiring the craftsmanship. It’s not every day someone can juggle that much material and make it work.
Well played. Bravo. Posts like this are exactly why I keep coming back to the blog.
Somewhere out there is a line, and we’re all standing on it.
Thanks to everyone for the kind words! I’m glad it was well-received. The story started with the question “what if you really had to interview Batton Thomas, for something that had a clear purpose?” You’d go insane and scream at Batton to get to the point, like Luann did. While he’s chewing your ear off and expecting you to buy him lunch.
I started with “you’re paying, right?”, and the great shot of Luann losing her mind, and wrote towards the middle. The story was basically already written for me, in the form of the actual interview. All I had to was reconstruct Batton’s own life story, and his obliviousness about how much of a self-centered prick he is, while Luann slowly gets exasperated at listening to it. I wish I had more time; I would have made it even more Space Madness-y.
I’m glad everyone liked the Pluggers cameo. That was a lot of fun to make, because that strip annoys me too. There’s only so many jokes you can make about it, but it’s great for one-off purposes like this.
My favorite part was the Ed Crankshaft cameo. I genuinely enjoyed making him the foul-mouthed voice of righteous fury. He’s a strong character, if Tom Batiuk would ever use him correctly.
“Annoying little shit” is exactly what I think happened at Batton’s DC and Marvel interviews. The man had the talent for the job. I just think he was so damned overbearing and full of himself that he turned off anyone who might have given him a shot. And to this day, he has no idea why or how.
I wonder if he calls people extras. He seems the type.
The Saalfield Building still stands just south of downtown Akron, but the sign has been removed.
I thought it looked more like a factory, or maybe a prison. Downtown Omaha has a lot of converted warehouses that look like that.
317: Reminding us that he thinks like a stupid, easily impressed third grader isn’t delightful.
Lemme take a shot at predicting the rest of Batton Death March week.
3/18: “I bought this rolling chair a few years after starting. Now it’s a necessity.”
3/19: “So I heard Carmine Infantino really liked this pencil and I just had to go out to buy one. Some times, I really felt connected to the world of Barry Allen.”
3/20: “A lot of dinners were from the local pizza parlor. It really gave me pizza mind.”
3/21: “I got a poison ivy rash once but that didn’t stop my work. That was one itch I was proud to scratch.”
Meanwhile, he doesn’t know to tell actually interesting stories.
“I read a lot about Al Capp, so I figured I should emulate his behavior. Now I have to introduce myself whenever I move into a new neighborhood. I figure if I recall this story to all of them, they won’t make it all the way to the important part…”
“I screamed at some hippies about climate damage. All they did was ask about MY damage.”
Batton can’t even find anything interesting about the very things he chooses to talk about! Yesterday’s strip was “I bought my drawing board for $25, and I saw it on Not eBay for $5,000.” The obvious resolution is either the sentimental “I would never it because it’s more valuable to me than that,” or the unsentimental “I cashed it in because $5,000 is a lot of money for a desk that’s easily replaceable.” Which did Batton do? Neither. He brings it up, then leaves it hanging in the air like a stale fart while he moves on to his next random fact.
Today he’s talking about Bristol boards. Why does that matter? Who knows? Who cares? Batton’s never going to tell us anyway.
I believe this is now Webster’s definition of the phrase “Immortal Wound”. Or at least Urban Dictionary’s…
I imagine Urban Dictionary has a much more interesting definition for “Immortal Wound.”
It’s like when Crankshaft didn’t see the irony in his non sequitur. He knows how the story ends so assumes that we do too.
That is an eternal problem in the Funkyverse. Remember when Les Moore angrily confronted someone who was following him in his car – an extremely risky act, and also completely out of character – but no worries: it’s just the harmless Mason Jarre doing “research”!
Les acts with complete impunity at all times, as if he knows the universe is looking out for him. And he’s absolutely right.
At least when Marciuliano has Ted Forth behave as if he’s the male lead in a comic strip, he’s aware of what he’s doing. Batiuk doesn’t.
You gettin’ all this, Skip? Because this is gold! Batton may never win a Pulitzer for himself, but he’s holding the door wide open for you, baby!
That really is the point, isn’t it? Skip has been sitting around for at least 3 trips to Montoni’s, 2 to Batton’s studio, one to Dale Evans, and a guided tour of dull apartment buildings Batton Thomas lived in. All the while, Skip’s got this massive smirk on his face, as if Batton’s pointless ramblings were god-tier wit, handed down directly from Mount Olympus on marble tablets.
What Batton doesn’t realize is that this is all for Skip actively sought out the most self-assuredly boring man in America as a form of both mockery of the man and a broader critique of the dulling nature of small town middle America and suburbia, where people act as if loyal devotion drudgery is a virtue. His series is called “The Droll and the Dutiful”.
“The Droll and the Dutiful,” oh that is just solid gold! It perfectly describes Batton’s style.
As great a twist as that would be, the underlying problem is that Batton is writing Skip. It doesn’t matter how incapable Batton is of saying anything worth listening to, having a point, or ever shutting up. Skip will sit there and smirk glowingly at Batton for eternity, because that’s what Batton wants. He wants people to sit around and make goo-goo eyes at him, as if he actually were the supreme wit he thinks he is.
The only way to make this interview work is to do what I did: delete Skip, and replace him with a character who would actually react to Batton like a human being would. Luann has a real objective: to complete her school assignment. Which is something a real interview would have. It would be done with an article in mind, and the interviewer would direct Batton to the topics the interviewer wants to write about, rather than just letting Batton drone on about every boring anecdote from his boring life.
Somebody at Batiuk’s syndicate should really put a stop to this. Not just because it’s a crap story, but because Batton is embarrassing himself. He’s written a testament to his own rudeness, obliviousness, neediness, and complete incompetence.
As long as their clients (i.e., newspapers) keep paying for it, the syndicate quite literally doesn’t care at all what the content is. Witness the continued existence of 9 Chickweed Lane.
Even Apartment 3-G wasn’t shut down out of mercy. It only ended when newspapers started noticing just how completely off the rails it had gone — and consequently cancelling it. The syndicate had allowed the feature to devolve into an incomprehensible senility-fuelled repetitive fever dream for years prior, and would have cheerfully continued to do so indefinitely if it were profitable.
That’s the thing the Batiuks of the world refuse to see: as long as it makes money, it could be squiggly lines in Zulu for all the suits care.
Bile fascination is still fascination so that’s not happening.
That’s the problem, though; there’s nothing to have bile about. The only bile it stirs in anyone is “why the fuck is this still going on?” That’s the wrong kind of bile. There’s a difference between “this performer makes us angry” and “we’re angry because we want this performer to go away and be replaced with a better one.” Batton Thomas (the latter) makes us pine for Les Moore (the former).
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 2 of Interview from HFIL Week
Darin Fairgood: WILL THE BOTH OF YA GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE ATOMIC KOMIX WORKPLACE!?
(both Skip and Batton sprint out of the building as fast as they can)
+1 for thanks to you, Banana.
3/18: Boasting about paying extra for special, magic Bristol board marks him as a nincompoop. It’s the smugness that’s idiocy’s giveaway.
Reading the interview with Batton, I feel like Steve Martin in Planes, Trains & Automobiles.
“You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. … And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”
John Candy didn’t whine about being silenced or bullied.
That’s a great point. As obnoxious as he was, John Candy’s character Del was sympathetic. His response to insults wasn’t a smirk and an eyeroll. He pushed back. He defended his own humanity. He also proved his worth over the course of the story, having skills that were useful to their shared goal of getting. At the same time, every mean thing Steve Martin said about him was 100% correct.
I saw a great video called How To Write (And Not Write) A Lovable Jerk. It uses Velma from that awful Scooby Doo reboot as an example of how not to write a lovable jerk. It lists three qualities lovable jerks should do: (1) be funny (where appropriate); (2) have value in some way (skills or social value); and (3) suffer for their jerkishness (internally or externally). It uses Dr. Gregory House as an example of a well-written jerk protagonist.
Velma, as written in that particular series, is a textbook Funkyverse character. She’s smart, because the story tells you she is. She’s horrible to other people, and makes cruel remarks at their expense, like snarking when she finds a murdered high school girl in a locker. And of course, all the other characters are written to defer to her self-assigned. She and Les Moore would get along swimmingly.
The kicker is that much like Batiuk, Kaling thinks she honored the character and franchise.
The video I linked explains very thoroughly why Mindy Kaling (who I usually like) failed. It explains how your characters have to earn the right to be a jerk, which Velma very much does not. The narrative declares her the smartest person in the room, when she’s not, and she’s such a jerk that nobody would tolerate her even if she was. Which is also exactly the case for Les Moore.
When Dr. House is a dick, he’s often being a dick for good reasons, like calling patients out on their flimsy lies. Characters like Velma and Les are jerks for no real reason, except to reinforce their own perceived superiority. Which could work if they really were superior, like House or Rick Sanchez are. But everything else about their backstory is a feeble justification at best. More likely, it proves why they don’t deserve the status the story gives them.
Contrast her with Del. He has every right to be a surly jerk but he’s just someone who comes on too strong.
Step one is for the *writer* to acknowledge that the character is a jerk. If the writer clearly thinks the jerk is a hero, there’s a sort of reverse dramatic irony in which the audience knows something the writer doesn’t, which is an awkward place to be.
And Del? Time proved him right, since if Planes, Trains, and Automobiles had any theme, it might be akin to the theme of Groundhog Day: ‘Tis better to be good-hearted and caring, even if that makes you a bit dorky, than to be clever, self-important, and cynical.
And that’s what’s truly sad about this. Tom Batiuk seems to have removed everyone from his life, except people who tell him what he wants to hear at all times. And this is the end result. Batton Thomas mocks Tom Batiuk much better than I ever could.
Calling course correction bullying marks him as a mediocrity.
More likely they’d try to kill each other like a pair of Highlanders. But they wouldn’t do it violently, they’d do it passive aggressively, like not pointing out when he steps into the street that there’s a truck barreling toward him.
Young Batton in today’s strip looks like the lovechild of Mopey and Dopey. And that’s a pairing that would be way more convincing than with their actual significant others. We already saw how much of a crush they had on Flash Freefield and Undead Phil.
3/19: In Crankshaft, more laser-like focus on the petty. In Luann, more dunking on Tiffany.
Meanwhile, in Comic Artist Heaven:
Milton Caniff: Oh, for the love of — Did you see this? Now everyone down there is going to blame me for inspiring Batiuk!
Hal Foster: Let it go, Milt. At least he didn’t accuse you of theft.
Jack Kirby: Or base a character on you who faked his own death so he could spend years drawing a single comic book.
Caniff: True, but still —
Winsor McCay: You know what you need? To have some fun. Come on, let’s head over to Walt Kelly’s place. He’s having a fry.
Foster: Ohh! And I hear Matt Baker and Dave Stevens are bringing some of their lady friends.
Caniff: They are? Wait, is Capp going to be there?
Kirby: After what he pulled last time? What do you think?
Caniff: I’ll grab my jacket.
Batty really thought that we needed an entire weak of his self-insert talking about a drawing board and some paper. An entire goddamn week devoted to a needlessly smug twat nostalgically opining over tree derivatives. There is nothing interesting about either the piece of wood or the paper. There is no cute or amusing story related to the wood and paper. There is no actual history regarding the wood and paper. “I went to the store and bought a piece of wood and some paper and then drew on them.” That is it. That is the entire week. Literally anything else would have been more interesting. An entire wodless week of the same drawings of Les reading the paper and then smirking at the reader would have been more entertaining.
“I bought a table and some paper.”
Eat shit, Batton.
On two separate occasions, Batiuk spent an entire week on nothing but a character opening an envelope. And he still managed to find a way to make an even more pointless and inane story. It’d be impressive if the result wasn’t so insipid.
As Bruce Cockburn said, it always gets worse: he bought the table and paper to channel an idol.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 3 and 4 of Interview from HFIL Week
(ZZZZZZZ)
I’ve read your parody strips six times. I liked seeing Truck Tyler.
It’s been said several times before but it bears repeating again that an important link to connect is how this week’s Batton Death March can be viewed side by side with the present Funky Winkerbean in reruns. It’s not just Tom Batiuk telling Tom Batiuk how great Tom Batiuk is; we can see Tom Batiuk’s cited creation at the same time now.
This week, in FW reruns, we have Wicked Wanda being depicted as a completely repulsive unfuckable freak of nature who is seemingly as physically horrific as she is stupid. See kids, it’s funny, because the butch flat chested oaf-beast-woman can only utter single words at a time. Oh and the football coach wants her to play on the football time. Ha ha! Hilarious! But hang on, it gets better! She’s so unworthy of human affection that even Les Moore has to tell her to stop stalking him! Oh, I can barely contain my mirth! Ha ha! This is definitely something that is worth revisiting fifty years later!
He thinks he’s being clever but all he’s doing is hammering home how cruelly they treat Big Ethel.
Batiuk is in his Metal Machine Music period at this point, if Metal Machine Music was also Mariah Carey’s Glitter. It’s a giant self-indulgent fuck you to absolutely everyone. I ask again: is anybody going to tell him?
3/20: It goes beyond just buying The Right Desk or The Right Paper. We also have his refusing to understand that Caniff might have used a tablet if he’d had access to one.
What’s most eyerolling is the need to attach some kind of spiritual significance to it. He can’t just say that he tried drawing on a tablet but didn’t like it compared to using physical paper on a board for X or Y reason. It’s not like “I prefer doing it traditionally instead of digitally” is some invalid reason. No, it has to be because doing it digitally connected him to the spirit of Milton Caniff as if they were somehow, in that moment, one and the same.
It’s how he approaches all of his meandering statements of the creative process. He believes he’s making it seem more whimsical and deep but it’s just phony glurge.
And yet he still wonders why we beady-eyed types don’t like seeing this condescending imbecile.
What’s even more eye-rolling than that is how Batton’s words about preferring ink-on-paper to using computer graphics, when those words are coming out of the mouth of an obvious cut-and-pasted computer graphic.