I swear on the decaying blonde Barbie jammed in the background of the Luigi’s bandbox, if we do not get Ed Crankshaft on Monday, doing one of the eight or so things that Ed Crankshaft has done for the last 38 years, then I will create an effigy of Tom Batiuk from old pairless socks and ritually burn it at the stake! This is not (just) a joke! I’m serious! On Monday morning when I go to GoComics there had better be a comic strip with an elderly asshole buying another Bean’s End boondoggle! Or else!
Am I coming across as aggressive? Maybe it’s because of this stupid week of Batton blathering about his precious Bristol Board. Because Batton, as Batiuk’s wish fulfilment Mary Sue, of course needed no ghost artist providing pencils for him to trace.
Heaven forbid Batiuk give Batton his own Avers Chuckson! He might have to write Batton having a relationship with someone who isn’t a goat looking git with a smartphone.
Still aggressive? Hmm….maybe it’s because of this comment by my own dear Co-captain.
One of Batton’s most obnoxious remarks had spilled, nearly word for word, from my lips months before that August strip. Should I be mad?
See, I dabble with a bit of fanfic writing now and then. Every few years, some movie or show or comic or video game or web series will spawn some mentally completish narrative in my brain and I’ll spend a few months to a year binge building the outline of an epic tale of cringe and feels. Sometimes I’ll even start writing the story down. Sometimes I’ll even show a couple equally cringe friends, so we can cringe and feels together.
Thus far, I usually lose steam after a bit, and it becomes more and more tedious and frustrating to put words to word document. I go full GRRM mode and eventually move on to another project, promising I’ll finish what I started I swear. Once I even did! (Do not ask to see it, it is 15% lost to digital hell, and 100% too niche and cringe for even you, my wonderful nitters)
Anyway, I was talking to one of my friends, (the one with the epic webcomic, who did the Westviewcrumb Tinies for us.) As I whinged to her about once again getting bogged down in a fic, she asked me, “Do you like writing?”
And I said, right away, not knowing that I was copying Dorothy Parker and WOULD be echoed by Batton of all people.
“I like having written.”
Because that’s the honest truth, for me. I love having written. I love going back to reread stuff I wrote even decades ago. I find my own jokes funny. The scenes I put down give me just the feels I was wanting to be feeling. The characters speak to me because I put the damn words in their figurative mouths. The set ups and pay off feel balanced and satisfying.
It’s like cooking for yourself, knowing just how much garlic and lemon and sugar you really really like. If eating your own handmade pasta was 100% more egotistical and narcissistic.
But writing, unless I’m in one of those wonderfully manic moods, can be an absolute CHORE. If I could have my rough drafts extracted from my brain and into a word processor by a helmet covered in needles, I’d do it. Definitely.
But I know that my dear Banana Jr. didn’t mean ‘loving having written’ in exactly the way I do. He’s clear about that in the rest of his comment.
And this is demonstrated SO SO CLEARLY in this godawful Skip and Batton interview drivel. Nothing (heaven help us– so far) has been about the stories Batton wanted to tell, it has been about wanting to achieve the social status of a writer. Like a forensic investigator dissecting a rotting corpse, maybe this wretched storyline deserves a deeper analysis…
FARM REPORT FOR THOSE SO INCLINED:
Monday was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit with a foot and half of snow. Today it was 85. All four seasons in one week. Someone get Mother Nature some lithium because the bitch is bi-polar af.
Had our first calf of the year on St. Paddy’s Day, on a day barely warm enough to leave it out on pasture. We’re up to four calves today, including a widdle moo with widdle Ray Bans.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of Interview from HFIL Week
I hope next week is gonna involve Ed Crankshaft doing his usual shit instead of Batton Out Of HFIL
RE: Sunday 3/22’s C’Shaft:
Great Guardians, not even Sunday can give us surcease from The World’s Most Boring and Self-Indulgent Interview!
Not only is it a Silver Age comic book strip, not only is it a sideways twist-your-head strip, not only does it make a mockery of a classic Gil Kane cover (GL #19, 1963), but “Batton Thomas” has the gall to put his own punchable punim (which at first I thought was Mopey Pete’s) on it! If this does somehow spread itself into a second straight week I’m bailing and spending the next six days over in Mary Worth!
We’re supposed to gaze in awe at this derivative hack being derivative and lament that we’re not boring imbeciles.
I wonder what color of light apathy is. Green is willpower, yellow is fear, rage is red but what Batton instills flips me.
I’m pretty sure that if “meh” was a color it would be beige.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the “how to hold my ink bottle” cover thing is actually (a little bit) interesting. Maybe that’s just because it follows such tedious insights as “this table is old” and “paper is great” and thus seems better by comparison. Like something Ray Doty would have done in “Wordless Workshop” (my favorite “comic strip” of all time.)
And also, Batiuk used to be the pretentious incompetent hack Freshman Comp teacher Les is…..as was Greg Evans. Luann is a spin-off of an earlier strip about a bitter, vindictive, apathetic and hostile failure teacher named Eva…..Fogarty.
CBH, I’m 100% with you on the fanfic and writing thing. Though my attempts, especially as I’ve gotten older, have been motivated less out of love for something and more out of spite. I remember a few years ago being so annoyed by the Brian Michael Bendis reboot of the Legion of Super-Heroes that I just had a burst of “Here’s what I would do if I could reboot it” and had this whole outline of possible stories, background info, dozens of character profiles… and then the spite-powered energy ran out and I got it out of my system.
When I was doing my readthrough and collecting of Funky there was this little niggling voice at times that would be like “Wouldn’t it be interesting to write about Sadie as an observer of the events around her? And what became of her after Act II anyway?” But ships like that never leave port because the process of writing once that initial burst of energy wears off becomes a big hill.
But then some times that spite — among other things — is powerful fuel and now I’ve got a script sent to a friend in the hopes that, apparently doing our best Atomik Klutzes impression, we’ll have a small comic done for Free Comic Book Day. I’m not expecting it to be great (on my end, the art will look nice though) but I figure if some of these individuals (and people like Batty) can call themselves comic writers then what the hell? I can at least say I did it once.
Anyway, I do wonder if we get a second week of the World’s Most Tediousy Trite Interview but I’ll go out on a limb and say we’re getting a Mopetoni’s week. But the last time Cranky was the focus of his comic was the 3rd week of February (it’s since been the interview, two weeks on Max Goof and Jessimindy and back to the interview) and even Batty is smart enough to realize going over a month without more than token appearances from the title character is bad, right? I mean I don’t get the impression he hates Ed Crankshaft the way that he did Funky Winkerbean.
CBH, don’t apologize for “I like having written.” Unlike Batton Thomas, you’re capable of explaining what you mean by that. You enjoy reading your own past work, but creating that work for the first time can be difficult. I’ve done this too. I’m really proud of some of the things I’ve written for this blog. Some of them really hit that sweet spot of “thoroughly researched, precise, fuck you” I’m usually aiming for. I like having written them.
For me, the feeling is more “I hate Photoshopping, but I love having Photoshopped.” Writing isn’t a chore for me; it was always something that came naturally. But Photoshopping can be tedious, and frankly isn’t my best skill. And one thing I particularly enjoyed having Photoshopped this week was Luann in the Montoni’s booth, saying “and were teaching arts and crafts at a local school.” That image was a NIGHTMARE to make. I had to stitch seven or eight different images together, remove all kinds of extraneous bits, and fabricate some of it by hand. It took forever to just make that Frankenstein monster look human. That image is the main reason why Luannshaft didn’t come out until Monday morning.
And our readers here gave me the best compliment possible: they said absolutely nothing about it. Because it looked like it belonged. I thought I’d have to apologize for it, and a couple other images which I thought came out pretty lousy. But that one shot of Luann, with her head partially blocking the speech bubble, is a goddam masterpiece. I’m delighted at how good it looks. I’ve marveled at it more than once. I love having Photoshopped it.
So I have absolutely zero problem with “I like having written.” What a have a problem with is Batton just throwing the phrase out there without no explanation, and then smirking as if it wins all arguments until the end of time. It is a perfect microcosm of how he views writing: as a way to one-up other people. When the act of doing so reveals that Batton can’t write for shit.