Son of Stuck Funky turns 16 years old this week!!! Celebrate with me that a child born when this shitposting haven started would now be legally allowed behind the wheel of a vehicle without adult supervision!!!
And what an auspicious start to our 16th year of nonsense. A brand new driver to take the wheel on posting duties and guide us through a scenic bus tour of Sadie Summers. Amazing, that this late in the game we’re still adding new crew to our roster. Narshe, we look forward to whatever you have in store for us.
Four years ago, when Funky Winkerbean was ending and Epicus and TFH were indicating they’d said pretty much everything they wanted to post about Batiuk’s silly universe, I had a big decision to make. I knew they’d let me truck on, but did I feel up to continuing?
I decided to keep the ball rolling, and I’m glad I did. You all have made it worthwhile, with your comments and engagement. New people keep finding this place. Old friends check in from time to time and make me smile. It is undoubtedly worth it.
But, let it be said, that I would have burnt out long ago if it weren’t for Banana Jr. 6000 stepping up to the plate and taking an equal, and sometimes outsized share of the workload. He’s the best. The bad cop to my good cop when it comes to prosecuting Batiuk. And taking the lead on some behind the scenes tech stuff I’m too analog brained to understand.
Thank you all for being here. And thank you all for the well wishes in the comments about my dad. He had a minor setback this week, a micro stroke which put him back in the hospital and made his projected road to recovery a bit longer. In some ways I’m back to where I was four years ago, with a big, long-running operation I have to keep rolling and decide what the future will bring.
But until all the grumpy old men in my life are ready to retire: Batiuk, Dad, Sorial Promise, I’ve decided I’m gonna keep it rolling, keep it Funky, keep it Cranky, and nitpick on!
Thanks for being here for the journey!
Son of Stuck Funky 
CBH, you and BJ6K are doing a bang-up job, and we can’t allow you to stop now, not while Batty still has fifty years worth of Crankshaft in the can. And once they perfect the Batiuk AI engine, this strip could conceivably go on indefinitely. Indefinitely, as in “forever”. Sigh. But anyway, much thanks for keeping SoSF breathing.
I can’t imagine an AI that could actually mimic Batiuk’s amazing ability to suck in ways no-one can quite ever accurately foresee.
I mean, could a dedicated AI write something that simply sucks? Absolutely! But could it achieve the unique flavour of Batiukian sucknitude? Wherein no matter how bad the current week’s cartoons suck, next week’s cartoons will suck even worse … but in a very different way? And where the cartoon that’s being produced has 423 recurring characters, and somehow ALL of them suck worse than each other?
Even Holtron would shudder at trying to achieve such a monumental task in the field of suckiosity…
AI are programmed to behave as if they understand what people want to read so I don’t see it happening either.
I honestly would not be surprised if Batty already was using ChatGPT to write strips. They’re so dull and flavorless nowadays that you wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.
ComicBookHarriet,
Thank you for the kind mention.
But my expertise does not reside in nitpicking. Others do that so much better. They are so far ahead of me, if they nitpicked me, I would have to thank them. They are so superior.
No my talents, such as they are, lie in being
an emoji-er.
See what I mean. 😍
There’s more. 😍😍
I do this for free? 😍
Scary isn’t it! I have way too much time on my hands.
Of course when I post this, it won’t look to be a pure diamond like ComicBookHarriet.
As Anonymous Sparrow would say, ¡C’est La Vie!
Be Ware of Eve Hill would translate it as, “Go for walkies, ya happy dog!” So I must be off!
What an honor to be among you all: CBH, BJ6000, Narshe, Epicus Doomus, and especially the
absolute best, TF Hackett, and everyone in the SOSF family!
💝💚💖🫂🤩😍😎🌺💐🌹
I remember why this site came into being: Batiuk’s being a thin-skinned and litigious bully.
Also: 4/11: It’s an accidental indictment of Lizard Woman’s cliché storm prose style.
Maybe not cogent to this post, but Merriam-Webster’s word-a-day email for 3 days ago was:
“Ohio
: weird, awkward, cringeworthy
Ohio is used (mostly on the Internet) to describe something that is weird, awkward, cringeworthy, or otherwise undesirable or bad in some way. It can also be used to mean “boring” or “foolish.””
I leave further interpretations to the reader.
(I went to college at Oberlin, Ohio. I liked it there! We had a Hardee’s and a Ben Franklin five-and-dime! And locals who didn’t cotton too much to our sorts!)
While I don’t comment on every post, I’ve read every post on this site since it went live carrying on the work of its predecessor. It’s not the snark or TB that keeps me coming back. It’s the admin leadership (over the years) of this site and the talented (yes, they are) people who comment here. Thank you for keeping this site going (and relevant). Here’s to the future…and the future of this blog. May it continue for as long as you find joy in making this magic (and that’s what it is) happen.
Congratulations to this blog, and all its wonderful people! I’m proud to be part of the team.
And in today’s Crankshaft, AI wrote Lillian’s next book and created its cover. Gee, I wonder what Sunday’s strip is going to be. And $10 says this “AI cover” is the same as the all the other Generic Man covers we’ve gotten.
The fact that AI created the cover is of much greater significance to Tom Batiuk than it is or would be to anyone else. Maybe a year from now we’ll have a strip where “The AI” is hooked up to a 3D printer which arbitrarily decides to create comic spinner racks.
“Egads! Not just the book, but the cover????” Yes, Tom; the cover. Yes. The part that matters, right? Yeah.
I mean, it’s bad enough that Batiuk built an entire week around one of his literary stars being easily replaced by AI. But he makes the same point about his own comic book cover creations too?! When he’s still pining after that Marvel/DC job after 55 years, and that he’s the only skill he has to offer? I often say it, but… damn, Batiuk mocks himself much harder than I ever could. And not in a self-deprecating way; in a “damn, I hate myself” way.
What I see is “I have everything upside down and backwards so I win.”
The fixation on the cover art and the disinterest shown to the story shows us what ails the man. His super-pretentious blogs that have him boast about how being a deluded sap who doesn’t get it makes him smarter than people who tell him that the cover always lies explain pretty much everything.
Speaking of his super-pretentious blog: Batiuk recently did a signing at a Barnes and Noble, and rambles on about how wonderful it is that brick and mortar bookstores are making a comeback (when they absolutely are not). He doesn’t bother telling you which Barnes and Noble. Nor did he announce the book signing in advance so any blog readers could attend it.
As Joe Kenda would say, if he’s going to lie, he should at least have the decency to be good at it.
I’ll be fair to Batty and say that it’s pretty well documented that Barnes & Noble has been having a comeback and doing a lot better than it ad been in a long time. Ancedotally, the one near me recently moved out of the space it had been in forever into a new, larger one.
The B&N near me closed down about ten years ago and hasn’t been replaced. The Borders closed down about the same time, and has been converted to the local library’s technology center. There are still two in the suburbs, though. Greater Cleveland has 4 or 5, all in the suburbs and none in the city proper, as is the caser where I live. I’m guessing Batiuk went to the Akron location.
Batiuk was at the B&N in Strongsville, Ohio. He showed a flyer on his blog saying “Barnes & Noble Strongsville Welcomes Tom Batiuk.”
For what it’s worth, B&N is scheduled to open a store close to where I live this summer. The location is the same building that once housed a Borders.
And, after lining up the comic book cover, he doesn’t use it. Baffling.
16 years? This site is old enough to be in Les Moore’s class! SOME SITES WERE LEFT BEHIND!
(But seriously, thanks for all this, and welcome to Narshe if I didn’t say it last time.)
4/12: We combine two awful things that used to be funny: Dinkle and Claude Barlow. Batiuk doesn’t understand what made them funny so we get smirking cluelessness as humanity’s nation.
Batiuk seems to have forgotten that the joke was “Barlow was a terrible composer whose music was utterly unlistenable”.
It’s like how he forgot that Dinkle was a cartoonish exaggeration of the sort of self-important authority figure who made a point to suck the fun out of life.
Harry Dinkle has been telling us for 45 years that Claude Barlow’s music was terrible. Even as recently as 2024, when Mason Jarre arranged to use Barlow’s music for the score of the “Starbuck Jones III” movie, Dinkle mentioned that Barlow’s music was unintentionally atonal and dissonant, and that Barlow’s publisher said that his copyrights were “copy-wrongs.”
So why is he incorporating Barlow’s music into his choir’s repertoire? Does he hate his choir? Or the congregation?
(Anachronism alert: The opening panel today mentions that Barlow lived from 1543 to 1627, which I believe is consistent with what Dinkle has said in the past, but that would make it difficult for him to be competitive with Felix Mendelssohn, who was born 182 years after Barlow died.)
This failure to understand his own source material makes me wonder if Tom Batiuk really is using A.I. to write strips.
Claude Barlow is very similar to (or less politely, ripped off from) Peter Schickele’s composer P.D.Q. Bach, who was presented as as a sort of talent-free bumbler whose work was enjoyable because of its inadvertent parallels to works by much more famous composers. Schickele was presenting “newly discovered” work of the 18th century composer (“the 21st of J.S. Bach’s 20 children”) as early as 1965, and jokes from Schickele’s wry faux-academic commentary and acerbic liner notes discussing “the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian’s 20-odd children” have been pretty directly lifted by Batiuk for Barlow.
Relevant to today’s work, here is P.D.Q. Bach’s “Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP0oMnL9tPM&list=PLys18dU1NHZPwt8Cq7JV1hnZ6TkVkVbA7&index=14
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
The Daily Bleak
AI Generates Entire Book For 160 Year Old Woman Who Can’t Write,
Today’s Crankfuckery
Why is Harry “The World’s Biggest Asshole Band Director” Dinkle suddenly phrasing Claude “The Worst Fucking Composer In History” Barlow?
Dinkle knows damn well that Claude couldn’t make a good song to save his life no matter how hard he tried
Still Today’s Crankfuckery
Ed: Mr. Asshole Band Director, if you decide to make us play Claude Barlow’s bullshit, I’m gonna kill you.
Happy belated birthday to Son of Stuck Funky!
4/13: His inability to understand that puns aren’t especially funny even when they’re clear is at least not his not understanding how out of touch with reality he is.