Josh Fruhlinger’s April Fool’s Day post at Comics Curmudgeon included this remark:
This is just another example of (the main characters of Intelligent Life) responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval.
April Fool’s Comics – The Comics Curmudgeon
I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase, “Pavlovian noise of general approval.” For our purposes, I take the word Pavlovian to mean “expressing a conditioned or predictable reaction.”
Which got me to wondering: is this blog just Pavlovian noises of general disapproval? Are we just throwing red meat at people who enjoy that particular flavor of red meat? Are we no better than the clucking, smirking, comic book-addicted clones of the Funkyverse, who stand around agreeing with each other that all Tom Batiuk’s personal tastes are really neat-o?
I think we are better. And I’ll tell you why.
If you pay $5 to go to a live show, a social contract emerges. You, the ticket-buyer, have an expectation that you will be entertained. You trust the venue to arrange a series of skilled performers that are worth $5 of your money, and two hours of your time. If they don’t deliver, you will be dissatisfied, and advise others not to visit.
The venue probably has expectations of you as well. They may have a dress code; rules about what substances you’re allowed to consume (or possibly required to consume, in the form of a two-drink minimum); and that you don’t disrupt the show to an unacceptable degree.
In comedy clubs, heckling is a part of the show, but there are well-understood standards about what’s too far. I’ve also known comedy clubs to forbid the use of certain words and subject matter. Because there’s a social contract between comedians and clubs as well: break our rules, and we’ll ruin your reputation.
Now think about newspaper comics. There’s a social contract here as well. If we turn to the comics page, then we, the readers, have the right to expect that the cartoonists have made a reasonable attempt to entertain us. We don’t pay that $5 cover charge, but we do invest a little time every day. But when we open the funny pages, what do we see? Roots country music. One man indulging his sexual fetishes. Incoherent sports drama. A parody of an 87-year-old movie. Millennial-bashing, raised to the level of gaslighting. NASCAR jokes that wouldn’t be good enough for a children’s joke book. Whatever Judge Parker is nowadays.
Who the hell is the target audience for any of that?
And I’m not even including strips like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Curtis, Doonesbury, Garfield, Hagar The Horrible, Herb and Jamaal, Hi and Lois, the aforementioned Intelligent Life, and the many Z-grade Far Side clones. I’m not even including other strips I’m usually critical of: Luann, Mary Worth, and Pluggers. All these strips at least try to honor the social contract of being worth 10 seconds of your time. Though the word “try” is doing a lot of work here.
Now to Funky Winkerbean. It has three clearly defined eras: Act I, when it was a solid satire of high school life; Act II, when it shifted to drama but was still worth following; and Act III, when it became a self-indulgent shitshow about book signings, comic book covers, and multi-month self-interviews.
Who the hell is the target audience for any of those things?
I suspect most of us followed this pattern: liked Funky Winkerbean in Act I, tolerated it in Act II, and were disgusted by it in Act III. The social contract broke down in stages. It went from something that was pretty good, to something that was at least worth 10 seconds a day, to something that angers us so much that we spend a lot more seconds a day hating it.
And now Crankshaft seems to be trying to make people hate it.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Banana Jr. 6000,
You write a good entry. It is easy to tell which comic strip writers put effort into their comic strip. Stephan Pastis takes time on his strips. Saturday April 18 is a good example. Charles Schultz did. Watterson always. On GoComics, I only read 2 comics alphabetically under the letter “C”. The first is Calvin and Hobbes. The second is Crankshaft. What a contrast in quality! The best and the worst under the same letter. Of course there are some writers that linger in the middle of the pack. Karen Moy from Mary Worth is an example. In the current story line, she has a character give away $200,000.00, and it is no big thing since he is so rich, but he lives in Mary Worth’s apartments. That makes no sense. Then to make it worse, he tells his daughter, he just gave away that huge sum of money, and she says, “[Oh Dad,]…At least you realize it was a mistake.”😱🤯
My biggest regret on Crankshaft: the wasted talent and such little effort TB demonstrates. He still can write some good arcs, but wow! They are followed with some of the most atrocious story lines. How often is it said on this website: “This is Batiuk’s worst arc until he starts the next one.”
TB has no excuse. He has a full year’s lead time, and he does not even draw the strip. With those advantages, TB should be knocking it out of the park, but he chooses not to do so. Inexcusable.
On a happier note, I am taking my first train ride in May for a wedding. (Not mine!) The trip takes 24 hours to go from KC to Denver, by way of Illinois. I am not joking. I am as excited as CBH finding a lost calf.
💝💚💖🫂🌺💐🌹
Are we no better than the clucking, smirking, comic book-addicted clones of the Funkyverse, who stand around agreeing with each other that all Tom Batiuk’s personal tastes are really neat-o?
Two reasons why we’re better: Everyone on this site explains WHY they have issues with any particular Batiuk work, usually quite thoughtfully (because it’s possible to be both snarky and thoughtful simultaneously) while also offering suggestions for improvement. And on occasions where Batiuk defies expectations and does a good job (rare, but not completely unheard of), people on this site will call attention to it.
The tone may be snarky, but the discourse is actually quite well-reasoned.
The man used to know what people wanted to see but got talked into not caring.
4/19: Well, at least an album cover isn’t a rare comic book. We get the same nonsense about collectibles being a guaranteed payday though.
The problem Judge Parker has is the same one Sally Forth has: Francesco Marciuliano. It’s nice to mildly mock conventions but not to the extent that the characters are aware of and exploit them. My god, the Forth place is an eldritch location that berates them.