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.
💝💚💖🫂🌺💐🌹
The Mary Worth story is a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? His daughter not even batting an eye over $200 grand as if it’s a small chunk of change, no gentle comments about how you need to be careful on the internet (although he certainly didn’t listen to Mary when she said it), and her father still unwilling to concede that that Trixie may not have been real. I still can’t figure out who the person was that he sent the money to, or where they were escaping from!
I wish you safe train travels next month and hope you enjoy the journey!
Thank you, Mela!
Mary Worth is a ridiculous storyline. As I mentioned before, this guy must be a multimillionaire, but he lives alone in Mary Worth’s apartments. Are they a gated community? I have never seen any prominent security. I am sure they have a regular security guard, but again, are we aware of any? What can we say that Mary is so concerned, but his daughter is not?
What few millionaires I know, act nothing like this. The Kansas City Chiefs original owner was Lamar Hunt. He and his original coach, Hank Stram, went on a road trip scouting potential players. They traveled in Stram’s car. Stram handled all the expenses and all the tolls. Mr. Hunt carried no cash at all. That’s my expectations for any multimillionaire. Although taking his age into account, where is his staff: secretary, accountants, and money managers?
Mela, I always look for your comments. I always meet the nicest people on SOSF.
Thank you for your kind desires for my trip.
SP
💝🤩💝 🚂 🚊 🚆 🌺💐🌹
Must be California Zephyr. You pass right through Omaha on your way from Kansas City to Denver.
Thank you, BJ6000!
I was in the USAF in Omaha for 3 years.
I experienced it all in the mid 1970’s: blizzard, 27 inches of snow. (-24°) temps. Then saw it jump to 50°! Tornados. Blistering humid temps over 104°. It couldn’t have been too bad. We played a softball game. Only 2 guys collapsed from the heat. I met President Ford. Got married. AND protected Omaha from the Viet Cong. Good times. Good times.
You brought back many great memories.
I show your Mom’s birthday happening on April 21. I will be at a friend’s birthday party that day. I will think of your Mom and her wonderful son. 🤩
That is correct! My Mom turns 82 tomorrow. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear you remembered her birthday. You’re better than some of her immediate family in this area. It’s quite a little community we have here, that a reader would remember something like that. I’m chuffed.
Interestingly, Omaha has birthsites for two famous Americans: Gerald Ford, and Malcolm X. Both were born here, moved out of the city well before age two, and never returned. But we have birthsites for them both!
Happy Belated Birthday to your mom BJ6K!!! Hope she had a lovely day! 😀
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.
Another reason: The snark is directed at the subject matter and not at fellow commenters. Any debates are well-explained and everyone here is respectful of one another, which is refreshing.
I also love that I can pop in here and occasionally learn about farming and other subjects! It’s a fun group here!
What helps is that I don’t believe there’s ever any personal attacks on Batty either. It’s a thin line I suppose but if someone brings up, say, the constant desire for validation I never get the impression that it’s done as a way to go after him personally. It’s brought up in relation to how it affects the writing of his comics. You can’t talk about the endless interview with Batton in a vacuum, for example, because so much of who he is is tied up in those strips such that to you can’t avoid it.
I think there can definitely be a lot of people who equate being critical and snarky with just being endlessly mean and negative but since I’ve been coming here that’s not the impression I’ve ever gotten for this place. It’s easy to criticize Tom Batiuk the writer and make fun of his eyerolling or baffling or frustrating writing choices but I never really see it crossing the line into making fun of Tom Batiuk the person or wishing ill on him. Nobody makes fun of Batty liking old comics in an of itself, as if that is something worthy of being mocked for. It’s only in how it relates to his works.
I’ve had to dial back my venom a little over the years. It’s hard to not to look at someone who publishes a three-month interview of himself and not think ‘jeez, what an egomaniac.’
In the interest of full disclosure, I did call TB a “humorless turd” when his lawyers sent SOSF and WordPress a cease-and-desist letter.
To be fair to TB, I don’t believe he pursued the matter further when we figured out his issue was that we were displaying each day’s strip as an image on the website rather than him finding our discussion objectionable (though I expect he did and does) and started posting a link to the strips instead. Still, we would surely have complied with a request to not post the strip image that did not arrive via legal threat.
Eh, that may have been driven by the syndicate’s lawyers and not him. And it was a fair complaint, that SoSF posted the entire daily strip without having rights to do so. Linking to it was a perfectly good compromise, and we haven’t gotten any cease and desist letters since then.
I’m sure Batiuk doesn’t like this site, but he prefers to ignore anything that doesn’t fit his desired narrative. You know, “ignore them and they’ll go away.” Which totally works! Because we’ve been here for 16 years, and outlived Funky Winkerbean by 3 years so far.
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.
Hey, did you know that if you’d bought Bitcoin in October of 2009, at its lowest, and sold it yesterday, you would have made about $759,500 for every single dollar you invested?
But sure, Jff, pine over a “butcher cover.”
This is a weird recurring theme, where a Batiuk stand-in mourns that he once had, or could have had, some collectible — usually a comic book — that has greatly increased in value. For some reason he never thinks about stocks, real estate, art, coins, precious metals, cryptocurrency, or any other investment that’s greatly increased in value, often far more sharply than comic books have.
In the Funkshaftiverse, comic books (and apparently select other Boomer collectibles that Puff Batty was thisclose to owning) are the only store of value. When you need money, you sell comic books. When you have money, you buy comic books. They’re basically used as currency.
In other news — CBH, I’m so sorry to hear about your dad’s health crisis and I hope things are looking up. You’ve got the ever-capable BJr6K and the very talented, very welcome newcomer Narshe to hold down the fort, so take all the time you and Dad need. He raised a good ‘un and he deserves all your attention.
You and pj202718nbca both touch on something that I believe would justify a separate article for a day’s post – there are many past strips where Tom mentions insane resale value on comic books and other items, and also makes a point to show others being gobsmacked by it. Two other instances leap to my mind: One where Jeff is able to make the biggest smug smirk in his life against Rose when the highest selling item from the garage sale is his comic books. Another is when Phil Holt resurrected and one of the patrons loudly wails about the plummeted resale value of some books that Holt signed.
This type of 20/20 hindsight observation is hardly exclusive to Tom, but the point that I believe is largely missed in this entire topic is 1) that there is a thousand times more old stuff that is worthless now and 2) that there is a thousand times more stuff that is worthless now that, for all we know, could some day spring up to resell for substantially more money, but you and I both are likely to not make that kind of investment, because we reasonably expect things that are currently worthless now to remain worthless in the future. There’s thousands of crypto coins that are worth 1 million or more to the dollar right now, and I’m not going to scoop them up. Are you? Probably not. There’s hundreds of CCGs that aren’t Magic or Pokemon that haven’t appreciated in value for years or decades, are you going to dive in? Meanwhile I can tell you about the 10K+ Jyhad/VTES cards that I dumped at the price of shipping two years ago because I haven’t touched them in 10+ years and I saw the market for that sink lower with each passing day.
Tom’s smart enough to know that the strips which feature this fixation will resonate with an audience, but he and that audience alike seem to fail at understanding why this happens.
The stories I could tell about my baseball card collection. To put it mildly, it did not realize its projected collectible value. And cryptocurrency is basically Beanie Babies, with a carnival barker pushing them for a pump-and-dump scheme. Of all the things that might be worth something in this world, “virtual money you can’t buy anything with” is pretty far down the list.
This reminds me of a comedy sketch I saw forty years ago. The performer was boasting about what he was wasting his paycheck on so as to reassure the audience it was all being blown on self-indulgent frivolities. Chief among them was a copy of X-Men 137 which beforehand he could only afford at newsstand prices.
Well, that’s okay, Jeff – you can just buy it now on eBay for $3,775 (marked down from $5,400). Then just turn around and re-sell it, right? Christ.
Interestingly, Bats’ awareness of the importance of condition in collectibles seems to wax and wane. One minute, he’s talking about “mint, slabbed” copies of some Silver Age comic as if they were the Holy Grail, and the next minute he seems to think his chocolate-stained, grease-smeared, heavily pawed-through copy of Flash #123 or whatever would be worth the same as an untouched, hermetically sealed copy still smelling of printer’s ink.
A *mint* butcher cover is worth orders of magnitude more than a half-peeled, water-damaged copy that some teenager scrawled “I ♡ RINGO” on.
Apparently, there are also variant versions of the album cover, some of which are rarer than others. But that’s way too nuanced for Batiuk.
The poor clown probably hates variant covers as they didn’t exist in 1962.
I’m sure he hates them now. Batiuk is already on record as opposing multiple comic book universes, even though they serve an obvious narrative purpose: allow for characters to die, or suffer permanent damage, without permanently writing them out of series continuity. Which is a pathologically stupid opinion to have in the 2020s. We need multiverses more than ever, to support the many movies, reboots, and spinoffs that are making mad bank for the comic books industry. Which you’d think he’d be in favor of. But Batiuk gonna Batiuk.
Anything that takes away from 1962 funny book logic is bad. He was fit to bust a gut when they tried assigning Flash his own Bat-Mite so Infinite Everything is not going to sit well.
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of Bean’s End Week
Pam: Dad, when you die, I’m getting rid of everything you bought from Bean’s End after you die.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Jeff takes a bite of one of the pizza slices, and immediately rushes to the bathroom)
4/20: Oh, garoo. Back to the Batton Death March so we can watch the mushhead fanboy over Chester Gould.
I see that the John Smart House is home to both the Medina County Historical Society and The Centerville Sentinel.
https://www.medinacountyhistoricalsociety.com/john-smart-house.html
Oooohhh! Nicely spotted! I knew when we got an all new angle on the Centerville Sentinel that there must have been a new photo for Davis to copy paste.
The big problem with watching Batton crave validation is how stupid it is. He doesn’t need to point someone his mother doesn’t know or care to know at her to prove he’s something because he is that something.
Somewhere in Manhattan, on a high floor of a fancy office building, the CEO of Mordor Financial chuckles at the copy of the Centerville Sentinel an underling has brought him.
“So this is what ‘speaking truth to power’ looks like. This is what uncompromising social justice advocacy is, according to that one-armed moron. I’m glad we didn’t even bother taking him to court over a few busted office chairs and a portable hard drive’s worth of .pdfs. Heh heh heh. Good lord, what a pathetic clown, him with his petulant, angry little pout and stupid beard with a week’s worth of soup still fossilized in it. And this is what it all came to: A 32-part serialized interview about some scribbler’s love affair with Bristol board and spinner racks. Jesus.”
My headcanon is that Skip did them a favor by hijacking the newspaper, because they had already drained it of everything of value. (Skip’s own reporting says as much.) It was easier just to let him have his dead newspaper than bother suing him.
My question is: what the hell did the Centerview Sentinel ever have that was worth buying? A small-town newspaper in the 2020s is about the dead-endiest business imaginable. I struggle to understand why big newspapers would be targets of hedge funds, since they don’t have a lot of assets to loot, besides printing presses and the land they sit on.
Yeah. I can dig it. Skip and his so-called standing on principle are little more than a rounding error. It would be pointless to sue someone who’s already a ball of dirt.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 1 of Interview from HFIL Week
How i feel everytime Batton appears in Crankshaft:
He can shove his imposter syndrome where the Sun don’t shine. We don’t need four years of his trying to prove something to a woman’s cadaver.
4/21: No, Batiuk, it’s not ironic that a name for a thing stays the same even if chalk is replaced by a Sharpee. We still call it a dial tone, don’t we?
And again, his narrow focus on looking like something instead of being something makes it redundant to deconstruct him as he does so himself. It’s like how Funky was too busy looking like he knew what he was doing to be someone who knew how to do things.
To be a little more precise: he doesn’t want to “look like” something, he wants to be “seen as” something. He wants everybody around him to say “oh, there’s the famous writer! The one who’s such a good writer that he… almost got a job in comic books!”
Three months of the Batton Death March, and that’s the underlying theme of everything. Almost everything Batton Thomas has to say is about how he’s an important cartoonist now, and how other people react to that. Les Moore, Lillian McKenzie, and Skip Rawlings are this character too.
The problem is that nobody could possibly care let alone be crushed by it. He can’t grin in triumph if nobody cares
Yeah, it’s the revenge fantasy of a bitter 14-year-old. As if all his enemies have to respect him now. You know, Batiuk’s enemies: the people who wouldn’t tolerate him pouting in a university TV room over an intentionally silly TV show; the Hollywood elitists who don’t give him all the awards he thinks he deserves; and anyone who suggested that maybe it’s time to put The Flash down, and grow up a little. And we all know who’s Public Enemy #1 on that score.
The mother who dared telling him that he was being a spoiled brat obsessing over stupidity.
Batiuk he grew up in an era when his peers would have treated him mercilessly for his behavior. That’s my real question: why didn’t a lifetime of wedgies and social exclusion put an end to his comic book addiction? The fact that his mother had to get involved suggests that Akron had some lame bullies in the mid-1960s. Even when I was in high school 25 years later, being a comic book reader was very uncool. And the Michael Keaton Batman movie didn’t reverse that by itself.
Admitting that his suffering was self-inflicted would mean growing up. It’s better to keep doing something damaging than to admit that he’s not in the right.
And also, he won’t admit it but the real reason that the campy sixties Batman bothered him is that it reminded him how absurd the idea of a man parading around in a costume actually is.
@PJ It was an accidental bit of malicious compliance. “Oh, you want a TV show exactly like comic books? Well, here you go!” That show gave Batiuk EXACTLY what he wanted. His own blog posts say that. But he did NOT like it. The show inadvertently demonstrated how silly all his life’s passions were. Most people accepted the show for what it was, and enjoyed it. Not Tom Batiuk. It was a major affront to everything he stood for. And it still is to this day.
Liechtenstein irritated him too for the same reasons. How dare they hint that he got treated like garbage for a stupid reason!
So after the first year-and-a-half of this interview, it looks like Skip has finally stopped recording it or taking notes. How long until we find out that Skip died while Batton was talking, and Batton has just propped up the corpse and carried on with his reminiscing?
Or: somebody finally strangled Batton, and Skip is propping his corpse up to keep pretending he’s doing real journalism.
My thinking is that Skip decided to wait until Batton said something interesting before he started taking notes.
19 months and counting….
That’s a good point actually. Skip was taking notes at the beginning; he isn’t now. You’d think Batton would have noticed, since he craves the ego validation. I guess merely having another human being listen to his rambling is enough for Batton.
What if he actually wrote the article months ago and is simply letting him ramble just to be nice?
My favorite theory is that they’re gay men with a crush on each other, but they’re both so closeted that neither will make the first move. Why else would a small-town newspaper puff piece need 13 meetings, usually over dinner? They’re practically dating at this point.
Possibly true of Skip, and it would certainly explain why he keeps calling Batton over to get “just one more thing for this interview”. And then not record it, or take notes … just spend the time gazing at him.
But it’s difficult to imagine Batton having a crush on anyone but himself.
Makes sense when you consider that over the last nearly two years we’ve seen Skip and Batton sharing at all those pizza meals together while Ed and his supposed girlfriend Mary have had none.
Maybe Batton has finally talked Skip’s arm off… which is a bigger problem for Skip than it would be for most folks.
Even crazier, it turns out that they’re cartoons and none of it’s real. They realize this and have existential crises which extends out to the rest of Centerville and Westview in an increasingly bizarre and rambling metafictional story. The final strip of Crankshaft is a photographic recreation of the final Funky Winkerbean strip but set in the real world.
Cathy Batiuk walks into the den where Tom is reading a book. “Bedtime, honey!” she says while Tom looks up from his book and responds with a disappointed “Aw, Cathy!” A closeup of her face as she replies “It’s time to retire, young man,” which is, of course, said with some irony. The Batiuks walk out of the den, arm in arm. “The books will still be there tomorrow…” says Cathy as the shot lingers on a real Lisa’s Story book.
Thus ends the Funkyverse.
Holy St. Elsewhere!
You put more care and thought into it than he did.
4/22: And of course he makes imitating other people into more than it is because of course he does.
As this interview continues on interminably, can you wait until six years from now, when Batton finally gets around to telling Skip about the greatest thing to ever happen to him — his nomination for the Pulitzer for his amazing work on “Eliza’s Story”? Yes! “Eliza’s Story”! The unprecedented, generation-defining comic that awakened people to cancer’s existence and proved comics don’t have to be funny! A work so seminal, that no detail about it is too trivial for Sentinel readers….
I expect that sequence to run for about two-and-a-half years.
THE Tom Ryan of Tumbleweeds?! Y’know, for the kids!