I had previously showed and examined the history of Sadie Summers to determine whether or not she lived up to Batty’s assertion that she was his biggest mistake. I, and others it seems, did not really see her the same way her creator did and that her biggest problems were endlessly underused potential and missed opportunities. After all, she did manage a 15 year run and it took a literal decade long timeskip for Batty to finally get rid of the character he so detested. So she was a failure mostly through no fault of her own.
In terms of failed characters in Funky Winkerbean, there are plenty that would hope to be as successful as Sadie was. Today, we’ll be looking at some of these characters and speculating on where things went wrong. This won’t be a comprehensive look at any one character but little snippets of a large variety of them. So let’s get started with the Parade of Failed Characters.
LIVINIA SWENSON: One of the more well known examples of this group. Present in the very first strip, she would appear fairly regularly early on with what seemed to be a few stock gags. First, there was her repeated shooting down of eternal loser Les Moore.
And there was also her being a young feminist.
However, her prominence would very quickly diminish and by the second year or so of the strip she’d quickly become barely better than a generic student. Her appearances would go down in number dramatically, with her final one being a wordless appearance in the Fourth of July 1976 strip.
Infamously, she would “show up” at one of the many Coming Reunions having been killed offscreen via her name and photo on a board showing Westview High School students who had died, many decades after she’d stopped showing up.
Why She Failed: Likely a case of Batty just not knowing what to do with her. He probably figured there wasn’t a lot of mileage in her young feminist thing and her shooting down Les became redundant once Mary Sue Sweetwater was introduced to fill the same role. Also she was The Girl and we all know how ineffectual Batty is at writing women.
ROLAND MATHEWS: Another character who appeared in the very first strip. He was the radical leftist who didn’t bow to The Man, man, and played by his own rules.
But he was also something of a hypocrite given his denigration of the women’s lib movement (via his antagonism of Wicked Wanda) and fighting capitalism with capitalism.
By 1975, however, he would be gone.
Why He Failed: The likely reason is that Batty probably figured there wasn’t enough to be mined from his shtick. Roland and Livinia both had the problem of being tied to specific cultural moments that were long becoming passé by the time they were being phased out in the mid-’70s. Of course it would be shortsightedness on TB’s part because the hypocritical radical never goes out of style and there were plenty of ways to take Roland’s character after Act I as well. So naturally Batty decided to do the most logical thing and after nearly half a century bring Roland back in the waning months of the strip…
…as a transgender woman named Rolanda and using the first strip posted as justification. It’s easy to say that Batty was simply pulling a contemporary issue out of his ass in a shallow and thoughtless attempt at chasing glory. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d do it with LGBT issues after all. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt as in 2025 comics writer Tony Isabella would come out as a transgender woman named Jenny Blake Isabella. Given how close they are, I don’t think it would be surprising if Batty knew about it long before Isabella came out publicly so I’m willing to take it more as a shout out to a good friend… with a little self-aggrandizing back patting on the side.
DEREK AND JUNEBUG: A pair of characters from early in the strip’s run. Derek, being African-American, seemed to exist as an excuse to make race-based jokes. Though they were never at his expense but rather directed at the unintended ignorance of characters like Les and Funky.
While Junebug was… well…
Yeah.
Neither would be written out or completely disappear per se. Junebug would appear well into the late portions of Act I as one of the cheerleaders in the recurring Cheers For Losing Football Teams gag weeks. Although like a lot of similar gag weeks she, specifically, does not need to be there for the joke to work. Derek’s importance would just steadily plummet and not even an attempt to give him a hip new hi-top haircut late in Act I could bring him back to relevance.
After Act I, both Derek and Junebug would continue to make what amounted to glorified cameos during the various Reunions That Came and Went and poor Derek would later get retconned out of a remembrance of the story where he, Funky, Les and Crazy Harry painting Big Walnut Tech’s school rock.
Why They Failed: As said, Derek mostly seemed to be a vehicle for race jokes and perhaps Batty quickly grew to feel uncomfortable with that. But he also seemed to serve the role of straight man having to grudgingly deal with the morons he was surrounded by and that’s still funny on its own. But I suppose Batty didn’t think so. Junebug was pretty much little more than a loud and sassy black woman and I could see Batty probably realizing that what amounted to an eyerolling stereotype wasn’t going to fly.
Of course, the work could have been done to make them into more rounded characters but effectively dropping them is much easier and never let it be said that Batty didn’t take the laziest way out of a given situation.
MARY SUE SWEETWATER: Batty’s Original Cindy, the first Batiuk Blonde goddess and unending desire of Les’ affections and unfortunate victim of his many romantic overtures.
She lasted at some point up into the 1980s but her relevance had massively declined long before then as Batty had other gags for Les and decided to have him pointlessly swoon over a variety of new girls instead, including a story arc with an unseen girl that our own BJ6K utterly despises.
In the later portions of Act III, though, Batty was feeling nostalgic and decided to drag Mary Sue out of mothballs but not before deciding that she needed a little divine punishment for denying God’s Favored Son what was rightfully his.
But Batty was not quite done with humiliating Westview High’s formerly most popular girl and in 2022 poor Mary Sue would be unceremoniously Livinia’d, probably of diabeetus or something. But she deserved it for her cruel treatment of famous writer and Oscar-winning actress Leslie Moore.
Why She Failed: She never had much in the way of personality to begin with and as stated it seems that TB very quickly grew bored of her. Once Cindy showed up her fate was sealed.
JEROME: A marching band member who was introduced as a rival to/annoyance for Holly.
He marched out about as quickly as he marched in.
Why He Failed: Incredibly easy to see why. His entire joke was pretty much his posture as part of him taking the band too seriously. It’s not remotely funny and I can imagine that this is one of the few instances where Batty stopped and rightly thought “What the hell was I thinking?” and immediately deep sixed him.
BODEAN: A delinquent introduced during the late Act I story arc where Barry Balderman is forced to go to summer school.
He and Barry connect during the summer, bonding over their shitty parents and Barry helping him discover that he’s dyslexic, which Barry is knowledgable about because he too is dyslexic. Unfortunately literally none of this is ever followed up on and outside of a few small appearances Bodean fades away before Act I even ends.
Why He Failed: I guess Batty really wanted to do a Breakfast Club riff focused on Brian and Bender and once he got it out of his system he didn’t really have much use for Bodean. Hilariously, he’s mentioned prominently in the description for The Complete Funky Winkerbean, Volume 6 (on sale now, BUYITBUYITBUYIT) as a new cast member alongside Cindy Summers so Batty seems rather proud of a character he almost immediately discarded.
CARRIE: Cindy Summers’ best friend and right-hand girl during Act I. Carrie pretty much served the expected role of both enabling her friend but also being one of the only people willing or able to give her a needed ego check once in a while.
She even gets a story dedicated to her late in Act I when she gets caught shoplifting at the mall.
But while she appears right up until the very end of Act I she doesn’t survive the transition to Act II, only getting small appearances during Cindy’s wedding to Funky and Cindy serving as maid of honor at her own wedding.
Why She Failed: Pretty easy to see in this case. Act II and beyond Cindy is such a completely different character from her Act I self that there really wasn’t much of a place for the Alpha Bitch’s Sidekick when Cindy’s attitude had 180’d like that. Maybe she still could have had use as someone for Cindy to bounce off so she has her own circle outside of the Montoni’s Dungeon but really, Carrie mostly filled a role that wasn’t needed anymore.
DUANE: Duane was a slow kid who Les hung out with in the gym a couple of times.
After only a handful of appearances he disappeared.
Why He Failed: Another one that seems pretty easy to see. I’m guessing Batty quickly got cold feet at making jokes about an intellectually disabled person. At least one that wasn’t an evil sporto.
GINNY WOLFE: If the saying “the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long” could apply to any single character in Funky Winkerbean, then it would easily be Ginny. She first shows up in 1985 as a mere substitute teacher.
But almost immediately she’d be either promoted or retconned into being a full-time teacher and regular member of the cast, teaching a sort of vague health/family class. Her most notable trait was that she seemed to be just about the only teacher who actually tried to do her job seriously which seemed to cast her in the role of Westview’s Frank Grimes.
She got a rather nice moment near the end of Act I, dancing with Les at the prom in an attempt to lift his spirits after his date stood him up. This friendly relationship between the two would continue into the first year of Act II where Ginny was portrayed as Les’ main work buddy.
She then completely disappears at the start of the 1993 school year, her spot having been taken by new teacher Linda Lopez who is basically just Ginny right down to teaching the same class. Only hispanic and much more jaded. No mention is ever made of why Ginny was gone, not even an off-handed line about taking a job at another school or anything like that.
Why She Failed: I… I don’t know. I really don’t. She’d been a regular and prominent character since the mid-’80s and then poof! There one minute, gone the next with no explanation. The only thing that makes even a shred of sense to me is that perhaps TB wanted to add a bit of diversity to the cast and so decided to replace Ginny with an effectively similar character. But really, out of all the characters in this entry Ginny’s “failure” is the most baffling because she wasn’t really a failure at all.
TRACY: In 1989 it was yet another prom story and Batty decided to actually do something with the strip’s namesake, who’d long been supplanted from his role as central character by Les, and give him a girlfriend. Thus come prom, Funky is one of many boys vying for the previously unseen and newly single Tracy and lucky him, she chooses to go with him.
Funky and Tracy would be an item all the way up until the time jump at which point she’d disappear until randomly coming back for a week in 2005.
At least I think this is Tracy. I’m pretty sure this is Tracy. Vicky was the name of a girlfriend that Funky had in the first year or two of the strip but seeing as this “Vicky” was Funky’s prom date I assume this is Batty screwing up names or something. Anyway, this led to Funky briefly falling off the wagon which caused some short-lived strain in his relationship with Holly in the lead up to their wedding. Tracy would disappear for good after this but managed to get a small cameo in an Act III strip where Funky is reminiscing about a merry-go-round.
Why She Failed: Even during Act I Batty didn’t seem to have much of an idea as to what to do with her. Her personality largely began and ended at Funky’s Girlfriend. But hey, their relationship lasted longer than the Divine One from Act I.
CLIFF: In the mid-’90s, Fred Fairgood decided that WHS needed a security guard and hired only the best of the best.
Cliff was another character who’d disappear fairly quickly but he makes what is probably the most confusing appearance in the entire strip. During Crazy Harry’s time travel trip back to 1980, he stops by WHS and gets accosted by none other than Cliff as he tries to warn Lisa about The Cancer.
“No wait, wasn’t Cliff not introduced until the ’90s?” you’re likely wondering. “Didn’t you just say he was hired by Fred who wasn’t principal at the time this strip is supposed to take place?” Yes, you’d be correct. Given that only a few months later, the Funky gang would be shown as having graduated in 1972, it’s clear that by this point Batty had long stopped caring about keeping the timeline coherent. So Cliff was somehow a security guard 16 years before he got hired which was 8 years after the gang had graduated high school and nobody thinks anything of it.
Why He Failed: Batty seemed to have a thing for the “old person doing stuff that old people don’t do” gag and Cliff was just one example of that. But his gag wore thin very, very quickly so it’s easy to see why he’d stop showing up. He was an Act I style character in a post-Act I world.
CARLO: It’s 2000, Funky is now co-owner of Montoni’s and decides he needs some extra help so it’s time to hire a dedicated cook. He eventually settles on Carlo whose whole shtick is that he’s a preening prima donna chef, not a mere cook.
As quickly as he showed up he… well, doesn’t not show up but stops having much of any focus. He does inexplicably manage to last all the way into Act III, still an employee of Montoni’s in 2010.
The gang’s all here. There’s Khan aka Kahn, Les, Holly, Funky, Carlo, Rachel and wait; hold up. Who’s that on the far end? It’s… a waitress who randomly shows up for a single strip in 2009 as if she’s been waitressing at Montoni’s the entire time.
Anyway, in spite of Funky’s assurances, that 2010 strip above turns out to be the last appearance of Carlo (and Dark-Haired Freckle-Faced Waitress) as near as I can tell.
Why He Failed: He had one joke and it sucked, simple as. DHFFW standing around and looking sad was more intriguing than him.
JAROD POSEY: Balding moody loner who, as punishment for smoking in the bathroom, gets forced to watch the football team practice.
Shock of all shocks, he actually has a great arm and is quickly press-ganged into being the new quarterback for the Scapegoats. Despite doubts, he leads the team to a win.
You’d figure that this would be an ongoing story. The talented outcast finding success on the football field and gaining the acceptance of his peers, you know? Of course not. Outside of a one-off cameo where he puts the moves on Gloomy Crankshaft Twin he never again shows up.
Why He Failed: Batty is lazy.
While this is not an exhaustive list of characters we’re running kind of long so this is as good a place as any to wrap it up. To run it back to the start of this piece, Sadie is far from the only failed character in Funky Winkerbean and characters can fail for many reasons. Some, like Jerome and Carlo, are shallow and ill-conceived and worthy of all the negatives that Batty (or the reader) can throw on them. But many come down to TB being too lazy to have simply taken a few minutes to think about what could be done with them once he’d seemingly mined all he was going to mine. Some times he just made really nonsensical decisions like memoryholing Ginny or doing nothing with the easy story of outcast jock Jarod’s rise to being the big man on campus.
I guess in conclusion, all I can really say is that Batty should have given more appearances to DHFFW.
Where did she come from? Why is she so sad? Is it because she knows she’s a great design wasted on a piece of wallpaper? Is it because she’s trapped in Westview? I suppose like many of these other failed characters, we can only speculate on what could have been.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
The Daily Bleak
Local Curmudgeon Creates A Black Hole While Trying To Use His Grill To Cook Hamburgers
This speaks to a defect in his understanding. He doesn’t think he was allowed to make Lavinia and Roland into different posers.
5/28: Forget the sinkhole, why is the robot yelling “END!! END!!!“?
DHFFW is a dead ringer for Peppermint Patty. Maybe she’s sad because still hasn’t processed the loss of her mother. Les and Summer can help her with that!
I believe that posts like this are why the phrase “I stand in line” was coined. At least I hope so.
The strip’s early casualties, Livinia and Roland(a), are interesting to look back on as both dated pieces of early installment weirdness and among the first indications that this writing thing might not be TB’s greatest gift. They are effective when speaking to/mocking the social counterculture of the moment when they were created… and nothing more (Dan Ronan capturing Livinia in “Cherry Chipmunk… The Girl” is, perhaps, the sharpest of a bunch of sharp bits in “Skunky Funkybuns”). And when the culture shifted, TB disposed of them rather than use them. That’s not necessarily a red flag in on its own, even great cartoonists hatch characters that aren’t built to last, but it certainly seemed a sign of things to come (as we saw with the recent review of Sadie). Compare Livinia and Roland’s disappearances to the many “of-the-moment” characters in 1970s Doonesbury who remained in the strip and culturally relevant for decades if you ever want a chuckle.
I choose to believe that Funky totally mixed up Tracy’s and Vicky’s names (blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol) and Tracy just went along with it so she could laugh about it with her friends later.
More Bodean would have been good. All of the other characters should have been asking “where’s Bodean?” in Act II and Act III.
I still say Bodean was straight out of Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Late 1980s high school was full of mulleted, band t-shirt wearing guys like that. I was one of them. (Okay, I was probably closer to Stuart from Beavis & Butt-Head.)
I agree that “Rolanda” was probably a shout-out to his friend Jenny Blake Isabella. But I also think it was pretty damn shallow. Rolanda had her existence acknowledged, then immediately disappeared from the strip. It’s basically the never-seen gay prom teens again.
He’s kind of chicken when it comes to representation that leads to hate mail.
This post was really well done and clearly well researched. The possible Rolanda/Roland Matthews link to Tony/Jenny Blake Isabella was eye opening to me. This was a really good article. Thank you!
That 4-19-2022 strip is another great example of Tom Batiuk’s favorite drama trope “somebody’s life was destroyed because they missed one message.” Even though there’s absolutely nothing preventing Crazy Harry from SPEAKING the information Lisa needed to hear. He’s not being arrested, detained, or even told to shut up. And the world doesn’t end when the strip does – Harry could have easily conveyed his message and still left, but we’re supposed to believe he couldn’t. Just abysmal.
Maybe Harry was just confused by he and everyone he knows being in high school in 1980 despite having graduated in 1972, 1992 and 1988. Maybe he really was just IMAGINING thanks to Eliminator helmet’s toxic goof gas. Maybe I hate everything about every time travel story in this comic and Batty’s flippancy in regards to adhering to any sort of logical timeline while patting himself on the back about doing things in comics nobody has ever done before.
Maybe.
There are lots of arrogant people in the world. But few arrogant people have such a huge gap between what they think they are, and what they observably are. Tom Batiuk could not be more wrong about his own strengths and weaknesses. He built his entire career brand on everything he sucks at: drama, continuity, realistic aging, being a writer, and not being addicted to comic books.
“Roland” did make an appearance at one of the reunion events prior to the 50th. At that time, he was shown to have a short buzz-cut, which implied he had gotten more conservative in his adult years. (Not sure if he actually said anything, especially to indicate the change in his outlook, but… it’s not a hair style one gives a more liberally-minded character.)
Anyway, some fun with Rolanda…
5/29: It’s funny because Jeff and Pam’s homeowner insurance doesn’t cover Quirk related shenanigans.
Yep, that’s the big comedy payoff. Crankshaft asking Pam and Jeff if they have black hole insurance. While they look far less concerned about the question than they were about Jeff’s slightly damaged Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt.
The solution to the problem is obvious. Turn off all video cameras, throw Crankshaft into the black hole, and hope it will be appeased by an offering. Have Lillian McKenzie on standby in case it wants more.
The real comedy payoff wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette.
Excellent post. Perhaps what makes Tom think that Sadie is his biggest failure is the amount of time that he poured into writing about her and still feeling like he “never got her right”. I imagine that he feels ultimately content with how the overall backstory and presentation has formed around the major characters like Funky himself and many others. Then, maybe in the back of his mind, Tom looks at Sadie and says something like “I’ve written so much about her, and I still don’t know who she is.”, and that is what bugs him.
I’m pretty sure I said as much here at the time it was originally posted but the Rolanda revelation strip really, really bothers me with the third panel, and Funky’s first word in response to Rolanda’s declaration being “So?”.
“So?”. What in the fuck do you mean “So?”. Just imagine a person making any kind of statement about something that significant to their life. Fill in the blank – “I’m [x]”: Married. Divorced. Widowed. Pregnant. Terminal. And so on. And the first word someone else says in response to that is “So?”. What an absolutely infuriating and callously ignorant thing to do at that point.
Yeah, that was another problem I had with the “Rolanda” strip. “So? I’m happy for you!” just seems crass. I guess Batiuk was going for a kind of noble indifference to something that a character feels uncomfortable about sharing. But it doesn’t work. This is more of a reaction you’d see from a man coming out as gay to a male friend.
But to be honest, I have no idea what *would* be a proper reaction to this kind of announcement. I learned in an HR training that you’re not supposed to say “sorry” if you accidentally mis-gender someone, but rather to thank the person for the correction. It was a rare case of actually learning something new in an HR training!
Batiuk really could have done the world a service here, by showing how to properly respond to this situation. But that would have required effort, research, editing, realism, and caring about the feelings of other people. Lord knows Batiuk isn’t going to do any of THAT.
It’s just so damn 24K phony. The world’s most dedicated trans ally wouldn’t react this way. Not a single twitch of surprise, even a raised eyebrow? Hell, if I met a HS classmate and they told me something far less surprising — “I’m a thoracic surgeon” or “I’m on the City Council, District 24” — I’d at least say, “Oh, wow, interesting!”
“So?” implies that Rolanda was expecting some kind of brass band or tremendous celebration. Imagine saying “So?” to the news that an old classmate is a surgeon. What a backhanded slap in the face. And it’s equally rude here.
What’s not addressed in this pathetic mini-arc is the incredible irony that 1970s Roland was a “male chauvinist pig,” as they used to be called — totally sexist. That would have been an interesting thread for an actual writer to pull on. But hacks don’t pull on interesting threads. Hacks just want to convey their message — in this case, “I’m an ally! I’m cool with trans people! See? See? Look here, see?, you can’t say I’m a bigot, no sir, I’m one of the good ones!”
Yeah, it’s not even an overindulgent “latte liberal” kind of response. It feels like it’s trying to imitate that, without knowing exactly what that would be. And of course, any kind of research is out of the question on Planet Batiuk. So we get this sloppy, insulting thing, that trivializes the very thing it pretends to celebrate. Batiuk tried to make a story about including marginalized people, but he excluded the marginalized people from their own stories as much as he could. Again, it’s just like the gay prom teens.
How about, “Pleased to meet ya, Rolanda! I’m glad you could make it, and it’s great to see you doing well. I ended up owning Montoni’s. What’s been keeping you busy these last 50 years?”
You know, like you’d do with any human being.
Maybe Bats himself doesn’t know how to do this? How does he lead off when meeting someone from his distant past? “Hi, did you know I was nominated for a Pulitzer? I was. Nominated, that is. For a Pulitzer. And I’m sure you know ‘Lisa’s Story.’ That’s me. That’s my book. ‘Lisa’s Story.’ Did you know I stood in Joe Shuster’s bedroom? Because I did. Right where Superman was first conceived! And I stood there. Okay, I’m gonna get some more cookies from the table, goodbye.”
Yeah, there’s also a basic failure to respond to life-changing news seriously, or diplomatically. Or having any interest in how to do so correctly.
If someone close to me told me they were now transsexual, I wouldn’t even know how to process that. It’s a hell of a thing to be told by anyone (unless you’ve suspected for some reason). It’s so new that there’s no guidelines for how to be courteous about that kind of thing. It’s kind of like hearing someone is getting a divorce: you don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing, so how do you respond?
A Pulitzer nominee-level writer should have been able to tap into that awkwardness, or the general unease with a complex new social issue.
“I know it’s a lot.” “It is… but I’m happy for you!” I mean… it shouldn’t have been difficult to find a response that doesn’t make Funky sound like a complete ass. Then again, this is Funky, the guy who practices his standup routine at AA, heckles the financial planner whose seminar he and Holly willingly chose to attend, derisively mocks medical professionals… I just doubt Batiuk intended Funky to come off that way…
I found that “So?” to be really rude and dismissive. Funnily, I have had the experience of meeting someone post-transition – I kept looking at them, trying to figure out where I knew them from, until they came over and explained. I did not say “So?”, I said something like “Oh, so that’s why you look familiar” and then we chatted about how they chose their new name and what they were up to lately.
And it seems really odd to me that Rolanda chose a name so close to their deadname. Tony Isabella did not choose the name “Tonia”. While obviously trans people are not a monolith, I think it’s more common to choose a name that’s more distinct. But of course TB is writing for his hypothetical readers who remember all the backstories, except when he’s deriding them as nitpickers.
Oh, goodie, Flash Fridays are back!
It’s like he’s never read a comic book before in his life. I mean, yeah, it can be annoying when a big reveal is spoiled on the cover, but if you made it to 1985 without ever encountering that… like, how?
But, really, the highlight is the final paragraph.
Oh. My. God. That was an option??? (Although we don’t know how they’re going to be portrayed, so it’s possible it could end up the most humiliating thing to ever happen to them. I’m almost looking forward to that. Almost.)
Could there be anything more humiliating than laying out $765 to own 17 volumes of ”Funky Winkerbean” strips? I mean, the dude has already zoomed right on past the humiliation event horizon and has crossed over into a dimension where shame simply doesn’t exist. Having Dan Davis use an app to make his picture into a cartoon character that’s pasted into Crankshaft? And then having Tom Batiuk put words into his mouth? You and I might be horrified: Loyal Reader will be most likely be thrilled.
He’ll probably appear as a fan waiting in line at book signing.
If something is supposed to be a surprise or a shock you probably shouldn’t give it away before the big reveal.
And if you do mess up and do that, don’t whine about the fallout.
It’s different when you’re desperately trying to get the attention of the Pulitzer people. (Or anyone at all, I suppose.)
Could there be anything more humiliating than laying out $765 to own 17 volumes of ”Funky Winkerbean” strips?
Yes: selling a walk-on role in your nationally syndicated comic strip for $765. If that’s the price, I’ll take five, and hand them out as prizes for the Batton Thomas prediction contest. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
I’m 100% serious about this. I would pay real money to be depicted in Crankshaft, even if I’m some straw villain, or dumbshit book signing attendee. Then I would buy that day’s strip, hang it on my wall, and proudly tell everyone in my life about the time I appeared in Crankshaft. I’ve always wanted some kind of permanent record of my own life, like an IMDB page. This would more than suffice. And fits nicely with my lifelong fandom of the comics page.
I realize that Batiuk may be attempting to reward “loyalty” rather than the amount of money spent. Well, here are my bonafides. I daresay the readers of this blog are the most loyal followers Tom Batiuk has ever had, especially after Lisa died. Which was almost 19 years ago – more than a third of his 54-year career! So yeah, Tom needs to get busy adding this offer to his web store.
(SEE ALSO: the October 5, 1998 Dilbert.)
I’ll predict how it’s going to go down. We’re at yet another of Batton’s book signings. In panel 1, Luke “Lucky” Fantano is standing in front of a table, excitedly clutching his copy of the newest volume of The Complete Three O’Clock High.
Lucky: It’s so great to meet you in person Mr. Thomas. You’ve signed all my books.
Batton: Thanks! You’re one-in-a-million!
Panel 2 is a closeup of Batton in his default condescending talk-grin and right hand raised pose.
Batton: As in the one person to actually buy all of them.
I predict that this is much funnier than whatever it is Batiuk will actually write!
It’s one hell of an admission, isn’t it? As cheap as these autographed books are, and as much as Tom Batiuk pushes them, only one person has bought them all? I thought there’d be more collectors/eBay speculators than that. I’ve seen people stand in line at memorabilia shows with a stack of baseball cards for Brad Woodall to sign. This guy can’t sell two sets of autographed books of something that’s been in every American newspaper for half a century?
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
How does cramming a bunch of charcoal create a black hole
Today’s Crankfuckery
Pam: What did Dad do?
Jeff: He said that he created a black hole by cramming a bunch of charcoal into his grill. I’m betting he used dark matter to pull THAT off.
5/30: It’s a hoax, a dream sequence, an imaginary story and a non-event that nobody will understand.
And a great example of why Batiuk can’t do Act I-style absurdity anymore. All he can do is de-escalate it into Act III-style smirking boredom. He can’t let the absurdity just be absurd for its own sake. He can’t build anything from it. He can’t use it to explore anything about his own world. And he’s allergic to fun. So we get what we get: a journey from a black hole in the backyard threatening to swallow two of the worst people on earth, to asking insurance questions, to “it was all a dream.” Rinse, repeat.
Because he’s an old man now.
Yep, pretty much called it.
Thus ends a story that probably would’ve been a lot funnier with Ayers still at the pen when he could draw the funny imagery of things getting sucked into the black hole. A funny pic of Cranky being pulled in by him would’ve been a shoe-in for Panel of the Year.
It would be appropriate that he die by his own hand.
I don’t think that the 2005 Vicky is supposed to be the same character as Tracy. Not only do they have different names, they look completely different.
The issue is that “Vicky” talks about things like Cindy overtanning herself which happened at the prom immediately before the timeskip to Act II, which Funky went to with Tracy. Vicky was also gone from the strip long before Cindy ever showed up. Like I said in the post, the only thing that makes sense to me is that Batty mixed up two characters which would be par the course seeing as he had Cliff in the Crazy Harry time travel story.
Could there be anything more humiliating than laying out $765 to own 17 volumes of ”Funky Winkerbean” strips?
Yeah, producing enough shit to fill up 17 volumes of FUNKY WINKERBEAN strips!
As for today’s CRANKSHAFT crapfest, once again, Batiuk uses the tired trope in which we find out, at the end of the story, it was all a dream. To borrow from Beavis, this doesn’t just suck, it..it…really sucks!
5/31: It’s kind of terrible that he revealed that he doesn’t need to waste a week on a Bean’s End arc.