Has it really been 25 years? Damn.
So strange for me to think about how there are bonafide adults with jobs, and mortgages, and college degrees, and marriages, and children, for whom that day in September is only history, not memory.
Those people will never really understand how all it took was one day to create an entire new culture overnight. Art, music, tv, movies, public events, everything became red, white, blue, and ashes and fire and heroic deaths. Twisted girders, plumes of smoke, big patriotic eagles. Sappy memorials everyone was stunned enough to accept without a hint of irony.
Or, as the comic artist would say,
“On a Tuesday in September, 2001, everything changed for everyone. On that day the entire nation was faced with the harsh form of reality to which I had become all too accustomed. And to show them we were all on the same page I published this strip…”
Oh. Wait. That’s not the September 11, 2001 Funky Winkerbean strip! That’s Skunky Funkybuns! An that’s not a Tom Batiuk quote, that’s Tim Negoda as played by the late, great, Dan Ronan.
THIS is Funky Winkerbean’s 9/11/01 strip:
And THIS is a quote from Tom Batiuk.
“And then the darkness flew in like the Nazgûl of Sauron on 9/11. When the attack on the Twin Towers happened, like so many others, I wanted to speak to what had happened. My way of speaking was through my comic strips, so I wrote a week that expressed my thoughts and concerns, Chuck and I turned it around on a dime, and Jay Kennedy, the editor in chief at King Features, had our backs as he marshaled the forces at King to get the piece in the papers in record time. I’ll always be grateful for his support of those strips. “
Like Batiuk indicates, it took about three weeks to get the turn around on shoving 9/11 into the Funkyverse, displacing already written strips to put Cindy at ground Zero by October.
For the month of September 2001, Funky Winkerbean offered readers a reprieve from reality, even if worldwide context may have rendered some strips suddenly sinister.
By October 1 Cindy is ready for primetime.
Ugh. What a load of dreck, eh? Batiuk is at his WORST spitting poorly worded platitudes. They’re always so empty and at the same time full of logical stumbling blocks.
A word of the wise to all writers. Only one in a hundred writers can pen a rousing speech, ala Independence Day 1994. The easier play is always, always to just show people doing things. Imagine a week of small kindnesses and experiences set in New York in the wake of 9/11, witnessed by Cindy, rather than a week of Cindy’s preaching.
But, sermon delivered, Batiuk had the rest of the year play out as he had earlier planned. The tragedy in New York took a backseat to other concerns. In the month and a half it took Les and Lisa to relive her entire teen pregnancy arc, there was a one panel mention of the attacks. I wonder if this strip was a rewrite?
In January, Batiuk introduced the biggest knock-on effect that 9/11 and its fallout would have on the strip. The beginning of the tragedy of Wally Winkerbean.
Batiuk had already sent Wally off to the military in 1998. Was he going to let an opportunity like trying to murder him in the middle east pass him by? No. You bet your ass he wasn’t!
And so, much like America, the fallout of 9/11 would have Wally stuck in a seemingly endless Middle Eastern quagmire. A heroic effort, suffering and sacrificing much, with only ephemeral accomplishments.
We did return to New York in January of 2002 so we could watch the news profit off of a hopelessly destitute woman.
It’s all these dumb little morality stories that came out all across the US in the next couple years: the artless tributes by the well meaning, the slop peddled by grifters tugging on heartstrings to make a buck– all these planted the cringe seeds that would bloom into 9/11 being the go-to punchline to any absurdist humor.
That day messed things up for both of the Winkerbean men. We all know what happened with Wally but it also is what led to Cindy deciding that she liked being in New York and extending her contract without telling Funky.
In other words, 9/11 ended Funky’s marriage.
Given what a poor sport he was during it, I can’t be spurred to care.
Comment like THIS are why I’ll never stop coming to this site. This is gold. PURE. SOLID. GOLD.
NEVER FORGET
That week also contains something that will never fail to make me laugh: someone enters a home or room only to find someone else sitting in the dark ready to confront them. Whether it’s done in a way that’s clearly meant to be humorous or dead serious it will never not be funny to me because you have to imagine the person has been sitting there in silence, stewing for hours like a psychopath just to make sure they’ve got things dramatic enough.
It’s the failure to realize how stupid a person would have to be to do that that gets me. Funny books rotted his mind.
11 September: Yes, Tony …. let’s remember doing something stupid that had no chance of success.
Also, it’s kind of a straight line from Security Theater to the current administration.
Haha, holy smokes, what a convincing reminder that Tim Negoda was NOT an exaggeration!
Today’s Crankshaft would be better if the panels were reversed, right?
(Sure, like all Crankshafts, it would be better if the panels were erased. But failing that possibility, reversing them is the way to go here, don’t you think?)
If Dan Ronan had delivered that Nazgul line, it’d probably come across as being too ridiculous for even a parody of Tom Batiuk. So, of course… Tom actually said it.
The funny thing is, Dean Devlin admitted that he was having trouble writing the big, rousing speech to lead into the climax, so he just wrote a generic placeholder speech, intending to write something better later. Until the day of filming, when he was told they were filming the speech that day, and he realized he never got around to rewriting the scene. About the only change that was made was adding “This is our Independence Day!” line to keep the studio from renaming the movie (the studio was thinking something like Doomsday, but putting the title Devlin and Roland Emmerich preferred helped convince the studio to keep it). But Bill Pullman just delivered the hell out of that generic placeholder speech, and it became a classic.
So a generic placeholder speech became iconic, whereas so many others who tried to make iconic statements fell flat.
Oh, hey, it’s Sadie! Tom’s Biggest Mistake™! Hi, Sadie! Sorry your creator lacked the imagination to actually follow through on the characterization he was setting up for you. Or even recognize that he was doing it. But at least we have a pizza-serving killbot now.
And let’s never forget: thanks to a certain Elegant Solution™ and his sliding timeline, everything that happened during Act II now came to an end in 1990. Including 9/11. Skunky Funkybuns was more accurate than anyone knew…
The Callery Pear is considered an invasive species and its flowers smell like jizz
Pfft. Amazing. Though I think that linden trees smell wonderful and not at all like cum, unless cum smells different than I hear tell.
Callery pears though…ugh. We used to have a couple outside out highschool and they REEKED.
They’re not exactly the same thing, but the skit was so similar I couldn’t help but share it.
There were tributes to 9/11 in Dick Tracy and Gil Thorpe. Those were the only two that I saw.
both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
(Pete gets up and tries to punch Tony, but completely misses and ends up getting beaten up yet again)
12 September: Let’s boast about our proud tradition of being excrement.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Tony: At least Montoni’s had customers under my sole ownership, unlike YOU, Peter. I’m told that this place hardly gets any customers nowadays under your ownership.
a question for ComicBookHarriet: What happened to the Chien deep-dive?
“Slop peddled by grifters tugging on heartstrings to make a buck” says it all about these comic strips. Everyone is nakedly trying to leverage 9/11 into some form of attention for themselves. Tom Batiuk and Cindy Summers both seem to view 9/11 as some kind of infomercial for their career. It reeks of the showy “look how humble and compassionate I am now” attitude a lot of shallow people took after the attacks. It’s almost a Tim Negoda bit, except Tim Negoda would be clearer about the self-mockery.
And this shit came out barely a month after the attacks? I remember everybody being a lot more testy about the attacks, to the point where we were having national conversations about what kinds of comedy don’t work anymore. I remember this scene:
Good post.
Tom’s first words making a metaphorical reference to other currently pop culture content says so much about his mindset.
re: “artist is showered with recognition and compensation in Funky Winkerbean story #445”, it’s important for us to know that “Sal was once stopped from exhibiting his work on the sidewalk in front of the museum”, because the museum’s enforcement of rules and standards regarding the use of its facility is irrelevant, and the stoppage was a personal attack against the artist that is posthumously avenged now. Take that, Metropolitan Museum!
Of course, the museum will happily display paintings that have sat exposed to the elements in a shopping cart for a few months, because the story said so.
Batty was clearly playing the And Then He DIED card.
By the way, “I don’t know what country I’m being sent to, but it ends in -Stan” isn’t a smirk-and-eyeroll punch line, you inhumane jackass.
I once owned a Springsteen live box set that included some audience banter (before “War”, I think). Bruce was talking about a friend of his who had been drafted into the Vietnam war, and said where he was going, but “he didn’t know where it was.” And that line was delivered with all the weight it deserves. Being drafted into a war is bad enough. But not even knowing where you’re going to fight, and having personal misgivings about your reasons for fighting at all, is one hell of a nightmarish scenario. Not something you’re *less* concerned about than the people you’re telling the story to.
And Tom Batiuk went through the Kent State shootings? I’m sure he was at the Rexall reading comic books when it happened, but how is this man *this* disconnected from how tragedy affects people? A major one happened in his backyard!
I swear one day Tom Batiuk is going to take his face off and we’ll see that he’s a machine piloted by space aliens, like in Men in Black. The man can’t even get bad taste right. At least Seth MacFarlane could pull that off.
His time in captivity was equally divorced from both reality and good taste.
Batiuk wasn’t present for the Kent State Shootings; I believe he had graduated in 1968. Chuck Ayers, however, was there. (Ayers’ recollections were the basis of the Crankshaft arc about the incident.) (Not that it excuses his general tone-deafness, of course.)
Did Batiuk actually graduate? I thought he was too busy skipping exams so he could buy Chad & Jeremy albums and read comic books. I mean, even Kent State requires you to actually show up occasionally, no?
We need a deep dive in Tony being an inept striver business moron.
A couple of Tony Montoni favorites.
I hesitated to post the same joke twice , but then I thought about the strips we’re posting about, and I thought, “What the eff!” ICW
A lot of people don’t know that Pete Roberts Reynold’s father was “Sneaky Pete” Rinaldi, a notorious mobster in the Cleveland family. Since his associate Tony Montoni came down from Cleveland to open a restaurant, drugs and gambling have been very lucrative for the mob. Every owner has worked for them.
13 September: Looky here….the actual title character muddling himself an aphorism.
Although it’s not a funny or even mildly amusing muddled aphorism. It’s basically just a series of words and pictures that enable the author to say that they put in the absolute minimum of effort required to create something that is, if one is feeling generous, marginally joke-adjacent.
Mind you, it’s still better than pretty much anything else we’ve seen from him in months.
Which is kind of a shame.
The interesting thing about Tony is that he’s a sort of shadow archetype to Pop Tate. A lot of Batiuk characters are deconstructed versions of the genre Archie is in, after all.
RE: Mon. 9/14’s Roboshaft:
Well, thank goodness Mopey specified “Where’s Pepper, our robo-server?,” or else poor Mindy might have thought he meant the spice. By the way, nice to see the pizzeria still has no customers.
Also, lest anyone forget, the Komix Korner sits directly over Montoni’s. Neither DSH John nor Crazy Harry could have walked down the steps the day before to get the pizza themselves? Neither of them wondered an hour or two in why their pie was late? Mindy couldn’t have walked up the steps herself? No one noticed Pepper was missing all day? The door to the comic book store is left unlocked? And lastly, does Batiuk seriously think readers of “Crankshaft,” the strip about the curmudgeonly school bus driver, are eager for a fourth week of this robot nonsense?
He thought we were eager to see Batton be stooooooopid.
I could buy that Dead Skunkhead is too lazy to go down a flight of stairs to get his own pizza, but there’s still the question of how he would have left for the day without going down that same flight of stairs that the killbot was trying to climb.
(Or maybe he did, saw Pepper trying to get up the stairs, complained about the bad delivery service, and got vaporized by the killbot laser. Lefty, of course, hasn’t noticed yet, since she doesn’t interact with her ostensible husband anyway. Eh, but that would actually be entertaining.)
No one noticed Pepper was missing because that was the only order they got the entire day. Though it does raise the question of how Mindy knew Pepper was out on a delivery, if it left for that delivery the day before. You’d think that would raise some concerns. Unless she’s doped to the gills on quaaludes. (Which, given that she’s agreed to marry Mopey, may very well be the case.)
But I’m pretty sure this is just a weak excuse to have Pepper and Holtron talk all week. Which is at least a marginally more interesting idea than seeing Skip and Batton yet again, but that’s a low bar to clear. (There’s also the possibility that the two sentient AIs team up to go on a killing spree throughout the greater Westview/Centerville area, but, again, that would actually be interesting.)
The only person who could find it interesting lives in a gated community in Ohio.
14 September: Between Tom Notsoswift and his Electric Smirkerdroid and Luann fixating on two side characters having a baby, it’s time to have Linda Belcher make an incoherent statement about dolls playing drums.
I thought Atomik Komix had Holtron so why does DSH John have it now? Did Atomik Komix go under and that’s why Pete decided to get out of the comics business or did his leaving cause Atomik Komix to close because they lost their (only?) writer and their only colorist? If so, what’s Darin doing? He left his storyboarding job for this fly-by-night piece of garbage after all. He has an MBA but seems to be rather useless (that’s why he has an MBA) since he was working at Montoni’s prior to Pete getting him the storyboarding job.
Also why have we spent an entire month on this stupid robot? Does Batty think he’s created some kind of beloved goofy mascot character? Because it’s about as lame as the Scapegoat which also failed in a similar role. Putting Pepper with Holtron, a character who’s actually reasonably entertaining, further highlights how dumb that thing is.
Yeah, this doesn’t track.
Mr. Director Martin Johns and producer Clay Wallace of Lust For Lisa fame gave Holtron to Pete and Durwood as a parting gift when they went to join Atomik Komix back in 2018. Holtron did get hauled to Komix Korner for free comic book day in 2019, but was subsequently seen back at Atomik.
If anything, Holtron should be at Montoni’s since it half-belongs to Pete.
It’s amazing how little the Skunky Funkybuns 9/11 strip differs from the real Funky Winkerbean ones.
It’s definitely nice to see Holtron again; perhaps with these interactions we could see the old computer acknowledged with full sentience as opposed to the “oh we were just pretending” crap retcon we got midway through Act 3 (unless they justify it with a modern AI update or something).
If they go that route I wonder if that’s the excuse to be made with Pepper being seriously kept as a long-term member of the cast of nuMontoni’s as opposed to ultimately breaking down in a week or two. If they’re going to commit to robots being around in the future to that even Lillian got one to maintain her abandoned shop, might as well double-down now. It’s hard to tell the dedication with the state of the strip and Crankshaft’s zaniness that has somehow kept around even after the “elegant solution” (Old Ed’s deflected asteroids with his grills, remember that!), but if it means we’ll see Pepper at the Pete/Mindy wedding for the most lukewarm Sunday wedding strip ever, I for one am all for it.
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
(Ed’s computer then explodes)
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Holtron uses his telekinesis powers to lift Pepper up and then tosses Pepper onto John Howard)
15 September: Oh, crap baskets. Batiuk is wading into AI paranoia.
September 15 Crankshaft: On the plus side, Pepper didn’t say “I stand in line!”
Of course, we also get that most Batiukian of Batiukisms. After all the “Tony Montoni, son of the founder of Montoni’s” and “Pepper, our robo-server” dialogues, today we get… “you’re Holtron!” Just… “Holtron”. No explanation of what Holtron is, as if it’s something everyone reading would naturally know. Despite Holtron only making essentially cameo appearances over the last… what, 30 years? And only in the discontinued parent strip to Crankshaft at that.
Batiuk thinks things need to be explained in clunky exposition as if someone were reading the strip for the very first time, yet also expects us to know 50+ years of minutiae on characters who haven’t appeared in years, if not decades. And, y’know, one or the other is understandable, but you really gotta be consistent about it.
Anyway, on with the Killbot Apocalypse! Let The Burnings commence!
To be fair, someone who knows who/what Holtron is will find the strip precisely as funny as someone who doesn’t.
16 September: They don’t need a computer’s help to be stupid. Their native idiocy will do the trick.
I don’t know if it would be the best or stupidest thing Batty ever did if he uses this to return to The Burnings and reveals that it was some sci-fi robot war rendering the entire previous Burnings story arc moot.
That would actually be interesting, so there’s no way he does it.