The Batty Blog has been slow lately, but there’s something to talk about this week.
In addition to Funky Winkerbean, Crankshaft, John Darling and the thankfully never-published Dick and Jane, we now learn that Tom Batiuk tried foisting a fifth comic strip onto the world. Meet Rusty:
Tom Batiuk confirms what you’re already thinking:
Basically a hipper Yogi Bear, a cartoon that was long in the review mirror by that point.
Clearly Yogi’s hipness was only updated from 1961 to 1973, since one of the three example strips we’re shown was a fondue joke.
I’ll let Batiuk tell you the rest of the story as only he can:
I’d only been doing Funky for a few months when Bob Votjko showed up at our apartment wanting some advice on his work and wanting to know how to get syndicated. I was barely started myself at that point so I don’t know how much help I was (none),
Through Batton Thomas, Tom Batiuk has told us at great length how he went to a cartoonist’s home, wanting some advice on his work and how to get syndicated. And now he’s received the same visit, and he’s being all self-deprecating about it? Did Batiuk fail to recognize the role reversal from his own life, just a few months ago?
“Oh, I’m sure I was no help, even though I did the exact same thing, and could have easily passed along all the information I collected from much more accomplished cartoonists than myself.” He’s so quick to play the self-deprecating card that he doesn’t notice when it makes him look like an asshole.
We didn’t have any luck syndicating it, although it did prove providential in a couple of ways down the road.
“We were unlucky, but we were lucky.”
Its strong ecological bent probably wouldn’t fly in today’s political environment, but nevertheless it holds up rather nicely.
“It didn’t age well, but it aged well.”
But just because we couldn’t get it in the papers, doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it.
This sentence seems like another instant self-contradiction, but it’s actually completely meaningless. Being in the papers and being enjoyable have nothing to do with each other.
There are comic strips in the newspaper that you can enjoy (Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Peanuts). There are comic strips in the newspaper that you can’t enjoy (most of them these days, especially the Funkyverse, except for the perverse enjoyment we get from it). There are comic strips not in the newspaper that you can enjoy (Penny Arcade, dozens of other good webcomics). And finally, there are comic strips not in the newspaper that you can’t enjoy (because many talented creators never got the exposure they needed to reach you).
I’m going to roll it out day by day just like you would have seen it had it appeared in your daily newspaper.
In 17 days, we’ve gotten three strips that don’t appear to be in any kind of chronological order, or look like an introduction to the comic strip. So Lord knows what he’s even trying to say here.
Rusty‘s greatest legacy is that he repurposed a character from it into the Scapegoat mascot that was around for a few years in the 1980s. It’s also not the only strip he tried and failed to sell to the syndicates because there’s an old Match To Flame entry where he mentions a pulpy space opera one (thankfully not called Starbuck Jones) that was drawn by a just-starting-out P. Craig Russell.