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.
Sheesh, there’s more? And I didn’t know Rusty was supposed to be repurposing the scapegoat mascot. Why wouldn’t Batiuk include this in his blog comments? It’s gobsmacking what this man fails to notice.
Match To Flame #46 specifically is the one that talks about Rusty and its creation. The way he tells it there, Vojtko came to Batty when Vojtko was still basically a high schooler asking for some cartooning advice and this would continue for a few years. He was flipping through some of Vojtko’s sketches and got drawn to a rabbit with tortoiseshell glasses and so they started working on something with that and wouldn’t you know it, the rabbit was a nerd who had trouble getting girls and would read books on how to impress them. Gee, does that sound familiar?
Here’s the couple of strips he included in that entry. He doesn’t say when exactly this and the other strip he tried selling (called Orbit) was exactly but it was pre-John Darling and he mentioned having been impressed by Russell’s run on Marvel’s War of the Worlds/Killraven feature so likely around 1976 or ’77. The third strip you can see the Scapegoat clear as day so a few years later it seems like Batty decided to dust off a character from a strip that never went anywhere and rework it into a Funky Winkerbean character.
The strips there seem fine enough. Around as good as Boner’s Ark, which might be what filled the market niche that Rusty would have.
Do you have examples of the Proto-Scapegoat as a character? I’m not sure it’s really important a character from an unused project if it’s just, they figured out how to draw a goat in a Funky Winkerbean style. A character’s also personality and goals and stuff.
Importing, not important. Spell check also wanted to turn Proto-Scapegoat into Proton Something and I thought I had caught its mischief.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 3 of Drug City Week
(Suddenly, Dick Facey / Act III Les barges in. Before he can say anything, Ed beats him into a pulp)
8 October: His point is that you’re a centenarian.
Also, it’s the predecessor of his trying to make climate damage a thing.
I was hoping for a Mark Trail crossover showing Rusty Trail as a furry.
Balderdash! Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose, the franchise’s peak, was still years away from being released! Heck, we’re not even to Yogi’s Treasure Hunt and the episode where Dick Dastardly is the leader of a country called “Dickaragua”.
Rusty‘s artwork is solid, at least… other than the infuriating human-esque ears on those bears.
Hollywood made a Yogi Bear movie in 2010, but by then maybe it was far enough in the rearview mirror that it counts as nostalgic.
Okay, first, don’t try to make your tripe look better by giving it a favorable comparison to a better work. At least people still remember Yogi Bear, which is probably more than anyone could say about Funky Winkerbean. (I suspect if you were to mention Funky, the reactions would range from “What’s that?” to “Is that still a thing? I haven’t heard that name in decades” to “Wait, The Simpsons didn’t make that up? What about the Noid?”.
Second, what the hell is a “review mirror”? Was that supposed to be “rearview mirror”, perhaps? (But proofreading is for chumps.)
For some reason, I’m no longer seeing the strip that was included in the first Rusty post. Which, honestly, is no big loss, although it probably could serve as Exhibit A as to why no syndicate picked up the strip. (It was the bear saying “The animals in this forest are really close to Mother Nature. We call her ‘Mom’.” Yeah. That’s weak even by Batiuk’s standards.) If I were a syndicate representative, and I saw that strip submitted, I’d pass, too.
On the “plus” side, The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 16 is now available for pre-order! I’m sure it’s already sold hundreds of copies! Or dozens. Or two. Or is that too optimistic?
“Review” was in the original post https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/rusty/. I thought maybe that was my mistake, since I tend to use voice recognition, and this kind of error is common. (Maybe Batiuk uses it too?)
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I wasn’t saying “review mirror” was your mistake, I knew it was all Batiuk. (I have to doubt he uses voice recognition; if he did, we surely would have had a “hilarious” week of strips showing Ed dealing with voice recognition mangling his already mangled speech. Or maybe taking Ed’s speech and spitting out proper English, I dunno.)
I doubt anyone but the most devoted Simpsonsophile even remembers the Funky Winkerbean episode. It’s considered one of the worst ever, and generally isn’t played in reruns because of a panda rape joke that aged poorly.
So it’s just us he’s leaving behind. Well, this isn’t the first time I have been a part of that. It’s been almost twenty years since I first posted on the Foobiverse.
Did it ever.
“What I came up with”? “A strip I called Rusty“? There’s a lot of I’s sprinkled all throughout that blog post. I I I I. Me me me me. Shouldn’t that line read “What BOB AND I came up with”? Shouldn’t that be “A strip WE called Rusty”? What an ego on this guy. Does Batty hate sharing credit? Is this why Chuck’s Ayers’ name disappeared from the strip’s margins?
Going by the samples of Rusty we’ve seen, I wouldn’t classify the illustrations as “enchanting”, but they were pretty darn good. The writing on the other hand, is pretty weak.
Since this is a strip Batty takes credit for, what were his contributions? If he didn’t illustrate it, did he write it? If he didn’t write it, what then? It was his concept so he’s taking producer’s credit?
I think Tom is claiming that he was the writer and Bob Vojtko was the artist.
Oh, I’m certain Bob Vojtko was the artist. One of the hosts, probably Comic Book Harriet, told me Batty stopped illustrating his own strips because he was too slow.
Tom Batiuk, the guy who fights back against readers who criticize his writing by declaring “It’s Called Writing!”
Maybe it just me, but these ‘Rusty’ strips look like the writer had a certain lack of enthusiasm. 🥱
Yup. Tom never illustrated John Darling or Crankshaft, and didn’t illustrate the last 30 years of FW. Instead, he worked with people who drew both better and faster. Batiuk hasn’t been an actual cartoonist — i.e., someone who draws cartoons — in decades.
And while I’m not sure about Batiuk’s enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for Rusty, what does come through clearly is a certain lack of writing skill for which no enthusiasm could cover.
He did at least still ink the pencil art though which is an important part of the process. I’m not sure if he does with with Crankshaft currently or not but I’m going to guess he doesn’t.
That’s a pretty safe bet, I’d say.
Y. Knott and Narshe,
I confess to being curious about the Crankshaft creation process. For example, does Batty create storyboards for Dan Davis, or does he send a script and leave the layout up to Davis? When are the word balloons added? If Batty inks the strip, what does he use? I’m not naive enough to believe he uses that drawing table and Bristol board Batton Thomas bloviated about. A Wacom tablet? Photoshop on a computer? How is the artwork transferred between the two of them?
It’s too bad Batty doesn’t have a blog or something where he could share, as he likes to brag about “how the sausage is made”. /s
Dave Kellett (Sheldon) has posted videos of himself creating cartoons. The same for “Gabe” of ‘Penny Arcade’. I’m sure there are more.
I would imagine the process is that Batiuk sends a “script” via e-mail to Davis with dialogue, and perhaps some written layout suggestions. Davis goes to a computer, uses or manipulates archived clip art to assemble 97% of the cartoon, and uses digital tools to tweak the remainder of the visuals. It gets sent back to Batiuk via e-mail to review; he takes special care to make sure both the copyright notice and the all-important web link to his book sale site are placed correctly. Then it’s time to hit “send” to the syndicate! Another sausage is made!
Rusty would have been from fairly early in the run of Funky Winkerbean, well before John Darling or Crankshaft started. If Rusty had gone into syndication (and remained in syndication), Tom might not have created one of his later strips.
I don’t see anything wrong with the overall idea of Tom wanting to have more than one strip in syndication. Lots of other cartoonists have done so, or at leat tried to do so.
Something relatively light like a mild deconstruction of Hanna Barbera might have steered him away from his later excesses.
Batiuk doesn’t say that, though, does he? He doesn’t say “this is clearly a highly derivative attempt at a spinoff,” or “I’m embarrassed by this now”, or even “Rusty was an amazing concept and I’m disappointed it never caught on.” He just says “this existed” and that’s that.
The guy thinks he’s so fascinating that anything he does is worthy of revisiting by its mere existence. Like that time Michael Jordan played pick-up basketball in the park when he was 13. Yeah, if you were the kid he played against, you’d gleefully spend your life telling everyone about your brush with greatness. But without that personal attachment, it’s irrelevant, because it’s a normal step of becoming a pro basketball player. I imagine every cartoonist had two or three spinoff ideas that went nowhere. Batiuk thinks it makes him special.
He’s blind to his being a regular guy. Hell, if he tried coming up with a superhero name, it’d be “Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight.”
Yeah, Batiuk is very invested in the idea he’s some kind of cultural icon for downtrodden Clevelanders. He’s here to defend everyone who loves Luigi’s Pizza, The Phantom Empire, Kent State, and how to comic book correctly! He is the champion of people who suffered because they couldn’t be bothered to send a follow-up letter, sue a negligent doctor, or get out of the way of an obvious catastrophe headed right for them.
So……”being pants-on-head stupid” is Humanity’s nation according to him.
Yeah I mean it sounds like a fun idea. And maybe it would have helped avert some of what we’re subjected to now
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Drug City Week
(YAWN)
9 October: What kind of assbucket expects a refund if he gets the flu anyway?
Many people get the flu shot for free, so refunds would be irrelevant. If you have health insurance — which Ed must have, as (a) a senior citizen and (b) a government (school district) employee — there is usually no charge for the flu shot at Walgreens or CVS, and I suspect other places as well.
Also (c) a veteran. The only way Ed paid anything for this shot is if he’s a complete idiot… which, to be fair, we can’t rule out…
Also, flu shots are not a luxury item. They’re widely available and not very expensive.
Alternative rewrite of this strip:
Ed: “Do I get a refund if I get the flu?”
Pharmacist: “Refund? With your insurance, this flu shot was free.”
Ed: “What’s your point?”
Speaking of successor strips, I couldn’t help but notice him boasting about salting the Earth so that someone else couldn’t take over a strip nobody was interested in the first place. He needn’t have bothered shooting John Darling. The last visual should have been an analog set being shut off.
As others have pointed out here before, if the syndicate had really wanted to retain the rights to John Darling to keep it as a strip without Batiuk’s involvement, they would have just rejected the last week of strips and run reruns that week instead, since the strip was being ended.
Or, if the syndicate had eventually won out and gotten to keep the rights to John Darling, I can imagine the revived strip proceeding accordingly:
John wakes up in bed with his wife Jan.
John: “Jan! What happened? I thought somebody shot me, and Peter Jennings reported that I had been murdered, and then everyone from Channel One was mourning at my grave!”
Jan: “John, calm down! It was just a nightmare!”
John: “You mean … like what happened to Bobby Ewing on Dallas?”
This is still an option.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of Drug City Week
(the doctor beats the shit out of Ed)
Today’s Crankfuckery
day 6 of Drug City Week
(ZZZZZ)
10 October: So……does this mean that Pizza Monster will interview Batton Thomas?
Crankershaft threw us a curveball today! We THOUGHT the joke would be about the comically large pillbox but noooo … Batton Thomas made with the old switcheroo! Still not funny.
11 October: I wonder if he’s going to give The Pluggers a tip.of the old felt tip.
Today’s Crankfuckery
I wonder if this week will be either a Pizza Box Monster, Ed Does Dumb Shit, Interview from HFIL or Dinkle The Egomaniacal Choir Director week
RE: Mon. 10/12’s C’Shaft:
Well, it’s not Skip Bittman interviewing Batton Thomas, at least.
Lillian, you saw Ed doing the exact same thing just one year ago, and he gave you the same basic answer. Why do you feel the need to inquire about the hanging soaps yet again? Is your memory at last slipping like your sister Lucy’s, or can’t the person putting words in your mouth think of a less ham-handed way to introduce a week’s (?) worth of lame cervine-themed “jokes”?
12 October: It’s clunky. It’s already worn out its welcome. That being said, Ed being defeated by reality is better than “robot pizza monster choir director daddy issues rocks for brains cartoonist interview.”
Not a lot of info on Bob Vojtko. Apparently, he never found that cushy syndication gig. He did well enough as a freelance artist to get his own page on the https://www.lambiek.net/artists/v/vojtko_bob.htm?srsltid=AU7gw4WMXBajfns4rCnb4n7HEHJlE3VU20IvQMWKtUQ8ql1z21rrIw3t
Oops. Premature send. The link is supposed to say “Lambiek Comiclopedia”.
Bob Vojtko did do the artwork for “John Darling” for most of the year near the end of its run.
I did not know that. It would have been nice if Batty had mentioned Bob Vojtko working on John Darling. After moving on from John Darling, Vojtko apparently did not have the same success finding syndication as Todd Armstrong, who has created the crappy comic strip Marvin for over 40 years. Not that his strip is necessarily crappy in quality, but Armstrong sure likes to include crap in his comic strip. Too much.
When Batty pulled the plug on John Darling, do you think that may have poisoned the well for Vojtko’s chances at syndication? Guilt by association?
Not a lot of info on Bob Vojtko.
And Lord knows Batiuk isn’t gonna give you any.
You’d think Batiuk would at least mention that Vojtko worked on one of his strips for awhile, as Joshua K. said. He doesn’t seem to have any regard for the man at all, even though Vojtko sought out Batiuk exactly like Batiuk once sought out people like Roger Bollen. That should have been a “whoa, now I’m successful enough to be on the other side of the fence” moment, even though Batiuk was only 25 or so. Not a drop of respect, thanks, humility, or anything human. Vojtko is just another factoid in Batiuk’s self-mythology, like minor league statistics on the back of a baseball card.
Which makes me wonder how many friends Batiuk actually has. He treats other human beings like Carrot Top treats his props. Real people like Vojtko, Bollen, Mark Evanier, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach, Tony Isabella, that guy who bought all the Funky Winkerbean volumes, and that kid whose drawing was taped up in the comic book store were all dumped into Batiuk’s work without any kind of acknowledgement or thanks. Even Pluggers does that!
Did Batty ever mention how Tony Isabella became Jenny Blake Isabella? There’s been no mention of Isabella on his blog since the operation.
Batty using that kid’s artwork without acknowledgement or thanks was the worst. I’d like to know the story behind that one. Did Batty at least ask if he could use it? If so, the kid still must have felt crestfallen when he saw his artwork with no mention of his name.
Are Batty’s omissions just clumsy oversights, a lack of grace, self-centeredness, or whether he really treats people as rungs on the ladder of success.
Battys’ blog makes it appear as if Bob Vojtko was cast aside when the syndication deal fell through.
Batty is allegedly friends with John Byrne. Two peas in a pod.
Weren’t Roger Bollen and Tom Batiuk fairly close friends? Batiuk wrote a tribute for Roger Bollen on his blog after he died.
A couple of times where Tom acknowledged Bob Vojtko’s contribution:
The latter was a sort of “leaning on the fourth wall,” where the actual artists of the strip were identified as the set designers of the in-universe John Darling Show.
Is he just running reprints or something? Or is his response to readers wanting to see Ed in his own comic going to be a bunch of banal crap so people yearn for Batton Thomas and Pizzabot?
I’m starting to think there’s a difference between Act 4 and Act 5. Act 4 is post-2022 Crankshaft, but Act 5 Is when Batiuk gave up entirely on any kind of narrative, even bad narrative.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Guess this week involves Ed tying up soap for deer
https://i.postimg.cc/j2wckTSW/029c67f081e2013eb60e005056a9545d.jpg
https://postimg.cc/xNQLcWHY
I don’t know why it’s posting a link rather than the strip. This strip ran on October 17, 2025.
I think it might be that WordPress went through another update
13 October: Batiuk is also the champion of improvident nitwit men who are oppressed by killjoy women.
Oct. 13 strip: Batty is going through his worst I-got-nuthin’ phase yet.
14 October: Generic old guy talk. Weird.
Oct. 14: Now Batty is ripping off Thoreau and not crediting him. That’s pretty low.
I don’t think there’s been one joke this week, not even the concept of jokes. And not in the “haha, there’s no joke because it’s not funny” way but I genuinely cannot see what the attempted jokes are even supposed to be.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
I’ve got nothin’ to say about these two strips