Hey folks, Banana Jr. 6000 here stepping in, with the second entry in my hopefully educational TBTropes series.
One of Tom Batiuk’s crazy blog posts, from a couple years ago, was about his decision not to use fourth wall breaks anymore after Act I ended. He said:
I stopped doing that because, while it’s funny, you lose the investment and involvement of the audience. They know the characters are going to be just fine, and they don’t really care about their fate. By breaking the fourth wall, I inject myself into the story to wink at the reader as we share the joke. Now, however, I began telling stories where my presence was less intrusive and less needed.
Most works that are infamous for being bad – The Room, The Eye of Argon, Big Rigs Over The Road Racing, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Crown Royal – are bad in ways that are easy to explain, and apparent to anyone who consumes them.
Funky Winkerbean was an awful comic strip, but in ways that are difficult to quantify.
My usual go-to resource for this kind of analysis is TVTropes. A trope is a “narrative device or convention used in storytelling or production of a creative work.” TVTropes catalogues them all, and catalogues works in all media by the tropes they use. Most importantly, it gives us a language we can use to talk about what’s good or bad about creative works. It’s one of the best things the hive mind of the Internet has ever come up with. If you’re not already a reader, go check it out, but be warned that TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life.
I view tropes as the atoms of storytelling. Every object in your home, at its most fundamental level, is made up of atoms. Water is two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. Salt is sodium and chlorine. If you look up your favorite book/movie/TV show/record/comic strip/video game/Bible story/anime/whatever on TVTropes, you’ll get a list of the tropes it’s made of. It’s a way of breaking down your favorite story into its most basic elements, and discussing what does well or badly.
Tom Batiuk’s writing is so bad that it defies this model.
Last Sunday’s Crankshaft, the one that ended last week’s divergence, raised discussion in its own right.
Here’s the strip. The scene is Lillian’s bookstore, with a table of books labeled “Banned Books – Get Them Before They’re Burned!” Visible book covers include 1984, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Maus. In the comments, some of you argued that the threat of banned books is overblown; that being banned actually makes them best-sellers; and other thoughtful takes. All while being respectful and honoring the no-politics rule. This is a great crowd.
While the strip’s premise was good, the overall strip was dreadful, for a reason nobody mentioned. And it’s dreadful for reasons that are common to the Funkyverse. To put it in context, I want to respond to a comment by Bill The Splut:
I will give Tom points for putting it in a new way. The Shining Twins don’t even notice. Book bannings mean Back to School now.
In the strip, one of the two twin girls says “Gee, it’s hard to believe it’s almost time for school to start!” Which certainly could be interpreted as Bill suggests; that the sign’s message had no impact on them. The art supports this theory:
But the art also starts to reveal the problem. These girls look like they’re 9 or 10 years old. Are children this young concerned about book censorship? Should they be? “Oh, this reminds me we have to go back to school” is a perfectly reasonable observation for a couple of soon-to-be fifth graders.
But that’s not the worst part of it. It’s this:
What in the hell is this face? What emotion is Lillian trying to convey here? What emotion are Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis trying to convey to the reader? I’d love to show that picture to 100 people and ask them what they think is being expressed here. My guess is “accidentally farted a little and is looking to see if anyone noticed.”
This is a book store Lillian owns. It’s implied that she set up this “banned books” display. So she must feel strongly about the matter. When her own helpers, probably the most book-aware children in town, fail to get the message, she must feel… something other than this! Angry? Disappointed? Sad? Condescending? Socratic, as if this were a great opportunity to educate the next generation?
Instead, we get: smirk.
Smirk is the universal emotion in the Funkyverse. Smirk is the appropriate emotional response to every single stimulus in life, from “I am mildly annoyed by your joke” to “I am painfully dying of cancer.” The champion of the smirk was, of course, Lisa.
The art puts so much effort into showing how gaunt and feeble Lisa is, but her smirk muscles still work! Cancer can’t kill those, apparently. Even though this horribly awkward remark should have cleared the room. If I met my biological mother for the first time and found out she was this fatalistic and self-pitying, it would also be my last visit.
But let’s get back to Lillian. Her expression kills this scene dead, because it sucks all the emotional stakes out of it. It’s another huge failure of If This Is True, What Else Is True. Put it another way: it’s another failure of Batiuk to view a scene from the perspective of his characters. Lillian should have a reaction here, or know not to be too bothered by it. But she doesn’t do either. The strip attempts to raise a serious issue, but Lillian’s wry, bored disinterest in her own cause stops it cold at second base. If she doesn’t care about what’s happening in the strip, why should the reader?
Batiuk has an infamous blog post about breaking the fourth wall, where he says “I would break the fourth wall by having a character do a side-glance to the reader. I stopped doing that because, while it’s funny, you lose the investment and involvement of the audience. They know the characters are going to be just fine, and they don’t really care about their fate. By breaking the fourth wall, I inject myself into the story to wink at the reader as we share the joke.”
But that’s exactly what the smirk does. The character does a side glance to the reader, and kills the investment and involvement of the audience. We know the characters don’t really care about their fate. By breaking the fourth wall, Batiuk injects himself into the story to wink at the reader as we share the joke. Except there’s no joke here either.
More genuine news from the Funkyverse this week. On Monday, Arcamax ran this Crankshaft comic:
But GoComics ran this:
Both are dated 8-21. Both have 2023 copyrights. Neither is explicitly a rerun. So what happened here?
On Tuesday, these separate arcs continued. Ed fielded a call from the EPA in Arcamax, while GoComics continued a week of disconnected punnery with Ed talking to 10-year-old Mitch.
As of Tuesday night, it still wasn’t clear what was going on. Comics Curmudgeon, Daily Cartoonist, news searches, and the GoComics/Arcamax forums themselves had no confirmed explanation, despite our own J.J. O’Malley asking around about it.
Fortunately, Tom Batiuk made a new blog post Tuesday afternoon:
I’ve always enjoyed puns, so it comes as no surprise that it was always fun to come up with the names for the various guests that visited John Darling’s show.
Yeah, thanks for that, Tom. It’s like the man is allergic to telling what you actually want to know.
Theories have abounded, here and elsewhere in the newspaper comics world (which is pretty much just here and the above few websites). Let’s start with the obvious: the wildfire arc is in very poor taste, in light of recent events. But… it name-drops Canada, the site of recent massive wildfires. Was Batiuk trying to build a joke on the real-life event, or was it a bit of fiction that became oddly prescient? If it’s the latter, it’s not even the worst comic strip I know of:
If Scott Adams had written this four years later, would have gotten cancelled a lot sooner.
An anonymous poster at joshreads.com asked this:
Is this GoComics censoring a storyline they deem particularly tasteless, knowing that since they manage the most easily accessible archive of strips they can deny it ever happened, or is it a case of Arcamax not getting the memo that a storyline has been pulled and they have to run the replacement strips?
The problem is that neither of these explanations really makes sense. If the strip was censored, where did the replacement come from? It requires Batiuk’s involvement, to make a new strip, unless the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than any of us thought. It’s hard to believe only one publisher would find it problematic. And if Arcamax didn’t get the memo, they should have gotten it in the last two days, or noticed the problem themselves. What’s running in local papers?
Watch this space for more updates. If you know anything, put it in the comments.
(UPDATE1: The divergence continues on Wednesday. And, it doubles down on the joke being at Canada’s expense. Crankhole says “you’d think that with all the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that folks would be used to a little smoke by now!” Yeah, they’re really used to it, a week after a provincial territorial capital had to be evacuated. Dude, not funny.
Which brings up another thing: Batiuk, and characters within Crankshaft, have declared their allegiance to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, a Canadian Football League team. This is a really dark joke to make about a country you have a mini-cultural exchange program going with. The Funkyverse has almost zero non-USA readership. If he gained any Canadian fans, he’s probably lost them.)
(UPDATE 2: The separate arcs continue on Thursday, and no explanation has been uncovered. The wildfire arc adds a badly-constructed “masks” joke. The news reporter mentions “the authorities warning folks to wear masks”, implying COVID-style face masks. Pam and Jeff are seen wearing gas masks instead. It’s the kind of misunderstanding the other party would immediately notice and correct, so it doesn’t work as wordplay.)
(UPDATE 3: Tom Batiuk has a new blog post series in which he promises to “provide some inside baseball factoids explaining the work’s creation and background and basically anything else pertinent to the work.” He finally explained… that the space girl in the last week of Funky Winkerbean was the great-granddaughter of Lisa. And that her space scooter was designed by Skyler, and inspired by the melted-down gun toy. All of which TFHackett pieced together the day the strip ran. I’d swear Batiuk’s trolling us, if I thought he was in any way capable of that.)
(UPDATE 4: The divergence continued until Sunday, when both Arcamax and GoComics ran the same strip, about book burning. Which had more potential to offend than the wildfire bit, because it takes a genuine stance on a contentious political issue. It deserves a discussion of its own, so I won’t do that here. What does belong here is the comic book cover the whole situation inspired:)
The reality-nudging Timemop, the alternate universe-hopping nature of Rick and Morty, and the two publishers running two different versions of Crankshaft without explanation all struck me as being pretty similar.
Tom Batiuk is writing a foreword for a Prince Valiant collection. The blog post “Workin’ Tonight” confirms this, and that it’s made him too busy to write any other blog posts right now. Hey, he wrote seven comic strips for July 2024, *and* a book foreword, all this week. How does he keep up this blistering pace?
Batiuk is a very strange choice for this honor. In July 2022, Funky Winkerbean had story a that depicted real-life Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster as an art thief, got Gray Morrow’s name wrong, and conspicuously omitted Foster’s successor John Cullen Murphy. It also ignored Prince Valiant’s real-life succession process, which would have worked much better than the dumb fictional story he wrote for Phil Holt and himself. I thought the whole thing bordered on libel, but I guess it didn’t offend the current Prince Valiant braintrust.
(UPDATE: Batiuk’s blog post specifically said “upcoming collection from Fantagraphics.” Which suggests the regular collections of Prince Valiant which the company publishes. This page at Amazon lists them all, and lists writers of forewords, afterwords, and introductions as co-authors. Few people are credited as such. These included Brian M. Kane (multiple times), Mark Schultz (twice), Dan Nadel, P. Craig Russell, Thomas Yeates, Tim Truman, and Roger Stern. Kane is a comics historian. Most of the other men are artists or illustrators. Batiuk seems even less worthy of this honor than it appeared at first.)
In other news, Tom Batiuk knows what cropping a photo is. The Saturday Crankshaft includes a pun on Pam cropping some photos, which proves he’s heard of the concept. It’s an interesting admission, considering we just talked about Batiuk’s own photos, which are badly in need of cropping. Here’s an example:
Batiuk’s raw photo is on the left. On the right is my cropped version. I removed those obnoxious bicycle tires at the bottom right, and some of those ugly golf carts. But this photo doesn’t need to be cropped so much as it needs to be re-taken entirely. Move two steps to the left, white balance, zoom in, and focus. Then it would look like this:
It’s much better, don’t you think?
This isn’t the first time Batiuk has used an artistic term as a joke without understanding it.
What’s Les Moore’s motivation? Buddy, we’ve been asking that question for years.
Son of Stuck Funky 