Author: Banana Jr. 6000

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. 

https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2023/08/24/the-kat-el-reflections/#comment-164555

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.

https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/john-darling-take-382/

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:

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?

https://joshreads.com/2023/08/how-many-ways-times-do-we-have-to-say-pluggers-are-dying-before-they-actually-die/#comment-2742138

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.

(UPDATE 1: 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.

I often speak about improv, and this is a question they teach performers to ask themselves in a scene. Especially in long-form, where actors need to construct a long scene, rather than the short games we’ve all seen on Whose Line Is It Anyway.

I think the most potent example of this concept is Monty Python’s famous “Argument Clinic” scene.

Continue reading “If This Is True, What Else Is True?”

One of the other games on my arcade machine is Pac-Land. It’s a platforming game, starring the little yellow guy running and jumping and solving puzzles and doing other things that Mario is much better at. It’s a rare case where one screenshot will tell you everything that’s wrong with the game:

You see that red arrow that’s telling me to move to the right? Umm, excuse me, video game, I’m Pac-Man. Eating blue ghosts is what I do. Don’t tell me that arrow is pointing to something more important. Especially after these guys were just using their children as bombs:

As we discussed in the prior thread, Pac-Man doesn’t have much of a personality. So games like this need an Excuse Plot just to give him something to do. In this game, he’s got to rescue a fairy, or something like that. There’s 8 levels, and on Level 3 there are springboards Pac-Man has to use correctly to make a long jump over water. I can’t figure out how to do it, nor do I care enough to look it up on the Internet. Pac-Mania, an isometric version of the original game, is a much better application of the late 1980s’ improved processing power. It’s still worth a play occasionally. This, not so much.

But the second screenshot is where Pac-Land crosses the line from misguided into downright disconcerting. If you followed the Pac-Man expanded universe – and if you’re playing Pac-Land at an arcade in 1984, you absolutely did – then you know that Jr. Pac-Man is about the offspring of the the Pac-couple. And also of the ghosts. So we know they can reproduce, and that game’s main plot is a story of forbidden love. So why did this game repurposing these characters as munitions? Why couldn’t the ghosts just drop bombs on Pac-Man? They’re already in World War I vehicles, so just give them World War I weapons. It wouldn’t make any less sense.

This is also a huge problem in the Funkyverse, and one we saw repeat in the Comic-Con arc. On July 14, we got this moment:

Which they never got around to. Ten days later, on a Monday, we get this:

And right on cue:

It turns out we didn’t all know where this was going! The whole week was about NFTs, a topic perfectly outdated enough to fit Tom Batiuk’s 11-month lead time. Why the hell did he spend two strips setting up an comic book investment story, only to ignore it? The storytelling priorities of this world are just baffling. It’s bad enough that Batiuk makes everything about comic books; why does he also set up comic book stories and then not tell them? What purpose did those strips serve?

We established in the previous article that Jeff was compelled to sell his comic books by Crankshaft’s destructive behavior. Oddly, this still is the most pushback Ed’s ever gotten for his behavior, But, let’s look at what he did set up:

This story has nothing do with Jeff’s mommy issues, but look who gets blamed. Again. Batiuk is constantly re-telling this story, even though he had a whole other story cued up.

And he planned this four months in advance:

You know, Jeff, if you just now noticed your comic books are missing, maybe they weren’t that important to you. Maybe you’re not remembering correctly. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of your mother, who’s been dead for years now. Does your mom throw away your comic books from the afterlife? Is she related to Lisa? Sheesh, Jeff, get some help.

And now for something Jeff should be anxious about: the last time he went on one of these trips, he narrowly escaped burning to death.

But it’s never mentioned. These people dwell on incidents from high school and their childhood, but don’t remember the last time they went to California four years ago. On a trip where the whole Los Angeles metro area burned too.

Here are some other forgotten story points that were touched on this week:

Where is Pete and Mindy’s relationship? The engagement tiger incident was August 2019. We’ve had no update since then. They haven’t grown any closer, further apart, upgraded the ring, scheduled a date, or even told anyone other than the comatose Ed Crankshaft. But Funky Winkerbean had about 25 more weeks of comic book stories before it ended. And it spent three weeks marrying ninth-tier characters Cory and Rocky, because that loose end had to be tied, I guess. Again, just mind-boggling priorities.

Why is Mindy just now learning who Pete is? She expresses annoyance at Pete “damseling” her, because Tom Batiuk loves naming things that already have names. Even if this is before the engagement, their relationship must be pretty advanced, since they’re on a trip together and he invited her father. Comic Book Guy was being a lech, and Pete wasn’t out of line telling him to back off. If anything, it’s a big step up from his usual indifference.

Why are they cosplaying as siblings? As best as I understand it, they’re supposed to be Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who are fraternal twins. It’s a bit squicky. And it’s not the first time. Remember Les and Lisa’s Batman and Robin costumes? For their wedding? Ewww.

Why does Atomik Komix have no presence at Comic-Con? They’re supposed to be a big, important publisher in this world. But every year, they just go as fans. And nobody ever questions this. Les Moore and Lillian McKenzie can’t walk down a street without having to do a book signing for a throng of groupies. Why don’t these comic book makers, who are constantly presented as rock stars in this world, get that treatment?