beckoningchasm

Owen to Circumstances

I think we have another first, folks. I think this is the first time Les has been rendered with anything other than loving detail. Look at that grinning death’s head in panel two. I’m thinking his jaw is about to unhinge so he can devour that poor woman.

Panel three makes this another strip wherein I wonder what kind of audience Tom Batiuk thinks he has. In order to get this “joke” you have to know who Owen is and you have to know that he wears that stupid chullo at all times. That means you have to be a regular reader who enjoys the strip enough to know the cast…the very sort of reader that Tom Batiuk has driven off with pointless, boring characters like Owen. Seems like one of those unsolvable puzzles. Could there possibly be such a thing as an Owen fan? It seems scarcely credible. And since that’s the case, one would regard an episode like today’s as another example of a strip perfectly designed to appeal to no one.

Is there anyone out there who thinks it’s hilarious that a son would wear the same headgear as his father? That’s the joke. I guess it’s supposed to indicate that Owen is following his dad’s fashion sense?

I don’t know about you, but when I look at Owen he doesn’t strike me as the sort who has any respect for his parents…or anyone else, for that matter (except comic book characters of course). He looks like the kind of lazy slacker who wonders why achievement isn’t handed to him, because he’s so deserving and all. He looks like the kind of kid who smokes dope at every opportunity…and maybe that’s what Chullo Senior does, too. The sloped neck, the half-lidded eyes…yeah, I guess dad prepped for a meeting with Les Moore in a very practical manner, by raiding his son’s stash.

Maybe I’ve got this backwards, and Chullo Senior is actually following in his son’s footsteps. Or maybe the lesson here is that I should get totally baked. I bet if I did, this strip would be the height of hilarity.

The Batiuk-Signal, Robin!

Link to today’s strip.

Greetings fellow snarkers, BChasm back for another stint in the chair. Congratulations to HeyItsDave for giving us an exemplary two weeks on his first time out. Well done indeed!

As for today’s offering, there’s one thing worth noting:

Wedgeman’s back! There he is, near the center of panel one, burnt orange t-shirt, arms angrily crossed as if he’s been assigned to read Funky Winkerbean. What tales he could tell us! Like maybe, what the heck is Alex doing with her hand? Stifling a yawn? I’m with ya there, Alex. Note that Glasses seems to’ve lost a lot of weight, and behind him is some kind of creature I think I saw in a scary YouTube video. And right under the dialog there’s a girl who is fading out of existence! Wow, someone could use that if there was a space movie filming nearby!

Other than that, ho-hum. When I was in high school, any excursions off the school grounds did not require a face-to-face meeting with the parents. Usually, a permission slip had all the information my parents needed (itinerary, what to bring, etc), so I brought it to them, they read and signed it, and I turned it in. Are there now actual after-hours meetings for this sort of thing? If so, my next question is “Why?”

I’m going to pass over the comic book stuff and point out the awful overly-spun dialog we’ve got today. Always a problem when you draw your word balloons a year before you know what to fill them with. Wouldn’t panel one read better like this:

On the other hand, maybe we should just go with our inner Batiuk:

Night of the Meek

Link to today’s cover.

So, as predicted, it’s a comic book cover using someone else’s artwork, and the Batiuk characters are pasted awkwardly in the corners to ruin the effort. The characters have nothing interesting or funny to say, but they have to be there because we can’t have nice things. At least you folks get to read it right-side up!

People here have long speculated–if Funky Winkerbean is such an onerous chore to create, and Starbuck Jones is obviously where his true passion lies, then why doesn’t Tom Batiuk drop Funky and take up Starbuck. After all, he’s gone to great lengths to detail a lot of Starbuck’s world, and it clearly holds a great deal of importance–heck, unless you follow Batiuk’s blog, there are all kinds of things in the strip that simply come out of nowhere. By contrast, over in Funkytown, he can’t even be bothered to remember names or hair color and the characters are stagnant and miserable.

My guess (and it is only that) is that Tom Batiuk has enough self-awareness to know that if he were to tackle Starbuck Jones, he’d ruin it. So far, the only appearances of Starbuck Jones have been comic book covers. Never an actual adventure. Well, a cover can promise a great deal, and it never has to deliver. It isn’t expected to deliver. It’s just supposed to make you buy the magazine. It’s supposed to set up a story, not tell it.

But, if you’re going to make a space adventure comic, you cannot just promise adventure and then have people smirking over old comic books. It’s going to require actual storytelling. Moon Mile Meek has to leave the space house and find a giant monster somehow. (Although I’d be willing to bet that Kloog showed up on the doorstep, thus obviating the need for Meek to do anything. I’m also getting the distinct vibe that Meek touched one of Kloog’s comic books, and that’s what set everything off. Sigh.)

To do actual storytelling, you have to have excitement, drama, action, violence, fresh fruit. Passion. Thrills. Spills. Romance. Adventure–all the things you would expect to find in a space adventure book. And when presented with the chance to do any of these things in Funky Winkerbean, Tom Batiuk turns away and does essentially nothing. A chance for some police action with Dick Tracy? No way, let’s have Tracy haul boxes of comic books. How about romance, with Wally and Rachel? Not really–that whole thing was presented as “Well, everything is only going to get worse, might as well get married now.” Danger and intrigue in the Middle East with Cory Winkerbean? Sorry, the cat’s eaten it. Adventure? Ah, usually fresh on Monday, today the van broke down. And so on.

Even if he only did the writing, there isn’t a way that I can see that Tom Batiuk could produce a Starbuck Jones story that would satisfy anyone, including himself, and its lack of substance would probably depress him even further. It would emphasize the various things lost to this strip over the years. Storytelling, for one. I don’t see any storytelling going on in this strip. Ergo, Starbuck Jones will continue to be mentioned and continue to appear on covers, but that will be the extent of it.

Ultimately, my point is this–that those expecting anything of interest to pop up in this strip had best appreciate things like today’s artwork, junked up as it is with crap. Let’s face it, there are some stains that no detergent can remove, and that shirt is always going to look like that.

Well, my guest stint now comes to an end. Tune in tomorrow when the unparalleled Epicus Doomus takes over center stage. I thank you for your indulgence, and I am outta here!

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire

Link to today’s piffle.

The content of today’s strip implies that Droppo and Pungent spent the entire weekend doing a cover mock-up. (Complete with title, logo, price, etc. Is Darin also a compositor in the print shop?) Because a cover is the only thing that Cigar McBalding is holding… I thought they were supposed to be doing an entire comic book, and that’s why it was so arduous? Hell, I could do a cover mock-up over a weekend without a problem.

–Unless I missed something–this strip is so careful and attentive to detail, after all.

If all they were doing was a cover, why was Pete even there? Oh well, looking for consistency or common sense in this thing is a fool’s errand. It’s like asking, “Why is Darin’s hair in color when everything else is sepiatone?” There’s no answer to that, man.

I think Moon Mile Meek is the big-eared thing barely visible at the bottom of panel one.

I seem to recall some Bat-Mite like thing on other Starbuck Jones covers. Doesn’t seem like a great idea to give it its own book, but what do I know? Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen was a successful enough comic for years. Of course, Olsen was an occasionally entertaining moron who drank whatever potions he found lying around, turned ray projectors on himself and ate millions of pancakes. Then Superman would have to save him. And then, the exact same thing would happen all over again the next month. There were always more potions, radioactive rocks, alien artifacts, magical crowns, and so on. Superman never lost patience with Jimmy or tried to knock some sense into him (and his teeth out of him), and despite what I imagine were hundreds of fan letters, Superman never punched Jimmy so hard he flew into a completely different comic book.

So I suspect that the same formula would follow in Moon Mile Meek, minus the “entertaining” bits of course. After all, the exact same thing happens with Funky Winkerbean. Someone will be asked to do something, he’ll complain the entire way, then it’ll end with a pun and a smirk. Interesting how the Starbuck Jones universe keeps expanding, while the strip that hosts it continues to shrink.

So, are we all ready for the comic book tribute tomorrow? It looks like it might be well drawn at least.

While I Ponder, Weak and Weary

Link to today’s swill.

It gets increasingly difficult to bother with the content of this strip. I think I spent more time writing that sentence than Tom Batiuk spent on the last month’s worth of strips. The strip above…I can’t in all honesty say that it was written at all. He overheard some five-year-old’s joke in the comic book store, and thought I can put that in the strip. Doesn’t matter where. It’s a space filler, a time waster, one more step toward that magical 50th anniversary when we can all go home. At least he knew enough not to make it a Sunday strip.

The other content is what makes today’s entry utterly pathetic. You just know that never in the last five years has Tom Batiuk worked himself into weariness like these two. That he would extol such dedication while avoiding it himself is one of the things that makes this strip so terrible.

That and the artwork. Seriously, this crap is just dismal. Pete in particular looks like he was drawn by a drunk with two broken hands, riding on a freight train in 1934 in the middle of major earth tremors. Panel three is an excellent illustration of “quality control” since you can see what you get when it is entirely absent.