Author: ComicBookHarriet

Sorry for the hiatus. Harvest season is gearing up here. And for my poor cohosts, the stupid pizza robot has a secret special robot power to suck organized creative discourse right out of their brains through their eyes. We’re all trying. I mean, they’re trying. I sadly have reserved only a quarter ass for blogging since I need at least half of my ass for farm chores. (The final half-cheek is dedicated to napping.)

Links to previous installments.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Summary for those not wanting four tabs open at once: Eugene brought Lil a box of old Summit Park photos. She saw Larry Dinkle’s band in one and asked Harry about it during choir practice. Harry and Lil and Cranky went to Harry’s house, where Harry explained that his dad was the scatterbrained genius trope.

I have changed the formatting for these final installments, since all the paint editing, even with just text boxes, was fiddly as all hell and took up more time than it was worth IMO. If you hate it enough, let me know and I’ll back to higher effort posting.

MONDAY:

Panel 1: everyone sitting in living room. Moon outside window to show it’s laaate. DINKLE: “On weekends, my mom would take me to see my father perform. She never missed a chance to see him in his element.”

Panel 2: sepia toned flashback of Larry directing his family sitting by, mom looks smitten, boy Dink looks amazed. DINKLE: “When he was standing on that podium, controlling all that sound with just the flick of a stick, I was in awe.”

Panel 3: living room again, Harriet looks lovingly at Dink because she’s dumb. DINKLE: “In that moment, I wanted to be him.”

LIL: A director?

DINKLE: A wizard.

TUESDAY:

Panel 1: living room, Crank is flipping through a photo album in the background. LIL: “Your father was only known locally?” DINK: “Yes, but he dreamed of making it big. Every piece he wrote, he’d say…”

Panel 2: flashback of Larry scribbling in his office in the dark, wife looks on from the door with a flashlight, little Harry peering around her. LARRY: “This is it, this is going to be my breakout hit!”

WIFE: “Dearest, did you forget to pay the electric bill again?”

Panel 3: Living room. LIL: How many compositions did your dad write?

DINK: Hundreds.

WEDNESDAY:

Panel 1: Living room: CRANK: “So every song was a dud?”

DINK indignant: “No! His songs were perfect! He was a master craftsman! Every tune more masterful than the last!”

Panel 2: Living room, CRANK: “Then why did…?”

LIL smug: “As an artist myself, I can guess what he was lacking.”

LIL and DINK at same time: “Salesmanship.”

THURSDAY

Panel 1: Living room: DINK: “I remember the last piece my father ever wrote, ‘Concerto for Trumpet’ He seemed twice as excited as normal about it. Twice as sure it would finally be his big hit.”

Panel 2: “He was set to debut the composition at a performance at the Wisteria Ballroom at Summit Beach Park on the night he died.”

Panel 3: LIL hand to heart, tearful: “He died?”

CRANK: “What’s your problem? It would be more surprising if he was still alive.”

FRIDAY

Panel 1: sepia toned flashback of an empty stage with a crowded dancehall and frantic Larry. DINKLE: “We heard that his band never showed up that night. We never found out why.”

Panel 2: sepia toned flashback of Larry driving away at night with Summit Beach in the background. DINKLE: They found my father’s car the next morning half sunk in a canal. Maybe he’d fallen asleep, or he’d veered for a deer, or another car had run him off the road.

Panel 3: Harriet has her hand on Dink’s shoulder. DINKLE: “Maybe he just got distracted.”

SATURDAY:

Panel 1: Living room. LIL: “How old were you when your father died?”

Panel 2: Sepia toned back yard, young Dink stands with his bat, ball in the dirt in front of him.: DINK: “Young enough to miss him. Just old enough to blame him.”

Panel 3: DINK frowning: “Not old enough to forgive him.”

SUNDAY

Panel 1: word bubble coming from Dink house sky is rosy. LIL “Do you have a recording of ‘Concerto for Trumpet’?

Panel 2: Living room, Cranky is looking at album again. DINK: “I wish! I don’t even have a copy of the sheet music.”

Panel 3: sepia flashback of sad lil Dink and Mrs Dink with boxes walking past the still packed music room. DINK: “Money was so tight after my dad passed that we lost the house.

Panel 4: Sepia flashback of driving away in a taxi, Mrs Dink clings to a trumpet. DINK: “We had to move in a rush, so we couldn’t even begin to sort through the chaos of papers my dad left behind.”

Panel 5: living room. DINK: “Some photo albums, records, and a few instruments are all I have left.”

Panel 6: DINKLE “Sadly, ‘Concerto for Trumpet’ is lost media.”

Crank: not looking up from photo album “Naw.”

Panel 7: closeup of a picture from the album, young Ralph is standing with the band. CRANK: “I know who would have it.”

NOTE: I did change the dumb song, it was spurred by this comment.

Instead I picked a more period appropriate piece as inspiration. Something eclectic sounding, composed in the big band era, that people really danced to.

Has it really been 25 years? Damn.

So strange for me to think about how there are bonafide adults with jobs, and mortgages, and college degrees, and marriages, and children, for whom that day in September is only history, not memory.

Those people will never really understand how all it took was one day to create an entire new culture overnight. Art, music, tv, movies, public events, everything became red, white, blue, and ashes and fire and heroic deaths. Twisted girders, plumes of smoke, big patriotic eagles. Sappy memorials everyone was stunned enough to accept without a hint of irony.

Or, as the comic artist would say,

“On a Tuesday in September, 2001, everything changed for everyone. On that day the entire nation was faced with the harsh form of reality to which I had become all too accustomed. And to show them we were all on the same page I published this strip…”

Oh. Wait. That’s not the September 11, 2001 Funky Winkerbean strip! That’s Skunky Funkybuns! An that’s not a Tom Batiuk quote, that’s Tim Negoda as played by the late, great, Dan Ronan.

THIS is Funky Winkerbean’s 9/11/01 strip:

And THIS is a quote from Tom Batiuk.

“And then the darkness flew in like the Nazgûl of Sauron on 9/11. When the attack on the Twin Towers happened, like so many others, I wanted to speak to what had happened. My way of speaking was through my comic strips, so I wrote a week that expressed my thoughts and concerns, Chuck and I turned it around on a dime, and Jay Kennedy, the editor in chief at King Features, had our backs as he marshaled the forces at King to get the piece in the papers in record time. I’ll always be grateful for his support of those strips. “

Like Batiuk indicates, it took about three weeks to get the turn around on shoving 9/11 into the Funkyverse, displacing already written strips to put Cindy at ground Zero by October.

For the month of September 2001, Funky Winkerbean offered readers a reprieve from reality, even if worldwide context may have rendered some strips suddenly sinister.

By October 1 Cindy is ready for primetime.

Ugh. What a load of dreck, eh? Batiuk is at his WORST spitting poorly worded platitudes. They’re always so empty and at the same time full of logical stumbling blocks.

A word of the wise to all writers. Only one in a hundred writers can pen a rousing speech, ala Independence Day 1994. The easier play is always, always to just show people doing things. Imagine a week of small kindnesses and experiences set in New York in the wake of 9/11, witnessed by Cindy, rather than a week of Cindy’s preaching.

But, sermon delivered, Batiuk had the rest of the year play out as he had earlier planned. The tragedy in New York took a backseat to other concerns. In the month and a half it took Les and Lisa to relive her entire teen pregnancy arc, there was a one panel mention of the attacks. I wonder if this strip was a rewrite?

In January, Batiuk introduced the biggest knock-on effect that 9/11 and its fallout would have on the strip. The beginning of the tragedy of Wally Winkerbean.

Batiuk had already sent Wally off to the military in 1998. Was he going to let an opportunity like trying to murder him in the middle east pass him by? No. You bet your ass he wasn’t!

And so, much like America, the fallout of 9/11 would have Wally stuck in a seemingly endless Middle Eastern quagmire. A heroic effort, suffering and sacrificing much, with only ephemeral accomplishments.

We did return to New York in January of 2002 so we could watch the news profit off of a hopelessly destitute woman.

It’s all these dumb little morality stories that came out all across the US in the next couple years: the artless tributes by the well meaning, the slop peddled by grifters tugging on heartstrings to make a buck– all these planted the cringe seeds that would bloom into 9/11 being the go-to punchline to any absurdist humor.

Full confession time. I planned to get Part 4 of my stupid fanfic out to the literally half dozen people here interested in heartfelt Crankshaft AU. But I’m going on vacation in like….five hours, and I’m worse with deadlines than GRR Martin. But I thought I’d whip up some lazy history to tide you guys over, Fire and Blood style. So enjoy a trip down memory lane, back to a time when Batiuk was just as long winded, but the art was nicer I guess.

Strap in for long dead famous people, off the shelf stock characters, love at first date, and back alley torture scenes.

Continue reading “An Ultra Lazy Interlude”

Spot the differences!

(Differences will be discussed in the next installment)

Batiuk is playing some real twisted mind games with us this summer. After an agonizing prestige arc that dragged on forever, we begged for it to end. Then we got almost an entire week of Batton Thomas waterboarding us with smothering smirks topped off with a titty twister of a political strip for that final jolt of torture. All so the ‘kids these days confuse Ed’ arc feels like the tender touch of a comforting friend. There are serial killers that don’t play with their victims this much!

Without further ado, please enjoy the second week of my half-assed rewrite of Batiuk’s stupid prestige arc.

Some notes for us all to ponder. And I’d love some of your opinons on this. Because while we all complained that Batiuk’s story dragged on and on, I feel like the week I just wrote moves even slower.

Punchlines are hard. And mushing the plot around to squeeze them in means each of my strips has to convey less information than one of Batiuk’s exposition dump strips.

At this point in Batiuk’s story Harry has already conveyed quite a bit of information about his dad, but IMO that was to the detriment of the story. Information about Larry is conveyed again and again and again throughout the tale with no clear progression of one tidbit to another, which makes the story feel like it’s not progressing no matter how many times they change locations. It’s just a bunch of factoids.

Harry also has no obvious change throughout the story in his feelings toward his father. For five weeks he talks about him with the same tone. And for someone who claims he felt distant from his father, he spews a lot of insight into how his father thought and felt even before he finds the convenient journal. The showing is not matching with the telling.

In true Batiuk fashion, ITNOTF is full of objects that are held up and explained. Trumpets and journals and pictures and sheet music and albums. But that leaves no space for characters to feel and react and say something funny. So a lot of detail might get left on the cutting room floor in ‘Sentimental Journey’. I’ll let you decide if that’s a mistake or not.

Most important for this week, I wanted Crankshaft to have a classic-Crankshaft reason to tag along with Lil and Dink’s stupid trip down memory lane.