Author: ComicBookHarriet

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.

With the advent of good ol’ Cranky bitching to a poor receptionist at the doctor’s office on Sunday, I think we can finally say that, ‘In the Name of the Father’ has reached its conclusion.

And boy, what a tale uh….softly…told it was. I’m guessing by ‘softly’ Batiuk meant ‘lacking direction, momentum, or motivation.’

It was awful, truly. So, for me, it was great. Because at least awe at awfulness is a feeling. His attempts at regular old Crankshaft gags, while objectively of better quality, leave nothing to be remarked on. It’s eating a stale, dollar store box of chocy-chip cookies, and remembering the taste of name brand Chips A’hoy. Forgettably disappointing.

But the arc we just got was a greatest hits medley of all Batiuk’s best sins. We got plot holes, weird retcons, call-backs to people who died in horrible ways, failed attempts to be artsy and profound, depression, ruin, and wry grins.

I went back and binged the entire seven weeks in one go. It took six minutes. Like many of Batiuk’s prestige pieces, it does improve somewhat being consumed this way, because you’re not stuck too long on a strip that’s nothing more than inane exposition, or a bland bit of conversation.

Somewhere along the line Batiuk has forgotten entirely that his audience will be reading his stories one strip at a time, with 24 hours between strips. No one is going back and rereading this dreck in massive chunks except for me. So, even if not gunning for a laugh out loud punchline, each strip should do something more than blandly progress the weeklong conversation.

RIVETING

That’s just one of many guidelines for writing well that Batiuk has either forgotten, willfully ignored, or never knew in the first place.

I confessed in some earlier posts that I dabble occasionally in the dark arts of fanfiction, and as I muddled through this nonsense for more than a month, my fanfic addled brain couldn’t help but cough up a version of the story that I saw as better.

I held myself to the constraints of being more or less the same story, told in way consistent with the best possible version of Batiuk’s style, taking up the same seven weeks. I briefly thought about trying to paste strips together for the true fan comic experience, but the task was too daunting, even for me. I hope you’ll accept my script format.

So, nestle in dear nitters, for a the first part of a story entitled, ‘Sentimental Journey’… which like all tales competently told begins with an inciting incident.

Week One:

To Be Continued…

Now, let me talk through a couple of my creative decisions, and how I think they fix some of the problems I think wrecked ‘In the Name of the Father’.

1.) Do not include Chippewa Lake Park. Yeah, both places are real and existed and it’s plausible Lucy and Eugene would have visited both. But all Batiuk did by adding a new location was confuse absolutely everyone. He’s spent 30 plus years building up Summit Beach Park as special. Keep things focused! (Something you’ll hear me repeat.) So everything here is Summit Beach and the Wisteria Ballroom again.

2.) Don’t try to make Eugene’s moving a big mystery. Two of the strips in the first week of ITNOTF were all ominous about Eugene moving. The audience doesn’t care about Eugene alone, he’s a bland quaternary character. You can’t build any stakes on his fate. The audience instead needs a little reminder about what the ancient love triangle is all about, as Lil is a main character of the strip.

3.) Try to make things specific to the characters. The only day that kind of maybe worked that whole week was maybe the “Good old days, getting old days strip.”

Except that it these sort of platitudes could be blathered by any two characters in this strip looking at any old picture. I did my best to make things a bit more personal.

4.) A wider range of emotions. Other than a few ominous side eyes by Eugene, most of the week in ITNOTF is full of bland grins. I tried to throw in some shock, surprise, concern and sadness.

5.) A bit of classic Dinkle behavior. If we’re going to learn Dinkle’s hardass personality was in reaction to his father, let’s get a little taste of it when he’s first shown in the story.

6.) Crankshaft being Crankshaft in Crankshaft. While he stood around blankly staring for most of ITNOTF, I hope to weave actual Crankshaft time into this, even if he doesn’t have a ton to actually do.

I acknowledge that one way this week still fails is in setting up clearly for the audience any question that would make them interested in what is next in the story. Lil taking the photo to Dinkle is plausible, but there’s no real stakes to it.

By talking about how Lucy loved the old band music, I’m hoping to establish why Lil would care at all about who Larry Dinkle was and follow Harry around listening to his stories. I also planted a little reminder of the whole thwarted proposal fiasco, so maybe people would speculate that I would finally resolve that.

I am welcome to any kind of criticism on this. After all, I’m not a Pulitzer Nominated Cartoonist of 50 plus years. I’m just a woman who has written some fanfic and binged some YouTube videos on story structure by other amateurs .

Stay tuned.