I’ve come to realize that my writing style can be… a little harsh. I’ve been making an effort to dial back my vitriol, focus my criticisms less on the creator as a person, and direct them at his work only. I even wrote a genuinely nice anniversary announcement just a couple days ago. But today I saw something that made me realize that the awfulness of the creator and awfulness of his work can never be truly separated.
I don’t usually talk about Tom Batiuk’s e-mail newsletters. They’re a semi-private message, intended for a curated list of fans, not the general public. Because of my J-school background, I feel that airing them in public is a little unethical. But I just can’t let this go uncommented on. Besides, we’ll all see it in the Akron Beacon-Journal soon enough. Here it is:
Just like the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Lisa’s Story, with an even measure of humor, hope and tragedy, tackled breast cancer, raising awareness for and about the leading cause of cancer in women, so I hope the upcoming Jeff’s Story can educate and inform on prostate cancer, the leading form of cancer in men.
Pardon the interruption, but I’m Banana Jr. 6000. If I give you a Susan Smith reaction, will you all stop asking me about it?
Let’s spend Five Good Minutes on the legacy of Funky Winkerbean. I know we’re here mostly to celebrate its… not-so-good aspects, but let’s take a moment to acknowledge its place in history. For its first 20 years, Funky Winkerbean was a snarky lampooning of life in high school and beyond, long before the word “snarky” was even invented. It even had an iconic debut strip:
“Murder In The Burnings” continues. Today, we see the town’s reactions to Les Moore’s shocking admission. You can read all previous installments under the Burnings tag.
What kind of insane irony is it, that just days after I carefully copy pasted Batton’s head onto George Keesterman’s body so he could sit in a booth at Dale Evans, we’re treated to Batton being served by Angie the waitress in the same guacamole shit green booth?
I can’t even call Batiuk and Davis evil stalking hacks for this. Because knowing both their work cycles, this obnoxiously autobiographical arc was written over a year ago and pasted together weeks if not months ago.
Instead I can only attribute this to some sort of terrifying Nietzschean ‘He Who Fights Monsters’ scenario where I’ve stared into the abyss for so long I’m being sucked into the very mindset of the monster I have come to slay.
Strange as it may seem, I do believe that Dan Davis, the copy pasta master, does put more effort into Crankshaft than the other strip he supposedly ‘draws’. This is out of pure necessity. Look at today’s strip, he had to find all those backgrounds to trace and paste together. He had to attempt to smoosh Batton and Skip into a panel with Angie that was originally drawn for the normal Dale Evans trio.
The two tone voids of Garfield these days can be generated like a sticker book with ‘fill in the blank’ word bubbles, and no one will ever bat an eye if the exact same dog drawing is used three panels in a row.
That wiggle on the nose? Vertically flipped from panel 2 to 3. Crazy.
Heck, are people even going to notice if he doesn’t change a thing from panel to panel? It’s for comedic effect, not laziness. Promise.
With Davis, every day is a cheat day.
But you know what? It could be worse. It could be so much worse. At least this copy pasted line art is coherent enough.
Of course we all know 9 Chickweed Lane has become nothing but a badly scribbled humiliation fetish, with cheap computer gradient backgrounds. But today it seems the first panel was so graphic that a giant misshapen blob of a digitally painted grand piano lid was necessary to conceal the depravity.
We could also be poor georgekatkins commenting over at The Daily Trail, where the lovingly traced beauty of The Lost Forest of Mark Trail has been taken over by gaping maws, jagged black lines, and insufferable hipster hair.
Please stay out of those woods! I hate drawing them!
Makes you long for the days of badly proportioned 60 year old panels clumsily traced by the similarly artistically inept ‘artist’ from the opposite side of the political horseshoe.
Or maybe not.
And really nothing these days compares to the drunkenly scribbled nightmare of Gil Thorp. The ‘artistic’ team behind that strip, having tired of trying to shock their readers with abortions, lesbians, non-binary bulimics, and hijabs, has taken to horrifying their hatedom with some of the most hideous and nonsensical art I’ve ever seen.
How the commenting team over at This Week in Milford manages to even understand what is supposed to be happening is beyond me. We thought trying to tell the endless army of bland Batiuk blondes apart was bad? Try imagining a human name to go with these eldritch abominations!
Maybe they should all take a page out of Mopped up Thorp and simply rewrite the strip entirely.
I hope you’re not reading this, but if you are, please accept my sincere wish that you had a lovely day! Hoping this year is full of happiness and health for you and your family!
Son of Stuck Funky 
