Son of Stuck Funky

Thanks everyone, the fools who fell for it and the fools who didn’t, for playing along with Banana Jr’s and my April Fool’s gag this year. When I finished my draft of the fake newsletter, I read it first to my roommate and she was skeptical that I had gone too over the top. That is until I pulled up a random Match to the Flame post from Tom’s blog and read it aloud.

She agreed it was closeish enough to maybe fool people on first glance. Like a stunt double. And Banana Jr’s great narrative and staging provided the heart pounding action to hopefully keep readers from focusing too hard on the fact that The Rock in that short scene has a less pointy head that usual.

As Epicus put in in the comments a few days ago “No one else writes like BatHam writes, and I don’t think anyone could, no matter how hard they tried.”

The newsletter had a combination of made up and real facts. So I want a few solid clarifications before any of these made up facts in the post morph, through the power of Poe’s Law, into Batiuk trivia canon.

Batiuk HAS told us we’re getting a Blue Bombers and Wedding storyline in the future. We are assuming Pete and Mindy are finally getting married, but that HASN’T been officially confirmed.

Batiuk HAS NOT ever mentioned his son Brian getting or being married. That was all made up for the fake newsletter. Maybe Brian is single. Maybe Tom is keeping his son’s personal life completely private.

Batiuk HAS battled prostate cancer twice both in 2002-03 and 2011-12. It seems to have, thankfully, been caught early enough both times.

One thing Alexa Vortuba in the comments reminded me is that while I really DON’T want a sappy and preachy year long ‘Jeff’s Story’ pooly collaged together from old strips, stock photos, and clip art, prostate cancer is serious business.

Older gent commenters and lurkers reading this, please. I know it’s an uncomfortable meme, but make sure you get checked out. I watched Ryne Sandberg toss out the ceremonial first pitch for the Cubs today, and knowing it might be his last one, and knowing he’s about my Dad’s age, and knowing that my Dad is going to be stubbornly impossible to drag in for a test. It about brought me to tears.

On happier notes. We’ve got so many adorable widdle baby steak nuggets running around we really can’t keep track of them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Infinitely funnier. Great job MopMan!