Good afternoon, or rather good evening, (I realize as I write this that I am not as omniscient as I would like, and can’t know what time of day you all will be able to read this,) Your friendly, neighborhood, CBH is here and I’m reporting in with the local Farm Progress Report.
While I tend to keep my roadmap in my glove box (or rather my Google Maps on my smartphone closed,) I must admit that the last week has seen me sitting at a dead end, or rather a crossroads.
More genuine news from the Funkyverse this week. On Monday, Arcamax ran this Crankshaft comic:
But GoComics ran this:
Both are dated 8-21. Both have 2023 copyrights. Neither is explicitly a rerun. So what happened here?
On Tuesday, these separate arcs continued. Ed fielded a call from the EPA in Arcamax, while GoComics continued a week of disconnected punnery with Ed talking to 10-year-old Mitch.
As of Tuesday night, it still wasn’t clear what was going on. Comics Curmudgeon, Daily Cartoonist, news searches, and the GoComics/Arcamax forums themselves had no confirmed explanation, despite our own J.J. O’Malley asking around about it.
Fortunately, Tom Batiuk made a new blog post Tuesday afternoon:
I’ve always enjoyed puns, so it comes as no surprise that it was always fun to come up with the names for the various guests that visited John Darling’s show.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/john-darling-take-382/
Yeah, thanks for that, Tom. It’s like the man is allergic to telling what you actually want to know.
Theories have abounded, here and elsewhere in the newspaper comics world (which is pretty much just here and the above few websites). Let’s start with the obvious: the wildfire arc is in very poor taste, in light of recent events. But… it name-drops Canada, the site of recent massive wildfires. Was Batiuk trying to build a joke on the real-life event, or was it a bit of fiction that became oddly prescient? If it’s the latter, it’s not even the worst comic strip I know of:
An anonymous poster at joshreads.com asked this:
Is this GoComics censoring a storyline they deem particularly tasteless, knowing that since they manage the most easily accessible archive of strips they can deny it ever happened, or is it a case of Arcamax not getting the memo that a storyline has been pulled and they have to run the replacement strips?
https://joshreads.com/2023/08/how-many-ways-times-do-we-have-to-say-pluggers-are-dying-before-they-actually-die/#comment-2742138
The problem is that neither of these explanations really makes sense. If the strip was censored, where did the replacement come from? It requires Batiuk’s involvement, to make a new strip, unless the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than any of us thought. It’s hard to believe only one publisher would find it problematic. And if Arcamax didn’t get the memo, they should have gotten it in the last two days, or noticed the problem themselves. What’s running in local papers?
Watch this space for more updates. If you know anything, put it in the comments.
(UPDATE 1: The divergence continues on Wednesday. And, it doubles down on the joke being at Canada’s expense. Crankhole says “you’d think that with all the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that folks would be used to a little smoke by now!” Yeah, they’re really used to it, a week after a provincial territorial capital had to be evacuated. Dude, not funny.
Which brings up another thing: Batiuk, and characters within Crankshaft, have declared their allegiance to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, a Canadian Football League team. This is a really dark joke to make about a country you have a mini-cultural exchange program going with. The Funkyverse has almost zero non-USA readership. If he gained any Canadian fans, he’s probably lost them.)
(UPDATE 2: The separate arcs continue on Thursday, and no explanation has been uncovered. The wildfire arc adds a badly-constructed “masks” joke. The news reporter mentions “the authorities warning folks to wear masks”, implying COVID-style face masks. Pam and Jeff are seen wearing gas masks instead. It’s the kind of misunderstanding the other party would immediately notice and correct, so it doesn’t work as wordplay.)
(UPDATE 3: Tom Batiuk has a new blog post series in which he promises to “provide some inside baseball factoids explaining the work’s creation and background and basically anything else pertinent to the work.” He finally explained… that the space girl in the last week of Funky Winkerbean was the great-granddaughter of Lisa. And that her space scooter was designed by Skyler, and inspired by the melted-down gun toy. All of which TFHackett pieced together the day the strip ran. I’d swear Batiuk’s trolling us, if I thought he was in any way capable of that.)
(UPDATE 4: The divergence continued until Sunday, when both Arcamax and GoComics ran the same strip, about book burning. Which had more potential to offend than the wildfire bit, because it takes a genuine stance on a contentious political issue. It deserves a discussion of its own, so I won’t do that here. What does belong here is the comic book cover the whole situation inspired:)
The reality-nudging Timemop, the alternate universe-hopping nature of Rick and Morty, and the two publishers running two different versions of Crankshaft without explanation all struck me as being pretty similar.
Two minor news items from the Funkyverse:
Tom Batiuk is writing a foreword for a Prince Valiant collection. The blog post “Workin’ Tonight” confirms this, and that it’s made him too busy to write any other blog posts right now. Hey, he wrote seven comic strips for July 2024, *and* a book foreword, all this week. How does he keep up this blistering pace?
Batiuk is a very strange choice for this honor. In July 2022, Funky Winkerbean had story a that depicted real-life Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster as an art thief, got Gray Morrow’s name wrong, and conspicuously omitted Foster’s successor John Cullen Murphy. It also ignored Prince Valiant’s real-life succession process, which would have worked much better than the dumb fictional story he wrote for Phil Holt and himself. I thought the whole thing bordered on libel, but I guess it didn’t offend the current Prince Valiant braintrust.
(UPDATE: Batiuk’s blog post specifically said “upcoming collection from Fantagraphics.” Which suggests the regular collections of Prince Valiant which the company publishes. This page at Amazon lists them all, and lists writers of forewords, afterwords, and introductions as co-authors. Few people are credited as such. These included Brian M. Kane (multiple times), Mark Schultz (twice), Dan Nadel, P. Craig Russell, Thomas Yeates, Tim Truman, and Roger Stern. Kane is a comics historian. Most of the other men are artists or illustrators. Batiuk seems even less worthy of this honor than it appeared at first.)
In other news, Tom Batiuk knows what cropping a photo is. The Saturday Crankshaft includes a pun on Pam cropping some photos, which proves he’s heard of the concept. It’s an interesting admission, considering we just talked about Batiuk’s own photos, which are badly in need of cropping. Here’s an example:
Batiuk’s raw photo is on the left. On the right is my cropped version. I removed those obnoxious bicycle tires at the bottom right, and some of those ugly golf carts. But this photo doesn’t need to be cropped so much as it needs to be re-taken entirely. Move two steps to the left, white balance, zoom in, and focus. Then it would look like this:
It’s much better, don’t you think?
This isn’t the first time Batiuk has used an artistic term as a joke without understanding it.
What’s Les Moore’s motivation? Buddy, we’ve been asking that question for years.
I often speak about improv, and this is a question they teach performers to ask themselves in a scene. Especially in long-form, where actors need to construct a long scene, rather than the short games we’ve all seen on Whose Line Is It Anyway.
I think the most potent example of this concept is Monty Python’s famous “Argument Clinic” scene.
Continue reading “If This Is True, What Else Is True?”Hey folks, it’s another The Komix Thoughts post post! Seems our ol’ pal Tom visited lovely Lake Erie recently, and graced his regular blog readers with a whole slew of delightfully Batiukesque pictures of various things. Fans of his uniquely mundane photography work need to check that out right now.
He also included this humdinger of an observation, which is just too good to not share.
“I’ve always been attracted by the Chautauqua commitment to the idea of lifelong learning, but I never followed the thought any further than that.”
Only one man could have penned a sentence that incongruous and baffling. While interested in the concept of “lifelong learning”, he never really went anywhere with it, which negates the entire point of lifelong learning in the first place. It’s almost zen-like in its own warped, demented way. Thank God for The Komix Thoughts, as shit like this really merits being preserved and archived.
Son of Stuck Funky 