Son of Stuck Funky

All The News That’s Fit To Print

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.

If This Is True, What Else Is True?

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.

Sweet Home Ohio

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.

Unexploded Ordinance

This post. This whole arc. Wally’s return. It’s been a struggle for me to attack. For a very long time I couldn’t really figure out why. On paper, there’s a lot to work with. Maybe too much, maybe that was part of the problem.

At first I wondered if it was because I was, once again, taking this marathon half-year of a deep dive away from John Howard. Should I save some of this stuff for a potential Wally retrospective in the future? But with the literally hundreds of stupid minutiae that the Funkyverse waves around in my face, begging me to snark and dissect, would I ever get back around to it? After all, I’ve got green pitchers and Jinx Bushka waiting for me! This is a John dive, yeah. But you can’t talk about DSH without talking about Lefty, and you can’t talk about Lefty without talking about Wally. And you can’t talk about Wally without talking about…this.