Son of Stuck Funky

Happy Memorial Day! Banana Jr. 6000 here again. I really don’t want to make Komix Korner posts a regular feature here, but Tom Batiuk has just dumped two more ridiculous declarations about Lisa that warrant a response.

I took Lisa’s story in to (editor Jay Kennedy) and King (Feature Syndicate), and the same measures that we had used to support my work in the past were undertaken without a hiccup. Okay, there was a hiccup.

Ugh. Batiuk loves his pointless stream-of-consciousness. This babble defeats the story. It reveals the previous 25 words to be a waste of the reader’s time. Just write “I submitted Lisa’s story to King, but there was a problem.” Sheesh.

Continue reading “Lisa, You’re No Jack Kennedy”

Hi folks! Your potassium-rich guide to the Funkyverse is back again for another post.

Unlike my colleague Comic Book Harriet. I’m not the “deep dive” type. There are a few Funkyverse stories I want to dig into, as we continue to write new posts for you all to enjoy and discuss. But for the most part, I will have standalone posts to make. This is another one.

I’m a regular reader of “Komix Thoughts”, Tom Batiuk’s very fittingly-named blog. Even though they’re mostly just excerpts from already-published Funky compilations that nobody but the most devoted non-ironic fan has ever seen. This week, it dropped a doozy:

The last remaining hurdle for me was how I was going to depict Lisa’s death. The answer came at a concert. I had been working pretty intensively, so my wife Cathy and I took a break to go hear Apollo’s Fire, a baroque ensemble, at Oberlin College. Near the end of the performance, three dancers came on dressed as harlequins and wearing white-full-faced masks, and I suddenly saw my ending. Using a bit of magical realism, Death would come for Lisa in an otherwise empty white space, wearing a white mask and a tuxedo. Using that conceit, I could now address and depict death directly. I was almost finished.

“Match To Flame 198”

Yes, he means Masky McDeath. And yes, he is dead serious.

At the climax of Lisa’s tedious, decade-long death, Batiuk decided “some dude with a deeply cheesy tails/Phantom of the Opera get-up” would lend the proper gravitas to the proceedings. To put it mildly, this character’s appearance undermined whatever emotional weight Lisa’s death was supposed to have. It was a textbook example of Narm: something that’s supposed to be dramatic, but is so poorly executed it’s unintentionally funny.

The character was a laughingstock, even to people who were inclined to like the strip, and became a symbol of the strip’s ineptitude – to anyone who still cared in 2007. And yet, here is Tom Batiuk in May 2023, making a serious blog post about the thought process that led up to it.

It reminds me of Jar Jar Binks.

I bought a DVD of The Phantom Menace as soon it was released. It contained the usual “making of” features. They’re interesting in that they were made before the world had a chance to be repulsed by Jar Jar. George Lucas really believed in this character, and wanted it to work. He was going to make a cartoon character come to life, and feel like a real character who belonged in a scene with human actors like Liam Neeson. He talked about what CGI technology could do now, how Ahmed Best could act with his entire body, that the character was going to achieve a level of comedy not seen before in a Star Wars movie; and things like that.

It. Just. Didn’t. Work.

We don’t need to rehash why. But it’s instructive to keep in mind that the great George Lucas genuinely thought it would, and put a lot of effort into it. It’s honestly a little sad to watch now. Say what you will about Lucas and the Star Wars universe now, but at least nobody’s making these claims any more. Jar Jar was a misstep that was swept under the rug, and not talked about any longer than it had to be.

That’s what Tom Batiuk can never do: admit that anything he ever did was wrong. It goes against the whole headcanon he’s built for How To Enjoy Funky Winkerbean Correctly. My last post was about Batiuk’s need to control the narrative at all times: this is a fantastic example of that. He doesn’t even defend the character; he just pretends no one ever attacked it. Kind of the opposite of what he does with Les, who’s always “protecting Lisa” from things that don’t exist, but is too spineless to act in her interest when it actually would have helped.

And, as is common is his blog posts, Batiuk’s middlebrow elitism is on display. “When I was overworked from deciding how to end my comic strip after eight years, my wife and I went to see the baroque ensemble, at Oberlin College.” I live in a city with an opera company and I have a range of cultural interests; I just don’t feel the need to bring them into unrelated conversations. Tom Batiuk is this woman, except he’s never been anywhere other than New York, Los Angeles, and Cleveland:

The other thing I love about this story is how impressed Batiuk is with himself for thinking he invented the most basic storytelling techniques. “Magical realism”? The personification of death isn’t a new idea. His other “Match to Flame” posts are all like this. “I know! I’ll have a time-traveling janitor deus ex machina our entire 50-year run into a galactic plot to make sure Les gets laid! That’s an elegant solution!”

But that’s a post for another day.