Reply to Toby

Below is my email to commenter “Toby”, who took exception to the negative comments. Toby’s comments can be read here, here and here.

Hi Toby,

Hope you don’t mind me emailing you directly, but I wanted to respond to your comments on Son of Stuck Funky, and if I post my response there, you probably won’t see it.

You said:

Wow! What a lot of nit-picking haters comment on this thread! If you all dislike the strip so much, why do you bother reading it?

A valid question. Not all the regulars at SoSF dislike the strip. Many, myself included, are longtime fans who take issue with how over 40 years (!), Funky Winkerbean has become an unfunny, self-serious soap opera.

Mr. Batiuk deserves serious credit for addressing the same-sex couple at the prom issue, regardless of how he develops his characters.

That’s debatable. The same-sex couple consisted of two hitherto-unforeseen characters about whom we know absolutely nothing except they want to go to the prom together. Batiuk didn’t even give these characters names. We saw them buy their tickets, nosey old Roberta witnessed the ticket sale and launched a protest, and principal Nate held an assembly, where he stated that there was nothing in the student handbook prohibiting same-sex couples from attending prom. Some defense.

By placing the issue in a nationally syndicate strip, Mr. B. does those kids a major service and THAT is the important aspect of this matter…

I hate to sound cynical, but Mr. B. also garnered a ton of press for himself (and for his just-published collection, The Complete Funky Winkerbean Vol. I). Meanwhile, he creates two cardboard “gay characters” who probably will never be seen again. He also (today and tomorrow) has another, closeted student thank the principal for making things “better” . The student speaks to principal Nate while obscured the whole time by scenery. In this way Batiuk scores himself some bonus points without taking a chance by “outing” an established character.

…one that seems to have gone right over the heads of the “oh this is all so ten minutes ago” phoney sophisticates who have been negatively commenting.

I have been running Son of Stuck Funky for over two years, and was a regular commenter on the blog that preceded it. I know and like the readers of my blog, and the vast majority are indeed sophisticated, especially regarding popular culture. Many of them recall that cartoonist Lynn Johnston featured an openly gay teenage character (nearly twenty years, not “ten minutes” ago) and handled the matter much more artfully than Batiuk could ever hope to do.

The vast majority of my readers are thoughtful, tolerant people. Some of my readers happen to be gay. What they are not is “phoney”.

Batiuk has been hyping Funky Winkerbean’s gay prom storyline since last year, and garnered plenty of attention, as he did with his Pulitzer-nominated breast cancer story. All my readers did was rightfully call “bullshit” where they saw it on his handling of a topic that deserves more thoughtful, less shallow treatment.

Sorry you didn’t enjoy your visit to SoSF. By the way, I doubt anyone really thought you were Tom Batiuk posting under a pseudonym, but it was just too good to resist. Anyway, you’re welcome to visit again and comment any time you like.

Thanks and best regards from a fellow Jerseyan.

TFHackett
Son of Stuck Funky

If These Walls Could Talk

Nate’s prom night reverie is interrupted by what appears to be a talking castle.

More TB News

So Marvel Comics is jumping on the “Boys in the Band” -wagon, gay-marrying superhero Northstar to his non-super partner. The Washington Post sought out Tom Batiuk for comment, since he’s a cartoonist and a comix fanboy. He offers up basically the same talking points he’s given everyone else since before Promagaydon:

“I think I’ve created a space for myself” to deal with serious issues, Batiuk tells Comic Riffs. “It’s not such a big deal for myself as some other strips. It’s been incremental … that I can grab my readers’ hand and [say]: ‘Let’s come over here.”

What really makes the Post piece noteworthy, though, is this illustration:

…it depicts an alternate reality in which actual confrontation takes place! This would have been so much better than the way it went down. Note the dude holding the “It’s Our Prom” sign: where’d he come from? My guess is that Batiuk inserted him into the tableau lest non-readers assume that the same-sex couple is Summer and Keisha. The “real” gay couple (and they don’t even match; are they sure they’re gay?) stand meekly behind their fellow students as Roberta gives them the evil eye, and Mr. Blackburn silently rolls tape.

Who's That Lady?

A good comics writer can keep the reader off-balance with any number of literary and/or visual devices. TB accomplishes it by employing lax, slipshod storytelling and draughtsmanship. I assume that’s Nate’s wife, and not Cayla from a hairstyle ago plus glasses. We were able to establish that Mr. Blackburn appeared in earlier Funky Winkerbean strips; can any of you FW scholars tell me when, if ever, we’ve been introduced to Mrs. Nate Green? I mean before today?

I'll Be GLAAD When This is Over

“Camelot” is the prom theme for 2012, huh? That’s timely…bet it was the theme for Batiuk’s own prom at Midview High back in ’65.

Linda and Becky are still (weeks later) discussing Mr. Blackburn’s public dressing-down of his wife in front of the whole high school. Becky shares that her hitherto meek Dad, the father of four girls, “hardly said two words the entire time” she was growing up. TB must think that having him finally find his voice in order to publicly tear his wife a new one over her opposition to the same-sex prom couple makes Mr. Blackburn seem heroic. I think it makes him seem pathetic.

99 Percent Bullshit

Hoo boy—she is mad, too! Just look at her little fists clenched in front of her. This is the strongest display of emotion we’ve seen from Cayla in a long time!

Now that he’s put “the intolerant” of the world in their place, the un-didactic Mr. Batiuk takes a(nother) swipe at those wicked Wall Street Billionaires, who in Cayla’s mind have somehow (how, exactly?) made college tuition difficult to afford. Les soothes her by relating an anecdote that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had shared in his commencement address to Rice University’s Class of ’98:

I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch 22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch 22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?”

Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”

I said, “What’s that, Joe?”

And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Let’s don’t quibble over the distinction between having “the knowledge that I’ve got enough” and just “enough”. Cayla expresses to Les her concern over the expense faced by their soon-to-be-blended family, and Les’ idea of easing her mind is to (mis)quote a writer, because writers are wise and all-knowing. Billionaires, on the other hand, are “greedy, amoral morons” who fuck things up for decent folk like “us”.

From April 2010: