Tag Archives: Akron

Rubber City Meltdown

Link To This One

“Hmmm. Maybe I’ll do a crossover story where Jessica sees what’s going on with Channel One and becomes nostalgic over her father, John Darling. Then they’ll visit Atomik Komix, where Phil will draw Skyler a spaceship. Chester will tell her about a freaked-out collector weirdo, who will be Mitchell Knox, the old Batom Comics child prodigy. Then Mitchell will give her the gun used to kill John Darling. Then she’ll take the gun home, and have it melted down into the very same spaceship Phil drew!” (begins writing furiously).

The thought process at work here is unique, you just won’t find it anywhere else. This is why I’m increasingly inclined to believe* that this BatYam nut is actually a national treasure. He’s not just responsible for a whole slew of terrible comic strips, despite the bevy of evidence to the contrary. He’s actually more like an avant-garde free-form musician no one likes, who’s taking the art of writing itself into strange, abstract directions that totally defy all known conventions and standards. These stories cannot exist, yet they do.

Just re-read my description of the story above, and marvel over how that’s pretty much exactly what happened. He needed to quickly pull a story out of his ass, and THIS is what came to mind first. I mean, wow.

*(not really)

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Dropping Mad Dimes

Link To Yesteryear

I’m amazed that this tedious anecdote amazes John, who’s literally surrounded at all times by thousands of vintage comic books that have the prices printed right there on the covers. On top of that the whole town is overrun with legendary old comic book codgers who just stroll right on into local comic book businesses and freely share comic book anecdotes with nary a second’s worth of thought. Not to mention the fact that he’s like at least fifty years old himself. Yet there he is, stunned by the buying power of a dime back in 1946 or whatever. Why, if I didn’t know any better I’d have to conclude that this John character is something of a total imbecile.

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Akron Zip

Link To Today’s One

Im·pe·ri·ous

  1. assuming power or authority without justification; arrogant and domineering.

So I suppose that a Rexall pharmacy COULD be “imperious”, I guess. Once again I know exactly what he was going for here but once again it doesn’t make it any less baffling. “My grandparents lived in Akron and there was a Rexall two blocks away”…how hard was that?

“Holy temple”…”sacred texts”…OK sure Thom, whatever you say. Once again we see BatYam venerating the most mundane aspects of things he loves the most, just like last week. I mean I remember where I bought my first copy of “Love Gun” but you don’t see me getting all nostalgic over going to Crazy Eddie‘s. It’s where they sold the records. The store was the facilitator, a means to an end, not the primary focus. Of course I liked going there, as it was where I’d buy the stuff I liked.

But it’s never that easy for Westviewians. They can’t just buy pizza, they have to immerse themselves within a whole complicated pizzeria experience full of old jukeboxes and whimsical band boxes with colorful local characters exchanging wry banter all over the place. And they can’t just buy a comic book, they have to enter a fantastical nostalgic dream world full of holy scriptures and clandestine attic forts full of milk and cookies. They just have to complicate everything, no matter how dumb it is. No wonder they’re all so grumpy.

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Funky Winkerbean: The Anchor, Man

(ZZZZZZZZZZ)

All that time he spent defusing bombs and dodging death over in Afghanistan didn’t do a whole lot for Cory’s cognitive thinking abilities, as he appears to be considering including Funky in some sort of relay race deal, which is a bit like entering an obese donkey in the Kentucky Derby. I liked old Cory better, at least he wasn’t just another predictable Pollyanna do-gooder with a dumb grin on his face 100% of the time. Now though…ugh. If the guy was any more bland he’d be completely invisible.

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