Batton Thomas – Son of Stuck Funky

The Compleat Batton Thomas

Hi, folks! The Crankshaft Awards are still under construction, due to some nasty cold here in the upper Midwest. (My hometown was minus 6 degrees on Monday.)

So in the meantime, I want to document the entire Batton Thomas interview. Boring, I know, but I really don’t know how else to respond to it. I can’t use Batton to mock Tom Batiuk, because Batton already does a spectacular job of that without my help. And I think we’ve all wailed and gnashed our teeth in the comments about what an inane, boring, self-serving ego trip this all is. But it just keeps going.

I thought the best way to document it would be to put it all in one place, to illustrate how much nothing there is in what has now been nine weeks of strips.

August 5, 2024: Skip seeks Batton to do an interview, so he immediately heads to Komix Korner. Batton saunters in on cue. He quotes Dorothy Parker for some reason, probably to show off his writerliness.

August 19: Skip needs to do another interview for a “longer and more in-depth” piece. He asks “what sparked your interest in comics?” Of course, it’s comic books. Batton traveled to New York and failed to be hired by either DC or Marvel.

January 27 ,2025: Batton sucks at being an art teacher, so he badgers the local paper into letting him draw a cartoon. He meets with a syndicate, NEA, which gives him some advice on how to turn it into a comic strip.

March 17: Batton talks about what inspired him to become a cartoonist. Spoiler alert: it was comic books.

May 26: Batton comes up with the name for his proto-strip Rappin’ Around, and annoys Roger Bollen, the creator of Animal Crackers. Roger says “just because I visited the syndicates in New York doesn’t mean you have to.” Batton immediately announces his plan to do this, rejecting Bollen’s advice right to his face.

July 14: Skip visits Batton in his studio. Batton takes his second trip to New York, eats at Howard Johnson’s, and gets rejected by the syndicates. But he returns home to find an important-looking letter in the mail, despite having spoken to no one. After telling a friend about it, Batton realizes that he is now better than everyone else.

September 1: Skip asks “So what happened after Publishers-Hall offered you a contract for your own syndicated comic strip?” Batton mostly whined about how difficult it was.

September 29: Batton is sitting with Skip for yet another interview when he meets Jeff, his “dopplegänger from the comics shop.” (The umlaut was Batiuk’s.) Ed Crankshaft then rips into Batton over the diminished presence of “Grandpa Wrinkles” in the comic strip.

January 19, 2026: Batton and Skip visit Batton’s first apartment house, Elyria High School, and syndicate president Dick Sherry visits. Batton says Sherry’s was “thoughtful and considerate”, but “it felt like we weren’t on the same page” as Sherry looked at some new strips. This anecdote is never resolved, as Batton talks about the apartment house some more instead.

To be continued, no doubt…

Oh Sherry

This week in Crankshaft:

Hmm, that second panel looks familiar:

This is a photo I dug out of the image folder at the old funkywinkerbean.com in 2022. At the time, I didn’t know who this man was. The only thing I knew was that he was too young to be Hal Foster, who would have been about 80 years old. This came up during the “Hal Foster rips off Phil Holt’s work and publishes it in Prince Valiant” arc, during which Batton Thomas himself applied for the job. I wondered if Tom Batiuk had ever auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in real life, and if this photo was evidence of that. It’s not.

This week, an Anonymous poster on Comics Curmudgeon explained:

Dick Sherry was the president of PUBLISHERS-HALL SYNDICATE around the time Funky Winkerbean was picked up.

I’m glad for that explanation, because Lord knows Tom Batiuk didn’t provide one. And it seems to check out. Wikipedia says “some of the more notable strips syndicated by the company include Pogo, Dennis The Menace, Funky Winkerbean (snort).” So this company would have been Batiuk’s first publisher, and Sherry his employer’s president.

Apparently Batiuk liked Sherry, since Batton went out of his way to call his visit “thoughtful and considerate.” Why is that even noteworthy? A meeting with an employer, especially a one-time visit at the start of an agreed-upon work-from-home arrangement, is courteous by default. Considering the absurd level of consideration Tom Batiuk routinely expects, I wonder what Sherry did to earn this honor. Did he bring Luigi’s pizza and fresh comic books?

Information about Sherry is scanty. The only thing I could find was in an interview with comic book writer Rick Marschall. He says that Sherry was still in this job in 1977, and that he liked hiring international artists so he could take “trips around the world at the syndicate’s expense to have creative conferences with these cartoonists.”

One wonders why he bothered hiring a comic strip creator from Akron rather than Las Vegas or Orlando. Maybe he didn’t have enough clout within the company yet. Maybe that’s the entire reason Funky Winkerbean ever existed at all! Maybe Dick Sherry wanted to hire a cartoonist from Honolulu, but the company refused to reimburse the travel, so he had to take his vacation in Ohio instead. And 50+ years later, here we all are.

We Were All Thinking It.

Well, at least Batton got something out of it. 🙂

Use this space to react to the Batton Thomas interview, or talk about something less excruciatingly boring. Again, I’ll do this bullet point style:

Batton Thomas has now been talking for well over two hours, finally gets to the part where he gets the cartoonist job, and… skips over it. Absolutely stellar.
Is this how Tom Batiuk thinks interviews are supposed to work? That they just let you drone on for hours and hours and hours about whatever you want? Highlighting Skip’s lack of journalism skills is belaboring the obvious at this point. But sheesh, he could try interjecting a question.
It’s no wonder Tom Batiuk always gets ripped off in his syndicate contracts. Apparently he just signs whatever they mail him.
Finally: have you looked at any other comic strips this week? Batiuk is being out-Batiuked all over the place right now.

Luann is doing a rerun about selling comic books door to door. Rex Morgan, M.D., has spent the last six weeks on a story where an unknown adult man thinks country singer Truck Tyler is his father. SPOILER ALERT: he’s not. Mary Worth is spending a week packing to go to New York to hang out with a 14-year-old. Who knows what Gil Thorp and Mark Trail are even about anymore.

It feels like every drama comic strip is trying to duplicate Batiuk’s lazy, tedious, self-indulgent, exposition-heavy, character-shilling, skip-over-anything-interesting writing style.

Murder In The Burnings: The Minor Suspects

So the burnings have suddenly turned into the world’s lamest Choose Your Own Adventure game. And we all know what the correct answer is in this world:

She’s got two valid reasons to call the police, a threatening mob standing in puddles of their own unburned accelerant, and the world’s greatest arsonist right next to her. But you do you, Lillian. Lord knows you have stellar judgment when it comes to not censoring other peoples’ reading material.

Continue reading “Murder In The Burnings: The Minor Suspects”

Interview With The Vapid

Last week, I wrote about Tom Batiuk’s blog post, where he defended his use of what he calls “non-linear storytelling.” He said that he intentionally abandons stories and returns to them later. I thought this was a nod to the fact that 90-something Eugene wordlessly rowed into a lake a couple weeks ago, and his story abruptly stopped there.

Silly me. It turns out Batiuk wasn’t talking about Eugene. He was actually talking about his favorite subject. No, not comic books. Himself!

I will go through this week of Crankshaft day-by-day, because it deserves that much attention. But first, let’s take a moment to review the history of the Centerview Sentinel.