Tag: Batton Thomas

Betton Thomas

Before I came to SoSF, I was a contributor to a college sports blog, where I also ran a play-money betting contest. So I speak the language of odds and vigorish and parlays. Tapping into that experience will be my latest approach to dealing with the Batton Death March. I love playful betting!

Since Tom Batiuk is snarking himself so hard there’s no reason for us to bother anymore, I’m setting up a little contest! Make predictions about the next installment of the Batton Thomas interview. (Because we all know there’s going to be another installment.) Score points if your prediction is correct. Choose from 20 different bets!

Make choices, and score a total number of points based on the difficulty of the prediction. -1 point for any incorrect choice. Make a comment listing your choices, and the bet number for each. After each week ends, I’ll tally the sore. If you want to review previous weeks, I’ve been keeping the Compleat Batton Thomas post updated.

RULES: All bets are for the entire week. Sunday strips count, if they feature Batton Thomas. Each panel counts as a separate mention. (So if Skip smirks in two different panels of the same strip, that counts as two smirks for bet #A7.) The house (i.e., me) judges all bets.

General

G1. When will the next week of the Batton Death March begin?

April 27, May 4, May 11, May 18, May 25 (1 point each), June (2 points), later in 2026 (3 points), not at all in 2026 (10,000 points)

G2. Will Skip start the week by making a comment about “continuing the interview”?

Yes or No (1 point each)

G3. Where will they meet?

Montoni’s (.5 point), Batton’s studio, Centerview Sentinel offices, Dale Evans, Komix Korner (1 point each), a location from Tom Batiuk’s personal life (1.5 points), none of these (2 points). 10 points for a specific new location which you name.

G4. What recording device will Skip use?

None (1 point), pen and paper (2 points), cell phone (0.5 points), other (3 points)

Artwork

A1. How many times will this image be used?

Not at all (2.5 points), once (0.1 point), two or more times (2.5 points). Mirrored versions, smaller versions, and slightly edited versions of the image count.

A2. Will there be a word balloon that is more than half the size of the panel?

Yes, No (1 point each), More Than One (4 points)

A3. How many flashback images will there be?

None (2 points), Only One (.5 points), More Than One (1 point)

A4. Will a flashback image include a real person?

Yes, No (1 point each), More Than One (1.5 points). 5 points for any real person you can name.

A5. Will there be a sideways strip?

Yes, No (1 point each), More Than One (5 points)

A6. What early Tom Batiuk artwork will appear?

None (0.5 points), his childhood drawings (1.5 points), pre-Funky Winkerbean work such as Rapping Around (2 points), Funky Winkerbean art (2.5 points), childhood drawings by someone else (5 points)

A7. How many times will Skip smirk?

1 point per smirk, but your guess has to be exactly right. 10,000 points if you predict zero smirks and are correct.

A8. What intellectual property will be appropriated?

DC or Marvel characters (.1 point), characters from other comic strips (.5 points) someone else’s artwork, but you can name the person (2 points).

Subject Matter

M1. Will Batton mention comic books?

No (2 points), Only Once (.1 points), More Than Once (2 points)

M2. In which of the following ways will comic books appear?

Batton failing to get a job at DC or Marvel (.1 point), a comic book cover Batton had no stated role in creating (.1 points), a comic book cover Batton helped create (.2 points), collectible value (.3 points), writing for comic books (.5 points).

M3. Will Batton quote someone?

Yes (1.5 points), No (.5 points). 10 points if you can name them specifically,

M4. Who will Batton name-drop?

5 points for anyone you can name specifically. 10 points if that person hasn’t appeared yet.

M5. Who will Batton bash?

5 points for anyone you can name specifically. 10 points if that person hasn’t appeared yet.

M6. Will Batton act like a complete jackass at some point?

Yes (.0001 points), No (10000 points)

M7. Will Batton talk about doing actual work on Three O’Clock High or The Wrinkles?

Yes (.0001 points), No (10000 points)

M8. How many of the seven deadly sins will Batton commit?

One point for each, but you have to get it exactly right

Roll Your Own!

If you want to make a bet on something other than the above, post it in your comment, and I’ll offer a payout.

Batton Thomas, You Asked For It. Luann DeGroot, You Too.

Recently, the comic strip Luann has been irritating me almost as much as the Batton Death March, which begins its 11th week today. Luann‘s tedious story arc is about a “Career Paths” class, which seems to be the only class the title character is taking in her 27th semester of junior college.

I decided to improve both stories, by crashing them into each other.

Text that appears in the standard Crankshaft or Luann font is unedited from the original strip, except for minor rewording, and sometimes being paired with different artwork.

Warning: The parody story text contains lots of foul language.

NOTE: Those are parallelograms, not triangles.

The end.

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.

WEEK 1: 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.

WEEK 5: 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.

WEEK 10: February 23: The interview begins to run out of steam, even by its own very low standards. Batton drops several disjointed anecdotes that make him look even more petty and mean-spirited. Batton’s wife helps him color his comics; he took once someone else’s boxes from a shared storage area to use to pad his mailers; and whines that he doesn’t own his own characters. None of this is followed up.

March 16: They’re back at Batton’s studio. Batton shows off his drawing boards, fanboys over Milton Caniff, and extolls the virtues of bristol board.

April 20: The interview continues in a new location, the Centerview Sentinel offices. Skip asks “when did you realize you were a bonafide newspaper cartoonist”, even though it’s the only subject Batton has been talking about for almost two years now. Batton says it was when he was actually asked to give a speech! He fanboys about Chet Gould, and then say he declined to talk to Gould when he had the chance. He never says why, and Skip doesn’t ask.

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.