FIRE!
Arthur Brown knew how to make an entrance! Tom Batiuk, not so much.
The Burnings have commenced! Both the Daily Cartoonist and Cleveland.com ran puff pieces in advance of the story, much like we saw ahead of the CTE arc. We’ve been wondering about the nature of The Burnings for months now, and these stories reveal some details:
Continue reading “I Am The God Of Hellfire, And I Bring You…”This week, Tom Batiuk gave us a classic Funky Winkerbean story. Also, he posted some nonsense on his blog about Harry and Donna going back in time to play “Defenders” again.
This week’s Crankshaft is once again worthy of comment as an extension of Funky Winkerbean Act III. It gave us a Funkyverse staple: the “young people just starting out” story. Tom Batiuk loves this story, as he loves any story where he can just walk the characters through the procedure again. Even when it doesn’t make sense for the character, as it doesn’t with Pete.
It’s been over a month since Harriet promised you an epic screed from me, about the three weeks Crankshaft spent on three different book signings (two for Dinkle and one for Batton Thomas). I haven’t delivered it yet, because I said I wanted to make sure the arc was over.
It wasn’t over. It’s still not over yet. It may not be over for months. Continue reading “The Two Scariest Words In The Funkyverse”
Harriet promised you an epic screed from me about this week’s shenanigans. This isn’t that screed, but it’s coming. In part because I want to be 100% sure there’s no second week of this arc. So right now, this is a quick TBTropes entry about the finale of the arc about the festival of Ohio-related books. I refuse to give them any more free advertising space than Tom Batiuk already has. Continue reading “Jumped The Comic Book”
Today’s TBTrope is about power dynamics. This is a subject I’ve wanted to explore for awhile now.
All fiction runs on Like Reality, Unless Noted. When we are consuming a story, we assume that the story’s world is like our own, unless the story says otherwise. We use our own knowledge to fill in the gaps about how things work. When we’re watching a rom-com, Emma Stone doesn’t turn to turn to the camera to explain to the audience how dating works. We all know how it works, from our own lives. And so it is with interpersonal dynamics.
In a story, one character may hold power over another. In the funny pages, the mechanics of this are often very simple. Adult/child, boss/subordinate, older sibling/younger sibling, aggressive person/timid person, and so on.
Funky Winkerbean used to understand this. In Act I, Bull was a bully and Les was his victim. Harry Dinkle was a hyper-demanding band director, whose students had no power to resist his orders. The characters made sense, even in the comically exaggerated world of Act I. We recognized these situations from our own lives. We understood the power dynamics in play.
By Act III, though, a new paradigm had emerged. I call it By The Power Of Batiuk. “The character in control of any situation is the character Tom Batiuk thinks should be in control of it, not the character who actually would be.”
Continue reading “Fight The Power!”
Son of Stuck Funky 