Lillian – Son of Stuck Funky

Limerence Front

Tom Batiuk’s latest attempt at a prestige arc, which he pretentiously titled “Dinkle, I Am Your Father” or something like that, is over.

Well, it’s not officially over. But I’m calling it over as of Thursday, because that’s the best place for it to end. I’m sure Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday will be full of Lillian smirking at us, and explaining how we’re supposed to interpret the ending. Which insults the reader, and undermines the point of leaving it ambiguous. But I’m done showing Tom Batiuk how to do his job.

This will also be the last leg of the strangest multi part post in SoSF history. Weather forecast: clear, smooth sailing. No trauma dumps or cluster f-bombs on the horizon. This post draws on elements of Destroy Everything You Touch, so read that if you haven’t already. Be warned: that post is also a M*A*S*H-level dive into my own psyche, tied into the two subplots of this tedious story. This post will continue that analysis, focusing on the Eugene and Lucy half of the story.

The problem is easy to explain. Eugene and Lucy is not a love story. Eugene and Lucy is a limerence story. Let’s start at the beginning:

Was it, Lillian? Was it really? Who besides you was even looking at them? It’s a dance! People are looking at their own dance partners! Like they should be! Get over your Main Character Syndrome! (No theory of mind, a central problem in all of Tom Batiuk’s writing, rears its ugly head again.)

This is not love, this is limerence. Also known as “putting someone on a pedestal,” “in love with being in love,” “infatuation”, “obsessive love”, and similar things that are bus stops between “crush” and “creepy.” It’s when you’ve built a fantasy version of someone in your mind, independent of any actual information you have about the person. This is a great explanation:

“Eternal Sunshine” is all about limerence. And it’s a damn good movie too.

Eugene and Lucy are a concept to each other. They’re both in love with the imaginary versions of each other they think will fulfill them. We don’t know anything about Eugene and Lucy, and they don’t know anything about each other, beyond one pleasant night at a pre-World War II dance, and an implied brief relationship. The story makes a lot of bold assertions about true love, but it provides zero evidence of that.

Most romantic relationships in the Funkyverse are actually limerence. They’re all arranged marriages between minor characters who don’t seem to have any reason to be together. This happens when your only source of how adult relationships work are comic books for 9-year-olds, and a marriage to your high school girlfriend.

John Howard and one-armed Becky are the most mismatched couple you could possibly create. She’s a disabled person with genuine talent, and is using it the best she can, hyper-motivated to prove she still has worth. He’s a lazy slob who only wants to spend all day in a comic book store, without ever contributing income to the family, or changing his T-shirt.

John and Becky, Bull and Linda, Mason and Cindy, Pam and Jeff, even Les and Lisa don’t even seem to like each other that much. (Exception: Funky and Holly genuinely do like each other, and have some sweet moments.)

I’ve long struggled with limerence, and it was a key reason many of my adult relationships fell apart. I took every relationship way too seriously, far more than my partner took it. Because I immediately turned any girl who gave me the time of day into a potential wife. I filled in any unknown data with what I wanted to be true. Limerence and low self-esteem is one hell of a cocktail.

The key is separating limerence from tangible qualities.

God, this show used to be so brilliant.

In Leaving Westview, I said:

In high school, I didn’t see anything but attractiveness and popularity as being important. I learned in adulthood that confidence, personality, positivity, values and common interests are far more important.

Let’s revisit Christine, my unrequited love from high school I introduced in Destroy Everything You Touch. (Inverted trope: I was her unrequited love.) She had personality, positivity, shared values and interests with me, and enough confidence to approach me when she otherwise didn’t have a flirty or forward nature.

This is not limerence. This isn’t me filling in the blanks with what I wanted her to be. These are genuine qualities I observed, based on many real interactions over a year or two. She was legitimately a very good potential partner, and would have been at any age. But in high school, I picked Ken O’Brien when Dan Marino was available. (Please note that Ken O’Brien was still a pretty good NFL quarterback, and two-time Pro Bowler. Susan, if you’re somehow reading this, I don’t regret picking you at all. You were awesome. My first kiss with you was one of the few romantic milestones in my life that actually went really well.)

Limerence can even make you idealize yourself! I caught myself comparing Christine’s 16-year-old self to my 54-year-old self, not my 17-year-old self. She was calm and easygoing, which I am now, but 17-year-old me very much was not. I was high-strung, and hadn’t learned how to manage my anger and frustration yet. Which might have been a serious obstacle in any real relationship with Christine. And I’ve had partners in my life who were attracted to me for qualities I definitely didn’t possess.

In the Funkyverse, limerence can apparently affect other people. Lillian seems to have swallowed the notion that Eugene and Lucy were some kind of destined couple that only didn’t get together because of her own selfish act. This is ridiculous.

If anything, Lillian should have been the one to tell her sister “oh come on, it was just one guy, get over it already.” Which is yet another way she should could have reversed her misdeed, but didn’t, even though she could have still covered up what she did. Lucy’s Story has a comprehensive list of the others.

It’s time for the lightning round! Today’s topic is Why This Story Sucks, Even By The Usual Low Standards Of The Funkyverse.

It’s too easy to move on. Despite my low romantic potential, I still preferred hoping for future opportunities in college over lamenting missed ones in high school. As any 18-year-old would.

Eugene never got a response to his letter, and interpreted that as a rejection of his marriage proposal. He served in the military until the end of World War II, and then came home. Imagine a returning soldier with a broken heart while V-J Day in Times Square is going on. No war veteran is going to be moping about the girl who said “no” years ago when they return home to a demographic abundance of females. Many of whom are throwing her panties at him, eager to start creating future baby boomers.

It should have been extremely easy for Eugene to forget Lucy and find a new girl. We’ll soon see why it wasn’t.

Something triggered my nostalgia. I haven’t been pining for Christine for 38 years. I never even thought of her for 37.95 of those years. Eugene has been in a consonant state of pining for Lucy since 1946, even though she died in 2009.

I don’t idealize the past. I realize that a relationship between Christine and I might not have worked out, for a million different reasons. Which would have been fine.

I spent most of my high school nights dreaming of random, unremarkable girls who caught my fancy at some point, but whom I never had the nerve to approach. They seemed unattainable to me. I daydreamed about how receptive they’d be to me, and how well-suited they’d be, even though I had no reason to think that. All while I ignored someone who actually was those things, and was trying to tell me she was interested. That’s what limerence does to you.

I recognize my own mistakes. Despite everything I wrote previously, I ultimately don’t blame anybody but myself. I could have started a relationship with Christine almost anytime I wanted to.

The failed relationship was a symptom of a much bigger emotional problem. This was obviously the case with me. My inner demons caused me to do an irrational, self-destructive thing to a desired relationship. We’ve often said that Eugene simply should have re-proposed to Lucy, or gotten a clarification of what her answer was. Why didn’t he?

Because Eugene was so afraid of rejection that he chose “no response means no” over Lucy actually telling him no. Why else would Eugene act like his “I’ll never bother you again” promise was more important to keep than his “I want to spend the rest of my life with you” promise? Which he didn’t keep anyway, because Eugene and Lucy had some kind of contact after that?

The four days of wordless, actionless panels imply that Eugene is moving into some kind of senior care facility, or hospice. And he’s ashamed of this. To be fair, dying at age 99 would be early compared to people like Lillian Mckenzie, Ed Crankshaft, and Mort Winkerbean. But I think there’s a much better explanation.

Eugene is moving into a mental institution.

Just like Lucy did.

And for the same reason Lucy did: because he was so in love with a concept that he let it destroy his entire life. And it also took Lillian down with it.

In a psychology class in college, I heard a story I’ll never forget. There was a psychologist who worked in a home of people having severe detachments from reality, to the extent that a woman would tell him she had a new baby every single day. The doctor said “even if I could push a button and cure her, I wouldn’t. She’s much happier where she is.”

So this is a bittersweet ending, which is an improvement from the just plain bitter we usually get. In the end, Eugene and Lucy got together, in a way. Unless this story is somehow still continuing. And if it is, then let me say with no irony whatsoever: bring on Batton Thomas!

Where Is Eugene Moving? Who Cares? It’s A Dinkle Story!

This is the photograph Lillian is looking at in today’s Crankshaft:

Okay, it’s not exactly the same photograph. Today’s version has what appears to be entrance doors where the text appears in the above image. But it’s now obvious where this week’s heavily padded story is going. Lillian is going to notice the name of the bandleader, and connect it to her choir director/former Bedside Manor band director/former Westview High School band director/fascist dictator/World’s Greatest Asshole Harry Dinkle.

It also explains the cryptic, pretentious introduction from Monday’s strip:

We all spent a week wondering what the hell that could possibly mean, in the apparent context of a very old man being forced to move somewhere unpleasant. It means we’re going to explore Dinkle’s daddy issues!

Oh boy. Where to begin?

This is so obvious I’m embarrassed to write it. But one-time Putlizer nominee Tom Batiuk apparently doesn’t know it, so here it is: A very old man awkwardly telling a lifelong friend about “moving to a new place” is a serious topic. It is not a benign piece of information you use to fill space while you get to the more important matter of yet another found photograph of yet another dead person.

I’ve used the word “tonelessness” to describe Tom Batiuk’s writing, and this is another manifestation of it: not knowing what’s important to human beings and what isn’t. This week appeared to be setting up a “move to the retirement home” story. Which can be played for dark humor. But that didn’t happen here either. Nor is Tom Batiuk even remotely capable of this.

It was also unclear why this would have been a bad thing for Eugene. Bedside Manor is a recurring location, and is never depicted negatively. Not even when it should be.

But the uncertain future of a 99-year-old man is irrelevant. Or the reveal is being pushed to the end for some reason that makes sense only to Tom Batiuk. It’s a coin flip whether the story even bothers addressing the matter later on.

The story didn’t even need the tired “found photograph” mechanism, because Eugene’s sad little shoebox also contained this:

That appears to say “Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro by Larry Dinkle.” Lillian could have found this sheet music almost anywhere, recognized the surname, asked Harry about it, and the same story could have progressed from there. This also could have been done in two days, tops. (On a personal note: my first ever blog post complained about Batiuk using days to set up something he could have opened with. It’s filler all the way down.)

I have a lot more thoughts, but let’s take a moment and enjoy what we’ve got here: a genuine Funky Winkerbean Act III-style prestige arc! Have fun in the comments!

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.

This Week Is Going To Be Awesome! (That Was Sarcastic.)

This week’s story in Crankshaft actually offends me.

It offends me because I was a news journalist once upon a time. So I know firsthand what a huge amount of work goes into creating video content. Even a simple 90-second TV news story means you have to write scripts, schedule, shoot, edit, add on-screen graphics, mix sound, fix errors, and manage the whole project.

And YouTube content can be even more complex than that, with fancy animations and the like. Don’t let the lo-fi, “I shot this in my apartment” aesthetic of YouTube content fool you about how much effort it requires.

Computers make these tasks a lot easier now, but that just means you have more competition. Almost anyone can be a content producer nowadays. Which is a good thing! YouTube is full of great stuff, from people whose voices we never would have heard otherwise. It turns out, the world is full of Hal P. Warrens. And they’re making broadcast-quality stuff. (There should be a Warren Award for do-it-yourself filmmakers.)

But Tom Batiuk has decided that Lillian needs to be a media star for the 25th time now, so now she’s going to become The Reluctant YouTuber. As if this were even possible.

This week is a great example of something Epicus Doomus often says: Batiuk never runs out of new ways to be infuriating and boring at the same time. It’s recently become a sport for commenters at this blog to try and guess what the next week of Crankshaft will be about. Known future stories include the upcoming Pete-Mindy wedding; the trip to Winnipeg for a Blue Bombers game; a likely trip to San Diego Comic-Con in late July, even though post-Funky Winkerbean has pivoted away from Atomik Komix; the endless Skip-Batton Thomas interview; Cindy’s pregnancy at Age 75, which is entering its fifth trimester; and standard Crankshaft plots.

But no, Lillian needs to be rewarded for doing nothing again, when she’s one of the most vile characters fiction has ever created.

Never mind all the practical problems with the story. In today’s strip, it looks they’re shooting a TV commercial for Lillian’s Murder In The Blank series. This book has a limited appeal, and has already been out for months. A promo would serve little purpose. And they’re shooting it with a cell phone? The video quality is going to be crap.

It’s like they’re trying to do a BookTok thing. But BookTok is a community for readers to talk about what they read, not for writers to promote what they wrote. And Lillian’s work is probably self-published, which is another hurdle to clear. Book reviewers usually have a policy against reviewing self-published/vanity press works at all, because they insist that a book have survived the winnowing process of being selected by a publisher. I can’t imagine the BookTok community would be receptive to this old self-promoting crone.

Another thing that annoys me: the girls work for Lillian, not vice versa. Especially after the recent week where they demanded to be paid. I think she hired one, because the other one still works at Centerview Sentinel. (Well, at least we know how the paper is still getting made, while Skip sits in Montoni’s with Batton Thomas for months on end.) But as we all know, no Funkyverse character can refuse to do something some other character wants, even when they’re that character’s boss.

But what galls me the most is how dismissive the Funkyverse is of every profession that isn’t teaching high school, writing, comic books, or pizza.

Making web videos? Pfffft. Easy stuff that anyone can be famous at. Remember when Bingo the Cat wandered into a video, and St. Spires church raised enough money to pay the national debt? Remember when Frankie was handed a reality show to slander and humiliate his sexual assault victim who died of cancer? Remember when Hollywood just stood around and let Les Moore make all the decisions for “his” movie, paid him a bunch of money, and probably took a loss when it failed? Remember how Cindy Summers became a national TV news reporter despite being a lazy, vacuous idiot?

Remember when Funky humiliated that investment planner for no reason at all? Or the many times he was a jackass to a doctor and their staff? Or when he abused his position as support group coordinator to workshop his lame standup? Remember the “Toxic Taco”? Remember “FleaBay”? Remember became how Crazy Harry and Donna/The Eliminator became world champions of a notoriously difficult video game, despite rarely picking up a joystick otherwise?

And before this week is over, Tom Batiuk will make a YouTube star out of a 105-year-old woman who doesn’t even want to be one. Who also can’t even make her own website, or write her own biography. That’s a slap in the face to anyone who’s picked up a camera.

To answer Lillian’s question from Monday’s strip: yes, Lillian, you have lived far too long. But technology has nothing to do with it. Dieplzkthx.

(UPDATE: As of Saturday, Lillian had only two YouTube followers, but still manages to be smug and insufferable about it. The whole week was an exercise in phony humility. “Oh, poor little old me doesn’t know anything about YouTube.” Then starting on Thursday, she knows she needs a professional voiceover artist, and knows what a follower is.

Which speaks to the underlying problem of it all. All the books, all the videos, all the signings, all the awards, all the interviews that get created by the dozens of characters in the Funkyverse serve only one purpose: an ego wank for the creator. We never even see them creating the content, or even having any real desire to create it. Just like we didn’t see it this week. The plot is always: 1. Declare self a writer. 2. Receive praise.)

Why Is Giving “Fahrenheit 451” To High School Students A Bigger Crime Than Arson?

The Armor-Piercing Question is the moment in a story where a character (usually the hero) asks another character (usually the villain) something that unravels their entire world. It exposes the flaw in the villain’s worldview, reveals knowledge of something the villain had tried to hide, shows them the evil of their ways in a way that will hurt them, and so on. Wreck-It Ralph has a great one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW1XX2L7g7Y

The title of this post is my Armor-Piercing Question, for this story. Why is the severity of the protestors’ crime being ignored? Not just by the story, but by the town, and by the main characters. I think this is the linchpin of why this story fails.

Yes, there are stories where the main characters can’t go to the authorities for help, because the authorities are actively helping the villains, or institutionally corrupt. This plot device is as old as Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. And, the police has shown some pretty questionable judgment. Like covering up Bull Bushka’s dubious suicide, and arresting Adeela when they wanted someone else with a similar name. But there’s no evidence of that in this story.