Tag: sepia-toned flashback

Plot Twist: Phil Holt Was Never The Main Character Of This Story

The story completely undermines itself.

It doesn’t look like Phil Holt had much of a “try out” for Prince Valiant. It looks like he made an unsolicited submission to a large publisher, which was promptly thrown in the trash. By the receptionist. Ouch.

This is typical, though. Most big media companies have a stated policy of “we do not accept unsolicited submissions,” and return them to the submitter with a letter to that effect. This so people can’t claim the publisher stole some half-baked idea they submitted, and try to sue them for damages.

But who’s that in the background? A man who is very specifically drawn; has a monogrammed art satchel; a pair of initials no real person who worked on Prince Valiant had; and looks like he’s waiting for an interview.

It’s Batton Thomas.

As further evidence, I submit this photo from the Funky Winkerbean blog:

That’s Tom Batiuk on the left. I don’t know who the other man is, because I don’t know the context of this photo. It’s too young to be Hal Foster, who was born in 1892, and looked like this in 1962.

Today’s strip makes it clear that Phil Holt tried to nag his way into a tryout, when Batton Thomas had a genuine tryout lined up. Which raises the obvious question: why is this story about Phil Holt and not Batton Thomas??!! Just from today’s strip, we know that Thomas has a better “I tried out for Prince Valiant” story.

This makes Phil look like a liar. In fact, this strip raises a lot of questions:

  • Two days ago, Phil said he has memory problems. Are we supposed to infer that his recollection of events is false?
  • Phil said he was “up against” Wally Wood and Gray Morrow, but he didn’t even have an appointment to show his work when Batton Thomas did.
  • Sunday’s strip was Phil telling an obviously fake story. Is he doing it again?
  • Does Kitch know everything Phil says is baloney, and is just humoring him for some reason?
  • Does today’s strip mean Tom Batiuk himself auditioned for Prince Valiant? Batiuk has never spoken of this.
  • Why would Batiuk give this storyline to his Jack Kirby clone instead of his self-insert character?
  • What does it say about the cast of Funky Winkerbean that it has multiple characters who could have plausibly auditioned to draw Prince Valiant in 1970?
  • What’s even real in this world?

The Funkyverse tries to use Expy Coexistence. Characters are analogues of real people, but mention real people, places, and events. This is done very inconsistently, though. Some characters are real people (Hal Foster, Conan O’Brien); some are ersatz versions of real people (Phil Holt, Flash Freeman, Batton Thomas); some are purely fictional (Ruby Lith, Pete); some are unclear because they’re real names that are spelled wrong (Gary Morrow, Joe Schuster); and some are fantastic entities that can’t exist in a realistic world (Holtron, Lord of the Late). Some fictional characters are real people in this world (Dick Tracy); some fictional comic worlds are still fictional in this one (Prince Valiant, Batman); and this world has its own in-universe fictional properties (Starbuck Jones, the entire Atomik Komix oeuvre).

There are a lot of other inconsistencies that need to be cleared up, too. Like how the time skips are supposed to work.

Funky Winkerbean needs a Universe Bible. I know Tom Batiuk can do this, because he wrote one for Batom Comics. And it’s actually decent. It’s concise, has a clear idea what it wants to convey, and isn’t trying to bludgeon you with a dictionary. Compare that group of blog posts with this group and you’ll see the difference.

This will also be a Cartooning Suggestion:

Write a Funkyverse Bible. And then obey it.

This would solve a lot of the problems that arise from Tom Batiuk constantly reinventing characters and the strip’s history to fit short-term story needs.

Batting .500

Ugggggggggggggggggggggggggh.

It’s Day 10 of the arc, and this is the fifth strip that could have been omitted entirely. It does not advance the story, reveal any new information, or serve any other purpose.

When I was in high school, I was in a theater production of Rebel Without A Cause. There’s a scene where a character dies because his car goes off a cliff. We accomplished this by playing a sound effects audio clip on the PA system, and telling the actors to improvise some dialog to fill the time. They never got it right. It was either “He’s getting close to the edge! He’s going to go over the edge! Oh no, he’s at the edge! He’s really close to the edge now!” Or they just said random things, and were somehow surprised when the crash sound happened.

Funky Winkerbean reminds me of that. It has no idea what pacing it needs, or what direction it wants to go. It’s just slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, ohmygodIneedtowrapthisuphurryhurryhurryhurry. It’s either burying you under an avalanche of pointless exposition because it’s got all week, or skipping important story points to get finished because the week’s almost over. It’s like watching the first hour of a long. tedious movie, and then random bits of the rest of it.

I blame Tom Batiuk’s insistence on week-long story arcs. I think it’s one of the less-talked about reasons why Funky Winkerbean is as bad as it is. Batiuk seems far more interested in making his arcs exactly six days long than he is in making them any good. I would put an end to that, with the second of my Comics Suggestions:

Story arcs must start on a day other than Monday, or end on a day other than Saturday and Sunday.

No more week-long arcs. Stories will be the number of days they need to be, rather than filling an arbitrary length for no good reason. Hopefully, this will encourage the culling of unproductive strips (which this arc has a lot of), and let stories happen more naturally.

This also replaces the “three-week rule” Batiuk frequently mentions. There’s nothing wrong with long story arcs, if they are otherwise compelling. This is dreadful at any length.

Hey! Art Teacher! Leave Them Kids Alone!

Link To Today’s

Ha, ha ha! He’s screwing with the students’ educations and undermining his fellow faculty members! Just to suit his own needs! Isn’t that HILARIOUS? Comedy f*cking gold right there, folks! What a guy! No wonder eleven or twelve Ohioian band directors love Dinkle and tape these Dinkle strips to the side of their office filing cabinets! Haphazardly, too, no doubt. Then, after they inevitably retire, those same strips are scraped away with a razor knife and become more floor sweepings, quickly forgotten floor sweepings. It’s kind of sad, really.

I’d give just about anything if this arc would just abruptly stop and suddenly go into, I don’t know, a few strips where Funky works out or Holly uses the credit card or something. Anything. Dinkle being felled by a massive coronary would be good too, but then there’d be a flashback-packed funeral arc that’d drag on for weeks, and no one wants that. And as we all know, it wouldn’t necessarily mean he was really, permanently dead, as people return from the dead all the time in the Funkyverse. So really there’s just no practical way to get rid of him, ever. BatHam likes him and he’s going to feature him twelve weeks every year whether we like it or not.

Just Holtron To What We’ve Got

Link To The Thing

Why, back when I first started here at SoSF it was really tough to defend my turf, I’ll tell you what. That was back before the internet, when SoSF was still hand-drawn on notebook paper and passed around via the comic strip underground scene. I knew what levers to pull, though, as right after I gave TF Hackett that $20 Wawa gift card, I was in. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Yeah, yeah, Dinkle rigged the school computer to “fix” the students’ schedule to his benefit and so forth. He really was quite a character fifty years ago. Unfortunately, though, everyone hates Act III Dinkle, and everyone grew tired of his ancient marching band gags by 1983 or thereabouts. So where does that leave us? Sigh…right here.

Font Of Outrage

Link To Today’s Strip

This, right here, is why everyone hates getting a Dinkle arc. Dinkle and/or band directing just grinds this already glacially-paced strip to a dead, still halt. As astoundingly bad as last week was, you had Makeover Summer gawking around, Boy Lisa being in the wedding for some reason, a possible love triangle, technology gags, comic books AND pizza. But this week? Total Dinkle flatline. I’m not even sure what the gag here is supposed to be. I really hate it when he shamelessly panders to band directors like this.