TBTropes – Page 4 – Son of Stuck Funky

Pseudo Echo

It’s time for another installment in the TBTropes series, where we come up with TVTropes-style descriptions of the writing techniques used in the Funkyverse and nowhere else. So far we’ve seen:

Story Asserting: The tendency of Tom Batiuk to advance every story where he wants it to go, with no regard to logic, realistic human behavior, the characters having motivations of their own, or making any sense.

Schrodinger’s Continuity: Continuity exists in a perpetually unknown state, its outcome influenced by events we cannot comprehend. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, Tony Montoni can be both dead and alive, until the story reveals which he is.

Tonelessness: The tendency of a work to convey no exposition at all, or any information about the author’s intent.

Today we’ll talk about a particular type of Tonelessness. Continue reading “Pseudo Echo”

Schrodinger’s Pizza

Three days. Three days separated these two strips. Last Friday, Montoni’s was closed, because a “Crankshaft sets things on fire” joke needed it to be closed. Today, Montoni’s is open, because it’s time for Pete and Mindy to get married. And because Pete is such a cheap, lazy schlub he wouldn’t dare go anywhere else. You’d think the writer of a multi-billion dollar movie franchise might do something a little special for a wedding proposal. Like Carrabba’s, in Westlake. Is he going to give her salad dressing too?

Monological Imperatives In Dick And Jane

Hey folks, Banana Jr. 6000 here stepping in, with the second entry in my hopefully educational TBTropes series.

One of Tom Batiuk’s crazy blog posts, from a couple years ago, was about his decision not to use fourth wall breaks anymore after Act I ended. He said:

I stopped doing that because, while it’s funny, you lose the investment and involvement of the audience. They know the characters are going to be just fine, and they don’t really care about their fate. By breaking the fourth wall, I inject myself into the story to wink at the reader as we share the joke. Now, however, I began telling stories where my presence was less intrusive and less needed.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/match-to-flame-160/

Batiuk doesn’t seem to realize what he also lost when he made this decision. Continue reading “Monological Imperatives In Dick And Jane”

T.B. Tropes

Most works that are infamous for being bad – The Room, The Eye of Argon, Big Rigs Over The Road Racing, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Crown Royal – are bad in ways that are easy to explain, and apparent to anyone who consumes them.

Funky Winkerbean was an awful comic strip, but in ways that are difficult to quantify.

My usual go-to resource for this kind of analysis is TVTropes. A trope is a “narrative device or convention used in storytelling or production of a creative work.” TVTropes catalogues them all, and catalogues works in all media by the tropes they use. Most importantly, it gives us a language we can use to talk about what’s good or bad about creative works. It’s one of the best things the hive mind of the Internet has ever come up with. If you’re not already a reader, go check it out, but be warned that TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life.

I view tropes as the atoms of storytelling. Every object in your home, at its most fundamental level, is made up of atoms. Water is two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. Salt is sodium and chlorine. If you look up your favorite book/movie/TV show/record/comic strip/video game/Bible story/anime/whatever on TVTropes, you’ll get a list of the tropes it’s made of. It’s a way of breaking down your favorite story into its most basic elements, and discussing what does well or badly.

Tom Batiuk’s writing is so bad that it defies this model.