Tag: The Komix Thoughts

All The News That’s Fit To Print

Two minor news items from the Funkyverse:

Tom Batiuk is writing a foreword for a Prince Valiant collection. The blog post “Workin’ Tonight” confirms this, and that it’s made him too busy to write any other blog posts right now. Hey, he wrote seven comic strips for July 2024, *and* a book foreword, all this week. How does he keep up this blistering pace?

Batiuk is a very strange choice for this honor. In July 2022, Funky Winkerbean had story a that depicted real-life Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster as an art thief, got Gray Morrow’s name wrong, and conspicuously omitted Foster’s successor John Cullen Murphy. It also ignored Prince Valiant’s real-life succession process, which would have worked much better than the dumb fictional story he wrote for Phil Holt and himself. I thought the whole thing bordered on libel, but I guess it didn’t offend the current Prince Valiant braintrust.

(UPDATE: Batiuk’s blog post specifically said “upcoming collection from Fantagraphics.” Which suggests the regular collections of Prince Valiant which the company publishes. This page at Amazon lists them all, and lists writers of forewords, afterwords, and introductions as co-authors. Few people are credited as such. These included Brian M. Kane (multiple times), Mark Schultz (twice), Dan Nadel, P. Craig Russell, Thomas Yeates, Tim Truman, and Roger Stern. Kane is a comics historian. Most of the other men are artists or illustrators. Batiuk seems even less worthy of this honor than it appeared at first.)

In other news, Tom Batiuk knows what cropping a photo is. The Saturday Crankshaft includes a pun on Pam cropping some photos, which proves he’s heard of the concept. It’s an interesting admission, considering we just talked about Batiuk’s own photos, which are badly in need of cropping. Here’s an example:

Batiuk’s raw photo is on the left. On the right is my cropped version. I removed those obnoxious bicycle tires at the bottom right, and some of those ugly golf carts. But this photo doesn’t need to be cropped so much as it needs to be re-taken entirely. Move two steps to the left, white balance, zoom in, and focus. Then it would look like this:

It’s much better, don’t you think?

This isn’t the first time Batiuk has used an artistic term as a joke without understanding it.

What’s Les Moore’s motivation? Buddy, we’ve been asking that question for years.

Sweet Home Ohio

Hey folks, it’s another The Komix Thoughts post post! Seems our ol’ pal Tom visited lovely Lake Erie recently, and graced his regular blog readers with a whole slew of delightfully Batiukesque pictures of various things. Fans of his uniquely mundane photography work need to check that out right now.

He also included this humdinger of an observation, which is just too good to not share.

“I’ve always been attracted by the Chautauqua commitment to the idea of lifelong learning, but I never followed the thought any further than that.”

Only one man could have penned a sentence that incongruous and baffling. While interested in the concept of “lifelong learning”, he never really went anywhere with it, which negates the entire point of lifelong learning in the first place. It’s almost zen-like in its own warped, demented way. Thank God for The Komix Thoughts, as shit like this really merits being preserved and archived.

When Life Gives You Lemons, You Make Second Rate Pizza And Eat It In The Parking Lot

I’m a little late with this spur-of-the-moment post, as this was from June 8th, but this The Komix Thoughts post amused me more than the entire run of “Crankshaft” AND all of Act III combined.

“At a book signing in Akron at Luigi’s (yes, the book launch was at a pizzeria. A sterling example by Susan Cash, who was the marketing manager for the Press, of thinking outside the pizza box.), they closed for the afternoon, and we spent the day with people filling the restaurant and the line spilling out the door. The generous folks at Luigi’s even took food and drinks out to the people waiting in line to get their books signed. When they finally had to open for the dinner hour, we moved my signing table to the parking lot and finished the book signing there.”

So essentially, they threw him out. The inner workings of this man’s mind are just endlessly fascinating. I picture a lot of non-Euclidean gears, wheels and ramps, all leading nowhere, with peculiar atonal melodies whistling in the background. It’s like he lives in another dimension that only he can perceive or access.

Not going to one of these book signings is a major life regret of mine. Mind you, I never wanted to openly harass the guy or anything, but what I really wanted to do was pepper him with increasingly obscure FW questions until he reached his breaking point…if he even has one, that is.

“So, Mr. B, sir. There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long, long time. Is Kerry Darin’s step-half sister, or is she his half-step sister? And how would Kerry and Summer be related?”

Things like that. And I’d have been all enthusiastic too, like I was a genuine FW superfan. I’d have worn a “Stay Funky!” T shirt, a fake Les goatee, and waved a homemade “Band Directors Make Better Music Together” sign, in the official FW font. And I’d have put tape on the corners, all haphazardly of course.

The rest of his post (you know where to find it) is pretty funny too, but man, that “Lisa’s Story” signing sounds like it was THE book signing to go to, like Jimi at Monterey or Van Halen at the US Festival. I’m sure all the other ones were, uh, “good” too, but that one sounds like it was a real barn burner.