“Increasingly painful” is a pretty apt description of this week’s arc. Crazy Harry doubles down on the imaginary CEO concept, and is compelled to give the old heave-ho to a raft of brilliant authors, any one of which, on his worst day, could write circles around Tom Batiuk.
It’s unseemly enough to have a suddenly unemployed adult decide to sell his books instead of searching for another job. But this whole transference thing, with the displaced worker assuming the role of CEO in his mind, and summarily issuing “walking papers” to his prized possessions, is just weird. Funky had best break down right now and offer him that Montoni’s gig, because this is getting to be re-God-damn-diculous.
Son of Stuck Funky 
It takes a certain sort of person to equate the free, open access to information provided by a public library to hiring cheap freelance labor. I’m not sure what the exact term for that person is, but I know it isn’t complimentary.
Increasingly stupid, too. The way Batom Inc. can take a weak, miniscule little joke or premise (like this CEO thing) and flay the living shit out of it for an entire week without ever getting anywhere is just amazing. “Harry was laid-off from his USPS job. He may have to sell his prized comic collection”. Two sentences of content, two weeks of comic strips. Given his mastery of filler material, I will pass on any dishes involving ground beef if I’m ever dining at Batominc HQ.
Harry owns books???
(and again, unless they’re signed first editions, he’d be lucky to get a dollar or two for each)
SP Charles is spot-on–used bookstores are pretty cut-throat nowadays. You’ve got the Signet versions of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, or the Ballantine Lord of the Rings? Hey fella, the line forms at the back. If you wanna save time, the “Free” bin is out front, just dump them there. Next!
don’t be so hard-on batshit Epic,he also is busy dragging out crankshit with two week brownies strip
So I guess this is supposed to be an allegory of the failings of Big Business, a subject ripe for parody. Unfortunately, our auteur doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. So it sort of fails. “Write what you know” is the advice best served for writers with highly limited imaginations. In other words, advice perfect for TB. Unfortunately, given the comic-book-oriented slant of this arc, it appears that even that advice is too advanced for our talent-deprived author.
Might as well try and sell your beloved “Night of the Living Dead” DVD while you’re at it.
Seriously, Harry, even Goodwill would likely turn its nose up at your “collection”. You’re talking about these things like they’re going to bring you enough money to cover the gas it’s gonna cost you to drive to the second-hand bookstore. Beanie babies would have been a better investment.
Your books are probably worth more on fire as a source of heat.
I suppose this is what we’ve been waiting for – real mental illness.
CH, FW, TB are all a bunch of dumbshits.
I have a 1st edition signed Stephan King novel and it fetched $25 on e-bay.
If the science fiction writers are Harry’s “R&D” department, what does that make his pron stash (assuming his Tarzan collection isn’t his pron stash)?
More scary tone deafness from ButtYuck. This is a guy who doesn’t know Skunk Head and Mopey Pete are extremely creepy and that Les and Cayla’s relationship is dysfunctional. With Crazy Harry and his “library,” he aims for “quirky,” but hits “mentally ill.” Only a mere quarter inch away, in the Land of Reality, a guy who starts talking like Harry here would be brought in for psychiatric evaluation. I expect him to start carrying on conversations with these books, and maybe having sex with a couple of them.
Geez, the only thing harder to make money off of than old comics is old books. Still, i kind of like calling the golden age SF “R&D” for comics, so i’ll give a pass today.
I was hoping Crazy’s bookshelf was Batiuk’s, but here you can see many of his favorite titles just under “the Lisa Shrine” (his own words)–and most are old comic strip collections and James Bonds. Huh.
Wait… with Crankshaft infirm or dead in the FW timeline, why hasn’t Crazy become the new Centerville Mall Santa Claus? He could argue with kids about Batman and get paid for it, instead of just doing it for free at DSH’s shop.
And speaking of DSH, what’s going to become of Komix Korner now that his only paying customer is selling instead of buying?
What is up with Funky’s nose in panel three? has it ever looked like that before? Seriously. O know that Snoopy’s and Charlie Brown’s looks changed over the years but it was a gradual thing ( I am partial to the elongated Snoopy from the early 60’s, but I digress), but it was gradual and not day to day or panel to panel.
Here is how you change a character’s look:
And you know I think only Doonesbury has pulled off a successful time jump. And Crazy Harry today looks nothing like the stoner Crazy Harry from the 70’s. Which is what he was–not a hippe which is what he is now.
Anyhow: I am going to stop at used book store to see how much one can get for used books. It is right on my way home and by a gas station. But I think davidorth is correct: Harry will spend more in gas or bus fare than he would ever receive.
I expect him to start carrying on conversations with these books, and maybe having sex with a couple of them.
Now we know the REAL reason he refused sex with his wife!
Has Harry picked out a shopping cart yet? He better hurry before the other mailmen get all the ones without a sticking wheel.
Batiuk still hasn’t told us who is delivering the mail now that Harry is out of a job. Maybe the Post Office is outsourcing it to Santa’s Elves.
But seriously, I get the feeling that Funky is going to save the day again, which he has done for DSH John (at least twice) and the Westview High sports program. The irony is, the rest of the time he behaves like a troll.
Of course. Of course! Of course Crazy Harry, creature as he is of Batominc’s tepid imagination, reveres only dead, white, male SF authors. As closely as can be determined in this strip’s sloppy, slippery time line, I am exactly Harry’s age. And yes, when I was 8, I went to the public library’s SF section and started at the top left, and got a really good SF education by the time I got to high school from A, B, C, D, and E: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Dick, and Ellison. And I did skip ahead a bit to Heinlein. But, you know, I also read some L’Engle, Delaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin (whose name is so cool, you always have to set it out in full). And then I read newer authors in magazines like Analog and Asimov’s SF. Batominc will devote huge walls of text to turgid lectures about the value of all this genre art, but won’t spare the ink for a little diversity here.
Feh!
To paraphrase Don M. Mankiewicz and Steven W. Carabatsos:
HARRY: Books, old man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn’t so important, I’d show you something. My library. Thousands of books.
FUNKY: And what would be the point?
HARRY: This is where science fiction is. Not in some homogenised, pasteurised, synthesiser. Do you want to know about positronic robots, the ancient concepts in their own language, learn the intent of the men who wrote them, from Asimov to Clarke? Books.
FUNKY: You have to be either an obsessive crackpot who’s escaped from his keeper or CRAZY T. HARRY, collector of comics.
HARRY: Right on both counts. Need a mailman?
FUNKY: I’m afraid so.
Crazy Harry is beginning to sound like an old, bitter hippie. If SOUTH PARK’S Cartman were around, Harry would get a punch in his mailsack.
Just the other day I took a whole bunch of old paperbacks down to the local used bookstore. Around 40 books, I think, none of them really remarkable but all of them in good condition and all of them good books.
The offered me $2 and change (in cash) or $15 and change (in store credit). Which, by the way, I felt was fair enough.
If Harry is hoping to pay his bills by selling books, well then I guess he’s Crazy.
(Someone had to say it.)
The way most art shifts work is starting out with a concept, evolving within a few decades or years (depending on the medium type) and using that consistently, until it starts to degrade with age.
Characters should not gain sudden changes: Crazy Harry’s de-aging, Fishstick Annie’s sudden geriatric appearances, Funky’s nose job (see top of page for how Funky looks normally).
That’s just lazy.
Obvious Tombat Alias Alert — Batom, Inc is posting as “comixpro” on the other site, lamely taking up for himself. Funniest part is he has smugly claimed in the past that he posts only under his real name.
Harry: “I’m tossing out some old books! Because that’s the first thing on every unemployed man with two dependent children’s agenda! Getting more shelf space!”
Funky: “I…apparently have nothing better to do than listen to you talk about tossing out old books.”
**********************************
Tom Batiuk: “Comedy Gold!”
Reader: “Well, actua-”
Tom Batiuk: “Quite, you no good pedantic hidebound literalist!”
I think it was a “comixpro” in some forum who was so vehement that shutting down SoSF was not only for copyright usage, but a good and moral thing to do as well.
Wasn’t there a second-hand bookstore that Les used to “haunt” that closed down? If a second hand bookstore can’t sell enough second hand books to stay in busines, how’s a second hand book schmuck going to manage?
I don’t often assume an author is posting under a pseudonym but in “comixpro” (pro indeed?)’s case, you have to wonder. Literally no one else on Earth could possibly read this comic that way except for Batiuk himself. It is the unfathomable distance between what the artist intends and the audience perceives that makes Funky so eminently snarkable.
I’m always skeptical about anything I read in internet forums, but yeah, I have no problem believing that “Comixpro” could be TB (or one of his relatives). Not just for the way he sticks up for Batiuk, but for characterizing FW’s critics as “mental midgets” and “losers”.