Why is everybody always picking on me?

[austin_dern]

Could we please get an injunction or something against Tom Batiuk? His work to make Funky Winkerbean an endless trail of depression, doom, and despair, let up with just enough rays of hope to crush everybody later on, justify it, but this week in his other strip, Crankshaft, we have the discovery that it's Crankshaft's birthday and somehow, incredibly, everybody has big important plans and can't be around this evening. Even his family are off somewhere or other, but they remembered the important thing, and they ask him to tape Masterpiece Theater for them.

Yes, the only story more predictable than getting trapped in a meat locker, the only punch line more predictable than a Jay Leno monologue can sustain, the only premise more boringly over-told than incompetent Star Trek time travel gibberish and Batiuk is laying it on us. Granted no creative person can come up with all-new stories all the time, and granted a talented person can wring new life out of the most turgid clichés -- has Batiuk given us any hint that he's up to finding something worth doing?

A lot of people whine about Classic Peanuts taking up space on the comics page, but when this is the ``living'' competition it's hard to see why.

Incidentally -- yes, I will be buying the Fantagraphics books doing the complete run of Peanuts. I'm just waiting until it's closer to my next trip to the U.S. (shipping's easier) and will buy from the publishers, since apparently that's the only way apart from visiting the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, to buy the book with Schulz's Li'l Folks and other pre-Peanuts material. You can see my interest in that.

Trivia: The term for ``channel surfer'' first appeared in the 1950s in print as ``channel swimmer.'' Source: The Story of the English Language, Mario Pei.

Currently Reading: Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed The Course of History, Giles Milton.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming 'Funky Winkerbean' has changed. In the late 70s it used to be quite funny, with the 'rumblerumblerumble' sound effect of class-changing time, and the hall monitor's chair with a Vickers machine gun mounted on the arm (which now and again would be used to machine gun some miscreant)...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, you missed a huge premise reset, then. In spring 1992 Funky and gang finally graduated as the Class of 1988 ... and then the next Monday many of them gathered at the high school again, having gone through college and become teachers or pizza shop owners or the like (``it seems like just last week we were students here''). Although some of the running jokes, like the Band, were kept, they also picked up a tremendous series of soap operatic ``dramatic'' plots that have earned widespread derision in rec.arts.comics.strips for being both predictable and ludicrous. It's a hard combination to pull off, granted, but why strive for it?

Among plots that I'm not making up from the past decade include Funky turning alcoholic; a crazed bomber blowing up the post office across the street from the pizza place severely injuring Les's wife, who survived breast cancer; Funky's little brother Wally driving while drunk, getting into a crash that chops off the arm of his then-girlfriend, who gave up an appointment at Juliard because of it; Wally running off to join the Army, getting sent to Afghanistan, being in a helicopter that gets blown up, being captured and held for months and finally escaping by walking around in the snow his regular ten-minutes-of-exercise long enough that a big frowny face shows up on Department of Defense reconnaissance photos; Comic Book Guy selling off his life's collection to buy an engagement ring for Wally's former girlfriend just in time for Wally to come back and sweep her off her foot as a war hero and stuff; bitter divorce on Funky's part; and the bankruptcy of the comic book shop.

Oh, and CIndy Summers is now an anchor on ABC's World News Now, and after Columbine the machine gun was retconned in the worst possible way, to being a ``cardboard prop.''

The most compelling thing about the strip is trying to keep your hyperbole about the next calamity ahead of what actually happens. I called Comic Book Guy's big Proposal Dinner getting cut short by Wally impossibly returning home, for example.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

As I've said before, the great tendency of a comic strip is to turn into a soap opera. Some were birthed that way: Mary Worth, Gasoline Alley, etc.. some have evolved slowly like For Better or For Worse and Doonesbury. Funky Winkerbean might be somewhat explained by that tendency, but it goes beyond it to soul-crushing levels. I think Batiuk genuinely likes causing pain to these characters; I can't fathom why, but it's there. I've noticed the same tendency in an online comic or two (which move even faster to soap operas- much as I like Kevin and Kell, it's a strip where everyone Falls In Love sooner or later). Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance went through the storyline 'Kitten' where a lot of mid-level subsidary characters bit the dust in a very unpleasing horro-movie fashion.. if it was meant to be a spoof, it wasn't funny.

Now, there's assuredly _room_ for touching on the dark side of life, and there's no reason for the comic-strip medium to not be a part of that. But.. adress them, then move on.

http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=20030801

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Runaway backstory is something strips that pay too much attention to continuity fall prey to, yeah. One of the most appealing features of Bil Holbrook's strips is he doesn't mind turning one of his characters into a mermaid (or whatnot), but after a few years of this things are so entangled that trying to advance a story reads like fan fiction, too introverted for normal people to follow. Case in point, I now skip any week in Kevin and Kell that tries to advance the Bird Conspiracy, which was much better the less it was on-screen.

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

Maybe this is really why Rumsfeld doesn't read newspapers any more? It's a big part of why I don't (unless I happen to find a used one just lying on the one open table in the cafeteria at lunch).

I'm thinking and thinking, and I know I used to read Funky Winkerbean (I remember the "seems like just last week..." gag), but I can't for the life of me even remember what the characters look like any more. I gave up caring about it that long ago.

I'd rather have Macropod Madness (http://www.geocities.com/macropodia), Alice Otter (http://www.alice-otter.com), Mullein Fields (http://www.mullein-fields.org/), Faux Pas (http://www.ozfoxes.com/fauxpas.htm), Freefall (http://freefall.purrsia.com), Dr. Fun (http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/this-week.html), and a few notable others any day.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

After a decade of trying I've given up on reading new web strips, really. It's too hard chasing down interesting, well-drawn, funny ones that don't immediately go on a five-month hiatus, and those that do stick to a reliable schedule tend to accrete too much plot to follow if you're not a hardcore fan, or are filled with enough pop culture references that actually reading the strip seems redundant, or else slow the pace down to where one day of screen time takes a year to play out.

And then there's the just plain bizarre ( Boston and Shaun, looking at you here). Easier to just read 9 Chickweed Lane.