Out of the past (in various forms)
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Crock and The Phantom, 10/21/24
One of my longest-running bits on this blog is pointing out strips where the colorists have very clearly not read the comic before doing their work on it. I feel like this doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen, like in this Crock, where that “golden” shovel is glowing and yet is still clearly made of wood and steel.
I assume that this happens in part because the strips aren’t sent to the colorists with any explicit instructions on what colors should go where. That’s an even bigger problem in cases where the color is important but you can’t necessary get it from context. Like, is this being emerging from the Avarice rover in today’s Phantom, who bears an uncanny similarity to Elon Musk, supposed to be Ian Mollusk himself? Or is it a robot that looks like Ian Mollusk, one made in the mad annoying inventor’s image, and therefore the human-like flesh coloring he’s been given is actually in error?
Bizarro, 10/21/24
A quick recap of some Josh Deep Lore: did I get a college degree in classics, and then get a subsequent master’s degree as part of an abortive attempt to become an historian of ancient Rome? Yes! Was this a mistake? It was! Do I regret having done it? Sometimes! Did they even cover Greek mythology in my coursework? Not really! Nevertheless, I feel qualified to say that this panel has the Medusa thing all wrong. This dumb hippie should be turned to stone! He’s looking right at her! She turns people to stone because she’s so hideous looking; it’s not a superpower she can just turn and off. Are you telling me that this won’t work on hippies, because they reject society’s rules about who’s beautiful and who’s ugly, or because they’re very, very high?
Zits, 10/21/24
A thing about getting old is that you do get to see mores change, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, but it always creates a little mental dissonance. For instance, a Zits anthology published a full five years after I started doing this blog noted that the comic got pushback from the syndicate whenever it used the word “sucks” in dialogue. And now here it is using the word “horny,” in front of God and everybody! Hopefully I don’t sound like an “old fuddy duddy,” but I think everyone involved in creating a Zits strip with the word “horny” in it should go to prison.
74 replies to “Out of the past (in various forms)”
Mary Worth Mashups: Estelle has options.
Hey, Robocop’s got a new job!
yyPhantom: “Oh, those are OUR Security Goons. We’re working with Mollusk.”
Next Adventures: “To Wrack and Ruin in East Texas” and “Breakout”.
yMW: That puckering Wilbur will be forever in our nightmares.
“One of the longest running bits in the blog…”
That got old LONG before its time I might add…
Crock: Sure, the shovel isn’t golden, but are we just going to ignore the fact that breaking the wooden handle in half goes ‘CLANG’ ? Can’t blame the colorist for that one.
Bizarro: Heh heh…Perseus ain’t here, man..
Zits: ‘Post’? Is [Zits character’s name not found]’s mom writing him a blog? Who even reads blo– oh, right.
Phantom:
“Who sent you!? Townshend and Daltrey!?”
Another colorist’s error in Bizarro, the guy’s eye should be red.
Zits: I am going to assume Jeremy is doing some sort of interpretative dance about his feelings in panel three because he literally dropped the ball between panels one and two.
Bizarro: Look how happy the guy is. When she’s horny, she turns his one thing to stone.
Where did Jeremy’s bsketball go in panel two?
@pugfuggly:
Crock: Sure, the shovel isn’t golden, but are we just going to ignore the fact that breaking the wooden handle in half goes ‘CLANG’ ? Can’t blame the colorist for that one.
Getting hit on the head is sometimes called ‘having one’s bell rung.’ (Can’t believe I’m justifying Crock)
JP: It’s a beautiful fall day in Los Angeles, and more specifically a new day and season as well. Granted, it was never specifically stated that Declan and Neddy were cohabitating as most couples wisely tend to do before officially tying the knot, but let’s face it, Neddy is definitely dumb enough to return home and climb into bed with her incredibly untrustworthy fiancé, waiting not just until morning but a couple months later to think, “You know, I really ought to bring up that stuff about my soon-to-be husband being a life-destroying serial charlatan.”
RMMD: Boy, this story sure is still happening. Usually the least (and most) that is expected of gratitude from a clinic patient is the prompt payment of billing, but while Terry Beatty is happy to follow the example of his predecessor’s love of having secondary characters offer gifts to Rex and June for simply doing their jobs, the spontaneous generosity has been scaled back significantly from $10,000 checks to unsellably ugly concert merch.
Luann: Apparently an “Arabian layout” is a real thing, and indeed pretty impressive looking. However, it’s a single maneuver rather than a routine, so the Evanses’ willingness to research the hated field of cheerleading still only goes so far.
SlyF: In the glorious and frightening future of the Slyverse, Ridley Scott is the world’s most wanted criminal.
Bizarro:
“You’re from Club ‘Med,’ right? — ‘Med’ is, like, a shortened version of the full name?”
The Ghost Who Struggles with Technology — This is getting so relentlessly unconnected to any real world scenario I honestly expected Count Weirdly to pop and claim he didn’t do it. . .
Bizarre — Most of the snakes are looking away, as if they’re embarrassed to be involved in this conversation. . ..
MW: Did Ed have an epiphany too? Maybe he dreamed that all of his wedding guests were the pets he’s put down.
DtM: Dennis learned in Science class that a bird’s gizzard is also called a crop. He ate some gravel before dinner.
BIZARRO: Obviously, the hippie opened with, “You should smile more!” Because that ALWAYS works on women.
Cheers to “Zits” for having the courage to tell parents it’s okay for them to have a frank talk with their kids via text about what said kids should do when they’re horny! Jeers to “Zits” for forgetting that the only people still reading newspaper comics are retirees whose children are in their 40s, and who have never been given their grandchildren’s cell phone numbers, possibly to avoid this exact scenario.
@Pozzo: You can just barely see it in the upper right of panel three.
MW: Jokes on you, Stell, Ed was having the same dream as you!!!!!!
Zits – She’s washed enough of his crusty socks to know he doesn’t need to be told what to do when he’s horny.
Phantom: An easy enough mistake for the colorist to make. Although a steaming turd arising from an open hatch should obviously be brown, Musk himself looks the gooey end of a steamed oyster.
MW (2): I’m slightly comforted after yesterday’s waking nightmare, however, that it was not Mary’s meddling, as she will no doubt believe, but the horrible visage of Wilbur in a dream that drove Estelle back into the arms of Ed the Not Hideous.
Remind me again why Crock is still running twelve years after it ended? Are there newspaper readers who can’t live without their daily Crock? Crock addicts, they call them. Crockheads. Lotta controversy about the longer prison sentences for dealing Crock (ha ha, if only).
Crankshaft: All right, it’s been more than a week since this “The Burnings” story just kind of trailed off with no indication that it would be continued, so I’m going to do my wrap-up and then never talk about it again. (At least until the next time Tom Batiuk reminds me of it by obliviously contradicting its plot, characters, and themes. So, until tomorrow, probably.)
Where better to start than by going back before the beginning to that puffiest of puff pieces that the Daily Cartoonist did about this story prior to its launch? There’s not much here, it’s mostly the interviewer asking hard-hitting questions on the level of “Why are you so wonderful and brilliant?” and Tom Batiuk taking a very early victory lap for his grand literary achievement, but there’s still some fun stuff here, especially in hindsight. For example, remember how we were talking about whether or not Les and Lillian might be forcing the students to pay for the books themselves? Turns out the answer was there all along:
“From there the story naturally unfolded as it tells about the bookstore owner, Lillian, offering to sell Fahrenheit 451 to the students for their class after the school board had banned it.”
There you have it, straight from the man himself. Not only did Les make acquiring this book a requirement for his classes and force his underaged students go all the way into town (and then another town across the county) to procure their copies of this book, they each had to pay $20+ out of their own pockets for the privilege of buying the expensive hardcover version. Anyway, the goal with this story (apart from the obvious award-pandering) was address a topical controversial subject, explore and develop some of the recurring characters, and close some of the loops of the Funkyshaft series, in particular the references to “The Burnings” at the very end of Funky Winkerbean. Did it achieve these goals? I think we’ll all die a little inside in the unlikely event that Batiuk receives even a trinket award for this story, but as to the rest: no.
Lillian was arguably the best choice for this story’s protagonist, as she specifically bears guilt over denying people the ability to read important and life-altering things, and this was a chance for her to reckon with that past. With Batiuk completely lacking in the self-awareness to realize this, however, Lillian ended up being the worst possible choice for this story’s protagonist. Ditto for Les, who historically believes strongly in his own rights to self-expression while frequently condemning others for attempting to doing the same; also, Les fell through a plot hole halfway through the arc, not even making an appearance in the anti-banning crowd at the end despite being the most prominent character in the first half of the story. Crankshaft was just kind of there, with his past illiteracy issues being a very long reach to draw a connection, and the less said about Crankshaft’s frequent dangerous uses of fire and cheerful attempts to prevent children getting to school to develop their own educations, the better (for Batiuk). We never met a single one of the antagonists.
The opposing side of the controversy was, laughably hypocritically, never allowed to be given voice. The favored side of the controversy was barely better, as it was hardly explored at all beyond a “We’re just right because of course we are” attitude. In that aforementioned interview, Batiuk said that Fahrenheit 451 was “too poetically perfect not to use” as the fulcrum for this topic, but only for the completely superficial reason of it being a book about book burning, despite the extremely limited controversies surrounding it (verbal profanity and depictions of religious text desecration) being tertiary at best to current-year book banning discussions. So many elements and all of the nuance of the issue were entirely ignored, mostly in favor of filling weeks with Batiuk’s narrow-minded preaching and godawful comedy.
As for the ending, it’s a joke. It’s so arbitrary, anti-climactic, and inconclusive that I had to wait a week just to be sure that, yes, the story was in fact over. The arson culprit was never caught or identified or even connected to the protestors. Nobody on either side even seemed to notice or care about this individual. The person who suffered the most, the owner of the other bookstore, never received speaking time or a panel appearance or even a name. The apocalyptic “Burnings” event, which supposedly left the future of printed literature in irrevocable destruction, amounted to just one store that suffered minor damage that harmed little of the stock and put it out of commission for only a couple weeks, and one other store that received only negligible cosmetic damage. Every scene in the plot sneers at the principle of cause-and-effect, joined together only with “and thens.” We don’t even know if a single student picked up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 or what they got out of reading it. That was the easiest slam-dunk “See, this was all worth it” moment possible and instead Batiuk airmailed it with some borrowed holier-than-thou platitude delivered by Mopey fucking Pete.
There’s more, but we all largely covered it as the story went on, and it was thoroughly enjoyable reading everyone else’s takes on the proceedings. In summary, I stand by what I said a couple weeks ago: this wasn’t just terrible, it’s the worst story I’ve ever read, even compared to some very strong contenders from the same medium. Congratulations, Tom Batiuk. You finally won something.
Crock: More than likely, the golden-shovel-that-was-not-golden is the result of coloring being done by A.I. these days, which means the same thing it always has, since the days of the Mechanical Turk: a little man in a box with dim lighting and probably a bunch of cigar smoke. (The horses trained to do math always did a better job.)
I had to reread The Phantom a few times to realize that robo-Mollusk’s dialogue balloon has an unusual shape to signify his roboticity. I thought the first panel dialogue was being delivered collectively by robo-dude, a rock, the Phantom, the steam coming from the crashed rover, and Devil.
@jroggs: Why, it’s almost as if you think Batiuk should have stuck with the gag-a-day format, rather than attempt to tell stories of any complexity.
Look, the joke in Crock wouldn’t work if the shovel was colored golden from panel one. On the other hand, it doesn’t work anyway. Hm.
Zits: 1. I’m so old, I remember that J.D. Salinger was once not allowed to use “pimple” in a short story, much less “zit.”
2. Horny jail!
Phantom: Did Ian Mollusk really think a facsimile of his own pudgy face would strike fear into the hearts of the Moon Men? He would have been better off with a replica of the “Crush, Kill, Destroy” android from the second season of Lost in Space.
Bizarro:
Innocently but ill-advisedly uttering “Nice asp!,” the hippie is immediately transformed into a petroglyph.
Bizarro:
“So, Medusa, do you have a favorite musical composition? Perhaps Jim Stafford’s ‘Spiders and Snakes’? Maybe the March Violets’ ‘Snake Dance’?”
“Nope. ELO’s ‘Turn to Stone’ !”
Damn it, either Zits is really poorly worded or shared posts by Jeremy’s mother make him anxious, stressed, angry, and horny.
DT: Speaking of 1966 pop television, I’m hearing this narration box in the grave, faux dramatic/serious tones of the narrator of the Batman show.
Bizarro :
Inexplicably light-skinnedMedusa replies : “Yeah, I’m basically the reason it’s nicknamed ‘Kush’ sometimes.”************
Crankshaft : The Pizza Box Monster being the half-owner of Montoni… IMHO, it’s less the absurdity of a man who dresses in a crappy homemade mascot costume (concealing his real identity) being the owner of a restaurant, it’s that the Pizza Box Monster was supposed to be this daring outlaw who challenged Montoni’s evil, porcine, greedy owner (Funky Winkerbean, who is the REAL monster), and you can’t have THAT anymore with a) PBM being the owner of the restaurant so he can have all the pizzas he wants b) the chill Mopey Pete can’t play that antagonistic role.
************
Hagar the Horrible : is too weak to Kool-Aid-Man through a flimsy stone wall, even with a battering ram and two other men helping him. Some raider he is!
*************
Slylock Fox : is arresting extras on Hagar under the pretense of them being “escaped prisoners”, but really he’s just sick of the constant anachronisms.
*************
Zits : Josh is forgetting how uncomfortably horny this strip can get sometimes, especially when it’s about Jeremy and his mother’s relationship.
FC: Yes, that’s true. They did. Great gag. We done?
Frazz: Take that, all you scumbag football watchers. Sheesh, you’d think she’d be happy that her Walk of Superiority wasn’t being contaminated by the presence of the slothful common herd.
RMMD: It’s another beautiful fall day in Los Angeles, as the smog begins to turn from yellow to orange.
Phantom: Oh good, just in time to see Lee Corso make his headgear pick!
C: You might think that Maggot, being a member of the master race enforcing colonial rule over the natives, would enjoy the fruits of exploitation. But no, he’s still the last cog, shovelling shit for the officers and bosses. But he is kept obedient by the psychological wages of whiteness and symbolic prices that make him feel superior to natives and fellow soldiers. Crushing imperialist domination is not opposed to, but essential for, class liberation!
A humanoid robot with Musk’s facial features! That’s a creepy uncanny valley! And, in addition, he’s a humanoid robot!
CS: The creepiest thing about Halloween so far is this perv’s kink.
RMMD: And by “tour,” he means this one-night stand at Lou’s.
6Chx: Jeez, talk about Grimm.
GT: Uh, that’s not Coach Martinez in Rodney Barnes’ uniform. Nope, that’s not him at all. That would be cheating. So, no forget that. What a stupid rumor.
Dustin: I can’t read this dumb, boring comic anymore. Bye, Dust.
Of course she left out “horny”! A teenage boy knows exactly what to do when he’s horny!
Phantom – Even if that is supposed to be a robot that looks like Ian Mollusk, if it were true to Mollusk’s real-life counterpart, it would actually be Ian Mollusk in a robot suit. It’s Mollusks all the way down!
Phantom – “Cueball”? I did not expect this Rex Morgan crossover.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Buzz off. Unless you have official business”
[Sign: BUS STOP]
[Sign: ARMY RECRUITER]
“Hi! Did you get your draft notice?”
SFx: The escaped criminal snickered as Slylock collared a careless, innocent actor and began to beat him with a rubber hose.
Shoe: I can’t read this lame strip anymore either. DELETE.
Bizarro: I know Bizarro‘s thing is including hidden items for readers to search for, but you really shouldn’t have Medusa be holding a smoking pipe. It turns the joke from “Whoops, this hippie is so high he’s confused literal and metaphorical definitions of ‘stoner’!” to “Two marijuana users bond over their shared love of toking. Also one has snakes on her head.”
Phantom: I had to rack my brains to work out who “The Cueball” and “The Stoner” were, but you know what? The idea that Elon Musk would teach his shitty AIs to call Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson mean names is the most plausible thing in this story so far. If anything, these names aren’t cruel enough – the real Elon Musk literally tweeted that Bill Gates looks pregnant and made him lose an erection. Ian Mollusk’s robot should be saying things so libelous that the strip gets banned by English courts.
Sometimes people get (voluntarily?) pigeonholed into a certain manner of sharing that they sometimes fail miserably.
Incredibly, you don’t need a master’s degree in classics to know Medusa turns people to stone. Poor lady.
But that’s not Medusa. Medusa is dead. Perseus killed her.
That’s one of her two sisters, Stheno or Euryale. Who are immortal.
And who may, possibly, not turn people to stone.
FC: “Grandma says they used to burn leaves…demons too. Your mom is one sick lady.”
@Baja Gaijin: The dog doesn’t deserve this!
Crock – Being a Millennial I cannot help but think the average Boomer reading this strip sides with Crock over Grossie, since the average Boomer boss still thinks Millennials are 21 and ought to spend the first ten years of their career working for free while saving to put money for a downpayment on a house.
Phantom – Being witness to online discourse, there is a good chance that Elon Musk sees Robocop’s merging of a a broken police officer into a cyborg is a good thing, until of course Robocop went woke by caring about oppressed people.
Bizarro – A feel like a year or so ago there was an attempt to revise the Medusa Mythos as making her the victim, though that was largely based on Ovid’s own reworking of the material, and not the original myths, though that wasn’t obvious given the discourse of the mostly college educated and underemployed people on social media. Suffice to say that Josh isn’t the only overeducated person pontificating on the popular conceptions of this Greek myth, but at least he’s entertaining about it and not trying to kill some down time at job below his education.
Zits – Zits is a good comic, hence why it only gets mentioned on the blog when some form of awkward horniness happens. In a world where actual teenagers are having less sex than ever, yet HBO insists on showing Euphoria where all the teens are switching between drugs and bisexual lit sex, I can’t get bothered that Pierce, a teenage boy, would critique Jeremy’s Mother forwarding a trite inspirational Facebook post that speaks to Millennial Wine Moms.
Luann: It took the Evansii long enough to put into play this low-hanging Fruit of the Loom observation.
Phantom: Credit where it’s due, I can see Elon Musk designing a moon-colonizing android that looks like himself in bad Vision cosplay.
It’s long been known that Tesla’s Optimus “robots” are really the 21st-century equivalent of the Mechanical Turk, so part of me is holding out hope that this will be revealed to be a guy in a costume, preferably by ripping off his fake-Elon face Scooby Doo style.
Wary Morth:
Tomorrow, Eshtelle goes to apologise to DrEd.
Eshtelle (bursting into operating theatre): “Ed, In sorry! Let’s get married RIGHT NOW!”
DrEd (not bothering to look up from a surgery, with Trashlee at his elbow handing him instruments and gazing at him with adoration): “Uh…who are you again?”
So a side benefit of copious marijuana consumption is immunity to Gorgons.
@Schroduck: I had to Google a bit to figure out how well “The Stoner” tracked for Fake Richard Branson, and it turns out that yes, the real Branson is a big pro-cannabis advocate. Learn something new every day. (I look forward to the time when weed dispensaries are a staple on Virgin Voyages ships.)
Zits – I guess the lesson here is that complaints about your mom should include an interpretive dance.
Coloring aside, notice that the shovel in “Crock” is described as gold and not golden. Hell yes, I would take a gold shovel. It has to be worth at least $200,000.
It’s so bizarre the “evolution” of Medusa.
So many modern “sexy” depictions, which really defeats the point.
And so many varying lores like either she turns people to stone unwillingly, or she can turn it on or off whenever she feels like it
(And some rare tellings can even have her reverse the affliction if she’s feeling generous)
And not getting into the whole “Show her her reflection to turn HER into stone” bit.
Also different depictions show her as a Naga, others show her with humanoid legs.
I feel like everyone is glossing over the most bothersome lines in the Phantom strip: Now admittedly, I’m not a daily reader of this strip, but WHO THE FUCK ARE CUEBALL AND THE STONER? Were they some long forgotten villains from the Lee Falk days, Did they pop up earlier in this storyline? The public, namely me, has a right to know!
@The Rambling Otter: Heck, one episode of “Tales from the Cryptkeeper” had a archeologist searching for Medusa’s lair.
A little girl would show up, give warnings telling him that its too dangerous and to turn back. He ignored “some dumb random kid” in the end, it turned out that the little girl was actually Medusa, who apparently could shapeshift in this continuity and turned him to stone once he got too close.
So that’s another interpretation here.
Crock: I feel that this is completely in character for Crock, as Crock (keep in mind) is a cheap lying bastard.
C’shaft: I feel like “don’t give a controlling interest in your business to someone who hides their identity by dressing up in pizza boxes like a pathetic version of the Michelin Man” is one of those things that should go without saying.
Dustin: Do Kelly and Parker have any sisters? Ones that haven’t cut off communication with them for obvious reasons, I mean.
Luann: Oh, Bets, I expect this sort of slut-shaming from Bernice, but you? You’re a cosplayer! You can’t tell me you’ve never had some gross nerdboy make assumptions about your availability just because you were dressed as Sailor Moon or Black Widow.
MW: So, if Estelle doesn’t marry Ed…she has to marry Wilbur? I’m not sure I follow the logic, but hey, if “I don’t want to end up with Wilbur” is your motivation for fixing your life you run with it. Hell, I can think of few things more likely to get someone to turn their life around.
RMMD: “The Trigger Finger Tour”? You’re playing a few sets at Lou’s Bar; that doesn’t count as a tour. It barely qualifies as a gig.
@Buck Ripsnort: They’re Fake Elon Musk’s nicknames for Fake Jeff Bezos and Fake Richard Branson, respectively. This whole thing started out as a riff on the billionaire
dick measuring contestspace race.“Tonight on Cueball and the Stoner, our unlikely detectives face their greatest foe, a billionaire mollusk with a war machine. Can baldness and pot smoking save the day? Find out, only on NBC.”
(Appropriately named) Crock – Well…back to my award winning work. That shit doesn’t shovel itself….
Phantom – I’m guessing from the waft-lines that the android just took a shit….
Bizzaro – Tommy Chong! Dave’s not here, man. No humor, either….
Zits – An easy addition, mom – pray for release from your sinful urges and carry on with your guilt you worthless pervert….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Schroduck:
I was speculating that the AI of Ian Mollusk’s version of Optimus was poorly trained with a focus on Dick Tracy comics, and imagined itself to be in a war with supervillians nicknamed Cueball and Stoner. But obviously Schroduck has hit the nail on the head here.
Joke’s on you, Medusa – the hippie is already stoned. All you do is make him more so.
Phantom. A nearly century-old comic strip about a white savior lording over the indigenous peoples of Africa is probably not the platform for satire of anything but it’s own concept.
Zits- This is what happens when you subscribe to your mother’s “Only Fans”
REX MORGAN M.D.: Truck (under his breath): “‘Specially since I won’t be payin’ the bill.”
June: “What was that?”
Truck: “Never you good folks mind! Enjoy this cheaply-produced t-shirt that an eight-year-old Malaysian girl lost a finger to make!”
Crock- I think that having this be an ordinary shovel that is obviously not actually gold is part of the “joke” because he’s so stupid that he doesn’t know any better. If he had actually been given a literal gold shovel it wouldn’t make sense for her to be angry.
Admittedly, I don’t keep up with the hip artist cats, but from what I thought I knew about word bubbles, the little triangle tags denote who’s speaking, so if I’m following correctly, a tree stump and the Phantom yell simultaneously, “WHO SENT YOU!?” A crater and the android reply, “Was it the cueball?” and a wisp of smoke and Devil the wolf yell, “The Stoner?” before the android and a palm frond say, “They’re too late!”
Admittedly, this doesn’t make much sense… but neither does Six Chix and it continues to get published.
FC: Grandma said the dried leaves made good kindling when they burned heretics and witches at the stake.
The Phantom: Who is even speaking here? The speech bubbles all have multiple random points going off in equally random directions, making it totally unclear who’s supposed to be saying these lines. What is the whole ass jungle yelling these things?
Bizarro: To quote the great poet Black Dynamite, this hippy isn’t turning to stone under Medusa’s gaze because he’s already rock hard, baby!
Zits: Acknowledging sex in an even mildly neutral manner in the funny pages? Who does this comic think it is, Pibgorn?
In today’s Zits comic Jeremy’s mother has started creating some amateur porn that she is “posting” and it is making Jeremy anxious, angry, and stressed. His friend is turned on by this and telling Jeremy he thinks his mother is a MILF. Makes perfect sense to me.