We recently started getting the paper (in the interest of satisfying those of you, such as my wife, who cannot allow for any kind of deviation in duration indicated by words like “recently” I will specify: about 6 months. If you take 6 months and compare it to the length of my wife without a paper then in that context, at least in my head, 6 months is “recently”. In case anyone is wondering, the other main phrase that causes similar grief is “the other day”).

At the time KT had a very good reason for getting the paper. I discovered that it was an excellent source of small “comics” sections. In case anyone is wondering these little “comic” sections make excellent bathroom reading. If you get the paper on a daily basis then there will be lots of reading material available and because of the format you can read as much as you need and then put it back down. When you’re done with that day’s section you recycle it with the rest of the paper. Great!

Let’s just say that I’ve grown to love having those little comic sections available in the bathroom that it is now the main reason for still having the paper delivered.

I’ve had some realizations about the comics. I feel the need to share them:

1. Funky Winkerbean Sucks. Really really sucks. It’s basically a “soap opera comic” like Mark Trail or Mary Worth but it occasionally pretends to be a humorous comic. Like a horribly boring wolf in bad sheep’s clothes. It doesn’t work though. The jokes aren’t ever actually funny. What was even worse was when for like a 2 month period the comic followed the very depressing death of “Lisa”. It was drawn out. It was awful mostly because … and bear with me because I don’t think the story shouldn’t have been told… THE DAILY NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION IS THE WRONG FUCKING VENUE FOR THAT KIND OF STORY.I think Scott Adams (Dilbert) had a much better approach to branching out and that was to draw interested readers to his blog, although never via direct advertising from what I can tell, and to there explore alternate ideas… without attempting to misuse the daily comics section. I guess the one problem with that is that Tom Batiuk (Funky Winkerbean) is a comic strip failure while Scott Adams (Dilbert) is a comic strip genius.

2. I hate Pluggers. It’s tone makes it appear to basically belittle the rest of society because we’re not all pluggers too. The comic obviously caters to a very specific audience. The audience is of course a “Plugger”. From what I can tell by reading the comic a “Plugger” is an old (retired), probably midwestern, hardheaded, blue-collar, overweight, bluejeans & overalls wearing… loser. I don’t know how else to describe them. It’s like picking the most unfashionable, backwards traits of our retiring generations and… praising them?

Really though the thing that takes this comic from basic irritant to all out target of damn you to hell hatred is the fact that IT IS A GIMMICK. Jeff MacNelly (may he rest in peace) and his successor Gary Brookins are HACKS. Here’s why: They don’t actually write their own material. All the content is submitted by “Pluggers”. Ugh. If these cartoonists had come up with this content on their own I could have at least lived with it. Now however whenever I go take a crap I want to punch those illustrators (sorry, can’t credit you as a comic artist since you actually just illustrate other people’s inane ideas) in the neck.

This guy hates Pluggers too.

3. Crankshaft occasionally sucks? I had trouble figuring this out for a while. Crankshaft is an OK comic. It’s not one of the superstars. It’s moderately funny when it is well done which is about half of the time… but occasionally it TOTALLY SUCKS. It completely changes. It goes from being moderately funny to being almost purposely unfunny. It goes from being Crankshaft to Funky Winkerbeanish…

… whoa hold on there a second wait a minute!

Yea that’s what I get for not really reading the little text at the top right of all the comics where it says who the artist is. Turns out Crankshaft is a spin off of Funky Winkerbean… it is still written by Tom Batiuk but it is inked by Chuck Ayers. No wonder it took me a while to figure out. Funky Winkerbean’s art is very distinctive and would have been obvious in a Crankshaft strip.

Ugh. I feel so violated. Tom Batiuk get your greasy hands off my mind.