Tom Batiuk
I can’t tell you exactly when I first met Tom Batiuk, but it was more than likely at one of Roger Price’s Mid-Ohio-Cons. Since we both live in Medina, Ohio, and since we’re both fine, upstanding members of that fine, upstanding community—though, truth be told, Tom’s posture is better than mine—it was a real no-brainer that we would become friends.
At 50, Tom is a tad older than I am. He has one teenaged son; I have two children, Eddie (10) and Kelly (7). His studio is much neater than my office. He has two successful newspaper strips and I don’t. I never asked John Byrne to draw on my bathroom wall. These are small, subtle differences, but, nonetheless, they keep people from mistaking us for each other.
What we have in common: We love comics, we got into the comics business about the same time, we do various community service stuff (Tom more than I on account of he can draw) and we like our comics writing to reflect the world around us.
I’m a big fan of Tom’s work and, he claims, vice versa. Never trust a cartoonist.
When Hogan’s Alley asked me to interview Tom, I didn’t let a little thing like the fact that I had never interviewed anyone before stop me. I said yes. And, if it means a job, I can sing, dance and ride a horse. Never trust a writer, either.
Before I shut up and let you get to the interview, I want to mention that Tom and Chuck Ayers, the creators of Crankshaft, have a new book out. It’s called Safe Return Home: An Inspirational Book for Caregivers of Alzheimer’s (AndrewsMcMeel Publishing, $12.95). It gathers together most—if not all—of the Crankshaft strips about Lucy and Helen, two characters who are suffering from
progressively worsening Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a wonderful book filled with compassion and humor. It comes from where all our best comics have always come from: the heart.
Jokes aside, that’s why I said yes when the magazine asked me to interview Tom. Comics creators who pull their stories from the heart are a precious resource. From time to time, we should remind ourselves—and them—of that.
Come and meet my friend Tom.

Tony Isabella: What was your first exposure to the comic art form as a kid?
Tom Batiuk: Newspapers, definitely. I have real strong recollections of sitting there with the Sunday funnies from the Akron Beacon-Journal. I would make my dad read those things to me. I had to know what was going on in Prince Valiant. That’s when it was awesome—it just looked like something great was happening. Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordons were just gorgeous in a whole other way, but I loved those. Isabella: The adventure strips were your early favorites?
Batiuk: Exactly. I didn’t care for the humor strips that much. The stuff that was out there at the time was Henry and Nancy, and there wasn’t much that captured your attention. The humor of Blondie was probably beyond me.
Isabella: Your first published cartoons were in an elementary school newspaper. How did that come about?
Batiuk: Even in elementary school, I kept telling people, “I’m going to be a cartoonist.” I probably badgered this teacher into letting me do them, which I recall having to do backwards on a ditto sheet. [laughter] I don’t remember what it was—something stupid, probably. But I did a lot of cartooning in class. The accelerated-student program at my school was, “Here’s some paper—go draw something while the rest of us finish up.”
While I was in elementary school, I was looking in an encyclopedia and I saw the name “Jerry Siegel” and learned that he created Superman. And he was born in Cleveland! That was a real revelation—somebody born in Ohio can do a comic strip?! That’s great!
Isabella: That leads me to my next question: When was your first realization that grown people could make a living doing cartoons?
Batiuk: I was inspired by the Jerry Siegel incident. And Dondi was the other one. Until Dondi showed up, all the other strips in the paper had always been there. Then one day, there’s this new one. Even as a kid I could tell this was just starting. I thought, “Wow, they have a beginning! They haven’t all existed since the dawn of time!” That was the second one to inspire me.
Isabella: Was there any one cartoon, comic book or strip that made you say, “Hey, that’s what I want to do when I grow up”?
Batiuk: Aside from those early strips I mentioned, once I started reading comic books, that cinched it. Especially when I discovered Stan Lee . . . that put a lock on it. I had encountered the master storyteller. Stan was one of my idols in terms of what I wanted to do.
Isabella: During elementary school, what was your parents’ reaction to your cartooning?
Batiuk: Sort of a wary skepticism. I don’t know that they were too worried or concerned with it when I was at a very young age. When I got into junior high and high school, I think my dad worried about it. But he was also very good about it. I wanted to buy a drawing table, and he took me out to a place to buy one. He worked at Goodrich, and they had artists who worked there. If I ran into problems, he would take my stuff in and have a guy critique it for me. And I remember once he showed up with a pen and a bottle of India ink. “If you’re going to do this, you might as well do it right.” Even when I graduated from college and was flying to New York to try to sell my stuff, he was digging up maps for me and finding places for me to stay. In fact, he picked the Holiday Inn on the Hudson River, where Angela Davis was arrested not too many days after that. But he encouraged me, even though he realized it would be very difficult for me. But I’d also gotten a teaching degree, so I had that.
Isabella: You’ve written extensively about high-school life in Funky Winkerbean. What was your own time in high school like?
Batiuk: That was pretty much what it was like! [laughter] I was sort of . . . what was that great line on the Hanson album? “Didn’t fit in, didn’t stand out.” That’s what I wanted to reflect in Funky. When I started doing it, I wanted it to be reflective of what high school was to me at that point, which was not being on the football team, but being in the band. Facing all those little terrors, like climbing the rope in gym class. I wasn’t into a lot of activities, I wasn’t involved in a lot of things.
Isabella: Were you publishing any cartoons during high school?
Batiuk: No, I never did. Not for the school paper, nothing. Our school paper was kind of hideous. It would come out in January with the fall football scores.
Isabella: How did your peers in high school react to your interest in cartooning?
Batiuk: There were a few kids who knew about my interest in cartooning, but it wasn’t really a big deal. It still boiled down to me and my one friend who read comic books a lot. He was somebody I could talk to about comic books, but other than that, I don’t think a lot of people knew about it.
Isabella: Have you had any contact with your art teacher since high school?
Batiuk: Oh, yeah—he’s a great guy. His name is Jim Mateer, and Jim was one of those teachers . . . it wasn’t so much the art he was teaching you as the other things he taught you about life. He sat down one time and told us stories about things he had done in college, stuff like that. It was at the point when adolescents need reassurance that they’re not the only people in the world going through things like this. He was absolutely wonderful, and I still talk to him.
He was responsible for me developing an attitude within myself. He said to me, “When people go out into careers, there are two approaches. Some people get a job somewhere and they sort of rise to whatever level that that association leads them. Other people are bulldogs—they target one goal, and that’s all they do.” He told that to me at a time when I was out of high school and I was teaching. I was thinking of maybe getting a job with an ad agency, thinking this was going to somehow lead to a cartooning career. After he told me that, I said, “No, it’s either cartooning or teaching, and that’s all I’m going to do.” That really helped me. He kept me from wandering into a career I probably wouldn’t have been as happy with.
Isabella: What were your favorite comics during your high-school years?
Batiuk: As far as newspaper strips go, I was most impressed with Charles Schulz. He was great. I thought Tom Ryan’s Tumbleweeds was a brilliant strip. I really loved that. There were certain adventure strips that were still good: Rip Kirby was one. But Schulz really made an impact. He had come in and taken the humor strip and turned it around.
In comic books, I started out with Batman and Superman. DC at that time was kind of juvenile. Then I found Julie Schwartz’s books, and things got a lot better. They were great. Also, I was a big science-fiction fan, and I could tell there was a science background in his books. I swear I thought Gardner Fox must have thumbed through Scientific American, found a concept and built a story around it. Everything had a rationale to it. Then, as I said, I discovered Stan Lee. At first, I was kind of put off by Marvel. I was reading DC when I was 12 or 13, and there was that very mannered, beautiful artwork there, the Murphy Anderson and Carmine Infantino stuff. Marvel seemed a little cruder to me. But I could not resist those stories. Once you started reading, that was it. Then there came a point where I just flopped over and stayed with Marvel.
Isabella: Once you got to college, what were your specific career goals?
Batiuk: I was a painting major—fine professional art. And toward the end of college I picked up an education degree. And I’ll be honest—the Vietnam War was going on, and you could get a deferment if you were a teacher. So it had the double incentive of not only providing me with a living, but keeping me alive. [laughter] Which was good.
I went in as a general art major, and they eliminated that program almost immediately. But it had 40 hours of electives, and the only specification was that they had to be junior- or senior-level courses. I would go into mass registration, and everything would be closed out, and the only things open would be these literature courses. As long as they were on the junior or senior level, I could take them. So I was taking a lot of lit courses and reading stuff like Don Quixote and The Aeneid and The Odyssey and books I probably wouldn’t pick up today, but I ended up with a great background, and it allowed me to amass this smattering of education.
Isabella: What kind of student were you in college—serious or Animal House?
Batiuk: Well, I’ll tell you one story. My dad’s going to find out about this for the first time. [laughter] I think the statute of limitations has probably run out on this, but . . . I had a test in philosophy one day, and I didn’t take that test that day because I went down to the record store to get Sgt. Pepper [laughter], which had just come out. In a nutshell, that kind of sums up where I was in college.
Isabella: Were you publishing any cartoons in college?
Batiuk: Well, yes. This buddy of mine and I went to the campus paper, and they weren’t running any comics. We talked them into doing some comic strips, and we did some for them. They weren’t that good. My buddy’s were better than mine, and they were just pretty awful, really. Then, oddly enough, Chuck Ayers came along and he went to the Stater, and when he saw that there weren’t any comics, he took in these comics that were actually great. He was so far ahead of anybody at that point in terms of his draftsmanship and his ability. And he got the job. [laughter] We were out and he was in.
Isabella: So you’ve known Chuck a long time.
Batiuk: Yeah, we were in classes together at Kent. Chuck was hot, in terms of art students. He was the big guy because he had gone to trade school in Akron. He had really been working on honing his talent, and he was way ahead of everybody. I think he was already maybe working with the Akron Beacon-Journal at that time. But yeah, our association goes way back.
Isabella: When you were out of college, what was your next move? Did you go directly into teaching or did you pursue other avenues first?
Batiuk: Right out of college I went directly into teaching. I got a teaching job for the following fall. That summer I worked in a small machine shop and amassed enough money to go to New York before the end of that summer. I put together some stories, and I wrote and drew one story and made an appointment and went to see DC and Marvel. I was hoping to try to connect with something there and maybe do something other than teaching, and it didn’t work. [laughter] But the experience at DC . . . the editor looked at my stuff and was pretty tough on me. He came down on me pretty hard. I heard just recently that he was going through some tough times; apparently he’d gone through a divorce and a job change, and I guess I didn’t catch him in the best mood. [laughter] But what he had to look at was not that impressive. In fact, he told me actually how to lay out a treatment—he was pretty good in a lot of ways. He did try to help me. So in between that and going over to Marvel at lunchtime, I sort of rewrote things and arranged them up in a sort of “treatment” look. At Marvel, the reception was nicer. I talked to Roy Thomas, and Roy was very, very good. He shot me down for all the same reasons and rightfully so, but he did it in a very nice way, and it left the door open. He came out with that line, “Well, this is as good as what we’re doing—we don’t need any more of that.” [laughter] “You have to be better than what we are doing, so send me more stuff.” I left feeling pretty encouraged by that.
Isabella: You taught at Eastern Heights Junior High?
Batiuk: Yes, in Elyria.
Isabella: How long did you teach there?
Batiuk: I think two-and-a-half years. What had happened was, I came back from my New York trip and started teaching school and had every intention in the world of working on things and trying to get back into my comics. I decided to go to the local newspaper, the Chronicle-Telegram, and see if I could maybe get a job doing spot art. I guess my thinking was that I would be doing little spot illustrations and someone would see it and say, “This guy should be doing a comic strip.” I don’t know what I had in mind. What happened—and again this starts a series of very lucky circumstances—I walked in, and all I had to show was this sketchbook. And the sketchbook was filled with a lot of pictures of kids at school, and I would just put little captions on things they were saying. Just little cartoons.
To digress for a little bit, my buddy and I used to read comic books, and we used to sit and go through Reader’s Digest. We would put captions on all the pictures, just make up cartoons for everything that was in there. So I sort of followed along with that sort of thing. The editor said, “We got a thing called the Tuesday Teen Page—it comes out once a week. Would you want to do a cartoon for it?” And I said, “Yeah, great!” I had never done a humor cartoon before—my stuff was all geared toward storytelling and adventure-type strips, but I jumped at the chance to do that.
Isabella: Were you working on comic strips of your own at this time for possible syndication?
Batiuk: Yes, I was periodically trying to do things that were like what I was seeing in comic books and strips I had seen before, like Rip Kirby and things like that; they moved a little bit more toward the fantastic. I’d start something and get a little bogged down, and then, lo and behold, I started getting a nice reaction to the Tuesday Teen Page cartoon, which was called Rapping Around. It’s interesting that rapping has now come back. [laughter] But it was great—I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed seeing my work in the paper more. I looked forward to Tuesday because that was going to be the Tuesday Teen Page cartoon. It was a great opportunity to see how the work reproduced. It was a great way to learn. It was absolutely super. The Chronicle paid me, I think, $10 a week, and this was back in 1970, which was a lot of money. I don’t even know if they’re paying me that much now. [laughter]
Isabella: Were you trying to come up with comic-strip ideas? Were there any monumentally bad ideas that you were working on?
Batiuk: They were probably all pretty bad. One of them was an updated Mandrake the Magician, which was probably more of a Dr. Strange knockoff for newspapers. There wasn’t anything in the newspapers like that. It was all pretty bad. What made it all not work was that it took me a long time to draw those things, which is why the projects kept getting bogged down. It was very hard to do. And then I started getting more positive feedback from the Teen Page cartoon, and I just started paying more attention to that. I would roll in with about 10 or 12 ideas. I was drawing more cartoons than we ever used, as I recall. Surprisingly, I found that I enjoyed that, I enjoyed that humor writing and that you could do legitimate things with that. Charles Schulz was at a peak probably, too, at that point and that was inspiring, so you had a role model there—someone who was obviously doing very intelligent work, very introspective work. Cartoons didn’t have to be slapstick. So that’s how I started spending more and more of my time. It eventually led to the idea, “Well, maybe I can do something with this.”
Isabella: Before you sold Funky were there any near-misses?
Batiuk: No, I was incredibly lucky. Funky was the first time that I tried syndication.
Isabella: Tell me about the day you sold Funky.
Batiuk: Well, let’s back up a little bit. The first thing I did was go to Newspaper Enterprise Association. I took a bunch of my “Rapping Around” strips and showed them what was going on with those strips. I talked to this guy up there—his name was Flash Fairfield—and he was great. He’s like an old-school type of guy you want to run into at one of these times. He’s looking at my stuff and he says,“This stuff is great. This stuff is wonderful. You know, Peanuts came through here. I told ’em we should buy Peanuts, but they turned it down. Nobody listened to me.” I heard that and I’m just thinking, “Oh man, this is so cool.” What Flash did was have me take some of those panels and work them up into strips. I think I even worked up something of a Sunday strip.
I really felt, “This is it,” I was on my way, because this guy was really excited. After I worked up all the things, I turned them into him again. A few weeks went by, and I heard from him again. He said, “Well, we’ve had a meeting, and we’ve decided not to do anything with it.” So I said, “OK, fine.” I gathered up all my stuff and took it to New York City and went to visit each of the major syndicates in New York. I got turned down by everybody except Publishers Hall. They wouldn’t even talk to me. I had to leave stuff with the receptionist. So while I was in New York, it was sort of a depressing day, everyone shooting me down. The two best receptions were with the Chicago Tribune and Universal Press, which was a fledgling at that point. John McMeel was wonderful. He looked at the stuff, and I left feeling very encouraged. He showed me Doonesbury stuff, which I hadn’t seen much of before, and that was depressing because he was not only turning down my work but he was showing me this other brilliant stuff. I went to King Features, and somebody there just sort of came out in the hall to look at my stuff and said “No.” They were a major syndicate, but they were very rude, actually. I went to McClure and talked to a really old gentleman. He actually pulled out a Mutt and Jeff strip where they were slipping on a banana peel or something and said, “This is what you need. You need action.” [laughter] I was sort of straight out of that Charles Schulz school of a kind of talky strip, not a lot of movement and that kind of thing. A fellow with the Chicago Tribune syndicate was very nice. I wish I could remember who I talked to there, but he was great. He sat down and talked with me and gave me a lot of advice, things that I actually incorporated when we started the strip. Sort of like a panel introducing the characters and stuff like that. It was great. And then there was Publishers Hall, where they wouldn’t even see me. And then when I got home, there was this option contract to sign.
Isabella: You’d been working on Funky for several years, and then you began the John Darling strip. What was the genesis of that?
Batiuk: Tom Armstrong had gone to the same syndicate that was syndicating Funky, which had at that point become Field Enterprises. He took in this strip called Heads and Tails, and it featured celebrities, Hollywood . . . just terrific caricatures. He’s the best I’ve ever seen. He would take celebrities and have them saying things. The syndicate called me, explained the situation and said, “Would you like to write for this strip?” I said I don’t like to write that kind of thing. I said what I like to do is work with characters and develop little stories, and I think that’s much more interesting. Then I suggested making it a talk show, because then you could still have your celebrities, but you could have a continuing cast of characters. Get the best of both worlds. They just loved it. They thought that was great. So, they put Tom and me together, and I just said, “Tom, I’ve got this character, John Darling.” I had already developed Brenda Harvey, the reporter, and Charlie Lord, the anchorman, and Phil the forecaster. I already had a small crew put together, so I said, “Why don’t we just take these guys and make John the host of the talk show? We’ll promote him from reporter to talk-show host and go from there.” John had been the roving reporter that went around just interviewing all the various Funky characters at one time or another. Tom liked it. The syndicate loved it. So John Darling was launched in 1979.
Isabella: Tom left the strip after a few years.
Batiuk: He had started a strip, Marvin, and it was taking off like gangbusters. John Darling had sort of plateaued, and he wanted to devote all his time to Marvin. John Darling was running into a lot of problems. They had sold it to a lot of TV pages, and as cable came in and these new rolling logs needed all our space, we were starting to get squeezed. It’s hard to develop a strong readership when you’re not being run steadily or if you’re not being run on the comics page. You don’t do well in polls if you’re not in the regular section. And I have to confess to contributing to a lot of John Darling’s problems. I wrote it the way I wrote Funky. Funky was one of those strips where I could do anything I wanted. I put in a cast of thousands, and it somehow still worked. So I thought that’s how it would work with John Darling—I would just jump in and go all over the map. As a result, the strip was a little unfocused, and I realize that you can’t operate on that basis with every single strip.
It ended up making Crankshaft a better strip when it came along. I had seen what I had done wrong with John Darling, and I was able to focus Crankshaft more.
Isabella: You killed off John Darling, which was an interesting way to end the strip. Did you know who killed him? Batiuk: No, I didn’t. I didn’t like what I did there, but at that time I was in a lawsuit with Funky’s syndicate, trying to gain ownership of the character. I was also doing John Darling and Crankshaft at the same time. John Darling was getting to be a struggle because it wasn’t in a whole lot of papers. It got to the point where the money was going to the artist, and I wasn’t making a nickel on it. So I wanted to get rid of it, and I didn’t want the syndicate to be able to continue it. [laughter] They weren’t going to get their mitts on it. That’s why I killed John Darling. I kind of regretted it later, because there were things I wished I’d been able to do. But I had no clue as to who murdered him.
Isabella: What gave you the idea for following up on Darling’s murder in Funky Winkerbean?
Batiuk: When I decided to graduate my characters and move them into the adult world. One of the first ideas I had was to have Les write a book about the John Darling murder, and he would uncover who murdered John Darling. I thought it would be a lot of fun, and it was something I was hoping to attack. I was lucky enough to be able to do it.
Isabella: You did Funky as a gag-a-day strip for a long time before you did the teen-pregnancy story.
Batiuk: Even longer, because that story was in 1986. So it would have been more like 14 years.
Isabella: So you’d been doing gag-a-day for 15 years. What inspired you to do a serious story? In terms of the other humor strips, this was a serious subject matter.
Batiuk: Very early on, I had taken an idea to the syndicate, which they rejected. I was going to do some stuff with teen pregnancy. They were probably right, and I’m glad they did reject it, because it would have been a bad idea. I wasn’t ready to do it.
There’s a bit of a chronology to what was going on: Field Enterprises became News America Syndicate. The new president, Richard Newcombe, came in, and he was great. The first time he met with me, he said, “What can we do for you?” The first words out of my mouth were, “I want editorial control of all my work.” Rick later became a real force in the industry for allowing creators to own their work. He was a real fighter for creators’ rights. If I’d had an inkling of that then, I would have also said, “And I want ownership of all my characters!” [laughter] But I got editorial control, and once I had that, I was free. They couldn’t stop me from doing the kinds of stories I want to do. The teen-pregnancy idea came out of the drawer and went back on the board. Les had broken up with Lisa, and I was getting them back together . . . the motivation behind this is entertainment. You want to tell entertaining stories. So I said, “What would make this story special?” I thought, “What if he goes back to see her, and she’s pregnant? How would he deal with that?” What’s great about that is, it just shifted everything. The way the characters respond, the type of humor they use . . . everything changes. It’s a whole new ball game. It was like I opened up a door and said, “Wow—there are a lot of toys to play with here! This is going to be great!” [laughter]
I also saw the downside to it. It’s a lot more work, because you want to do it right, you want to do it credibly, and you want to do it with sensitivity. So I took it to Richard Newcombe, and he supported it. With their support, it ended up being a very successful period for the strip. That started things rolling for me. Once I had matured the characters to the point where they could deal with something like that, the fantasy element in the strip began to look a little ludicrous by comparison. And the teen-pregnancy story line was the sort of thing I wanted to move toward.
Isabella: You’ve done a lot of stories addressing social concerns. Have any of these stories been in response to something in your own life?
Batiuk: Indirectly, yes. I think you try to draw on your own experiences as much as you can. You try to put your feelings into them. But a lot of times, they’re story-driven, but they’re story-driven in the context of what’s happening with high-school kids today, like the story where Susan Smith attempts suicide. That’s the sort of thing you’re encountering more. I wanted to let people know that they’re not the only ones experiencing this. It’s one of the things I learned from Peanuts—you’re sort of touching a common humanity. When I would see Charles Schulz’s stuff, I would think, “Oh, yeah, I’ve felt that way. I don’t feel so bad about it now.” Unfortunately, society has changed and the problems kids face are tougher, so kids who are thinking of ending their lives need to know that they’re not the only ones thinking like that. It became much more satisfying to write about that type of subject matter.
Isabella: Crankshaft is a spinoff of Funky. What inspired you again to do a second strip?
Batiuk: Crankshaft was getting a lot of response. I had put this bus driver in, and all of a sudden I was getting fan mail for him, and that hadn’t really happened before to that degree since the band director. I realized he was a really cool character, and that he could probably carry his own strip. This was before I had gotten ownership of Funky, and I felt pretty sure I was going to be ending John Darling in a few years, and I wanted to own my own characters. I thought I’d be able to do it, because I was working with Rick Newcombe. At that time, King was getting ready to buy News America, and they rejected Crankshaft. So I asked them to give me a release so I could take it anywhere I wanted. I sent Crankshaft out to all the syndicates, and it was around that time that Richard Newcombe formed Creators Syndicate. He expressed interest in Crankshaft, and since I’d worked with him, I took it to Creators.
Isabella: At what point did Chuck Ayers enter the picture in terms of Crankshaft?
Batiuk: Initially, I’d worked up a few Crankshaft strips, flew out to the syndicate in California and showed them what I was doing. They liked it a lot. They were very interested and excited about it. I flew back home and knew I had to get an artist for it, because I couldn’t do both Funky and Crankshaft. So I called Chuck. I knew him from Kent, and I asked him if he’d be interested in doing a comic strip. He was working at the Akron Beacon-Journal, and I caught him at a time when things were changing at the Beacon. He was ready to look at doing something like this, and I was fortunate to be able to team up with him.
It was amazing working with him. Maybe because we shared so much background, but he would just translate my ideas so easily—he would just take it and run with it. He’s as much an illustrator as a cartoonist. Chuck has since left the Beacon-Journal and is now working with me on Funky as well, doing the penciling.
Isabella: You’re doing an Alzheimer’s disease storyline in Crankshaft. It’s gotten a lot of praise. Have you experienced that through any of your family or friends?
Batiuk: I have friends whose parents have suffered from Alzheimer’s, but that story was research. It seemed logical to me that if you’re writing a story about an older man, that would be a part of their world. In fact, it seems like it would be remiss not to write about it. I did what has become my modus operandi—I went to the library and started reading about it.
That question comes up a lot, because Funky and Crankshaft are pretty idiosyncratic strips, and obviously I’m writing from a certain amount of personal experience. But at the same time, you kind of get tagged. People think you’re writing about what you see outside your window. It doesn’t work that way. You make these things up, and you enhance them so they make better stories. It’s mostly made up, guys!
Isabella: I know you work well ahead of publication. How far ahead are you at this moment?
Batiuk: I’ve been keeping this a secret, but Chuck and I made a decision about three years back to get ahead, so we started working real hard. So right now, both strips are maybe a year ahead, more or less.
Isabella: That represents a pretty impressive work ethic. What motivates you: enthusiasm or fear?
Batiuk: That one was fear. Our lives are real crowded with lots of things, and the fear of something happening is . . . for a while, I was doing three strips. Having three balls in the air is a wonderful thing, and as long as they all stay in the air, great! Luckily, I was doing those strips when there wasn’t a lot of demand on my time. But the inevitable is going to happen, and with two strips, you have twice the amount of problems. Things crash. So we decided to put a little insurance policy together for ourselves. It was pure fear.
Isabella: Take me through a typical Tom Batiuk work week.
Batiuk: Oh, man, this is boring . . . Monday is the day I can pretty much count on being in the studio, so I’ll spend the day working on the art for Funky. Some-time in the afternoon, I’ll start doing some writing for one or both strips. If I’m lucky, the next day will be just like that. The tough part is coming up with enough days where I can do that. But there are a lot of ancillary things. When you’re promoting a strip, you’ve got promotional pieces to put together, all of that kind of stuff. There’s coloring the Sunday strips, although I’ve recently started working with Lee Loughridge, and he’s doing a simply amazing job with the colors on Funky. There’s a lot of office work to keep up with. I try to go to the high school, Midview, once a week. I’m not always successful at that, but I try to spend the better part of a morning there. I’ll sketch. I don’t go there to see certain incidents, but just to soak it all in. The sketchbooks are helpful. I’m horrible at making people up, so it’s good to be able to flip through my sketchbook and go, “That’s the character.” Occasionally, I’ll take two or three days off just to write, so I can get in an extended groove that allows me to get a lot of material together. A lot of time I’ll work in the evenings, which is nice because the phone’s not ringing. And it’s good because I’m always home, so if my son, Brian, has a question about his homework, I’m always here.
I always work Saturdays—and this is where the week actually gets different—I have a high-school student come in on Saturdays. It’s usually someone from an art class who I think is pretty good. I practice job discrimination like that. [laughter] This student will come in and fill in blacks, stuff like that. They’ll take the scripts that I’ve written and correct the spelling, white-out all the stuff I’ve crossed out, and weave it together so it looks like a legitimate script. They’ll copy stuff, file release sheets, all that office stuff. I have a girl coming in now to handle all that stuff, and she’s great. It can be the most incredibly boring job. You have to endure sitting in a room by yourself all day long.
Isabella: In Crankshaft, you’ve done some very moving stories involving adult illiteracy and the homeless, as well as some nostalgic stories about Crankshaft’s baseball career and musician Bunny Berrigan. Are you a baseball fan?
Batiuk: Those two things are perfect things to mention, given that you asked me about writing about things in my life. The illiteracy thing was inspired by my parents. They had retired, and they had become tutors, teaching someone to read. I was able to draw on their experiences with that in Crankshaft. The baseball thing is funny, because I really don’t like baseball that much. I don’t watch baseball. If I watch any sport, it’s football, and as you know, in Cleveland we can’t do that anymore. [laughter] The baseball thing is not really about baseball. It’s a metaphor. It’s about someone who had a dream and tried to pursue that dream and fell a little bit short. And yet, there was one moment showed that it could have gone a little bit further, that he had the potential. And the rest of his life is a little unfulfilled, because life got in the way and prevented him from pursuing the dream. It’s also about being in love with something, like people are in love with cartooning or baseball—that’s what it’s really about. It’s about that story in his youth when he was as good as anybody else, even though he didn’t get a chance to go further.
It’s so much fun to write. I’ve got a friend who’s a big baseball fan. He’s got a baseball encyclopedia. I said to him, “I want Crankshaft pitching for a team that’s close to Ohio, and that team would go on to the World Series.” We found that the 1940 Detroit Tigers played in the World Series. It had three All-Stars on it, and their farm team was the Toledo Mudhens, which is great—I love the name, it’s absolutely super. He helped me keep it real, he helped me get my terminology straight, and it’s fun researching that stuff. It’s fun explaining why Crankshaft didn’t get called up to the Tigers, why he didn’t pitch in the World Series. I find I really enjoy that kind of research. It’s foolish research—I research far more than I absolutely need to do, but I just like it. And it’s helpful to Chuck because I can give him pictures. It’s the same thing with Bunny Berrigan, although I really do like music.
Isabella: What kind of music do you like?
Batiuk: It starts with rock and roll. To me, they haven’t gotten any better than two guitars and a drum set. But I’ve grown beyond that. I like classical music. I’ve started listening to opera. The Bunny Berrigan thing in Funky was an education for me. I went out and bought some of Bunny’s CDs and got exposed to a lot of big-band music. It opened my eyes and ears to a world of music that I hadn’t paid much attention to. I was learning about Berrigan, I was learning about that time period, and it was wonderful to work all that together into a story. The local public radio station just did a little piece on Bunny Berrigan. He played in Ohio. He died in his thirties from alcoholism. It just seemed like a very interesting and inspiring story, so I started researching it.
Isabella: Another Crankshaft question: Will Ed ever remarry?
Batiuk: I’ve thought about that. I don’t know. In fact, there’s a back-story there: Whatever happened to his wife? I think people assume that she died, but there’s a story there that I never really got into. I haven’t ruled remarrying out, but I don’t have any immediate plans to do anything with it.
Isabella: Remember, I made a suggestion to you on the phone the other day that Crankshaft have Apple Annie, the homeless actress he met when he was mugged in New York, move in with him. [laughter] You’ve got the May-December romance . . .
Batiuk: I have plans for Apple Annie. I love her character.
Isabella: I loved the whole homeless series. It brought out some dimensions of Crankshaft that we hadn’t seen. And he seems more accepting now of his daughter’s live-in boyfriend—his sin-in-law.
Batiuk: It was fun. I put that character in, and then Chuck’s artwork came back, with the Yankees baseball cap and everything. It was too nice to be a one-off situation. I had to keep this character. I do more things with her now—I bounce her back and forth between the strips at will now. It’s one of the great things about owning all your characters! [laughter]
Isabella: In Funky Winkerbean a while back, you bounced it ahead a few years. What was the genesis of that move?
Batiuk: Once I had done the teen-pregnancy story, these characters had matured. I had opened up a door, and I could go back and forever do Les on a rope, or I could move ahead. I chose to go through the door I had opened. I did that story in 1986, and it was shortly after that that I came up with the idea of graduating them and having Les come back as a teacher. I didn’t do it for a few years. The twentieth anniversary of the strip was coming up in 1992, and I thought that would be the perfect time to do it. Also, I wanted time to work on it, to see if I really liked the idea, if it was something I should do. I was more nervous about it then; it hadn’t been done much. I think Trudeau bounced his characters ahead in Doonesbury. I kept test-marketing it. I would go up to people and ask, “What if I did this?” I remember asking my dad about it, and he said, “I wouldn’t do something like that just for the sake of a stunt.” He later told me that it turned out to be a pretty good idea, which I thought was great. And of course I had to make the syndicate feel good about it, so they wouldn’t think I was crazy.
This all came down in the middle of this lawsuit, so everything was kind of crazy. And even though I had quit John Darling, I was writing three strips: Funky 1, Funky 2 and Crankshaft. So when everything settled down, I had quite a backlog of material. In retrospect, it was a much better idea than I thought it was at the time. I’m so much happier where it’s gone. Looking back on it, I had been in a rut. I didn’t think I was in a rut then, but I had started to dig a pretty deep hole. I probably could have continued doing the same thing I had always done, and some days done a pretty good job of it, but I think I would have gotten kind of bored with it.
Isabella: I don’t want to dwell on the lawsuit, because that stuff is boring, but where do things stand with your strips and the ownership thereof?
Batiuk: With Crankshaft, when I signed the contract I owned it. I’ve owned those characters from the beginning. With the Funky characters, it’s one of those deals where, as part of the settlement, I’m not allowed to talk about everything that’s gone on. But the copyright on the strip changed. It changed from the syndicate’s to mine, so it’s pretty obvious that I own the copyrights to the characters. That’s where it is now. And I have editorial control over the characters, which I had before the lawsuit. So I now control their destiny. [laughter] I control the Funkyverse.
Isabella: Since the characters jumped forward several years, you’ve done Funky as a blend of continuity and gag-a-day. As a reader, I saw a quantum leap in your work at that point. The older stuff was good, but the newer stuff was great. Was the teen-pregnancy story what inspired you to make that move?
Batiuk: That story was reprinted as a booklet offered by the syndicate. They had more than 60,000 requests for that booklet, so they were real pleased with that. At that time, I became one of their cartoonists who does this sort of thing. I started to develop a reputation within the syndicate and with the readers as someone who would do this thing, and it wouldn’t come as such a surprise. I found myself interested in jettisoning some of the fantasy elements of the strip—they no longer worked. When you’re writing about a teenager who is contemplating suicide or who is pregnant, the fantasy elements become more incongruous. Little by little, they started to disappear. I found ways of dumping stuff like the anthropomorphized objects. Like the talking leaves: I did a sequence where Les, as a teacher, is looking out at the falling leaves and remembering how, when he was a kid, he would imagine that the leaves would talk to each other. So it was rationalized. With Cindy Summers, the school’s most popular girl and Funky’s future bride, I got rid of her . . . hair probe. [laughter] When you want to do more mature things where she and her husband are embracing, it sort of gets in the way. More and more, I was moving to a sort of behavior where the humor gets layered into the situation, the way it would really happen. It’s very satisfying. I’m ready to enjoy different styles of humor.
Isabella: You’re a comics fan. Do you study the work of other cartoonists?
Batiuk: Oh, sure. I think a lot of the more dynamic work is being done in comic books. You’ll come across more interesting art, more interesting stories . . . they’re just more experimental. That’s where the fascinating stuff is occurring. Oftentimes I’ll open a comic book and see something that a syndicate wouldn’t allow a strip to talk about. It’s like we’re building a wall, and each of us is trying to put a brick in the wall. You’re lucky if you get to put one brick in the wall. If you do, somebody else can build on that, and that’s cool.
Isabella: Many creators will see other work that opens their eyes to new possibilities in their own work. Has this ever happened to you?
Batiuk: Not as one great epiphany that I can point to. But Charles Schulz was a revelation. He was an eye-opener for everybody. I can’t point to any one thing that made me want to totally shift gears. It’s more like a series of small assimilations, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. I remember when I was a kid living in Akron—it must have been in the second or third grade—I was watching Rin-Tin-Tin. They were under attack and trapped, and one of them broke out a guitar and started singing Silent Night. It was a Christmas story. And even then I thought, “Wow, what a great bit—I’m going to use that someday.” I filed it away. I loved the incongruity of it. If you’re a writer—and I’m sure you do this, too—you see things and you put them away in a mental file.
Isabella: I remember a time not so many years ago when you discovered the work of a certain cartoonist.
Batiuk: Oh, you mean Milton Caniff! Yes, that was because of the advice of a certain interviewer. [laughter] Terry was amazing. I was blown away by it. I had missed Terry as a kid. I had seen his work in Steve Canyon and I had known it was pretty good, but I never paid much attention to it. By the time I was starting, I don’t think Steve Canyon was even running in Cleveland. But going back and reading Terry, I was amazed at the depth, the breadth, the humanity Caniff could put into that. Coupled with his artistic ability, those are just amazing strips. As a writer, you want to create real character, people you can empathize with and put them into situations. So yeah, that was a real revelation.
Isabella: This will be old news by the time this interview sees print, but right now you’re about to explore another serious subject in Funky: teen dating violence.
Batiuk: One of the courses I sit in on at Midview High is called “Human Development.” There are a lot of courses like that. It’s part sex education, part learning about adult responsibilities, about family life . . . it prepared them for what they’re going to encounter. I like it because they sit around in a horseshoe and talk, so I hear things I don’t hear in other classes. The teacher of that class, Holly Davidson, came up to me and said, “You ought to do something on teen dating violence.” She said it was a big problem that she encounters among students. At the time, I thought she was giving me a lot more credit than I deserved, but sure enough, five years later, I jumped on that idea. I remember thinking, “That would never work.” But the world takes another couple of turns and becomes worse, and teen dating violence becomes a high-level topic. So I went to the library and took a stack of books home and did research.
Isabella: I’ve seen some of the strips, and there’s a moving sequence where Lisa Moore tells Susan about her own experience with dating violence. That sequence seemed to indicate that Lisa’s own teen pregnancy was the result of date rape. Is that accurate?
Batiuk: . . . yeah, although I didn’t say it. It was implied, but it was certainly there. It’s a perfect example of what I was saying about how marvelous these characters are. I had written that sequence, and I left them in the parking lot. This fellow, Matt, who was abusing Susan, drives off, and I thought, “That’s it—that’s the end of the story.” But it just wasn’t right. So I thought maybe she should talk to Les about this. Maybe she should talk to Lisa about this. So she goes up into their apartment, and Lisa kicks Les out, and there are these two women talking, having this heart-to-heart discussion about this subject matter. And it was absolutely amazing. I had revisited the teen-pregnancy storyline, and I added a darker layer to the whole thing. It could have been there all along. It was one of the most wonderful writing experiences I’ve had. It was always there, but I had to discover it, and that’s what I love about these characters: I can do stuff like that. It adds so much depth to the characters.
Isabella: Overall, what has been the reaction to the serious stories in your strips?
Batiuk: It’s been very gratifying. Part of that is because the syndicate has been very supportive. King Features has had the brunt of those stories, because more of them have occurred in Funky. They’ve done a great job of encouraging me to continue pursuing that sort of thing. When I first started it, with the teen-pregnancy storyline, we were afraid that if we just laid it out there and didn’t let the editors know what was coming, the reaction of the readers would make them crazy. So King does a very good job of letting the editors see the material in advance. It’s one of the problems with comic strips: You don’t get to see the entire storyline at once. There are people who see one isolated strip and just totally freak out. A lot of times, editors will do pieces that help readers put the stories in context. So they say, “Here’s the story, and it will all work out.” Sometimes they’ll do sidebar articles on them, which happened with the suicide-prevention storyline. the strip becomes a catalyst for disseminating information. It comes from a different venue—it’s not the news or the TV. A comic strip is novel, so it’s a good excuse to bring it to the surface and talk about the subject. So far, the reaction has been really good. I’m waiting for the one where I really mess it up; then I’m really in trouble. [laughter]
Isabella: Have any of these stories had a personal impact on you?
Batiuk: I find myself investing a lot more emotionally. It gets hard to do these things sometimes. It’s draining, because you really identify with these characters. And it becomes more time-consuming. The writing, even as it’s more enjoyable, just take up more and more time. I sometimes have to back off and write something a little lighter, a little funnier, just to get away from it.
Isabella: Are there issues you’d like to address but can’t, either because they would be inappropriate or because you haven’t been able to figure out how to address them in Crankshaft or Funky?
Batiuk: Based on some of the things I have tackled, I don’t feel there’s a whole lot I couldn’t do. But I don’t have an agenda. They really do grow out of the story and the characters. But if I wanted to and if it was important enough to the story, I think I could touch on just about anything.
Isabella: Describe yourself in terms of persoality traits we see in your characters.
Batiuk: There are two obvious ones. With Les, it’s obvious that I’m drawing on a lot of personal experience. The rope in gym class—I was afraid of it. I wondered, “What’s the point of climbing to the ceiling of the gym?” On the other hand, the band director—as much as I hate to admit it—I’ve got a bit of the band director. There’s a bit of megalomania there. Small doses of it, but it takes a lot of gall to think, “I can write words and draw pictures and people will want to read that.” It takes nerve to approach life like that.
Those are two obvious ones, but there are others. Crankshaft, he’s a cranky guy who says what we would like to say.
Isabella: Your wife, Cathy, is a schoolteacher. Does she ever play a role in the development of the strips?
Batiuk: Sometimes Cathy will say something and it’s too cool not to use. She’ll have a little one-liner, and I’ll jot it down. She’s a big help. And for people who do stuff like I do, their spouse is often their best critic. She can just look at my stuff and see immediately where it’s going wrong. I’ll run downstairs to show her something and say, “Look at this!” like a little kid with a drawing, and she’ll say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if you did this?” I’ll pout and slink back upstairs. And I know she’s right, but you don’t want to redo something. But I’ll end up redoing it because she made a really good suggestion. So I try not to show her much. [laughter] But she really does have a good capacity to look at my stuff analytically.
Isabella: Has Cathy worked her way into any of the stories in the strip?
Batiuk: I don’t know if you can really do that in a marriage. You can’t play practical jokes like that on your wife. Well, I take that back. A lot of the marriage between Les and Lisa as it stands now has some elements of our relationship, what goes into a good relationship. So although she isn’t like Lisa, a lot of what I know about a good relationship gets written into the strip. She affects it in that way.
Isabella: You have a teenage son, Brian. How does he rate his dad: geek or way cool?
Batiuk: I don’t know. I don’t think he knows what to make of it. For a long time I don’t think he realized what was going on. I think he thinks it’s kind of fun, but I don’t think he pays a lot of attention to it, which is a good thing. He’s certainly not going to get into cartooning and carry it on.
Isabella: Does he ever contribute anything to the strips?
Batiuk: Occasionally he’ll say something that’s just absolutely terrific. When he was younger, I would use him as a model, because Fred and Ann had adopted Lisa’s baby.
Isabella: Do you have any other plans to do any stories about that adoption?
Batiuk: Yep.
Isabella: [Pause] Ohh-kay. Do you have a favorite character in the strips?
Batiuk: There are so many characters . . . it’s really difficult. I guess the relationship between Les and Lisa is my favorite. It keeps coming to the forefront. I get a lot of nice feedback on that.
Isabella: Has there been any interest from movies or television in your characters?
Batiuk: Crankshaft has been optioned three or four times. Funky was optioned once, but I could tell it wasn’t very serious. I think with Crankshaft it comes from being in the Los Angeles Times. It’s out there where people who do that sort of thing see it. Beyond that, there’s been nothing. Until the glow from the cathode-ray tube hits my face, I’m not going to get excited about it.
Isabella: Who would you cast as Crankshaft?
Batiuk: George Kennedy. I think he’d look fantastic.
Isabella: How about Funky?
Batiuk: Gee, I haven’t thought about that. Is Leonardo DiCaprio available? [laughter]
Isabella: If you could trade strips with another cartoonist for a week, who would it be?
Batiuk: Given where I’m trying to go, probably the only one that I could do anything with would be Lynn Johnston on For Better or For Worse. I once tried to see if she was interested in crossing our characters over, but she wasn’t.
Isabella: Have you ever considered creating an original Funky story in comic-book format?
Batiuk: I thought about that. I thought it might be a way to do stories I couldn’t do in the strip, but I haven’t bumped into that yet. I can work into the strip most of the ideas I have—all of them, to this point. I don’t see it coming about, just due to the time aspect.
Isabella: What are your goals for the future now? Where are you going?
Batiuk: I guess I’m getting less ambitious now—I don’t want to start any new strips. I want to take what I’ve got with Funky and with Crankshaft and explore those. I feel very fortunate that I have subject matter that I’m growing into, and it has potential to keep growing along with me. I don’t know how long newspapers are going to be around, but I’d like to push those two things into new and challenging areas.
Isabella: If you could reach your younger self—the Tom Batiuk who is just starting to dream about a career in the arts—how do you think he would react to you?
Batiuk: I’ve done a lot of the things I’ve wanted to do. When I was younger, I thought what a great opportunity it would be to create a comic strip and see it in the newspaper and to hopefully have it go on for a period of time and become a part of people’s lives. If I could see that I would one day do those things, I’d think, “Boy, what a lucky guy!”