Well well! Another opportunity to catch up with Westview’s own Dennis the Menace, Cory Winkerbean. Following in the footsteps of his uncle-cousin Wally, Cory appears to be headed off to start a life in the military.
Military snarkers– first off, I salute you. Secondly, is this how it all goes down? The mood is pretty grim; like they’re about to send him to a firing squad. Is this how it goes down? I was always under the impression recruits went to a bus station or flew to wherever their basic training was.
Note to Backache– this is not the best time to draw Cory as a 12-year old kid again.
Son of Stuck Funky 
All I can say is good riddance. With any luck at all Cory will end up being stationed in Greenland or something for the next thirty years. Of course, there IS the possibility that he returns a few years from now as a “fine young man” suitable enough for our old nemesis Summer, who should be graduating from KSU sometime around then. Just throwing that out there.
isn’t that mailmans wife from yesterday ??
Back in the day, I go a plane ticket to Orlando and a Navy bus, much like a haze gray school bus, picked us up at the airport and hauled us to boot camp. The Chief was pretty nice to us until that bus rolled onto Navy real estate, then hoo-boyos. As for Cory, I think they are taking him directly to a firing squad. The kid’s a menace.
For daring to have a functioning pair and refusing to take any s**t from Les and Funky, Cory is hereby banished from The Village. We’ll never see him again since Batiuk has already given Wally PTSD and lopped off Becky’s arm and the services apparently don’t care anymore if a male recruit wears pearls, so there aren’t any more Very Serious Issues to inflict on him.
I’m surprised that they send a vehicle and two soldiers to pick up every new recruit. That is, unless Corley is already AWOL and these are MPs taking him to the stockade.
Will the army guys drive through the tough part of town and show Corky all the places they used to live?
I’ll second the salute to our military snarkers here at SoSF. THANK YOU for your service.
I’ll also salute David O for sitting in for TFH in what is sure to be a scintillating week of strips. You should receive combat pay for this one (pun intended).
I have a different type of salute for BatHack and I’m sure you all can guess what it is.
Could Funky’s contempt for his (step)son be any more obvious? The look on his face leaves little doubt that he intended to follow up “maybe he’ll surprise us” with “by surviving.”
I do think it is kinda cool, though, that the Army has Dodge Caravans painted to match their uniforms.
Maybe Corgi is getting a special escort because he’s the Army’s new Top Secret chin-up weapon.
I’ll add my thanks to our military folks–for your service and for helpfully explaining all the ways Batiuk’s depiction of the military is fucked up. I have a feeling you’re going to have a lot of “fun” this week.
It’s very telling that Holly reacts to Cory’s parting with a hug and “I love you!” while Funky just stands off to the side and says “Eh, maybe he won’t screw up quite so badly this time.”
Add me to the folks who appreciate those who serve our country.
I think what’s happening here is that Tom Batiuk is winding down Funky Winkerbean prior to ending it, probably Dec 31st or some other symbolic date.
Think about it. Suppose you’d only started reading FW a month ago, and for some reason you decided you liked it and kept reading. How much sense would today’s episode make to you? Here’s some kid you’ve never seen, doing…what, exactly? For all that new reader knows, the kid is going to prison. Or to Boy Scout camp. Or to a WWII re-enactment.
Since the previous strips are not available, and the “About this Comic” doesn’t even mention Cory (this also seems unavailable…on any of the Comics Kingdom sites), this person is a complete unknown.
Again, think on it a moment. Since the big 40th celebration, we had the Gay Prom, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Les’ Wedding. All of them could easily be seen as “These are the things I wanted to do. Let’s wrap up all these plot threads before we strike the set.” Sending Cory finally off to boot camp seems like another one of those, though shoe-horned in so awkwardly that it would have no meaning to anyone other than a long-time (and I mean long-time) reader. (Of course, I assume Tom Batiuk feels that people breathlessly follow his work and have done so for decades.)
Maybe he’s getting tired of doing it, and instead of a John Darling solution, he just wants to send everyone off with a completed plot arc.
After all, I’m sure it must take a lot of time for him to post all those comments at NJ.com.
That Army van reminds me of Walter White’s 2003 Pontiac Aztek from Breaking Bad:
I am astonished Funky is even there instead of at Montoni’s. Who will make the breakfast pizza and serve bottomless cups of coffee to Crazy Harry?
Well… now that you mention it, I recall a van coming to pick up my brother just before he started Army basic training (he’s at West Point now, [obligatory go-Army huah]). But I think it was a regular maroon van, not a tricked-out Army-green one. And the people picking him up didn’t look like WWII veterans arriving to inform us of a death. So, there’s that.
Cory wasn’t drafted to war, he’s going voluntarily! Shouldn’t he be excited about shooting a gun, serving his country?
I’m wondering if FW is getting canned, or ending. By this time last year, Batiuk was excitedly telling us the plot lines for 2012: gay Prom, Kilimanjaro, etc.
Unfortunately, I heard he was going to re-introduce an old Act II character next year.
Hey! That’s not the US Army Recruit Door-to-Door We Drive U Express Shuttle Service! It’s the CASH CAB!!
The whole “Cory is off to the military” arc (and I use the term loosely) has been tacked on rather hastily. We saw him doing push ups at the state fair, then he announced to his parents that he’d joined. It wasn’t brought up again at all until today.
Is Funky the worst, most absent father ever? The only interaction he had with Cory was when Cory was in trouble. I’ve never seen one genuine father-son moment with any kind of warmth whatsovever between those two.
DavidO, reminds me of the relationship (if you want to call it that) between Goatee Boy and Crayola.
Funky’s angling to beat out Les for Westview Asshole of the Year.
I did not think it was possible for Batominc to create a character more hateful than Les Moore. But I was wrong. True to form, the title character is the least likable reformed alcoholic (I’d like him better drunk), most unsupportive step-dad, and least attractive fat, gray man in literature (and I use the term loosely). That none of this is deliberate only adds to the shame Batominc brings upon the serial graphic art form.
Why would Holly marry such a man and subject her son to him? Inexplicable. Why would an otherwise intelligent man in his 50s rail against this affront to art and writing? (Whoops, got self-referential there!). The plot of Funky Winkerbean is, like everything else about it post–Act-I, inexplicable. To call Batominc a hack is to insult hacks.
If I were Cory Winkerbean, aged 18, I’d change my name back to my real dad’s name, and then, then I’d kill that fat son of a bitch by jamming a Montoni’s calzone down his throat and pounding it in with a bottle of cheap vodka.
I think what we see with Funky, and with all the characters here really, is something I don’t have a good term for.
Let’s call it assumed history.
Those of you who write know that while you’re writing, you accumulate all kinds of details about your characters in your head. Sometimes, you accumulate them so thoroughly that these details seem so second-nature to you that you forget to put them in the story. So when you have a scene where your main character slaps his wife, it’s perfectly justified in your head because of all the details built-up in the writing. A third party, however, is going to read that scene and say, “What a scumbag. I hate this guy.”
I can easily see this as the reason why Tom Batiuk thinks Les is lovable (“He had to put up with so much as a kid”), Funky should be admired (“He was a pretty funny guy as a teen”), Summer is awesome (“Uh”), Cory’s crying out for a hug (“Um”), etc etc. Instead of, “What scumbags. I hate these guys.”
Unfortunately, it seems pretty obvious that there are no third parties in Tom Batiuk’s life. He’s obviously playing the “Protection from Editors” card (search tvtropes if you have a few hours to spend at tvtropes).
counting down to Cory fragging his lieutenant…
So the fauxstalgia tour wasn’t building up to anything. Then why bother? I mean, wouldn’t it actually have been more, you know, relevant if it had been Funky hauling sullen Owen around to all Funky’s childhood and young-adult haunts as a sort of a farewell tour before sending him off to be scarred in whatever way Tom is cooking up? Instead, all Owen gets is this morose “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” goodbye.
I’m calling Cory ending up (in one form or another) like the fat guy in Full Metal Jacket.
Batom Inc. treats Funky a bit like Crankshaft. In Crankshaft, the problem is that day in and day out, Crankshaft is a sadistic old bastard that takes his only pleasure in making others miserable. But then something comes along (like how Crank supposed for a bunch of kids college educations, never mind the paltry salary of a bus driver) that tries us to make us see that he’s really a good guy underneath. Trouble is, it doesn’t really work that way and just ends up a victim of bad writing. Same with Funky.