Something Depressing This Way Comes

I didn’t get to see today’s strip ahead of time, and I really don’t have much to add to the excellent comments that have already posted. I will say that despite their ineptitude (administering tPA before a CT scan, for example), the staff at Westview Memorial work very quickly indeed. Fred came in less than an hour ago, and already he’s been seen by a neurosurgeon.

31 thoughts on “Something Depressing This Way Comes”

  1. So, Fred Fairgood’s stroke is a horrible event that must be treated with grim seriousness…

    –but Pa Winkerbean’s senile dementia is knee-slappingly funny?

  3. Know what else is funny? How you can telegraph an entire FW arc after just a few panels and still be completely confounded by a few lines of clunky, confusing dialog that’s trying way, way too hard to be profound. How about knocking it off with the sad reflections regarding the utter futility of life and maybe just telling a goddamned story for once? WHAT did she know was coming for “her whole life”?? WHAT “didn’t she ever see”?? How the f*ck would she know Fred would suffer a stroke? Or is she talking about mortality in general? Who the hell knows, because in his rush to be deep and meaningful he skipped right over the “having it make sense” part. What a hack.

  4. Hey, lady. People get old, sick, and die. Especially those in the Funkyverse. You should have seen that coming up the river easily.

  5. Ann knows all about basketball, but she doesn’t know that people eventually die? That’s deep… real deep, man. Deep like a slam dunk or something. And yet, this strip lives on.

  6. “An hour ago I had the heat on… And now… It’s funny how you can know one day your adopted son will let you freeze in the coming waiting room… But you never expect his new wife to wear a color changing sweater.”

  7. Ha, there’s a depressed Black guy in a ballcap, just in case this scene isn’t depressing ENOUGH for ya. Today’s message – Live each day knowing old age and/or death is waiting just around the corner, so start being miserable about it NOW.

    Fred will survive, but he’ll be a little weird. For one thing, that game when he slams the toilet seat down and lets out a “loud scream?” Every five minutes. And when company comes over, he’ll enter the room naked, spinning his schlong around, making airplane noises. Then he’ll take a dump on the carpet, point to it proudly, and say that he helped with the delivery.

    But otherwise, he’ll be fine.

  8. ah Anne? Fred’s the one in the hospital bed with the all the tubes sticking out of him. He had the stroke not you – while grieving for your life you might want to spare a thought or two for him yes? Fred’s stroke doesn’t mean zilch to Anne except as how it has affected HER life. Ye Gods every person in this strip is utterly self absorbed selfish monster without a thought in the world for anyone or how anyone is, unless it affects them.
    One has to wonder, did the rest of Ohio decide to put all of their sociopaths and narcissists into one town so the rest of the state could go about their business and not have to deal with these people?

  9. Several newspapers place certain comics in other sections…sports, editorial, entertainment, want-ads…..I’m going to lobby for FW to be placed in the obituary section of all newspapers.
    That’s the only place will it can be appreciated

  13. Ann: “It’s funny how you can know something is coming your entire life…but you never SEE it.”

    Jess: “You knew your entire life that your husband would have a stroke?!?”

    Ann: “Quiet WOMAN, the person who knows SUFFERING is talking!”

    Jess: “….my father was murdered.”

    Ann: “Yes, but Les Moore wrote a book about John Darling, so he’ll live forever, so that doesn’t count!”

    Jess: “Les’ book was never published.”

    Ann: “Darin! Tell your newlywed wife to know her place and shut up!”

    Darin: “We’ve been married over a decade, Fishtick. I mean, Mom.”

    Ann: “AAAAARGH!”

    ********************************

    And -still-, the comments section on the other site is full of “IF YOU AREN’T ANOTHER SYNDICATED CARTOONIST THEN YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN!”

    Uh-huh.

    Tom, drop the aliases.

  14. Because God knows syndicated cartoonists only write for other syndicated cartoonists. That’s the majority of their readership! They can’t help it if the masses sneak a peek now and then.

  15. There’s a lot of cross pollination between the official sites and SoSF. Why doesn’t Batiuk come over here to complain? Is it because

    a) He was here as Reflex76, and banned.
    b) He lacks the balls to come over here, as the harsh criticism will cause him to shrivel up.

    I secretly hope for the day when Batiuk writes a storyline where he not-so-subtly attacks SoSF, using name knockoffs like “Whimpering Heights”, “Senor Burrito”, “Inksmell”, “BillyWhoStinks”, and of course, the ringleader, “T.F. Hatchet”.

  16. That’s Keisha in the ballcap in panel 2. She hangs around the ER waiting room wondering how she can tell her mother she ditched basketball and lost her scho0larship as a result. And could you blame her, always having to live in the shadow of the immeasurable Summer Moore?

  18. I think the expression of the black guy in Panel 2 in the blue hat speaks for us all.

  19. “But you never see it.” Wait a minute, is she complaining that she missed watching Fred have his stroke, thus there’s nothing in her life left to look forward to?

  20. Quick, someone please give Bathack some kind of award, the idiot is really desperate for one, with the unnamed gay couple and now this… What. An. Asshole.

  21. Oh, I get it. This explains the boring “let’s visit our old apartment” slumland tour we went on a few weeks ago. (Or was it months? I forget). Annie, that was foreshadowing that you could’ve seen a mile away. But you chose not to.

  23. So where was Blondie McFilmmaker the previous two days? Did she have to step out during the important information sharing by the doctors in order to shoot a few scenes for her documentary about her dad’s murder? The one that was solved by Les, the greatest author of all time with only one publication? Or did she stop by her old dorm to relive old times?

  25. So where was Blondie McFilmmaker the previous two days?

    She was in Cleveland with her boyfriend seeking some contact with normal people.

  26. Geez Darin, your father’s in there on a slab, quite possibly dying, and your mom’s sitting there in the waiting room, looking shattered at the prospect of her husband dying. Couldn’t you, you know, hug her or hold her hand or at least touch her? Couldn’t you at least not look so bored and disinterested that you appear to be here only out of obligation, rather than because Fred actually means something to you?

    I mean, I can understand being distracted by Jess over there, what with her clingy sweater that clings in all the right places, along with her skintight “nude” colored pants. I’d totally be all imagining all the filthy things we could be doing together, but that’s me. Fishstick Annie’s not my mother, and I don’t give a shit about dyin’ Fred.

  28. Señor Tortilla: A SoSF-themed arc would be the best arc ever IMO. I want to be Epic Doofus. If anything close to that ever happens, expect that Pete guy to somehow be involved. Or maybe Les writes a new book and gets savaged by the internets…even better.

    When he tries too hard to give these stories the “human touch” he forgets to move them along. Then you get entire weeks consisting of these characters telling you (sigh) how they feel (yawn). “What will I do? How will I take care of him?”…real life reactions. “Sometimes you blah blah and forget the blah blah blink and you miss it yadda yadda yadda”…half-baked philosophizing most of us left behind when we stopped getting stoned behind the garage. “Fred has a stroke”. As usual that will be the entire story, no more, no less. He does it every single f*cking time. There is no “story” here, no one “cares” about the characters in any way, thus it’s all just senseless babbling in that “look how quaint it is to make dumb wisecracks about the futility of living” way of his that annoys everyone so much. Nine months or a year from now when he finally re-visits this arc it will STILL consist entirely of “Fred had a stroke”. There’s no story there, just miserable stilted conversation. As always. At least in Act II stuff would explode or cars would fly off cliffs every so often.

  29. The fact that One Big Happy had a sight gag where “Fruhlinger” is written on a tombstone (and keep in mind that’s a very unusual name), then 9CL retaliated against its critics with “Sphinxter”, in which Esther Blodgett made one of the best JoshReads.com comments I’ve seen, which went something like “A talking asshole? Well, now I don’t know which character is supposed to be the author avatar, gives me hope that Batiuk would do something.

  30. —-So where was Blondie McFilmmaker the previous two days?

    She was in Cleveland with her boyfriend seeking some contact with normal people.——

    in Cleveland???

  31. Our local hospital has a new fast-track system for minor injuries that don’t require totally checking-in and can be taken care of by a Physician’s Assistant, and I recently had my finger stitched-up and was on my way home in just about an hour after I got there – but it still took me a half hour to get my stuff together and drive to the hospital, so an hour after I cut myself I was still waiting to see the PA – and I didn’t need to see a neurosurgeon. The following weekend, my mother fell down the stairs, landed hard on her butt and hit her head hard enough to not know where she was, and I called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. By the time the ambulance got to her house, got her loaded up and to the hospital (10 minutes away), and she got signed in there, over 2 hours had passed from the moment she fell down the stairs. It’s obvious that T-Bat has no grasp on how time passes in the real world, as well as anything else in the real world.

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