For better or for worse, reading and commenting on Funky Winkerbean every day for nearly three years has enabled me to pick up on Batiuk’s jokes, however weak, and his references, however obscure. It’s kind of a challenge to search the web for background on what goes on in this strip. Having said that, today’s strip has me at a complete and utter loss.
Googling “liquid sound” turned up a bunch of results, but nothing really relating to school bands or music education. Wikipedia talks about “a method of attaining underwater sound reproduction of music or meditative sonorities in swimming pools, combined with lighting effects.” There’s a liquidsound.com website. I found lots of images of fountains made of musical instruments, but not any that were on display at a music education convention.
I finally decided that it’s just TB once again indulging his fetish for musical instruments being doused in water.
Son of Stuck Funky 
There’s also “liquid funk,” which is a subgenre of electronic music. I doubt Batiuk actually knows anything about electronic music, but maybe he saw the term while skimming a newspaper article a few years back and thought, “what, is that like a fountain made of music instruments, hyuck hyuck”?
Folks, I keep saying this over and over–the word-balloons are drawn well in advance. The dialogue to fill them is written shortly before publication. There is no other way to explain the bizarre grammar-throttling dialogue in this strip. There have been thousands of occasions in the last two years when “It’s nice to be here!” would have worked perfectly, but instead we get “Crazy Harry, it’s nice for me, Les Moore, to be able to tell you how much I can appreciate my being here at this time!”
Word-balloons before text. Make that your mantra! Word-balloons before text. It’s the Batiuk way.
Today is yet another example. There’s a fountain of saxophones. Dinkle has a word-balloon to be filled. What can possibly fill it? “Gasp, they’re ruining those reeds!” Nope, he’s smirking, so it has to be…what?
What, exactly?
That must be a pretty good GPS system — they found the trombones exactly one panel later.
Why not just have Harry ask, “Water they doing to those instruments?” Duh-yuk-yuk-yuk-yuk!
By the way, has anyone seen Mrs. Dinkle lately? Maybe she left early because she already heard all these jokes last year, too.
So Batom either dreams up this band instrument sculpture or maybe he sees it in “real life” and decides it’d make a good sight gag. Then he finally gets the chance to break it out during this band convention arc (which is already so flimsy it requires single-panel-arc-stretchers on Friday) and THIS is the best “joke” he can could come up with for it? That’s simply alarming.
“I got the inspiration when we played through the Monsoon of ’86″…there you go, a far better terrible joke that almost even makes sense within the content of the strip AND is in character for Dinkle. And I’m neither a published, paid author OR someone who likes the strip. It took me ten seconds, which means I spent nine seconds more “writing” it than the actual author of the strip did. He should put this strip up on the refrigerator door at the studio in case he ever forgets why FW hasn’t been more popular through the years.
Ummm…. Sort of looks like a bukkake thing going on there.
At any rate, we’ve got hatchet faces galore today. Hey, TB: It’s still not too late to learn how to draw profiles!
And as far as the ancillary characters are concerned, well, the less said the better, I suppose. Clearly the person who drew this strip just doesn’t give a crap anymore.
It’s a spit valve joke?
Summer has a real Hatchet Face in this one. Other than that, what’s the point? I think this is the kind of stuff BatHack writes when he’s not getting enough sleep. That old bat on the right stole Funky’s glasses with the precious little chain on it.
I guess we beady eyed nitpicker NON-CARTOONISTS were not meant to understand the Subtle Humor in today’s hilarious episode. Either that, or it’s Filler Friday, as Bats stretches out this arc in his quest to be recognized as the laziest, least talented cartoonist in the known universe.
So why isn’t Dinkleberry being mobbed for autographs wherever he goes?
This strip has three settings – over-the-top depressing, unfunny, or incomprehensible. Today’s strip straddles the last two.
I’ve heard of fluid harmony, but this is ridiculous…
The only water analogy I can come up with is that reading this ‘comic’ is what I imagine waterboarding would feel like.
I think he is going for something like “fluid sound” but missing by a mile.
How come One-arm doesn’t get any lines this week?
Ah! Now I know what’s been bothering me about today’s strip, apart from, you know, everything else!
The sleeve! The pinned-up sleeve is out of frame!
That woman next to Darby Hinkle could be anybody: Slumber Moore, Mopey Pete, even Cody (mysteriously Owenless). Heck, it could be any black-haired character between the ages of 14 and 94, given how inconsistently this artiste portrays age.
Without that sleeve so prominent that it seems to be pressed directly onto the reader’s retinas, there’s no way to identify that character. Except for—oh, my!—the plot.
That “liquid sound” is a giant Sunami coming to wash all this Batcrap outta exisitence.
Those people are WAAAAAAAYYYYYY too interested in those big ,white-liquid spewing horns!!!
Becky: “It does my heart good, seeing people so proudly display their instruments!”
Harry: “Oh, rrrrrreally?”
Becky: “Indeed. Those big, powerful instruments, gushing forth with such might and majesty. It’s awesome.”
Harry: “Mmmm. You don’t see Harriet around anywhere, do you?”
Becky: “Come to think of it, no. Where is she? HAAAARRRIE-”
Harry: “Quiet, you fool! And come with me. I want to show you another instrument…”
How about this: make the fountain out of only French Horns, and have Dinkle say, “I guess it’s to demonstrate their liquid tone-quality”?
You beady-eyed nitpickers crack me up.
Age? Age don’t matter. According to the Model Sheets, the age for Mr. and Mrs. Fairgood is in their late 50s, which they have been drawn as so. Later on (and sometimes even back and forth), they suddenly aged to their late 60s or early 70s. Does poor Fred last Sunday, his head resembling an apple that’s been left out too long, look in his late 50s to you?