Today’s strip takes us through space, from London to Lowell, Massachusetts, and through time, to the mid-nineteenth century, to finally arrive at a weak “pun-chline” which a year or two ago would have been served up by Cory “Call Me Fishmeal” instead of Cody.
As an aside: a long-running comic to which FW is often (unfavorably) compared explains how “small lapses in continuity and art…only add to the charm” of “artisanal comics” such as Funky Winkerbean…check out today’s Doonesbury!
[Edit: Link to today’s FW and to Doonesbury were incorrect; I’ve fixed ’em now]
Son of Stuck Funky 
Hey, it’s the comic Batiuk was working on in one of those video interviews that came out around the Gaypromageddon. He isn’t kidding with the year-long lead time. At the time, the character model sheets on his desk appeared to be for long-lost Frankie and… Alex? Possible future appearances?
“A Tale of Two Sit-ins”? Heh heh heh. No, you stupid fuck. You worthless, stinking pile of dog shit! Boy, I sure am glad TB decided to leap forward 10 years, so he could showcase this new crop of hilarious high school students. This fuckjack is called, er, Cody, I gather? And he’s totally different from the old…never mind.
Either way, I notice a striking similarity between Les’ and Poe’s visages. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Wow, that sure was a long, long way to go to finally get to that terrible, dopey, sub-moronic punch line, wasn’t it? Note to Batom Inc., perhaps you could just take all of those long-festering “gag” ideas you have on file and just cram all of them into one incoherent Sunday strip. No one’s going to notice the difference anyway.
If Charles Dickens had visited Westview Ahia…..he would have written:
“No Great Expectations”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
This sucks so hard
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I mean, my goodness, if I was actually Satan (and my application is still under advisement so laugh if you want!)–I could not conceive of a comic strip so devoid of any merit what-so-ever that I would dare publish it in a major marketplace.
This actually makes me think I should watch the 2nd and 3rd “Transformers” films so as to glean some insights into the human condition, as delved into by Les Moore. And I’m kind of thinking that’s not good…right?
@Merry Pookster, and he would have dedicated “Bleak House” to Westview. Of course the town would have inspired a sequel “Bleakest House”.
We’ve been wrong. Les doesn’t teach English Lit. He teaches English Lit Trivia.
“Well, today we learned when Faulkner wrote Sanctuary and tomorrow we shall find out where Joan Didion was living when she wrote Play It As It Lays. It’s sure to be a corker of a class!”
“…READ something? What are you, a crazy person? Get out of my face!”
“Our Mutual Enemy”
“A Tale That’s Real Shitty”
I detest “Professor Moore”, with his ponderous pontificating and sincere, interested eyebrows. That scholarly pose he’s striking in panel two there is one of the most grating things I’ve seen in quite some time. Such a dick.
Ah, if Les Moore had been a 19th-Century superstar, what would he have written?
– 20,000 Cancer Cells in My Wife
– A Journey to the Center of the Cancer
– A Tale of Two Tumors
– Around the Cancer in 80 Days
– Cancer House
– Cancer Sawyer
– Cancer Twist
– Dr. Moore and Mr. Cancer
– Frankenstein, Or the New Carcinoma
– Huckleberry Cancer
– Letters From the Cancer
– My Life on the Mississippi with Cancer
– The Armless Man
– The Cancer Machine
– The Cancer of Dr. Moreau
– The Last of the Wives
– The War of the Cancers
– Two Years Before She Died of Cancer
>>As an aside: a long-running comic to which FW is often (unfavorably) compared explains how “small lapses in continuity and art…only add to the charm” of “artisanal comics” such as Funky Winkerbean<<
As I see you have made changes in a couple of panels, too.
Son Of Stuck Funky has gone artisanal!
TFH sez: If you’re talking about the broken links, they’ve been fixed. Sorry about that.
I thought Westview school district was broke. Here they are, paying double time to keep the school open for (presumably remedial) class on Sunday.
If Les was a hipster, I could see the need to wear cardigans. He and TB are the only men in Ohio under the age of 70 who wear them as a fashion statement.
“On our first evening aboard the steamboat out of Cincinnati, we were rather forcibly made the acquaintance of a fellow passenger, who introduced himself as the ‘Bard of Westview,” which is apparently a small village in the wilds of northern Ohio. This Bard, who wore spectacles and a long beard streaked with grey, was the village’s schoolmaster but seemed to spend all his time traveling about the frontier reciting an epic poem he had composed on the murder of the town newspaper editor and another about the death of his wife. I inferred from his interminable, pompous conversation that Westview was located in a malarial swamp and populated entirely by either one-armed consumptives or militiamen who had been driven out of their wits by their suffering at the hands of the Wyandots. It was with considerable relief that we saw the Bard waddle down the gangplank at Louisville mumbling to himself about children being left behind.”
(with apologies to Dickens)
@Charles- “We’ve been wrong. Les doesn’t teach English Lit. He teaches English Lit Trivia.”
Precisely. Why bother discussing an author’s actual works, much less the context? What matters is the minutiae!
And mocking the evil, stupid teenagers who you’ve brainwashed into being a bunch of slack, sad-eyed dolts due to your relentless drilling on worthless facts and random, unwarranted temper tantrums!
…and Les still wonders why his students do nothing but cheat, year after year after year.
No, Odie. It was A Sale of Two Titties.
Last week, these idiots were beating the drum for another tax grab. Today we get more of the same far-leftist, pro-union propaganda. “Da, cheeldrens, your eendoctrination ees almost komplete!”
Today’s episode is confusing. Unless Odie was trying to be funny (his facial expression suggests otherwise), I was under the impression he was the smart, nerdy kid in the group. Chullo Boy is supposed to be the slow-witted, slacker, smartass, right?
And do kids today know what a sit-in is/was?
Only way today’s strip could possibly be worse would be to have all the kids in the class do a Lynn Johnson style open mouth, sticky-out tongue laugh. Bet BatSuck considered that.
The Old Curiosity Komic Shop
I had to look up the answer to that question (American Notes, apparently), so I wouldn’t honestly expect a teenager who at best has been compelled to read Oliver Twist or Great Expectations to know it off the top of his head. Les is obviously baiting his students so he can sneer at their ignorance and impress them with his superior literary knowledge.
bad wolf: Hey, it’s the comic Batiuk was working on in one of those video interviews that came out around the Gaypromageddon. He isn’t kidding with the year-long lead time. At the time, the character model sheets on his desk appeared to be for long-lost Frankie and… Alex? Possible future appearances?
Great call, badwolf! That TB interview from May 2012 is posted on this page in the “Other Crap” section of this site: https://sonofstuckfunky.com/other-crap
Re: those model sheets of Frankie and Alex; I’ve seen other pictures of TB’s studio and workspace. I think those model sheets are just props he casually leaves laying around when “company” comes to interview, in order to give us mere mortals (a.k.a. non-cartoonists) a sense of how the pros operate.
And notice the word balloons are empty — to be filled in later with whatever idiocy BatArt thinks of in the middle of the night when Ayrhead’s snoring wakes him up.
I’ve always thought those model sheets for Act III look like they were drawn by someone other than TB, or that he no longer draws the Act III characters. The model sheets all look like a different hand created them.
He also has the Summer character model sheet, which manages to look even worse than she turned out.
These idiots don’t speak well of their parenting or their elementary and middle school education.
Withering Heights:
The cancer of Amontillado
The Black Cancer
Cancer and Punishment
The Cancer Manifesto
In the Shadow of Young Girls with Cancer
Alices Adventures in Cancerland
Lady Chatterly’s Cancer
Madame Ovarian Cancer
Wives and Daughters and Stage 4 Breast Cancer
Rusty: The model sheets all look like a different hand created them.
They are apparently the work of of Batiuk’s Ohio homey, comics artist John Byrne, who subbed for Batiuk in 2003 while TB was recovering from foot surgery.
War and Pizza.
The Idiot– no need to change the title and it applies equally to everyone in the strip.
This strip is literally like taking putting on a tuxedo, driving in a limo, taking a scenic woodland route, going to a glorious million dollar mansion….just to take a shit in the servants toilet.
@Helskor: I… I… I stand in line! That was magnificent!
Thanks for hanging on to that, TFH! Geez, i know i have a more visual memory, but that was weird. I like that the blank word balloons do give credence to Beanie and BeckoningChasm’s theories that the jokes are put in at the last minute! And you’re probably right about the model sheets just adding some sort of artistic ‘ambiance’—otherwise why not have the sheets for the characters you’re drawing on the strip in front of you?
“TFH sez: If you’re talking about the broken links, they’ve been fixed. Sorry about that.”
No, maybe just imagining things.
Luncheonette missing in panel 1.
Crazy eating the pizza in panel 3 as well as something against the door?