Coulda stopped at two panels today, TB; really, the turkey joke holds up just fine without Darin adding his two cents. Unless, who knows, maybe Darren’s seemingly casual remark is just some grim foreshadowing.
35 thoughts on “Turkey Timer”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
And now we finally get that horrible off-model face. Seriously. Her hair and face change between panels. Look at the chin.
Ann: “So…um…Jess…you’re being eerily quiet there!”
Darin: “She is doing her wifely duty, forming my heir. The first grandchild of Saint Lisa the Holy!”
Ann: “And, um, me, too.”
Darin: “N-no…you aren’t my blood!”
Ann: “….”
Jess: “Wow, BURN.”
Darin: “Silence, woman! All your energies must now be for one purpose only…GROWING THE FRUIT OF MY LOINS!”
Senor: I’d go as far as to guess that Tom forgot Fred had a stroke and started drawing HIM in the second panel.
“Well…there’s time, Mom”….
time to find health insurance
time to find a real job
time to find my bio-dad
time bang my pseudo-half sister
time to bury Fred and turn the room into a nursery
time for the morning after pill
time to write a new pizza app.
time to bang that red-hair waitress
time to drive through the bad side of town
time to try for a Pulitzer
I think Tom Batiuk is trying to play the Doonesbury game–Trudeau always had that hanging last panel after the joke was delivered (or sometimes just a hanging line of dialogue). Usually it was a kind of relevant flip to the joke, though.
I guess Batiuk feels he’s in the same league, so it doesn’t really matter that the hanging panel adds nothing. It’s the style that counts, not the substance or the context.
Well, our long national nightmare is over: http://funkywinkerbean.com is back online.
Did somebody say “Bigger turkey”? That means Les has been added to this year’s guest list! Although, Darrin shares the prize for insisting on being that guy who pretends not to get the obvious dumb joke told during Panel 2.
Bigger turkey needed becaaaauuuuse…? The newborn will be scarfing it down? Blondie McPregnant will be “eating for two?”
Normally, one would assume something dramatic will occur in this arc. Hey, why else would we care about two of the most uninteresting characters in FW having a third? But then you remember that BatTard is the master of the Dead End Storyline. So what we have here, basically, is filler.
Smirks all around!
Credit where it’s due: a quick look at the math indicates Jess is about two months along, which is usually when one starts the routine doctor’s visits and gets the first ultrasound. So Batiuk got that much right, at least–let’s see if it holds for the next seven months.
But could someone tell Ann the Colorform for her mouth is slipping to one side, please?
I’m pretty sure blondie hasn’t opened her mouth during this entire visit.
jezz,this will be one ugly ass smerking bundle of joy
“Bigger turkey”. What? Why?
“Well…There’s time, Mom.” Double What?
Why a bigger turkey? Time for what, exactly? Does it take longer to order a bigger…wait, who “orders” a turkey? Does a single line in today’s strip make any gawddamned sense?
Re: the offical FW site…2004 called and they’d like their website back, Mr. B. At least it’s still a handy reference in case I ever need to know what a never-seen FW character looked like ten years ago.
“It’s almost finished, I’ve made my point and told my joke, but it’s just missing a certain….something. Hmmm, let me think….wait! Eureka, I’ve got it! It needs a nonsensical unnecessary comment and one more great big terrifying sideways-comma-eyed smirk….and there we are! Perfect!”.
Poor, poor Becky. There’s always something throwing a wrench into the big band turkey sale every year, you know? Now, on top of only having one arm, this year Becky will have to contend with the birth of the Sainted One’s purebred blonde grandchild, which will surely result in road and school closures at the very least.
“Oh my…I’ll have to order a bigger turkey.”
This is what Tom Batiuk says to himself when he realizes his two-week arc will have to become a three-week arc instead.
Darin doesn’t need a job: he’ll write a book about Jesss’s pregnancy and, even though their experience will be no different than that of countless other people, the book will be a huge best seller and he’ll win an Oscar for his made-for-television screenplay.
Yes, TheDiva, let’s praise Batiuk for getting the “average pregnancy is about 9 months” detail right. Because that is, in fact, how low we’re setting the bar
My prediction: the baby is born premature, before Ann buys the turkey. There is no time left.
for what, who knowsTurkey…baby. That combination sounds vaguely familiar- 0h God no, even Batiuk wouldn’t go that far.
Jessica really looks sedated today. And what the fug is up with Fishstick’s mouth in the 2nd panel? Looks like she should be saying, “Yah, seeee?” Maybe she got too close to Fred and caught his stroke.
If The Time is coming, she’s definitely going to need a bigger turkey!
Um, no, Ann. You should buy a smaller turkey because Jess will be in the goddamned hospital on Thanksgiving.
Who knows, Dinkins might even be there with her.
TB is actually pretty timely with this Roger Ebert tribute, though talking turkey with Jess and Durwood is a real non sequitur.
S.P. Charles: You miss my point, which is that obstetricians usually won’t see a woman until she’s at least eight weeks along–it wouldn’t have made sense for Jess to talk about her doctor’s opinion before this stage. It’s a little thing, but it’s not something I would expect Batiuk to know so he still gets points for it.
If you want a low bar set, I will say this is so far proceeding better than the pregnancy arc in 9 Chickweed Lane, where the heroine panicked, talked to everyone but the prospective father on the subject, got harassed by a pro-choice strawwoman, and flew to Vienna on a whim to ask advice of her grandmother before taking a five-dollar, three-minute home pregnancy test and finding out the whole thing was a false alarm.
^ Wow… That’s just… wow. The fact that it was one of those cheesy, time-wasting, fake-out stories isn’t even the most infuriating part.
OK, so its FishStick Annie who is in the header. Never would guessed it.
Um, maybe my calendar is off, but wouldn’t this hellspawn be born after Thanksgiving? Or is this evidence that this strip was written months ago. Which is really sad since this whole strip was just the set up for a lame Thanksgiving joke.
Oops my bad…It actually does fit in the timeline. Well the strip still sucks anyway.
Time to place those bets, folks…name and gender. I’m guessing it’s a boy, named Fred, after Boy Lisa’s dad who will die shortly before the hell-spawn is born. Then, a few years from now, we’ll all be wondering whatever happened to that baby they had that’s never seen or mentioned anymore. Then after we “time jump” to Act IV he’ll be obese, miserable and bald like the rest of ’em.
Well Epicus, if you’re going to take all the obvious choices it won’t be much of a contest, will it? OK, here goes. A girl, named Lisa of course. It won’t get weird until Step-Grandpa Less (gag reflex!) props the newborn up in front of the old VHS camera with a custom made baby cancer wig. Less reaches for the record button, says ‘action’, and fade to black. So ends Act III.
To me, a better way to start the arc this week would not have Darin and Jess, it would be Kerry and Darin. What better way to bring the family together?
“There’s time,” said the guy who took an entire week to open an envelope.
Then, a few years from now, we’ll all be wondering whatever happened to that baby they had that’s never seen or mentioned anymore.
Well duh, that’s why it’s Jessica’s and Darin’s baby, rather than Les’s and Cayla’s. It’s so he can ignore it when he wants to, ultimately resulting in the little family disappearing from the strip entirely.
When I was reading my new volume 1 of Complete Funky Winkerbean, I noticed how Bautik had the habit of defaulting to a single facial expression after every single one of his jokes/puns/”Witty” writings even back then. Except wheras we have almost pretentious smirks, the readers of the 70s had: the grimmace:
Here’s an old strip with my current favorite character: the sentient computer. As he proves his intelligence for deciding class placement, pre-stroke Fred and the old Principal he replaced show unmistakable frowns at the comedic outcome of these panels.
http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/4478/review-the-complete-funky-winkerbean-volume-1-1972-1974/
This review of the volume holds several more examples (albiet with bad scans, but it’s all I can find on the internet). Just about every ending to a strip ends with everyone but the source of the humor grimmancing in a face of “my gawd, that was bad”. A bit of self-deprecating humor, yes, and it does get tiring.
But compare it to something like today’s strip, where an Overly-Long unfunny joke is accompanied by five overdone, almost pretentious, seeming to say “Oh ho ho, that was good, let’s pat ourselves on the back” smirks.
I ask you, in the face of bad jokes, would you rather have a grimmance or a smirk?
And FunkyWinkerbean.com is down again, it seems.
I would have a grimace instead of a smirk, and it seems so weird when you compare the one with the computer and Fred with this strip. Same artist. Same illustrator. Same character. Same strip. Wow.
Well, it’s a nice quip (except for that last extra panel) but it doesn’t really make sense. If the child’s supposed to be around Thanksgiving (and I’ve never met a doctor who could give that precise a time) then why would she even want to be near a turkey? Saying November and having the quip about the turkey would have sounded better.