So when Pm & Jff interrupted Frankie during his wind-up, it turns out he was about to pummel Lisa because she was breaking up with him, not because of her pregnancy or whatever. Perhaps I’m just way too cynical but to me this one reads as if BatTom felt he really needed to give the reader a reason to hate Frankie even more. So he used the diary contrivance to inform us that his assaults were an ongoing thing, without elaborating, the same way he always dances around and skates the “issue” at hand while pretending to “address” it. Now he can add “teen domestic violence/underage drinking” to the ever-growing list of “relevant topics” FW has “tackled” and he can get back to his real “plot” which involves a reality TV show or something.
Panel three features some of the corniest dialog he’s ever put to paper. Good thing Lisa grew out of her “eye-reading” phase because quite frankly she really, really sucked at it. Also of note today is the bizarre shading in panel two (shadows??) and that horrific squiggle-haired chair which honestly makes me nauseous, as does Summer’s “concerned/sad” face.
Son of Stuck Funky 
boy Summer needs glasses if she has to stick here face in book to read
How long did Lisa date Frankie? We can’t tell, because she apparently didn’t date any of her diary entries. Which would come in handy if this is supposed to be the big smoking gun that’s gonna stop Frankie’s reality TV plans. “He’s hit me before.” Hmm… and yet, this is the first diary entry (from our point-of-view) that mentions that. It’s almost like none of this ever truly happened in a reality-based comic strip.
I’m a little puzzled why Frankie would be angry about breaking up with Lisa.
I mean, sure getting dumped by the eventual paramour of Les Moore would be a blow to anyone’s ego, but I’m pretty sure Frankie could spin it off he broke up with here cause she was a just a drunk one night stand.
I’m sure he could coax Lisa into mutual acceptance of the story. It benefits both of them. It maintains Frankie’s jock image and put’s Lisa high on the hotness scale since she’s gone with a 10 on the hotness scale guy. Isn’t that usually how it ends in real life high school?
I think the real problem is that Lisa didn’t cop with Frankie’s “I broke up with her first” cover story. If that’s the case…it’s her own damn fault she got beaten to a pulp!! ……j/k
Wait, wait. Are you kidding me, Tom? Lisa the homely nerdette was apparently the one who ended this frankly ludicrous relationship, not the (or so we’ve been assured) hot, popular jock, who could have found a dozen better-looking girls to replace her at five minutes’ notice… and his reaction is to be so upset that he’s no longer going to get to drag this frizz-haired, joyless lump around with him any more that he tries to hit her? Come the fuck on. Not everyone’s obsessed with Lisa Lisa Lisa – or they sure as hell shouldn’t be.
So yesterdays “Blink” was an euphemism for “done the dirty deed”.
Now today’s strip must shift to another day where she tells him off…and Pm & jff save the day.
Let’s recap:
Nerdy low self esteem girl falls for the attention of a abusive overly possessive jock. She lacks any sense of self-control and is lead to being a punching bag (yet no one ever saw any bruises…like her parents?)..they drink, they break-up..kid goes to adoption…she dies of cancer
The End.
Ludicrous.
And….yeah, I’ve officially reached my snark limit on this arc. The clumsy attempts at retcon, the heavy-handed handling of the subject matter, and the utterly tone-deaf writing have defeated my desire to even attempt to spin anything humorous out of them. So, if you wanted to silence your critics, Batiuk, congratulations, you’ve done it…albeit not in the manner you intended.
AUGGHH! THIS SUCKS! I WANT TO JUST STICK MY HAND IN THE BLENDER, SET IT ON FRAPPE FOR A MOMENT OR TWO, THEN GO BOWLING WITH IT AT THE NEAREST REC CENTER! THEN, AND ONLY THEN, MIGHT I FEEL BETTER ABOUT HAVING ALLOWED MYSELF TO READ THIS “TEENAGE GIRL’S JOURNAL”.
WORST PART IS, NOW I ONLY GOT ONE HAND
It is so horrible that that was the only alternative!
“(S)Hit Parade”?
Spit take of the day. Damn, that’s funny.
Okay, here’s the only way any of this makes sense: Lisa was the school slut (I’ve suggested this before, and the low-self-esteem issues we’re seeing here makes this even more likely), which of course Les was too oblivious to see.
What Summer is reading in Lisa’s diary is not the truth, but rather Lisa’s version of the truth: self-serving, teenage-girl-angsty, and generally unreliable.
Jeffcoat Wayne summed it up perfectly.
So there was an ongoing relationship – much more than the one-van-stand that I had thought occurred. I hope that Wednesday brings a sort of Apocalypse Now level of unspeakable violence as Lisa hacks Frankie to bits with a machete, at least in her diary. That said, Summer’s leg hair squicks me out and do you ever get the impression that Les’ house smells funny? Sort of an undefinable fuming stench of half-cooked rice, unwashed hoodies and fortified wine. Ew.
Perhaps you could break up with him over the phone? Just a thought.
It’s almost like TheAuthor suddenly realized there wasn’t any “coercion” here at all, so he added that throwaway line about how Frankie “hit her before” to establish a pattern of abuse. But as recently as last week Lisa was over the moon about how happy she was to be approached by one of the “cool guys” at school. So either a) Summer skipped over whole chunks of the journal or b) Batom added that line to increase Frankie’s overall “evilness” quotient up a few notches.
Nor does any of this explain why Boy Lisa detested Frankie so much, as he had no way of knowing this new information when Frankie first arrived. Maybe he inherited his mother’s “eye reading” abilities.
The following is an actual comment over at Comics Kingdom. It is quoted verbatim:
So now we know Les has a brother, Phil.
@oddnoc: You know these kids today with the slang. I’m sure “intense” must mean “unfathomably stupid”, like how “bad” meant “good” back in the 1980’s.
And the look on Summer’s face does indeed speak volumes. “Hit me repeatedly with a shovel”, it’s saying to me.
It’s almost like TheAuthor suddenly realized there wasn’t any “coercion” here at all, so he added that throwaway line about how Frankie “hit her before” to establish a pattern of abuse.
Or maybe he realized his retcon was not going well at all, and there was a growing resistance…
Just sayin’…
Here’s my post from NJ.com in case their consistently inconsistent moderators decide not to post it.
So again Summer is, for some reason, on the chair instead of the bed. Why would she see the need to leave her bed? Nothing to indicate that she wasn’t comfortable or had insufficient lighting there.
And the story falls apart here. No date entries are given so the reader has to assume that she’s just read only three entries total and that these were the only three entries to read so far. With that in mind we have to realize the following.
1. Apparently Frank has hit Lisa prior to this entry even though that was never mentioned before and nothing we saw suggested she had been hit. Lisa had no problem mentioning his “leopard skin seats” and how she “blinked” but she never felt a reason to mention being hit by her boyfriend?
2. It wasn’t being hit by Frank that made Lisa decide they couldn’t work, but what may or may not have been the night of unprotected sex. Being physically attacked by him wasn’t a problem, but sex was?
3. Lisa was scared of being hit again, but deliberately chose to tell him she wanted to break up on her own, late at night, in what is supposed to be an alley (even though it clearly isn’t) instead of in daytime, in a public place with plenty of people around. With a boyfriend who now has a history of physically abusing her.
The only possible way Lisa could have put herself in any more danger would be if she had gotten Frank drunk, given him a knife, insisted they meet at an abandoned warehouse and THEN told him she wanted to break up.
Everything that we have seen of Lisa till this point has always suggested that she was a fairly intelligent person who made an understandable mistake, not that she was suicidal. You cannot tell me that an intelligent person would deliberately do everything mentioned in number 3.
Mr. Batiuk, this comic hasn’t done anything recently to actually address issues relevant to teenagers. The only way this is relevant to them is the same way that Jurassic Park is relevant to security experts, as an example of what a complete fool would do in a particular situation and how a real person should not act like a complete fool.
Rusty: Phones. Evil, modern, 1970’s technology. Gaaaahhhhh!!!
Gyre: Funky Winkerbean is a reality-based comic strip that retcons contemporary issues affecting young adults of years past in a thought-provoking and not-so-time-sensitive manner.
Tom Batyuck = Phillip A Moore
Well, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m confused. I don’t understand the “blinked” thing. Did something happen between “blinked” and breaking up? I’ll have to face it, FW is too subtle and deep for lil old me. Time to go get an MRI.
To review…
1) “It was one lousy time.” – Lisa to Les regarding what led to Darin’s conception.
2) We have been told over the last few days that Frankie asked her out, took her on the Solo Car Date (TM) to the Alcohol Drinking Party (TM Pending), and proceeded to deflower Saint Lisa all within a span of less than 24 hours.
3) Frankie, in trying to pitch the “Reality Show of Evil” to his partner, described Lisa as just a girl he’d “been with,” suggesting it was a one time hook up.
4) We now have “Time Jump 0.5” where we learn that AFTER her lightly buzzed indiscretion, she continued a relationship of an undetermined period with Frankie that consisted of her not putting out and him hitting her.
Oy vey.
Gordon Lightfoot called just this morning. He thinks this storyline is long-winded.
Summer: “Wait a minute, they were on their very first date, then suddenly Mom was going on and on about how she never actually loved Frankie, and now she’s suddenly the victim of months and months of abuse…but I’ve only read three pages in this thing. Either Mom left BIG honkin’ gaps in this thing, or it’s a fake.”
Les: “Um, no, it’s totally real and stuff!”
Summer: “GAH! Pop! What were you doing behind the chair?!?”
Les: “I definitely WASN’T listening to you reading a phony document I concocted as part of a harebrained scheme to end Frankie’s reality show.”
Summer: “….oh. ‘kay.”
(Summer resumes reading)
Summer: “Dad, while I’ve got you here…the way you talk, as old as Harry seems and the way this journal is written, you were in high school in the 70s and Mom would’ve been pregnant around 1978. Wouldn’t that make my half-brother Darin, whose lout of a bio-dad’s arrival set this whole series of events in motion, about 40?”
Les: “Try not to think about it. And it was MY book about your sainted mother who died of cancer that brought Frankie to Westview.”
Summer: “It’s not all about you, Dad.”
Les: “Actually…”
Summer’s surefire insomnia cure doesn’t seem to be working. Any more copies of that John Darling biography lying around?
Still stunned by the idea that an actual human being is receiving any form of payment for producing this strip.
A lot of folks defending Tom on other forums. Stating that the Funky we grew up with in the 1970s would be gone had he kept the same tropes up today… Would that have been a bad thing? …No. It could have died with dignity.
We have a cartoonist in love with one or two of his characters and cannot let them rest in peace, or live a normal life. This is not good story telling, this is not good writing, the art is constantly off as well.
And yet people defend him with that old chestnut of “If you hate it so much why do you read it?”
I may fire back at them someday – that the man they are defending is the same guy that took Les Moore off a mountain climb 1 DAY to bring him back to make snide remarks about Funky’s new car. Then he put Les Moore back on the mountain.
Sincere Funky Winkerbean defenders? You are fucking idiots.
I’m convinced PhillipAMoore is a good troller.
@Rusty: The phone is evil technology. Evil, evil technology. Which means when Lisa called Les at the airport, she was calling from Hell. Which I guess is still better than being in Westview.
When did Frankie hit Lisa before? It wasn’t mentioned on the night he picked her up in the van and took her to the party, which was aformentioned as the only night they went out. Frankie hit Lisa and she went out with him again? A guy she didn’t even like? This makes no sense.
That’s the problem with beady-eyed nitpickers. They spend too much time thinking, and not enough time enjoying the labors of my fruits.
Didn’t Batiuk already cover dating violence with pre-time jump Susan?
Maybe we should adjust how we view Lisa. Lisa wasn’t a normal girl (a bit below in popularity but still normal). Lisa was actually a girl with absolutely no self esteem who deliberately put herself in dangerous situations because she was so unhappy. This isn’t Lisa bashing. This is my genuine opinion that these events make far more sense if you assume that Lisa is unconsciously endangering herself.
–That’s the problem with beady-eyed nitpickers. They spend too much time thinking, and not enough time enjoying the labors of my fruits.—
You really must be Tom Batiuk…because not thinking is exactly what Tom Batiuk expects of the readers of his comic strips.