YouTube (registered trademark, BTW) better upgrade their servers, pronto, before Boy Lisa follows through on his “threat” and crashes them with the tens of hits that video would certainly generate. Some arch-villian Frankie turned out to be. Ditto for his doughy henchman White Lenny, who is a real wuss compared to Black Lenny, who at least knew how to lean menacingly. Derin would have probably gotten the same results by simply throwing “Lisa’s secret journal” at them. Those corners do hurt, you know.
OK, so who had “they make a video of Summer reading random pages from her dead mother’s thirty-something year old journal that just happened to be discovered exactly when it fit into the story which forces Frankie and Lenny to give up when they threaten to air it on YouTube” in the “how does this arc end?” pool? Once again TheMaster finds the least-interesting, most random, nonsensical and totally balls-out stupid way of “crafting” a story that took what seems like a hundred weeks to tell. No one can predict what he’ll do and quite frankly I don’t think he even knows until he pens it. This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender. Like every other FW story does. It’s amazing, uncanny and totally inexplicable.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Summer and Jessica do realize that Youtube is a worldwide video site, right? and not just local to Westview? In other words, How do they figure that posting their amateur video on Youtube will squash Frankie’s plans to do a Dead Lisa reality show that Darin doesn’t want to be a part of? Acknowledging, of course, that Frankie’s show can’t possibly draw a large national audience, anyway, even on Youtube or WeTV. The reality is that Les’s book and TV-movie adaptation would never draw an audience in a real-world setting, either. So instead of creating this 45-week melodrama, ol’ Puppetmaster Batiuk should have simply let Frankie go ahead with his plans, then watch him scowl furiously as no one tunes in. Oh, wait — But that would have to imply that there’s no market for Dead Lisa, even in a fictional setting, which Batiuk could never wrap his head around. Silly me, Never mind. Of course, we’ll have to discredit Frankie’s plans, because only the Chosen Ones are allowed to capitalize on the make-believe worldwide Lisa phenomenon. Wow, this hurts my head more and more each day. DAMN YOU, REALITY, FOR MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO FALL IN LINE WITH THE BATIUK FANTASY VISION MACHINE!! If only I weren’t a reasonably intelligent person, I, too, could sit back with my mouth open and drooling and enjoy this reality-based comic strip that depicts contemporary issues affecting young adults in a thought-provoking and sensitive manner, along with all the other dunderheads who savor its delectable truth!
I once said this current storyline was the “One More Day” of comic strip. I was wrong. This is the Marville of comic strips.
Well, Batty does read these threads doesn’t he. Where before he in no way resembled Frankie, Durwoods head is now shaped like dear old bio dad’s.
Guess losing his facial hair and skin pigment made Lenny realize he won’t make a cent off Dead St. Lisa. Maybe they cash in on Frankie becoming a Mitt Romney impersonator. But they better hurry before everyone forgets who he is.
And so our heroes ruthlessly blackmail Evil Frankie and Ethnically Ambiguous Lenny with circumstantial evidence (because as we all know, there’s nothing that sinks reality television faster than bad publicity), thus assuring they are the only ones who can profit from the memory of the Blessed Saint Dead Lisa. Once again Batiuk has exceeded my expectations, though perhaps not in the way he intended.
Frankie: “YouTube? You do realize that Lenny and I are already well-established om YouTube, right? And that cranky, bitter rant videos dissing the work of others by making negative claims are nothing new or unusual, right?”
Lenny: “How were you going to built awareness of your Blue Hoodie Confession Cam vid? Post a scotch taped sharpie-written message at the Montoni’s window? HAW!”
Darin: “I’ll…I’ll WRITE AND APP!”
Frankie: “An app.”
Lenny: “Oooh, I’m so SCARED.”
(Both laugh uproariously. Darin fumes.)
@The Diva: Good point. This “revelation” would simply add spice and extra drama to Frankie and Lenny’s reality TV crap. They should embrace this.
If I recall correctly, Infinity is not a rational number. But it sure applies to the level of absurdity in this arc.
Viet Cong Guellirra Readel say: “We wourd have NEVEL attacked South Vietnam if we had known sterrpid Ohio Nationarr Gualdsman tlied to KIRR Tom Batyuck and miss the tallget!”
Um…wasn’t the whole plan originally supposed to be them taking legal action against Frankie? Wasn’t that the whole damn reason why they brought Crankshaft’s sisyphus-in-law Jeff in? I guess Bat-hack realized he doesn’t know nearly enough about law to come up with a plausible reason for a legitimate lawsuit.
I guess that’s okay, since Lenny apparently has forgotten that nobody put a cease and desist letter to him. So there’s like NO fucking reason they couldn’t film their lame-ass reality show!!!!
—This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender—-
The fact that Batiuk hasn’t yet taken all those substances together is the EXACT effing problem with Funky Winkerbean in general!!!!
The self righteous sneers from the two blond idiots are enough. Don’t you think Darrin would want to have some connection to his biological father? If nothing else, to find out any heriditary traits that mey concern him in his future? We already know his bio-mom has a pre-disposition for cancer. Might the not-so-young man and his idiot, pregnant wife want to know such things? Why did they so self-righteously kick Frank out the door?
Darrin and Jess are losers here.
Along with all of the FW fans.
So… they’re going to blackmail Frank with Lisa’s story about a teenage boy and a teenage girl having consensual sex??
“Once again TheMaster finds the least-interesting, most random, nonsensical and totally balls-out stupid way of “crafting” a story that took what seems like a hundred weeks to tell. No one can predict what he’ll do and quite frankly I don’t think he even knows until he pens it. This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender. Like every other FW story does. It’s amazing, uncanny and totally inexplicable.”
-Brilliant. Sums up Batyuck’s method perfectly.
TOM BATYUCK YOU SON OF A BITCH!!!!!
if writing is praying God could you please hit batty with a pile of crap to make up for pile he lays on comic pages every day ,amen
If writing is like praying then I am drenched in irony.
Me on NJ.com
How fitting. Characters started this arc in an improbable manner, the back story involves a character acting in an improbable manner and it ends with characters acting in an improbable manner.
I, John Darling, father of my darling daughter (get it?!) whose father John Darling was murdered, would like to thank my guest page-turner author of the book “What a Nasty Self-Righteous Pile of Nonsense these past few Months at Funky Winkerbean have been!”
Actually, nothing else yet compares to the atrocities of the Sunday strip on June 13.
I fucking hate Dagwood. I wish Frankie would beat the shit out of his self-righteous ass and smash their silly-ass laptop with a karate kick.
Haha! See, it’s funny because Lenny has more of a conscience than TB does.
And Summer repeating what she said yesterday? Gil Thorp may reuse artwork in pretty much every strip, but we get new words every day.
If you look closely, you can see that the Green Pitcher is on the telephone with its agent, seeing if there are any openings in Curtis.
Little known fact: the Red Button on the President’s desk is really for embarrassing world leaders on YouTube. And now you know how World War III is averted.
So the “coercion” that was supposed to be “involved” was the heroes threatening Frankie into canceling his TV show project. What a tweest!
I’m still puzzled by the use of “gets” rather than “has.” I think Lisa is saying that she hopes her child grows up to be a fat, depressed loser who never gets any inkling that successful, happy, skillful people even exist. Better to live in a half-world of gloom while worshiping the Great Les and the Saint Lisa.
A person “gets” to meet Santa Claus.
A person “has” to meet the warden.
Fellow snarkers have touched on these concepts, supra, but here’s my take, anyway.
Wow, Paul Shaffer is pissed in panel 3. Also, totally out of his fucking Hollywood mind. DerpHey putting that video on YouTube is, to quote myself, reality TV show gold. Negative publicity for a reality show? Oh noes! Not only does this denouement perfectly fit this strip’s catchword—inexplicable—it’s also unbelievable. There is no way these characters would behave as Batominc has portrayed them. This isn’t right. It isn’t even wrong. It’s outside the realm of fiction, outside the realm of human behavior, just—irrevocably—outside.
Don’t get me wrong. Outsider art, especially music, is fascinating. But Batominc is no outsider. So Batominc fails even at being an outsider. I don’t get it. Who keeps greenlighting this strip at the syndicate? Because seriously, I spew utterances more logical than this plot line when I’ve gotten into the grappa stash.
Let me add this: I have direct, personal knowledge of a man whose bio-dad left him at an early age. And this story is nothing like how these things go in reality, even ¼ inch away. In all solemnity, I call shenanigans.
And this (with all respect to our gracious guest blogger): There’s another writer in Ohio who does not plan his stories, but writes them as they come to him: the highly entertaining John Scalzi. So we can’t pin Batominc’s failures on technique.
@$$$WVO$$$: Ignorance of a topic has hardly stopped Batominc from “writing” in the past 🙂
@Chasm: Yah, spot on about the get to/has to dichotomy. What a surprise! Batominc calls it “writing.”
If Lenny was really a soulless Hollywood type his response would be “Wow! We can use that.”
Darin “huh what”
Lenny: This is great; it shows some of the difficulties that Frankie has to overcome to reconnect with his son. This is astounding! It adds what was missing – conflict! Thanks a hell of a lot. “
Darin: Wait what?
Lenny: of course it’s worthless visually but we can use audio track as a voice over.
Darin: “Huh?”
Later Frankie and Lenny watch the rough cut of the show’s opening
Frankie: Hi, My name is Frank. A long time ago I made a mistake. But I want to correct that mistake now.
Shot shows Frankie walking along a park path
Frankie: But it’ not going to be easy.
Audio of Summer reading Lisa’s diary “and I pray that he never meets his father,”
Frankie: it’s going to be a long hard road to reconnect with my son.
Music up
Frankie: and prove that I am a changed man.
Title Frank and Son – Part 1 – Frank comes home.
The screen fades to black
Lenny: now that’s reality TV, we’re going to make a fortune. We’ll pepper each episode with quotes from the diary – this will be massive everybody loves a bad guy trying to reform – My name is Earl ran for years.
Frankie smirks.
The only slightly redeeming way to end this storyline is to have Les and Frankie have a knockdown-dragout which results in Les getting killed. Will never happen, though.
I don’t want to lose sight of the underlying premise to this whole sordid affair, because it underscores the egomania we’ve been subjected to for these past few…eons? The premise is that Les’ Lisa book is so goddam popular that it is to be made into a movie (written by Les), and, as such has given rise to this attempted reality show and the threat of a video expose posted on Youtube – all of this intended to plant the idea that Lisa’s Story has the nation abuzz. At this point the details of how wrong this entire enterprise has gone are lost like whiz from an open jetliner door, but the underlying idea remains constant and totally implausible – that The Les Moore has written the definitive non-fiction book and it has captured the national interest like no other. Objectively, it’s beginning to look like the Lisa book may unravel a bit with revelation that there is a Lisa Diary and Les refuses to read it. Oooo, now maybe Summer will write Fifty Shades of Lisa and set the record straight…a Must Read!! Go crazy America, catch Lisa Fever!!
There has been so much bad in this strip lately that something seems to have slipped by in the comments. In the second panel where the heck did that camera come from (besides a garage sale of ancient video equipment) and WHY was Frankie using it to record a video playing on a computer?
Another thought I have had (and sensitive readers may want to move on) is about TB and his talent for always finding a new bottom. The nearest known star to us is about four light years away. That means when we look at it we see it not as it is today, but how it was four years ago. Since TB writes a year in advance we are seeing him as he was a year ago not as he is today. Ponder that friends and be very, very afraid.
And suddenly Lenny looks like a 65-year-old.
Who would watch an ugly androgynous teenager read out of a diary anyway? That’s probably worst than some hearing some raspy 12-year-old trying to make an Angry Video Game Nerd knockoff (of which too many exist).
By the way, it’s “nice” to know that I can be out of town for nearly a week, without any internet access, and not miss anything in Funky Winkerbean. You can’t miss it if it wasn’t there.
Also, besides noting that the comments here are far more creative than anything happening in the strip, it sure seems odd that Frankie expects everyone to love him, that he abhors criticism, believes himself to be brilliant and won’t stop even when he gets no support. Because none of those traits would ever apply to, oh I dunno, a cartoonist from Ohio or anything.
Beckoning: “Missing anything” in FW? Novel concept, but I don’t think that’s even possible. Welcome back.
@beckoningchasm, your second paragraph is why we really need the like button back.
Anyone else reminded of the ending of the GayPromageddon strip, with Mr. Blackburn telling his wife to shut up? “Frankie! Sit down and be still!”
Darrin – “You keep going with your reality show and this goes up on Youtube the next day!”
Frankie – “If we keep going? You mean… if we don’t stop…?”
Lenny – “Soooo… by ‘the next day’ you mean tomorrow?”
Darrin – “…”