More massive accolades for TomBat Harry L. Dinkle at the Ohio Band Conference, where everyone recalls the way he… umm.. led the band and did fund-raisers? Can anyone fill me in one what this random, never-to-be-seen-again character is talking about? Panel One Snapping-Turtle Faced Harry is carrying on like he invented the damn trumpet.
15 thoughts on “Banned Legend”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
“Harry, you could still pull it off!”
“Are you kidding? All it takes is a few cupcakes, and my wife will pull it off for me!”
Wow, Bathack, you are a true narcissist. Essentially, today’s strip is you calling yourself a legend. And that look on Harry’s face in the last panel. His contempt for Harriet is not even hidden a little. New levels of suckitude Tom.
Wow, if the unwarranted adulation gets any thicker Mary Worth will have competition for the most insufferable character in comics.
Bow down before Him. Worship Harry at the chruch of your choice!
For all the jokes, Batiuk is a comic strip writer who has gotten printed in multiple major newspapers. So how does he not know the basic rule of Show, don’t Tell?
There’s actually some lead up to this strip in Funky Winkerbean: The Novelization.
Unprompted, but always eager to review his illustrious career, Harry began to tell his favorite tales. “So then I told Coach Stropp ‘football fields are for band practice!’ Ha ha, that was a good one. And then every year I would make the woodwinds carry a turkey carcass door-to-door, telling them it was a ‘fundraiser’. And they bought it! Ha, sometimes I’m just too much, right Harriet?” his smirk growing with every braggadocios anecdote.
“And get this… one year it RAINED heavily during the battle of the bands! I mean really heavy rain. Like, you couldn’t see three feet in front of you. Ha ha, there was flash flooding an everything. The organizers wanted to cancel the competition, but I was like ‘the show must go on’,” Harry said, lowering his voice for effect. “And of course they agreed with the world’s greatest band director. Anyways, a couple of the piccolo players drowned… the weakest of the herd amiright? …but we still won the battle. And you won’t believe this, at the next year’s battle of the bands IT RAINED AGAIN! Ha ha crazy.”
Good old Harry Dinkle: the Alpha and Omega of OMEA.
One thing about this strip is, it’s uplifting.
No matter how bad your life is going, what misfortune has crossed your path, a quick read of this strip and you feel a sense of relief…………
Yeah, he was a “legend” all right, but now he’s fat, old and obnoxious like the rest of them. Yet we’re all supposed to look back on his old arcs as fondly as TB does, just because. So why did he bother aging him so terribly in the first place? Who the hell knows? Pretty soon this strip will be nothing BUT old characters looking back on old arcs fondly…it’s close to it right now.
I love how Harriet insults his weight, yet she’s a bigger pile of goo than her husband. And what has she done with her life?
Are there any actual active Music Educators at this conference, or is it just a bunch of retired band teachers sitting around and ruminating about the good old days? This guy has been retired for what, between 10 and 20 years? (I honestly gave up trying to do any actual time measurement in this strip). Why does he keep coming back to conferences? What does he have to offer? The first time he did the OMEA conference arc it was boring enough. Why keep doing it when there’s other potentially interesting things happening in Westview? sigh…
@bobanero, “Why keep doing it when there’s other potentially interesting things happening in Westview?”
What strip are you reading?
“What strip are you reading?”
Perhaps there really is a vibrant sun drenched Westview out there somewhere, and these are the tales from the Westview ghetto………………………….
With your permission, Epicus–
By the way, I changed the colors on the clothing to match today’s strip–but I didn’t touch Mrs. Dinkle’s hair. That means, once again, Tom Baituk has forgotten how to draw one of his own characters.