Ah, another day, another unfunny quip. (I’m talking about your host here, SoSfDavidO as well as TomBat)
We’re going to be here all week, folks, so grab an over-sized, salty, stale pretzel for $4.99 and have a seat! Your host for this week’s unending list of knee-slappers is someone apparently very close to Harry that we’ve never met before named Hugh Manpun.
Can we just give Harry his Lifetime Award for yelling at kids through a megaphone and call it a week?
Son of Stuck Funky 
In panel 2, Baldy is thinking, “I can’t believe I rehearsed that joke for weeks and wasted it on THIS monstrosity.”
This is Batiuk’s favorite story arc every year, until he figures out how to reanimate Lisa’s corpse.
“No, really, they’re cutting arts programs and I’m going to be out of a job next year. I’m going to throw myself from the hotel roof after this is over.”
Sweater McHairloss here’s gripe is a little confusing. Is he perturbed that he has to spend his tenure at asbestos filled death trap that will eventually kill him? Is he jealous of Harry Dinkle bragging about Westview’s miserable financial state, that he feels he has to one up him? Is he trying to pick up Mrs. Dinkle? Seriously, this week’s strips are so dull that you have to grasp at straws to snark this. I guess this is where Batiuk has found the key to stopping us…make the strips so boring that they are beyond snarking!!!
Funky Winkerbean is bad enough—with its dull banality, annual tropes, unwarranted nostalgia, and veiled misogyny, to name just a few of its sins—when its author indulges his obsession with just one of the tricks from his tiny bag. But when there are two or more at once—here we already have Harry Dinkle, old age, obesity, the music educators’ conference—the dreck really begins to stink up the comics page or web browser. Now, to this steaming pile, comes Batominc with—wait for it!—the coming school levy. It’s—it’s too much to bear. It is just cruelty, bile, and spite from the heart of Medina, Ohio. What is wrong with Ohio?
Turns out, nothing.
Last week, I saw Dear Mr. Watterson, from which I learned that Bill Watterson is also from Ohio. That’s right: Calvin and Hobbes and Funky Winkerbean have the same geographical provenance. The fault, dear Batominc, is not in the land, nor in the stars; it is in you and your bitter, unimaginative soul. In the main.
I mentioned the web browser, above. As Batominc descends further and further into banality and bathos, as we burn carbon to run the presses and push the bits through the Internet, we snarkers face an ethical question. Is it right to contribute to the Internet’s carbon footprint to bash the worst syndicated comic strip of our age? Should we be buying carbon credits to offset the ecological crimes of the funkyverse?
Know what I dread? That when Batominc retires, the damned syndicate will hire someone to make FW and Crankshaft into zombie strips to plague future generations until the oceans boil and the Universe descends into its heat death, when, at long last, Westview will be safe.
That when Batominc retires, the damned syndicate will hire someone to make FW and Crankshaft into zombie strips
I wouldn’t worry about that specifically, because Lynn Johnston has shown that you can simply rerun these continuity strips into oblivion. It’s obvious that Batiuk doesn’t care that something seems 20 years out of date, so there’s no reason for the syndicate to care either. That’s probably cold comfort at best, though.
The thing that always hits me whenever Batiuk mentions some school levy getting voted down is how incurious he, and thus his characters are for why this keeps happening. I mean, if I were a parent or a teacher and if the levy got voted down once even, but especially if it was voted down multiple times, I’d want to know why that was happening. (Of course, Batiuk doesn’t seem to understand how levies work and as such doesn’t properly recognize the issues this circumstances would raise) Maybe they’re consistently asking for frivolous upgrades or programs. Maybe the superintendent is corrupt or incompetent. Maybe the community is full of a bunch of assholes (this seems to be Batiuk’s default contention, but he’s so vague about it that it’s a shaky conclusion at best), or maybe the community very simply can no longer maintain the level of educational funding that they had grown accustomed to when things were better.
But thinking about this, I realize there are really only two reasonable results that would come out of Batiuk exploring it. Either Westview is a miserable, dying community with no real hope, or Les Moore and the assorted other characters are all entitled dicks. Take your pick.
This entire arc is nothing more than an excuse to mention this Ohio Band Directors convention (or whatever it’s called), it’s pretty obvious that the actual content of the arc doesn’t matter to him even slightly. He might as well just draw eighteen panels of Dinkle “thought-bubbling” about his “glory days” instead of six days of feeble gags about being a retired band director. It’s a mystery to me as to why he’d even attend the thing in the first place as he’s been retired for decades now.
One thing about Harry does stand out, though. He’s the only Westviewian educator who seemed to actually enjoy his job, as opposed to the likes of Becky, Linda, Bull, Jim and Les, who do little more than sigh, complain and sulk over their horrible fates. So naturally TB had to have the guy go deaf and retire because God forbid anyone in the Funkyverse has too positive of an outlook. In a way, that “Harry goes deaf” arc from way back when was maybe TB’s cruelest work, as he stripped his beloved band director of the one thing he truly loved just for more cheap pathos, something the strip was hardly in need of at the time.
Music hipsters, Westviewian-style.
Like I said on NJ Charles, the problem is we are never seeing any impact of this bad thing. It’s like telling me a character suffers from clinical depression and every time they appear they’re having fun.
Speaking of NJ, I really cannot figure out the people on it. I mean, it seems obvious to me that RedRonin is just a troll wannabe, but what about the others? Posts of mine have been voted down just for pointing out that Batiuk’s idea of a sentence is to have two facts stated and then end the sentence. Anyone want to tell me what’s controversial about that?