17 thoughts on “For Make Glorious Comic of 20 Feb. 2014”

  2. Showing her age? Not really. She looks like she might be in her late thirties–but I guess she’s actually in her forties. She’s the same age, more or less, as Crazy Harry, Funky, Holly and the rest of her own high school class, who look to be in their sixties.

    More realistic would be…but then why bother to finish a sentence that begins “More realistic would be”?

  3. Just remember everyone, this is the strip that “depicts contemporary issues affecting young adults in a thought-provoking and sensitive manner”. Because obviously young people are really worried about getting fired for being too old.

  4. “You look like shit in high-def”…wow, subtle as a bowling ball dropped on a pinkie toe. He finally gives the Cindy character an arc and it centers around her declining appearance…welcome to the Funkyverse, Act III, kiddo. Imagine how it’d feel to get shit-canned via some especially obnoxious wordplay like that…Batom had ice water running through those sincere little veins of his when he dreamed up this cruel and vicious piece of business. Sometimes, when he’s not asleep at the switch, he can be one f*cked-up dude, doling out the woe upon his characters like regular people change socks.

  6. Imagine how it’d feel to get shit-canned via some especially obnoxious wordplay like that…

    No kidding. Baldy McSincere better hope there’s nothing in his office Cindy can injure him with, because if someone were to say something like that when I was holding, let’s say, some searingly hot coffee, he’d be wearing it.

    Seriously, any line that’s not some derivation of “Fuck you” following that just shows that TB has no ear for dialogue, which of course means that’s not what it’s going to be.

  7. Plus, I love how brutally blase this guy is about his intentions. There’s no “we’ve decided to go in another direction” mealy-mouthing. No sugarcoating. He just rips that band-aid right off. “We’re firing you because you’re an old woman, and nobody wants to look at an old woman. So pack up and get out. You have until the end of the afternoon.”

    Just the kind of sensitivity and care that’s made Batiuk the writer today. Why, I can just imagine the conversations he had with his son when his son was growing up.

    “Dad, Susie Finkelstein, the most beautiful woman in my class” (ed. note: he’d totally phrase it like this because TB’s the one who taught him how to speak, after all) “told me she doesn’t want to go to the prom with me.” (Turns away to sob quietly)

    TB: “Well of course she doesn’t want to go to the prom with you. You’re a dull, unattractive schmuck. What made you think she would want to in the first place?”

  8. This has to be a flashback.
    Or did they make her redundant before, see her brillant local report on Les’s movie deal which resurrected Frankie, reinstate her, have buyer’s remorse, and then get rid of her again?

    And what year is this anyway? she looks too young to be Funky’s age.

  9. It would help with the story line if Cindy didn’t look like a perky twenty-something. Who are they going to hire who looks younger–a twelve-year-old?

  11. Digital Age? Given how popular comic books remain in the Batiukverse, I would have guessed standard definition broadcasting still ruled the day.

  12. Experience?, Cindy you’re a news anchor, for Chrissake!!! You practically are hired only for your looks and ability to say words like “genocidal conflict” without breaking into laughs. Looks are everything in that business! Jeez, it’s really sad when Ron Burgandy is the more truthful potrayal of news anchors than Funky Winkerbean. It’s also funnier, too,.

  13. @Saturnino – I didn’t think Cindy was a local reporter when she broke her “Les gets a movie deal” story, since FTR was in Hollywood (or somewhere not local) when he saw it on television.

    Anyway, this network executive must have been sick the day they had the “things that you absolutely never say when you’re firing someone because they’re too old” training.

  14. Now I’m utterly convinced this is Batuik’s reply to the ‘why don’t you just end the stip aleady give someone else some room” comments here and elsewhere. Tom. it’s not that you’re old, it’s that you have nothing to say.

  15. “@Saturnino – I didn’t think Cindy was a local reporter when she broke her “Les gets a movie deal” story, since FTR was in Hollywood (or somewhere not local) when he saw it on television.

    Anyway, this network executive must have been sick the day they had the “things that you absolutely never say when you’re firing someone because they’re too old” training.”

    To take a line from Spike Jones’s version of Ghost Riders in the Sky, “In this strip, it don’t matter pahdner………..”

  16. TL/DR post.

    I was born in 1960. I read newspaper comics in their traditional meduim for most of my life. I switched from print to digital in 2011.

    A good deal of my personal animus to FW relates to reading it exclusively in print, and all the consequences of reading from a newspaper: it comes at a certain time of the day, it is often shared with others, there is no way to customize it other than simply not reading that which is not worh reading. Minimal time will be spent with each comic, about 10 seconds each on average, unless its quality merits pointing it out to a fellow reader, or perhaps even clipping it and saving it. It is often shared in the morning over breakfast.

    One morning in December of 2000, (the Funky-is-an-Alcoholic arsehole arc), my dear late husband said, “I’m not going to read Funky Winkerbean anymore. It’s not just that it isn’t funny, it is actually anti-funny, in the sense that I alwayls feel a little bit worse after reading it than I did before.”

    There once was a happy time when “Calvin & Hobbes,” “The Far Side,” and “Bloom County” all ran in the papers. “Doonesbury” was occasionally good then as now. Then the good comics ended within a few years of one another. There was a long dry spell before my local paper finally picked up “Dilbert.” During that time we were left with tepid melodramas like FW and FOOB.

    This was before widespread use of the internet. There may well having been early user groups devoted to comic strip criticism, but I mostly encountered comics proto-snark in college newspapers and independent weeklies. In one of these, the author compared reading “Fred Bassett” to drinking the tea at a cheap Chinese restaurant. .You drink it, not because it is particularly good, but because at least it isn’t horrible, and it is just part of the meal.

    Applying this analogy to FW, it’s like being served tea that has gone bad. For some reason you drink it anyway (because it is there?). I would have done well to follow my husband’s example. I allowed this nasty thing to annoy me for years, until finally during the long stretch of high school girls’ basketball, I realized that, at best, FW was dead boring.

    For an example of one of the worst arcs of Act II, refer to the story that ran in fall of 2000, Batiuk’s response to the Columbine massacre. If you are a subscriber to the comickingdom premium service, you can view archives going back to 1998. And yes, I realize that giving a lot of hits to FW in any form presents a moral/ethical dilemma.

  17. “For an example of one of the worst arcs of Act II, refer to the story that ran in fall of 2000, Batiuk’s response to the Columbine massacre.”

    I can’t quite imagine what this must have been like — not sure that I even want to see it, aside from morbid curiosity.

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