ACTUAL FW CONTENT:
Oh, good grief, what crap.
ORIGINAL POST:
As is usual, Sunday’s strip was not available for preview so you get another of my ramble-o-thons.
I’m sure it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that last week’s arc consisted entirely of people sitting around while things happened elsewhere. In fact, near as I can tell, almost all of Funky Winkerbean consists of sitting around and talking about things happening elsewhere.
Even when people do act, they don’t do so because they want to, but because someone else is forcing them. Funky went to the fitness center not to get in shape, but because his wife wanted him to. Similarly, Holly goes around and collects comic books not because she likes them (though this being Westview I’m sure she’s a huge fan, pun unintended), but to take her mind of Cory’s situation and to “feel closer” to him. Even the epic trip to Kilimanjaro came into play not because it was a planned-out adventure, but because Les won an unwanted prize. The only action anyone takes is making someone else do something.
What does this say about the strip, where no one has any motivation whatsoever except to sit in chairs and chat? Think back on Les’ epic struggle to write a teleplay for a book he’d already written, and a life he’d already led–months and months of staring at a screen because he lacked the merest shred of motivation (don’t tell me the garbage about being “unable to capture Lisa’s thoughts,” that’s an obvious and exceptionally poor excuse). That seems to be the Funky Winkerbean world in a nutshell.
I’ve never read the “Lisa’s story” arc in its entirety and I have no desire to, but I’ll assume for the sake of argument that it was well-told and affecting and give Tom Batiuk whatever kudos he wishes for telling it. When it failed to win a Pulitzer, did that knock all the wind out of his sails? Perhaps he told himself, “I gave them a good story about terrible things that really happen to real people, and they dismissed it–well, the hell with it then. I’m tired of trying.” Because it sure seems like the strip has been on auto-pilot since I’ve been reading it.
Last week’s story reminded me of the Gay Promaggedon series–I came into the SoSF orbit around the tail end of that–in that there was a very slow build-up that promised a real payoff…and the payoff never came. Or rather, it did come, but it was such a let-down that it might as well never have been hinted in the first place.
Then there are the stories that just stop. I’m still curious about Becky’s mother. She hasn’t been seen since Becky told her father to stop filming. It makes me wonder if whole strips, or whole weeks worth of strips have been lost in the mail. Or perhaps rejected by the syndicate–“Gee, Tom, this week’s worth of Becky’s mom being pushed out of the scissor-lift, hitting the ground and bouncing into a dead heap is pretty interesting, but it’s a little too gruesome to run on the comics page.” “Oh, okay, just run the strips for the week after that. The only people who’ll notice are really beedy-eyed and they don’t have any jobs.”
It’s been said from time to time that Tom Batiuk is probably unhappy that the strip is called “Funky Winkerbean,” since that takes focus away from Les. I wonder if he wished he’d ended the strip when Lisa died. He could have then restarted Act III with the same cast, but under a different title.
My suggestion would be Sittin’ Around.
PS: Hm, this is only my 60th post? It sure seems like there’ve been thousands…
Son of Stuck Funky 
I didn’t know a helicopter crash in Afghanistan would have any relevance to a former soldier on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Does Wally have a seizure every time soldiers die overseas?
I kind of assumed he’d use today to blow off the “Is Cory Dead?” arc and oh my, what a grim finale it is. A bunch of trite, weak dialog followed by Holly making a preposterously selfish, thoughtless and moronic statement topped off by a cut to Wally quivering in PTSD terror on the couch as he watches the all Afghan news channel, a channel you’d think he’d probably want to avoid. Never a happy ending for poor hapless Wally and not a shred of “personal growth” for any of these hopeless and totally doomed losers. And get a load of Cory, who here doesn’t feel an immediate need to smack that obnoxious look off of his stupid face? A fitting end to a really sorry arc.
And BC, I enjoy your rambling Sunday diatribes. Re: “Lisa Dies”, I wouldn’t re-read it either as I’d hate to waste that fifteen minutes, but here’s the condensed version. Lisa finds lump on breast while roughhousing with the boys (because she was like that, you see). It was treatable. But it was actually far more dire (damned medical profession). Lisa fights valiantly, learns that Darin is her son then takes a really long time to die with profound dignity. Les is very sad. Everything skips ten years ahead. Lisa is now Les’ undead spiritual and life advisor and she has magical powers as well. Then Les hooks up with Cayla, they have rainy day sex and Lisa is relegated to video tape and journal form. You are now fully up to speed on that arc.
Rusty, he does have PTSD, so this is a problem for him. Why he watches the news instead getting a newspaper and checking it online is a good question.
Well, one group of people it might affect like you Holly are the families of the Afghani and US soldiers that actually will be getting the “Your son/daughter has died” speech. But they don’t matter because they’re not relevant characters in this strip. Just faceless figures for Batiuk’s lame-ass attempt to endear himself to the plight of soldier’s families.
You know if I were a soldier…It would depress me to no end that I am making sacrifices to ensure the freedom of Tom Batiuk to write Funky Winkerbean strips about me risking my life. It’s like being an EMT who saves a guy just so he can spray graffiti on the hospital.
Actually, Wally’s reaction has nothing to do with Corky and/or a tan Charlie Chaplin reporting from Afghanistan; no, it’s just that he’s about to “refund” another Montoni’s pizza… Talk about “popping the corner”!
Gyre and ED, what’s the big deal on where Wally gets his news? Are combat veterans supposed to avoid TV? And ED, your comments on Wally’s PTSD disappoint me greatly. All-Afghan TV…? Really…?
Rusty has chosen Sunday’s strip as an opportunity to show how detached he is from the world around him, and how little of it touches him.
Yes, little boy, it has relevance. It’s known as PTSD, and calling it a seizure in your context is insulting at best. This is still Wally’s war, the one that hasn’t ended in the sand or in his mind.
One of them may never end.
If you have nothing else to do tomorrow, bring your laptop or tablet or whatever you carry around down to the local VFW or DAV or American Legion post, and show them Sunday’s strip and your crass comments. And tell’em one of the VVA guys from Region One sent you.
So how the master of the anti-climax finish off another half baked story line. With a pair of navel gazing nitwits who think the world revolves around them and in such a close orbit that they don’t even think of Wally. After all it’s not like Funky doesn’t see his cousin almost every freaking day.
The people of Westview would be better off in the hands (or tentacles) of Cthulhu than TB.
PTSD even years and years afterwards is real.
How Wally has been treated by friends, family, the Army and Westview is unreal.
It’s hard to respect the real struggles when the rest is portrayed so absurdly..
“Yes, little boy, it has relevance. It’s known as PTSD, and calling it a seizure in your context is insulting at best. This is still Wally’s war, the one that hasn’t ended in the sand or in his mind.”
My complaint was that Wally, as far as I know, was never shown involved in any circumstances with a downed helicopter. Batiuk started this arc with a helicopter crashing in Afghanistan, not being shot down in any combat scenario. Wally has always been portrayed as having PTSD panic attacks when confronted with a scenario that mirrors his own experiences in combat. I don’t see how a news report of a helicopter crashing, given the history shown about the character, makes any sense in the comic strip world of FW. My use of seizure was meant to describe what was portrayed in the strip, granted it was a poor substitute for panic attack, but that’s what I was thinking when seeing the response of the therapy dog.
The bottom line is that this is a place to snark on a poorly written comic strip, so judging anything about me or anyone else based on an off-hand remark done after midnight with a few beers in the system is pretty lame.
O.B. Dan – Get off your high horse. It’s a horribly written strip and it doesn’t feature real people. Snarking on it in no way is intended to insult real veterans and real PTSD victims.
I work as a physical therapist at the local VA hospital and have gotten more than a few laughs from reading this website with some of the vets. They understand sap, and they understand sanctimonious writing, whether it is from the high handed author or it is from some misguided defender of the troops who can’t distinguish criticism of “writing” and criticism of the troops. The regular contributors to this blog have quite a few fans down there, especially Beckoning Chasm, Epicus Doomus, and Gyre. Good work in helping keep up the vets spirits, guys!
And finally, as a 50 something year old man who lives with PTSD, I find Battic’s treatment of the subject via Wally crass and self-serving. So that’s my take on your lecture.
You know how 1984 has the Two Minutes Hate? Funky Winkerbean has Two Minutes of Pretending to Care About Wally.
OB: This is why I’m never fully comfortable snarking on these military arcs, as people tend to take offense pretty easily. IMO it’s a pretty cheap move to have Wally be the “go-to” guy for something like this, as much of his story over the course of the last several years has centered around the strides he’s made in recovering from PTSD. Would it not be just as effective if, for example, he showed Wally simply being sad about the plight of the five other servicepeople (who were never mentioned again BTW) who died in that fictional crash? IMO using his combat PTSD as a “punch line” to underline Holly’s idiotic statement is a crass move. And not only that, but to have the Holly character make such a statement when she already has a combat veteran in her own family (one who suffered terribly no less) is pretty heavy-handed to say the least. AND I’m not the one who used the deaths of sixteen people in a war zone to set up a bogus “aww shucks, Ma” gag to once again reiterate the plight of those with loved ones in the military, an angle that the author is beating into the ground this year for easy pathos and cheap suspense.
As far as the TV stuff is concerned, it’s been pointed out all week how (sadly) TV news in this country would have spent maybe two minutes on that incident before moving on, thus having the characters intently staring at the box waiting for news on their loved ones comes off as being somewhat unrealistic. That was what my “all-Afghan” remark was rooted in. If you took the joke as being a knock on anything but FW’s idiocy, it wasn’t and accept my apology.
One final thought: I’m here to goof on this comic strip and I do strive to not offend or insult anyone or anything except this strip. I find that whenever FW attempts to touch upon any sensitive issue it does so in a simplistic and heavy-handed way and THAT is the subject of my scorn, NOT the individual issue, whether it’s cancer, the military, gay couples, adoption or whatever the hell. Just for the sake of clarification.
Furthermore, OB (and anyone else) is certainly entitled to his opinion so let’s not get all defensive about it. SoSF does not tolerate mindless or off-topic nastiness simply for the sake of it, never has and never will. Some comments and commenters have been banned for exactly that. He expressed his displeasure and I hope I explained and resolved it to his satisfaction, as the point here is not to be snarky about “real life” topics, just the strip itself. And I respect him for questioning comments he found offensive which is something any “community” with standards should value.
It’s a bit disturbing to me that TB has no idea that he just made two of his characters look like first class a-holes. “Gee, no one WE know gets this upset! Nope, no one at all…”
I though Buddy the wonder dog was supposed to have cured Wally’s problems.
Here is the deal, the entire arc could have been covered by the Sunday edition. And if he wanted to show Holly’s being obtuse he could have done two cut-aways, one to Wally, one to family that lost a member in the crash and one to a survivor missing a limb. Three cut-aways. And one to a an Afghani family who lost someone. Four cutaways.
I will say this had a better ending than the gay Prom arc. Damning with faint praise I know.
Epicus Doomus, you have addressed Wally’s PTSD trigger very neatly, concisely, and correctly. It was both a poor way to end an already badly-written script, and a poor way to show Wally reliving his own experiences. This storyline, like so many others, seems to have trailed off when Batiuk lost interest or focus. If Batiuk actually knew how to draw, something akin to a 1000-yard stare with unblinking eyes would have said it much better.
Rusty, that you think because no storyline involving Wally in a helicopter crash was ever shown means he never saw one, or was part of one, is very short-sighted. Equally short-sighted is that you are under the impression that only replays of exact incidents should trigger PTSD, while others simply “don’t count.”
GPTA, get off your own high horse. I worked in the system myself, and my clients much more often than not didn’t see you or any other VAMC personnel – or even know they were eligible for any VA treatment – until they went through people in my position, which is why by the time you saw them, they had already shit, shaved, showered and douched, put on clean clothes, and had lost some of that clinging stench of the street. And if you really feel the need for “time served” credits, I’ll take my own as a just-turning sixty-four year old man who lives with PTSD. Yes, the story wasa badly written and poorly drawn, and I also find Batiuc’s treatment of the subject via Wally crass and self-serving. So we see eye to eye on that one.
But I make it a point not to go “more veteran than thou” with any other brother in arms, or wave what I’ve done as a certificate of qualification – unless it suddenly becomes necessary.
And that’s my take on your lecture.
Don’t mean nothin’…