Let’s continue the litany, shall we?
with ten guests, or only seven;
with illness chronic or acute;
with thick crust or with thin;
with corners poppèd or unpopp’d;
if you will or if you won’t;
if you do or if you don’t;
da, da, da
ich lieb’ dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht,
aha
ich lieb’ dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht,
da, da, da
Looks like some of the guests have already bailed on this event, and I don’t find that ironic. Not at all.
Son of Stuck Funky 
What a sad spectacle. Poor poor Wally never gets even one day in the sun…and now we can say that and mean it literally. Shitty weather, the usual pitiful crowd of annoying locals…even the guy’s wedding day is a woeful, depressing mess. The only decent thing to do at this point is to just have the two of them leave town never to return, but BatFlog enjoys torturing Wally too much to ever let that happen.
Another single-paneler too. Interesting how he needed the entire panel to convey the sense of desolation and loneliness Wally must be feeling as he gets married in that crappy park in front of that miserable little crowd of the usual irritating locals. Doesn’t he have any old army buddies or anything?
even the guy’s wedding day is a woeful, depressing mess.
Yeah, there’s just something utterly sad about the fact that his best man is a dog, and a service dog at that, and that his new wife doesn’t have a matron/maid of honor. Their entire wedding party is just the dog. And then you get to the guests, who are mostly people who sat by and did nothing as his life went to hell. The only people who did anything were his cousin/uncle, who absolutely treated his problems as if they were his own burden, and his ex-wife, who basically told him that he no longer had a place in her life.
This actually reminds me that the one person who treated Wally with consideration and tried to help him (with the exception of Rachel of course), is Rana, who’d be a perfect maid of honor here since Rachel apparently has no other friends. But we haven’t seen her at all, which is doubly disgusting as we’ve seen Gross John in this sequence, who was the guy who almost certainly wished that Wally had never come back from overseas, and who openly acts, when he’s around Wally, as if he would rather be anywhere else.
Just standard emotional tone-deafness from the guy we’ve come to expect it the most.
Well, if it were anyone else writing this, I’d say there was nowhere to go but up. Sadly, I know better.
“Doesn’t he have any old army buddies or anything?”
You bring up a point many of us have touched on before, you included, Epicus. Other than their employers and their usually estranged, coldly snarking elderly and obese relatives, none of the younger FW cast members have any friends.
Part of it is surely Tom’s resistance to creating new characters (just who -did- Wally meet and socialize with at his new college classes, eh?), but also his negative, distrustful view of friendship in general.
Other than Wise Author Les Moore, whose fickle, petty high maintenance friendship MUST be held as a sacred bond, friendship’s depiction in FW is 99.99% a negative, ambivalent thing. Good for greasing the wheels for short term temporal gain, but otherwise a nuisance to be dismissed and mocked.
“This actually reminds me that the one person who treated Wally with consideration and tried to help him (with the exception of Rachel of course), is Rana, who’d be a perfect maid of honor here since Rachel apparently has no other friends. But we haven’t seen her at all”
…because she’s been shoved into the same limbo where Rachel’s kid, Wally and Becky’s son, and Crazy Harry’s younger children currently reside. It’s a cold, empty void of nothingness. But hey, at least it’s not Westview!
That’s the gazebo that holds an entire band on holidays, eh?
Wally Jr should be close to 14 by now…..Rana 20….Rachel’s kid 7….they were once very attached to their parents…mostly at the wrists and ankles but they’ve mysteriously vanished along with the servants.
Even Specialest Snowflake Summer (and her token black stepsister) has vanished into the younger generation ether. Are they taking summer classes at Kent? Or are they doing the smart thing and avoiding Westview for as long as possible?
Next: Wally gets cancer. Seriously, the way Tom Batiuk treats this character is beyond reprehensible. Look at the crowd–there’s a guy in a plaid shirt who can’t even be bothered to tuck it in. Yesterday, Les couldn’t be bothered to find a tie. Why did Wally invite these people? Why are these people even here if they care so little? I suppose they’re here solely for the reception pizza at Montoni’s afterwards…which is an even sadder notion.
“For better or for worse… In sunshine or in rain… In sickness or in sickness…”
I’m intrigued by the wedding guest on the right, whose idea of appropriate wedding attire is an un-tucked blue flannel shirt and khakis. Is he Wally or Rachel’s friend? Or maybe he’s just some guy who was visiting the park, decided to crash the wedding, and was allowed to stay because attendance was so pitiful.
From what I can see, even the videographer has bailed.
Is this a wedding or a funeral? I mean seriously, if you didn’t watch the previous strips, you would have no idea. You can barely see the bride and the groom.
There are more umbrellas than people.
“There are more umbrellas than people.”
The black one on the middle right is Lisa’s umbrella…………..
The Wally character’s life has been so brutal he makes Funky’s look like a beam of sunshine in comparison. TB just never tires of keeping his foot on the back of Wally’s neck, it’s relentless. He’s like PigPen in “Peanuts” only with a trail of tears instead of a dust cloud.
…because she’s been shoved into the same limbo where Rachel’s kid, Wally and Becky’s son, and Crazy Harry’s younger children currently reside.
That’s the amazing thing, because if I were Batiuk, I’d love to have a scene like this which would be a perfect excuse to bring out the second tier characters who we rarely see. The way it is, if he wants to show Rana, he’s undoubtedly going to contrive some dumb situation where she’s the focal character of the sequence, which will be created from whole cloth and pretty much divorced from the rest of the community, not to mention something that he’d probably not be very enthusiastic about. After all, the problem with this strip isn’t that it has too few protagonists. It’s that it has too few protagonists who aren’t repugnant. Writing a story specifically about Rana would dilute the storylines that he genuinely wants to tell, and I’m sure that’s why he hasn’t told any about her.
Which is why she really should be showing up here. I mean, hell, Wally’s her father for Christ’s sake. He shows the utterly useless Jessica (who has been getting overexposed lately if you consider her importance to the strip) as a set dressing but he can’t be assed to show the groom’s own daughter. You know, the girl Wally adopted after she was orphaned due to an IED in Afghanistan.
Although it’s probably good that Batiuk didn’t have Rachel have a MoW, seeing as how it’d probably be Becky, which would be vomit-inducing in ways that Batiuk seems strangely unable to appreciate.
Also, it’s a real testament to Batiuk’s halfassedness that here we have a wedding of two of his characters. One of the characters was a veteran who suffered from PTSD so badly that for a while there it seemed as if he was destined for suicide or suicide-by-cop, at the very least, if not a full blown turn-the-gun-on-yourself-afterward mass shooting. The other character was, if I’m remembering right, a single mother whose husband abandoned her, and (I’m really not sure of this) might have even abused her. But they’ve found each other, and are supposedly turn their lives around for the better and found happiness.
And the only thing Batiuk can think to conjure up about this entire sequence is “HAHA RAIN”. Oh, and a joke about the best man being a dog, the pitifulness of which Batiuk seems to not realize.
Charles: nailed it. He’s just lazy and unmotivated and it shows. He created these complex back stories with all kinds of contrivances and children involved, then he just glosses right over them to do a cheesy cornball arc about (surprise) rain. So why even continue Wally’s “story” at all? He went through the trouble to create this little universe for these characters then when his readers question the details they’re “beady-eyed nitpickers” for daring to expect anything resembling continuity or logic. What a hack.