Hi folks, BChasm back for another round in the Fungeon. Let me start by saying that I like this guy’s booth — “Buying Comics” with a dollar sign on the right and presumably on the left. No beating around the bush for this guy! If you’re into buying comics, well, he’s your man.
Of course, except for eBay and the one she got for a dollar, Holly’s not into buying comics at all. So even if this guy has what she wants, she’ll either expect the issue for free because her son is in the service, or (as seems most likely given this universe) bemoan the unfairness of it all. Paying money for comic books? Why, the very idea!
The main takeaway from today’s strip, or any that feature Holly for that matter, is how relentlessly Tom Batiuk needs to display her…well, for lack of a better phrase, bottomless stupidity. We’re been told over and over that her purpose in attending Comic Con is to get one specific issue of one specific comic. How hard could it be to remember “Starbuck Jones 115”? I can remember it, and I haven’t even gone back to yesterday’s comic to look!
And yet…Holly has a list. A list, you’ll note, with four entries.
I suspect that list reads like this:
STAR
BUCK
JONES
#115
Yeah, I get the idea that she has a list so that Tom Batiuk can display some “clever” word-play. It seems to me that if, in order to seem clever, you have to make your characters dumber than rocks, something is wrong with the equation.
Bonus fun: place your thumb so that Holly’s hair is covered. Oh my God, that’s Funky Winkerbean’s profile!
Son of Stuck Funky 
I can just imagine Holly haggling.
Holly: How much is that?
Seller: $5
Holly: I can give you $7.50
Seller: (confused) $7.50?
Holly: OK how about $10?
Seller: Just take it and never come back.
I didn’t know Ron Jeremy was that into comic books
My guess is that he wanted the readers to laugh at his very clever (chortle) little “wish/need list” gag he no doubt overheard while he was skulking around eliciting shouts of “who’s that?” at the real-life SDCC. He failed spectacularly at that because it’s a really stupid joke, but he inadvertantly generated a chuckle at how dumb Holly must be of she needs to walk around clutching a list that contains the one specific item she traveled across the country to obtain.
Or maybe her idiocy is supposed to be the joke, I don’t know. “Clueless Army Mom completes comic collection for Corporal Cory” was the opening premise here and, all these months later, Holly is still cluelessly bumbling around like an imbecile so as usual Batom is true to form. Premise, repeat as needed, contrive resolution when half-baked and serve on downbeat note. All I know for sure is that it’s a sustained pattern of stupidity that honestly makes me see Funky in a whole new (but still very unflattering) light.
So, is the girl in the sleeveless hoodie and tiered skirt supposed to be cosplaying somebody, or is that how Batiuk thinks geeks dress nowadays?
TheDiva
That might be a version of Raven’s costume, but I have no idea since it seems to also have an apron tied around it.
As for the story, it’s got an additional problem. I gave her a pass a few days ago for not telling the vendor that she was looking for that comic that was just misfiled because I thought that maybe she didn’t want to let him know and jack up the price. But today we’re seeing her telling a possible owner that she doesn’t just want it, she NEEDS it.
Maybe we really should have lower standards for a comic strip than other things because the medium needs padding and there can be a lot to remember, but guys just follow me on this for a moment. This is clearly supposed to be a big storyline. It’s been going on for how long now, half a year? More? It’s even trying to tie together a son fighting in another country and the creator’s favorite form of story telling.
So in this we’ve seen that the character is generally just given things, the son is largely unmentioned, the rare and expensive comic books are just shelved unprotected for anyone to paw at and any growth we might have seen from her time dealing with Hagglemore has been forgotten.
Some times I feel like people are just picking on the work and insulting it just for the sake of insulting it when really some of it isn’t any worse than most other published comic strips. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is still poor storytelling right here.
Question, has anyone else using the Comics Kingdom site noticed themselves unable to access the new strip until at least half an hour past midnight? That’s happened to me every day since last week.
Gyre: that’s what I thought, although I can’t find a version of Raven who dresses like that. In any case, Wikipedia tells me Raven debuted in October 1980, so she’s on the outer edge of Batiuk’s geek awareness.
Gyre: I know what you’re saying but IMO my expectations are set pretty low and yet he always manages to slip under the bar anyway. As far as character growth and progression are concerned, it’s only happening in FW if that’s the premise. That’s the thing about FW, it’s all premise, there are no stories. She was clueless and oblivious at the beginning, she’ll be the same at the end, guaranteed.
@Gyre Oh, no doubt. I can name fifteen nationally syndicated strips off of the top of my head that are more boring, stupid, or aggravating than Funky Winkerbean: Marvin, Marmaduke, Apartment 3G, Mary Worth, Gil Thorp, Drabble, Fred the Basset Hound or whatever, Crock, Pluggers, Mark Trail, 9 Chickweed Lane, Luann (caveat: this comic isn’t exactly unreadable or even dull, but it’s easily the creepiest of the lot), Family Circus, Zits (tragedy is that this was once unironically good), Gasoline Alley, Herb and Jamal, Sherman’s Lagoon, Spider-Man..
Hang on, was that more than fifteen? Oh, whatever.
The thing is, though, there’s just something about Funky Winkerbean that makes me really want to mock it and deconstruct it and just disrespect it.
Howard and Nester,
At least in my case, I used to really like FW before the time warps, drama, and cancer. It was an amusing strip that descended into a maudlin and smug cancer play. Also, Les went from lovable loser to a smug insufferable douche bag.
And this helping Cory how???
FW warrants mocking because Batiuk has aspirations that he is telling the story of his generation.
bigd–I liked a few of the Act II stories (Funky’s alcoholism, Susan’s killing himself), but since Lisa’s relapse the strip has going into the toilet with intelligence-insulting plotting, depressing storylines, or everyone in the strip behaving like troll or an idiot.
@Howard and Nester, Have to disagree with you about “Sherman’s Lagoon”. That strip is a gag strip. When they do mention environmental issues they don’t get heavy handed and still manage to tell jokes.
Now “9 Chickweed Lane” is just plain depressing, once it was a very funny strip and one of my favorites. Now I find it unreadable. It’s problem like FBOFW is that Mr. McEldowney like Ms. Johnson and TB is they got to full of themselves.
@Gyre, I can’t access any strip on the Comics Kingdom site at any time, so I have to read it on a newspaper comics page. Not sure why. Really don’t appreciate having to take an extra step to read this glurge every day.
IMHO, next to FW, the shark-jumpingest comic of them all is Get Fuzzy. Though still one of the better drawn strips, over time it’s become so droll and repetitive that it should be retitled Get Funny.
Thank you, Beckingchasm. Now I can NOT unsee Funky’s face in panel one. Well done, sir!
If she can’t remember the one thing she came for you do have to wonder what else on this list -” Breathe in, Breathe out” “Put food in Mouth not ear” “First socks them shoes” (the last is a quote from a Far Side comic.
“Thanks for the effort, Ma, but Starbuck Jones is so last week. I’m into vintage Penthouse now! Those letters are bomb!”
Every time I see TB’s attempts at drawing faces, I’m reminded how good he is at drafting brick walls and falling leaves.
If we’re listing boring, stupid, and aggravating comics, surely Dustin warrants a mention. Wit its reliance on insipid complaint-centered gags, it is perhaps the only strip capable of competing with FW’s Les in Hollywood strips for the title of “First World Problems: The Comic”.
Am I the only one that the obscured sign in Panel 2 said “Dying & Comics”.? I guess that’s the section where the planners people place Batiuk at during Comic Cons.
Gyre: I noticed last night that Comics Kingdom didn’t update until well after midnight. Usually, when I play host, I try to delete the image around midnight, but I wanted to wait until the link was live. So I waited and waited and fortunately, a fellow member of the Council of Elders deleted the image for me.
As for beating up on Funky Winkerbean when so many other strips are equally as bad/stale/creepy, the thing about FW is that it claims to have a depth and meaning that it simply doesn’t have, and that’s what makes its failure so much more so than say, Spider-Man.
I don’t think anyone is meant to read newspaper Spider-Man and think, “Wow, that is so true! Newspaper Spider-Man really has a lot to say about life!” I think most of the other comics mentioned in this thread fall into the same category (For Better or For Worse being a FW-level exception).
What I find most criticisable (sp?) about FW is that it does pretend to say profound things about life, while falling far short of saying even interesting things about life.
I was thinking the cosplayer might be DC’s Pandora, but that’s only three years old, so… unlikely. TB always seemed more like a DC fanboy, and there was that great blog entry where he took pride in buying an obscure issue of the Flash instead of the first issue of Spider-Man ($$$) when it came out, but after Les’ Rawhide Kid homage and last week’s Thor & Dr Doom, it looks like he’s a Marvel Zombie after all!
I’ve probably said it before but to me FW is an uncanny valley of mockability. Only a couple of others–(original) FBOFW and Luann–really hit that spot for me. I probably only started reading FW after the Foobpocalypse and the last time-jump. Gag-a-day strips and soap opera strips just go too far one way or the other. Doonesbury is probably the only one that actually succeeded in world- and character-building.
Gag-a-day strips that suddenly decide they have something important to say with characters that are built up as Mary Sues… that’s the ticket.
FBOFW was the only strip in FW’s league as far as forced pathos and cheesy melodrama was concerned. But TB blew past LJ with the cancer arc and never looked back. It was like they were deliberately trying to top each other for a while there. “Oh, you killed the family dog? Well I’ll BLOW UP LISA!”. It was relentless.