Rusty
September 16, 2014 at 11:19 pm
He’s not even trying to write a joke now. It’s just a declarative sentence.
Today’s strip is somewhere in between. In a sense, the team picture is “the ‘before’ picture” as it depicts the team before the season starts (though the ‘Goats have already played, and presumably lost, their first game). Does Coach summon them again at the end of the season for a (not optional!) “after” picture?
Random notes:
- “OK men…let’s get lined up for the 2014 team picture.” For those still trying to unravel TB’s convoluted timeline, this places Funky Winkerbean solidly in the present. Therefore, over in Crankshaft, it’s 2004….even though three years ago, we saw Ed watching Cindy Summers reporting on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
- Quite a few weird looking “extras” in this scene, but my favorite has to be Blond Guy with a Hitler Stache:
Son of Stuck Funky 
When you look at it in retrospect the stupid time jump was a huge failure. It appeared to be all about Summer as early Act III was all about what a fine young woman she’d become, but now it’s all just seems so pointless and dumb. I know, I know. But you all know what I mean.
And it always comes back to the decision to kill off Lisa for easy attention and cheap pathos. Betcha he wishes he could take that one back, eh? Oh, he’d swear up and down to the contrary but I’m not buying it for a second.
Maybe the team actually won a game in 2014, so this picture is a kind of “cosplay” picture to get Bull and the team “in the mood.”
“Let’s line up and get photographed as if we were people who might win a game–like the team I coached 22 years ago, before jet packs. Later, as we actually play your own season, here in the technical vastness of the future, you’ll understand that victory is completely beyond your grasp, except in the dictionary–if you’re lucky enough to own one printed before The Burning.”
“The football team is back” is another trope (of many) Batiuk needs to bury, Especially when he has all these story engines (Cory, Summer, Maddie, Crazy) that he doesn’t use. This is pathetic!
And why does the football team always have to be awful? For the sake of the “running gag”? Who’d miss that? While TB seems like a sincere “nice guy”, he definitely has that bitter streak that shows through in arcs like this and last week’s Funky arc. Even when he allowed Bull to have a moment of victory (the basketball arc) he was mostly just a sideline character who couldn’t win without Annie jumping on board. Why the hatred? Why the resistance regarding the stupid football team? He’s a weird, weird dude.
“I just wanted to remind you that I have zero faith in you and blame you entirely for the inevitable disappointment you will provide. Now don’t forget to smile for the team picture!”
Ahh, who needs continuity. All we need is this strip to continue for another 10 years
When it comes to the timeline incongruities, it’s clear that TB has just given up. Just call it “writing.” The retcon will not be televised.
I’d stipulate that TB is the nicest guy in the world, and wants nothing but to write endearing stories about the tribulations of young people. I’d even stipulate that his many recurring gags are just what he considers “fun.” But after 40 years, it’s clear he’s just bad at it. Also, you have to abandon any reasonable definition of “young.” Or of “fun.”
And then I remember his promise to dredge up more characters and situations that he thought up when he was a fifth grader. With that in mind, I stipulate nothing.
Aren’t coaches supposed to be optimistic and encouraging?
…Oh, right. This is Westview. Never mind!
He thinks that he has to have the football team lose for the same reason Schulz always had Charlie Brown have the football yanked away from him without understanding why Sparky did that. His better wanted to show a determined little boy clashing with a nasty little girl who never wanted to let him win because she’d decided he wasn’t supposed to. Batiuk won’t let the team win because he wants to show a good man frustrated by screw-ups but the way he frames it makes his good man look like the problem.
“He’s not even trying to write a joke now. It’s just a declarative sentence.”
But the declarative sentence “Let’s get lined up for the 2014 team picture” is becoming another version of “My Dad, John Darling, who was murdered…”
Yep, he’s using an entire day’s strip to set up a “punch line” for the next day. Of course, he’s dicked around for a week or more just to make an inch of progress in a story line, so get used to it. He’s clearly run out of material in the high school and Montoni’s, but can’t help himself from returning to them. Again and again.
Ye gods, this week has just been awful. Of course, one could say that about every week on Funky Winkerbean.
Quite a few weird looking “extras” in this scene …
My favorite is the in the middle of the group, who looks just like a pre-whitened Cayla. How much you want to make a bet Batiuk just C&P’ed and old version of Cayla onto that player’s body? Like I posted at Comics Kingdom today, “Tom Batiuk. Mailing it in for nigh onto 20 years now.”
If TomBat was like this as a teacher, he did the kids of Akron a great service by becoming a mediocre cartoonist.
How many Westviewers does it take to set up a camera?
Fewer than it takes to set up a joke apparently.
There’s enough space in the word balloon so that Batiuk could have written “this year’s” picture instead of giving it a date and damning his continuity. I guess lazy gonna lazy.
There is an assistant! An assistant coach. That’s unsettling. He’s lurking there like one of those characters played by Clint Eastwood in a Spaghetti Western. What does he think? What does he do? He’s probably got his mind on 100 painful ways to make a team win, all of which are unknown to Bull.
TB’s timeline would give MC Escher a headache.
The unsettling thing about the presence of the assistant coach is this means that there is someone on the staff who is deemed to be even less competent than Bull.
To draw a comparison with a genuinely GOOD comic (apologies for the lengthy exposition): Scott McCloud’s “Zot!” was about an ordinary teenage girl (Jenny) who meets a hero (Zot) from a shiny, happy utopia; initially, she assumes he’s from a Buck Rogers-style future (excuse me, a “Starbuck Jones-style future”), until he announces “Welcome to the far-off future of 1965!” Turns out his world ISN’T the future, but the past of a parallel universe where everything turned out just right to produce such a world. Or so it seemed, until Jenny joined Zot for a New Year’s Eve celebration, and at the stroke of midnight, it was 1965 again. When Jenny looked into this anomaly by researching the history of Zot’s world, she discovered that the utopia wasn’t simply a case of everything having gone right…it was as if somebody had gone back through time, and taken out all the bad things while leaving all the good things in place. (For example, World War II never happened, but there are still songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” which could never have been written if not for the war.) (The explanation for Zot’s world was never resolved, as the series was cancelled, the publisher went out of business, and McCloud moved on to other projects.)
With this in mind, it’s obvious how it can be 2014 in both Funky and Crankshaft…Batiuk’s world is the opposite of Zot’s! It’s where all the bad things from Zot’s history wound up and all the good things were taken away!
Ugh, these last few weeks have actually been exhausting to read. The strip is just the lack of inertia incarnate.
@Epicus Doomus: Batiuk seems to have jock-resentment and elitism like a number of nerdy/geeky creators have (examples: Aaron Diaz and Michael “Mookie” Terracciano). Nerds and geeks are super-awesome people who should be awed for their wisdom while jockish people are total jerks who need to be trashed (even nice ones).
Though Diaz and Mookie come from different camps: Mookie has a pathological hatred of jocks where they are all terrible people who like to sexually mistreat women while the only nice jock was put through the ringer to the point that he became a pariah and permanently disfigured and in constant pain. While Diaz with his redesigns of superheroes has to make a majority of the guys skinny nerds even if it goes against their character (Lex Luthor, Wolverine, Gorilla Grodd, Cyborg). Even in his original stuff, people have to fit that ideal so no big muscles, bros or sports fans.
I’d say Batiuk is a toned-down version of Mookie. And Brooke McEldowney would be a artsy version of Diaz if you replaced transhumanitism with being unable to see past 1955.
@carriekube1: Also the inability to see black people.
@Paul Jones: Could you imagine if Brooke tried to write and draw a black person.
When you look at it in retrospect the stupid time jump was a huge failure. It appeared to be all about Summer as early Act III was all about what a fine young woman she’d become, but now it’s all just seems so pointless and dumb. I know, I know. But you all know what I mean.
I don’t know, ED. It’s obvious that no matter what age Les and the others were going to be, Batiuk would still have his seven storylines that he flogs constantly when he’s not transparently gunning for some popular recognition through some special arc. But by pushing the main characters up into their fifties, Batiuk was able to write about things like prostate troubles and other health and aging problems, personal obsolescence, ennui and things like that. He could still do it with characters in their 30s, of course, but the very concept itself becomes ridiculous. His actual result is ridiculous, but not because of its concept. It’s an acceptable concept executed badly.
I also think that he thought that if he made all the kids teenagers, he could continue to write stories akin to those he originally wrote for Les, Funky and the others, but it’s pretty obvious he lost interest after a very short time. It was probably something he originally thought he was up for, as opposed to writing about children under 10 and their parents.
I also think that perhaps he didn’t believe he could adequately address the immediacy of Les’ feelings right after Lisa died. If that’s the case, that’s probably the only good decision he’s made, along with the only honest assessments of his talents he’s ever given.