Flummoxicated
September 18, 2014 at 8:31 am
Ye gods, this week has just been awful. Of course, one could say that about every week on Funky Winkerbean.
captaincab
September 18, 2014 at 4:26 pm
Ugh, these last few weeks have actually been exhausting to read. The strip is just the lack of inertia incarnate.
Thanks, snarkers…I was starting to think it was just me. “Disparage the Football Team Week 2014” takes a grim turn as Coach suggests to his players that they might die horrible, disfiguring deaths on the gridiron.
In the complete absence of jokes, the reader is left to dwell upon minutiae, which includes the “extras” in this week’s scenes:
Orbiter
September 18, 2014 at 10:14 am
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’s really unsettling is that the mystery assistant coach is back again today…in the exact same pose! It’s weird which things Batiuk chooses to be consistent about. Maybe it’s not even a live person; after blowing their budget on those swell Riddell pro-grade helmets, the school has no money left to hire additional staff, and the team is forced to make do with a mannequin.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Another one-panel arc-filler job, a sure sign that BatWrite was just as bored with this football nonsense while he was writing it as we are when we’re reading it. If you’re fresh out of awful football gags, just do a WHS “grab bag” arc, don’t needlessly prolong the agony by…
Whoops, I forgot who I was talking about there for a second. FW is all about prolonging agony. In fact it was the basis of TB’s all-time most favorite-est arc ever. What a sadist.
Haven’t commented in a while. But that’s because everything here has been just completely awful.
At first I thought I saw the word ‘impotent’ in the first sentence. That world help describe this strip in its entirety, actually.
My theory tonight is that these throwaway junk strips exist only to sell the household item of your choice as gifts for the crappy high-school coach in your life. I wonder how much Batom, Inc. pulls in from the print-on-demand schwag.
Three days to take a picture. And he’s only been talking about taking a picture the entire time. I’m going to guess all of next week is devoted to pressing the shutter.
Obligatory morbidity used as a final-panel “punchline”. Bravo, Batiuk.
TFH: It’s not just you, trust me. It’s bad enough when he just repeats the same joke six times, but it’s even worse when that joke is the same joke he’s been repeating for years and years and years. Not to mention that he did the same thing last week too.
Maybe he’s not an assisstant coach; maybe he’s an enforcer who keeps the students from walking away from Bull’s “pep talks.”
Yeah, that’s real encouraging, man. Tell the team that a group of preschoolers can mangle them.
“Identify the bodies”?! Bull, you incredible nincompoop, they are wearing numbers, you have a roster forfucksake! … Oh, it’s a joke? Why doesn’t someone tell me these things….
”Maybe he’s not an assisstant coach; maybe he’s an enforcer who keeps the students from walking away from Bull’s “pep talks.”’
Well, out in the “field” Stalin had the NKVD and Hitler had the Feldgendarmerie……
“What’s really unsettling is that the mystery assistant coach is back again today…in the exact same pose! ”
But it’s not the same guy!
Different nose, and he’s lost weight in his arms!
Must have CANCER!
Today’s “joke” is just creepy. Typical Batom Inc.
My theory is that the assistant coach is really the football coach from Foxtrot. He needed a weekday job after Foxtrot went Sunday-only.
With a couple modifications, Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine stip hits this week’s FW strips, and TB in general, pretty hard. (original PBS strip)
I think TB has pretty much given up on producing a quality comic strip and is instead just focusing on baiting Chris Sims.
Nothing like a death joke to make this strip a knee slapper.
Well at least they got Francis Ford Coppola to film to document these proceedings. I guess he couldn’t resist filming a bigger train wreck than “Heart of Darkness”.