Walkers, stretch out those legs! SoSFDavidO here with an army of tacky pink-ribboned goodies to pass out during yet another Lisa’s Legacy Walk in today’s strip.
I must say, I’m feeling for the Funkster. Despite over three years now of jogging and a personal trainer, he hasn’t lost a pound!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Who starts a sentence with the word “anymore”?
If I wanted to read Pluggers, I would…well, question my sanity, really, but it still does this kind of thing better.
Meanwhile Cayla helps out at the city’s African American history exhibit.
“We need to make sure that our children remember the struggles of our past” she says, glancing at the photo of the Million Man March “or they won’t understand the problems we face now”
(Hashtag WhatYouCouldBeReading)
Rusty: Beat me to it, people only speak like that in the Batiukverse. Other than pimping the annual fun run, what is the point of this? To remind us that Lisa died a long time ago? No shit, tell us something we haven’t been beaten over the head with for seven years.
Yeah Dickface, years aren’t what they used to be in YOUR universe, a place where entire decades fade in and out randomly. “Time marches on”…”it sure has been a long time since Lisa died”…uh yeah Tom, real profound. No one put a gun to your head and forced you to mark Lisa’s passing several times a year, so quit bellyaching.
Look at Les’ obese lackey grinning moronically as if the dick with ears just made some sort of amusing observation about the foibles of this mortal coil instead of just another typically block-headed wisecrack. God I despise these two so much today. I still cannot believe he dropped the mascot arc for this wankery.
Happy October, everyone!
Creeper dude in the last panel is throwing off some strange “whip-out-a-machine-gun-and-finish-everyone-off-Plantman-style-thus-ending-the-strip” vibes. Maybe BatDick is celebrating the umpteenth anniversary of Lisa’s death by killing off everybody else? (Not being mean, but for a second I honestly hoped this would happen.) I can see it now: another timeskip, this time 15 years. A now PTSD-stricken and armless Sgt. Major Cory Winkerbean writes a book that later becomes an award-winning documentary about his stepfather, Funky Winkerbean, the owner of the local pizzeria, who was murdered….
We got the gibberish and we got the pseudo-profundity. What we don’t got is an admission that Batiuk simply couldn’t be bothered with the ‘boring’ story of Les being a single father to a four-through-sixteen year old. There’s a decade we got cheated out of and a host of more interesting stories not told so that we might focus on Beardo the Weirdo and Pizza the Hutt.
C’mon Les. An English teach and published author can’t think of any more pithy response to an observation about the human condition than “years just aren’t what they used to be??”
How about “I wasted time and now time doth waste me?”
This race is certainly wasting time. Is it now a multi-day endurance event?
The saddest thing about this strip is that we learn Funky actually helps organize this annual altar to Lisa despite the way Les treats him.
This is a rare case where I must rise to defend TB’s diction. My family hails from western Pennsylvania, and I can recall the older ones using anymore as a synonym for nowadays or even just now, even at the start of a sentence. Fortunately, I was raised in a region where English is spoken, and eluded this habit.
To be absolutely clear: getting that sentence right in no way improves the humor or storytelling in today’s strip.
Ahem. Anymore, the comics just aren’t funny.
I begin to be convinced that the end of the mascot arc was exactly as TB planned it. There’s nothing missing. The intended climax/punchline was meant to be that Owen(is it Owen?) gets crunched. Oh, and Westview won a game. Done! Now on to a new poignant yet hilarious storyline.
That panel of Les imagining himself rounding the bases is possibly the invisible final panel to all of what we think of as unfinished stories or dropped plot threads. TB congratulating himself on knocking it out of the park.
Reading some of Batiuk’s “writing,” I’m often reminded of this classic Lewis Black routine (might have been from an appearance an old Conan O’Brien episode from back when he was still on NBC) quoting Dan Quayle who was speaking to some students years ago:
Black: And then he said “We must look forward to the FUTURE, and not (gesturing and looking behind his shoulder), BACK to the PAST!!!”
HOW would you diagram a sentence like that? HOW would you diagram it?? Simple. Take a pencil out, sharpen it, and shove it in your eye!”
Seriously, would have gladly the taken the dumb mascot story for at least another week. At least you can suffer something cheesy. On a Mystery Science Theater scale, reading any dialogue involving only Funky and/or Les for an extended period is like sitting through Manos the Hands of Fate on repeat. Dumb hijinks with students is more like watching something awful that’s at least silly like the Horror of Party Beach.
Ah yes the annual running of the Smug in Westville.
If Funky last any weight, Holly found it.