Cayla opens with
Understatement of the year
Linda unimpressed
Husband’s health problems
Wordplay fodder for Linda
The way of Westview
23 thoughts on “Haiku Anxiety”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
It’s funny because the sudden onset of crippling, unfocused fear and panic was only slightly less debilitating than she’d expected.
Between the frosted glass and the hidden right arm, I thought that was Becky in the first panel. But then Batiuk pulled the switcheroo by revealing Linda to have an extra-freaky long arm by Panel 2.
I’m just going to ignore his sub-moronic gag that couldn’t possibly have less to do with the big game. Instead I’m going to focus on Linda, quite possibly my least favorite minor FW character. Always so snide, always so cynical, always dripping with sarcasm as she makes yet another obnoxious joke at someone’s (usually Bull) expense. Of all the joyless miserable Westviewian spouses, Linda seems like the most miserable one of all, as well as the one who’s most resigned to her fate. Has she ever appeared in the strip and not oozed disdain for everyone and everything? Nope, with Linda it’s all zingers or weary disgust, all the time. It’s unbearable. If she had ended up with Les Moore somehow, the entire universe would have imploded upon itself from the sheer wryness of it all. And imagine if they had bred (shudder).
That’s hilarious, Linda. You’re hilarious. I wonder what other rhetorical gems you’ve got waiting to be unearthed from your pea-brain.
“I thought he was having a heart attack this morning… turns out it was just a heart intimidation!”
“I thought he was having a brain stroke this morning… turns out it was just a brain diacritical!”
“I thought he was going into diabetic shock … turns out it was just diabetic schlock!”
HAW HAW HAW HAW
I…I…don’t get it. Why is Bull anxious? Is something different about this week? Man, I must have missed something.
I am enjoying the haikus.
Linda’s face is taking a turn for the worse in that last panel, she looks like Henny Youngman.
(*Smacks forehead*) SHUT UP!!!!!
Who could possibly think up such terrible, horrible wordplay? These folks can NOT be human.
I thought Bull was going to die this morning.
He didn’t. He lived.
**Pause** wait for the laughs and money to roll in.
It’s pretty much impossible for me to imagine someone writing and drawing this, then smirking, leaning back in his chair and imagining himself running around a tiny baseball diamond.
Unless the goal was to make the dullest, least involving, most non-interesting strip ever, in which case, grand slam home run, Tom.
And speaking of giant lazy hacks, what was the deal with that Mickey nonsense on Sat. and Sunday? I mean that’s it? She shows up after eleven years all so BatWipe can take a nostalgic victory lap and have the team ogle her time-jump-enhanced cleavage? That was a rather peculiar cameo IMO. And meanwhile Roberta stands on the scissor lift, silently waiting….
Honestly I love it when Batiuk goes off on his insane, aimless and always-disappointing tangents. No one gets distracted like he does. He takes the simplest and most obvious of premises and ends up in the strangest (yet never entertaining) places with them. It’s always interesting to watch him perfect his craft, if you consider exerting as little effort as humanly possible to be a “craft”, that is.
Great. Not only is it ‘funny’ that she hates everyone and everything, it’s funny because Bull is terrified that he’s the problem. He’d have realized that years ago if he weren’t married to this hate tank.
Bull’s anxiety
Joke is bad but I’m happy
When Less is absent
Yet another strip featuring two women who have nothing to do but talk about a man. Has Batiuk ever drawn a strip that passed the Bechdel Test?
@ED, Batiuk constantly shows Linda and Les spending more time at work and football games together than with their respective spouses, so if not actually Les’s mistress, Linda’s at least his “work wife.” In the much more entertaining Funky Winkerbean that takes place inside my head, Les is taking revenge on Bull and maintaining his status as Alpha Male of Westview by carrying on with Linda, which would explain why he’s always walking into Bull’s office just to smirk at him.
Oh no…Mickey came back after 11 years and suddenly disappears again…..with Kerry…..with Jinx….with Rachael’s son…. with Wally jr…with Maddie….with the entire KSU girls basketball team
Batcrack hates offspring
Batiuk has featured two women talking about their cancer. I guess that passes the Bechdel Test?
Or an “anxiety scrimmage” – which is more appropriate and maybe includes a scintilla of humor. Battic. I can’t even.
@Charles, hell I don’t think he’s written one yet that would pass the Turing Test.
But she has a ready wit… she just needs to tell us when it’s ready.
Look, I don’t see the problem. It’s been Batiuksplained to us again and again that the term comics is a historical accident that confounds hidebound literalists, and that the funny papers aren’t funny any more.
Case in point, today’s strip.
OK, this is the THIRD strip in the last week where Batiuk is LITERALLY just slapping Linda’s hair on top of Funky’s face. Panel one: Linda-Funky (I’ll refer to her from here on out as “Lunky”) Panel 2: Lunky suddenly has a weird bulge coming out of her jaw and now looks like Funky in a dress, wearing a relly bad wig after experiencing a debilitating stroke. Is Batiuk himself suffering from mild strokes when drawing Linda? I mean, this is just mindblowingly bad workmanship. Even the worst comic strips usually manage to at least have very consistent character art. As I said before, Batiuk just needs to go back to the “classic” FW art style if he’s so lazy and dismissive of his own post-act “realistic” characters that he just goes back and forth between swapping actual cut out faces of his male characters for female ones. Oh well, that’s Lunky! *recorded audience laughter*
Also, regarding last week’s strips, very disingenuous of Batiuk to “feature” some hispanic characters after that little incident this past summer during the Hollywood “storyline” and the insulting exchange between Les and the exec regarding “The Latino audience is hard to ignore” comment from the exec and the snide “Apparently” followup” comment from Les. Still really ticked off about that. As has been said before, everything about this strip is forced, insincere garbage and the pathetic way that the characters act is gradually telling of the author’s mindset at times.
But enough of that, let’s talk more about Lunky! *recorded audience groans* Regarding Lunky’s always insanely awful hair do, I’ll paraphrase one of Crow’s lines from the MST3K version of the educational short, “A Case of Spring Fever:” – Crow: “It looks like she parted her hair with a bandsaw.”
Author really knows how to pull us into the center of the tale yes? It’s like Les Miserables being told from the perspective of Jean Valjean’s cousin Fred Valjean “he’s always on about something. I find him boring”
There’s some serious Fireworks Factory Syndrome going on here too. He’s featured at least eight regular characters in this arc so far PLUS the return of Mickey and a whole host of Anon-O’s, yet they’re all still talking about the big game which is still taking place at some nebulous future date. I’ll be semi-surprised if he devotes more than a panel or two to the actual game itself.