Today’s strip
Gahhhh! Something has eaten away the flesh on Bull’s right ankle, leaving only exposed and picked-clean bone keeping his foot attached to his body. No wonder he’s hopping on his left foot.
Even more frightening than that, however, Les and Linda make an appearance.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Okay, how are people getting to the page? Because every night now I have gotten the same damn response. The page for this day cannot be found. Even though it’s after midnight where the site should be focused on.
TFH sez: Sorry for the inconvenience. Really not sure what could be happening; the Comics Kingdom strips go live at midnight Eastern time. Try deleting the date at the end of the url, so that it just says http://comicskingdom.com/funky-winkerbean/.
Not since the murder of “My Father, John Darling” has there been this much happiness in the Funkyverse.
Gyre: try this link…http://www.nj.com/comics-kingdom/?feature_id=Funky_Winkerbean
Figures that Les doesn’t recognize an rxpression of joy when he sees it.
If I were Bull, I’d cash in my chips and get out of Westview, too.
Yes, this means that Batiuk won’t have the customary ten weeks of humorless bad puns and smirks about a high school football team that only plays one opponent twice a year. But I have a feeling Batiuk no longer cares about such easy material, and is willing to write Bull out.
Does Batiuk magically decide to create a whole story surrounding Bull’s shady interaction with that ref last week… which in turn blows up Bull’s DUI gig and coaching job at Westview, forcing him to work at Montoni’s as a broken man? That would fall in line with Funkyverse standards, but Batiuk needs to draft an actual storyline to make it work, something he should have done in the first place.
If this was a competent comic strip, I’d be emotionally impacted with Bull’s apparent departure. But it’s Funky, so meh.
We’re probably going to have to stage an intervention so that he can be reminded of his place. After all, if the Scapegoats start winning, one third of the joy of complaining about an outside world that hates them and wants to crush them for wanting to be happy out of happiness-crushing malice will go away and that would be just terrible.
Thanks Epicus.
And hey, Disqus and Comics Kingdom are once again moderating our comments! I’m going out on a limb here and guessing they realized arbitrary deletion of comments was too obvious, so now they’ll have them waited to be moderated for so long that eventually no one will every try to post a comment!
And their viewership will decrease by fifty nine percent since a lot of it was people coming to point out the plot holes and awful characters.
The lawyers representing the estate of Charles M. Schultz would like to speak to you, Mr. Batiuk. They claim that “Scapegoats” logo is too similar to the profile of his “Snoopy” and are demanding that you “cease and desist” immediately or they will take legal action.
In yesterday’s comments TFH mentioned TB’s blog on the official site. My favorite line: “I had a chance to meet a lot of Funky and Crankshaft readers…”. Define “a lot”, please. And “Lisa’s Story” is a textbook in a college class? Who knew “Really Obscure Artists In Archaic Dying Genres” was a course you could take? I’d either ace that class or be kicked out on the first day, methinks.
Coming next week: Bull’s happiness is quickly extinguished by crippling chest pains, leading to a hilarious trip to the ER. But seriously, seeing someone expressing joy in a FW strip is just so jarring, isn’t it? Bull is very clearly doomed, it couldn’t be more obvious if the other shoe kicked you in the face. If I had to take a guess as to where this is going (and bear in mind I am rarely ever right about these guesses) I’d say it’ll be like Les’ Hollywood arc. Bull will discover that college football is soulless and evil and he will yearn to return to his pathetic sub-mediocre roots. He will schlepp back to WHS and be greeted with open shrugs. It has all the classic BatTom elements: loser “wins” by losing and/or quitting, dumb jocks, scheming greed-driven phonies, sappy sentimentality, the works. Which means it’ll never happen.
The problem with meeting the readers is that most of them tend to say inconvenient things about how it’s getting harder and harder to care for the characters because of the unrelenting misery and failure and despair that settled into the strip after he had his cancer scare. He doesn’t want to know about darkness-induced audience apathy because that makes him the problem.
@JerrytheMacGuy, “The lawyers representing the estate of Charles M. Schultz would like to speak to you, Mr. Batiuk. They claim that “Scapegoats” logo is too similar to the profile of his “Snoopy” and are demanding that you “cease and desist” immediately or they will take legal action.”
TB’s lawyer’s would win with the infinite monkeys defense.
“Your honor we request that this lawsuit be dismissed. Any resemblance to this “Snoopy” character is pure chance. We submit forty years of, to use the word loosely, artwork. As you can see Mr. Batiuik is obviously drawing at random since the same character never looks the same even in adjacent panels.”
Bull’s being the bumbling coach of the Westview Scapegoats is one of the constant conditions of the strip. There’s no way he’s going to actually take this job and leave. That would be like Gilligan and the castaways getting rescued from the island. Bull’s presence is necessary to keep the athletic-bashing storylines going. I think we’ll see Bull’s deal fall apart in the least interesting or funny way imaginable.
Once again proving that there’s no joy in Westview like the joy of leaving Westview. Actually, there’s no other joy available in Westview.
“Just remember, Bull. If you leave Westview, you’ll get written out. Trust me, I know. Sincerely, Susan.”
I think Bull should hold out for a better offer from Dannon Institute of Physics, South Hills Information Technology. It suits him better.
If Bull does leave, it’ll give Annie Fairgood the chance to be head football coach, and she’ll be able to fulfill her dreams!
Oh, wait. Her dream was to be a writer, a goal she was never able to fulfill because of crushing obligation. She’s a lot like Tom Batiuk that way.
I’m thinking that Batiuk must be planning a spin-off comic strip starring Bull as the head football coach at Diversity. There is a lot of stuff he can do with that. He’s probably getting bored with ‘Crankshaft’ Either that or he’s planning another time shift to coincide with Bull’s leaving Westview at the end of the school year. Possibly jumping ahead ten years to when Bull, having been fired by Diversity, returns to Westview and gets his old job back
Pretty sure the ESA just landed a probe on Bull, just beneath the Scapegoats logo.
I’m predicting the principal discovers the Goat play, and Bull is fired and disgraced.