Shafted

SoSfDavidO here! My Funky Winkerbean strip knowledge, though by no means that of a babe in the comic woods, is somewhat limited by my brain’s ability to remember the names and lives of the entire populace of Westview without starting to forget the names and events of things in my real life. In today’s strip, the memory of a cranky ghost from Christmas past has Funky so upset he’s trying to physically remove his head.

Fellow snarkers, is Funky reliving an actual event or is this more retconning?

18 thoughts on “Shafted”

  1. There’s no real reason to leave a comment, honestly, because the comment will always be the same: this is terrible. And not terrible in a good way, terrible in a boring, stupid way.

  3. Oh God, he’s dragging this trip down repressed memory lane out all freaking week? Ugh. Talk about mindless, pointless filler. Shameless cross-promoting self-indulgence, too.

  4. If only the payoff at the end of the week has a demon-possessed Funky spitting out pea soup on St. Les the Righteous Smirker after spinning his head around a few times, then maybe this will work.

    Even by Batom’s life philosophy of “tell, don’t show,” this is a new low.

  5. Even if we do actually see what Crankshaft did to ruin Christmas, it’ll be as boring as all get out. My guess is that we’re going to look at Funky scowl in impotent rage because he too cannot bring himself to actually call Cranky out for being his usual malicious, destructive and self-absorbed self because Germans shot at him once despite wanting to tear the old goat a new arsehole.

  6. 2 days to remind readers that he has another strip called Crankshaft?
    I can’t wait for tomorrow’s exciting episode where they try to remember what color his trucker hat was..

    It’s called padding.

  8. The awful is just a swirling mass right now, rolling and tumbling over both FW and Crankshaft, comingling two seemingly bottomless reservoirs of awful into one giant festering pustule so dense and powerful that Funky, caught in the hideous vortex, is reeling. His head throbbing – begging the two babbling nincompoops to just stop, but they won’t stop, they can’t stop and will surely bring upon the FW world the cursed visage of old man Crankshaft himself, appearing alternately as his CS-self and his aged and rotting FW-self at a pace and rhythm that incites uncontrolled nausea, weeping and gnashing of teeth throughout the Funkyverse. Finally, Les shows up and reminds both camps who is the realasshole of all Funky time and space, returning Ahia to a sort of Pax Montoni.

  9. I vaguely recall this crossover actually happening, but could not begin to give a date.

    It may just be me, but I think this strip is actually worse for longtime FW readers. Crankshaft is a spinoff of FW, and Ed Crankshaft drove Funky and Harry and the gang on the bus for darn near 20 years before getting his own strip. They called him by name… they ought to know who he is.
    On could argue that few people remember their high school bus driver, and I’d buy that here if Crankshaft wasn’t explicitly designed for students to remember him.

    Funky, at least, appears to have repressed or drank Crankshaft from his memory. What’s Crazy’s excuse?

  10. All i can remember is that there was a “Crankshaft at Montonis” cover image for the Batiuk Blog a year or two (or more?) ago. Never knew if that was a real storyline or not.

  11. So this week we have three guys sitting around talking about something* that happened that presumably was interesting.

    As Tony Soprano said “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

    *- Actually, it’s worse than that. They’re talking about something around something that happened that might have been interesting.

  12. I usually try to avoid Brooke McEldoney as often as possible, but surely that beefwit doesn’t blatantly self-promote “Pigborn” within “9 Chickweed Lane.”

    And Brooke is arguably WORSE than Batom®, in that 1) he shows AND shows, 2) he will go on and on with showing, and 3) he hates his critics to the point he banned comments on his strips.

  13. Funky is literally having a nervous breakdown over this? What did Crankshaft do, shoot people? (Of course not, that would be interesting and this strip doesn’t do that.)

    Why would Funky have hired Crankshaft in the first place? Aside from “old” he has none of Santa’s characteristics. Not to mention that Crankshaft’s SOB nature must have been well-established. The only reason Funky would hire Crankshaft would be brain damage.

    Which I guess answers my question, now that I think about it.

  15. @Nathan – I had to stop reading 9 Chickweed Lane because it sent me into fits of rage. It’s like a strip where every character is Les.

    As for today’s strip, we’ve got TB taking (at least) two days to set up a Crankshaft flashback that he could just as easily have just included in this week’s Crankshaft strip, and the end result would be much smoother and less confusing to the FW readers who are not also Crankshaft readers. As expressed by other snarkers here, the end result is practically guaranteed to be anti-climactic.

  16. I’m going to be completely honest here, I want to see the Crankshaft/Funky crossover. But it will be boring, with Funky running into him at the retirement home and realize that he, Funky, is far superior to this bitter old man. Hopefully it runs on Christmas Day.

    *Smirk* ….curtain.

  17. Oh, here we go, thanks to Comic Alliance’s FunkyWatch (Dec 2010), apparently just an illo from TB’s blog. I knew i’d seen it somewhere recently:

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