Link to today’s strip.
I’ve not heard of a memory board, and at first I thought it might be a “In Memorium” thing for all the students who died and thus were unable to attend. Look at that giant pile of photos, I thought. The high school must have been built on a toxic waste dump from an abandoned nuclear plant that was built on an Indian graveyard.
Then I saw that Cindy had a photo of Les, so I guess a memory board is just a “here’s what you looked like before you got old, fat, and bald!” poster. But then I went back to my first thought, and I wondered if this was Cindy’s way of saying she was going to kill Les! That would be awesome, go Cindy go! At last a character whose dreams and aspirations we can all get behind. Here’s to a new era in Funky Winkberbean!
Of course, back to reality–contemporary reality, of course, with its issues–we go. Look at Les in panel one. Oh, oh, oh, poor little unappreciated me. Oh, woe is me, no one is capable of understanding me. Boo hoo hoo. I cannot understand why his face isn’t tattooed with bruises from the rain of punches he must receive every day.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Was Les standing in the white room from the Matrix when the picture was taken? Or maybe the artist was just too lazy to draw anything else.
I really, really hope Les labors and loses sleep over this thing, and then nobody shows up. Not even Funky, Harry, and Cayla. Just Les, alone with his cat hallucination. Or even better, Ghost Lisa.
Didn’t she move to California, handing the whole organization of the reunion over to Les? Has she flown back from Culver City just for this? And if so, why did she hand over the coveted chairmanship in the first place?
Or is this supposed to be someone other than Cindy, in which case this is just evidence of Battic’s inability to draw more than two women. Other than her (presumably ) tongue in cheek self intro as Rumplestiltskin, there hasn’t been an actual establishment whether or not this is actually Cindy or just generic woman.
And also presuming that her name isn’t really Rumplestiltskin, where is the joke in this situation where someone might show up at an old classmate’s door and pretend to be named after an evil childless troll who wants to steal….Summer?
It’s all so stupid on so many levels.
Bah, mindless nostalgia-wallowing. Why don’t they just save the “memory board” from the past reunions and just black out whoever dies? Maybe they could even hold a lottery of some kind. I think the “bad yearbook” thing was an old running gag, but I could just be imagining it.
And by “one of my better ones” I mean “my only one.”
Les’ classmates avoiding him looks more sensible by the day.
Batom®, seriously. Just give up and run nothing but dialogue-less clipart until you get that goddam gold watch from Brendan Buford in 2022.
I doubt that any of the current newspapers that blindly carry your strip will even notice.
The mashup with Cody’s equally punchable mug is too perfect. That could have legitimately saved this crime against humor.
As for the reunion… @SpacemanSpiff85, that SHOULD be the ultimate punchline for everyone to not attend the reunion for some reason or another. But as has been shown time and time again, the surviving members of Westview High School’s Class of 1988 is nothing but a group of masochistic uber-losers, hopelessy mired in the past, who just can’t take no for an answer.
@Nathan Orbal: What’s more, said uber-losers cannot hack it in the real world and all eventually crawl back home wailing about the evil outsiders who don’t care about lousy pizza in a depressing setting, Silver Age DC Comics and spending Friday Nights watching the Scapegoats get beaten.
Hey TB did you know they have these collections of early FW strips in (gasp) book form? You might want to check one out next you, ah hem, draw someone from that period, because Les never ever got that close to being cool.
@ Guest Page Turner Author: Is that not Holly in the blonde hair? Or Pete McReynolds in the photo?
Maybe Les can get a “kill fee” for abandoning the coming reunion…
(The yellow liquid made me LOL!)
So we spend another week kicking the “Les was a loser in High School” dead horse, time that could be spent moving along any of a number of other (slightly) less tiresome story arcs.
Sigh.
And besides, it’s like Funkaholic said….the only photo Les is gonna care about is the one of Saint Dead Lisa.
Leslie Moore (a/k/a Tom Batiuk’s avatar) was such an imbecile in high school that he couldn’t even pose for pictures properly.
@Paul Jones: Less will construct a huge, seraphic shrine to St. Dead Lisa of the Blessed and Holy Tumor. And require everyone to genuflect to it repeatedly.
Cindy doesn’t have a single one of those photos of Les from the yearbooks that Summer used to haul out so she and Cayla could make fun of him?
This is literally the only thing that Summer does when she appears anymore.
“Seraphic Shrine”? Watch it, Jim in Wisc., if I wanted to learn something I wouldn’t read FW 🙂
The way they’re all carrying on like this is the very first reunion ever is pretty annoying. What did they do after the previous ones, destroy and shred all the details so they’d have to start from scratch each time?
Equally annoying is how Cindy is still there, as BanTom totally ignores his own premise for the sake of doing ancient Act I retcon gags.
His behavior could make some sense if Les was the type who didn’t give up anything because he’d worry that he’d let someone down if he did, but does that sound like him? Speaking honestly here, setting aside the joking, can people think up times he stuck through with something because he was worried that someone else would be inconvenienced if he didn’t?
The closest I can think of is the movie script, and he walked off on that without ever trying to make a positive change on it first.
What’s sad is that I thought Les was a likable loser in Act one
Yes, I agree. Seeing Les Moore face chopped in half is a better picture of him .
I guess some photographers were left behind.
This is just painful. Just let the whole Les was a loser in High School go – I mean really. does anybody in their 50’s think about high school? At all? Ever?
Le Mo i mo puncha tha ev.
@Professor Fate:Peaked-in-High-School-Rob-Lowe™?
Les: “The girl who I barely ever, ever, ever interacted with in high school and who has been more or less a complete stranger during our adult lives doesn’t have a good picture of me as a teenager, Cayla. Isn’t that the worst thing you ever heard?”
Cayla: “Um, no. Just get one of your old pictures.”
Les: *fumes* “LISA would have commiserated with me about the injustice of this situation.”
Cayla: *rolleyes* “-Lisa- would have locked herself in the bedroom with an ancient VHS camera and taped another crappy video intending to turn EVERY event in your DAMN LIFE into another opportunity to mourn and saint her!”
Les: “WHAT?!? You, you b…you…that was…”
Cayla: “Don’t stop -there-, Les. SAY IT.”
Cindy: “Um, hi. Still here. I’ll, um…be leaving?”
*Cindy runs for dear life*
I love how stricken Les looks in the first two panels. Oh no, he has to put together a collage for this event that he’s decided to organize. Truly, no one has ever been put in such an untenable and trying situation. There’s Job, and then there’s Les. He passed Mandela.
Also, it’s nice that Les and Cayla weren’t planning on doing anything tonight, so that Cindy could come by unannounced and do Les’s job as reunion planner for him.