Get a load of today’s strip… Darin and Jessica are going off to pursue a risky but exciting opportunity in California, leaving poor, pitiful Funky having to replace an employee AND a renter. “Oh woe is me. I now have to assume the common responsibilities of both a small-business owner AND a landlord! Oh weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Where the heck is the Green Pitcher?! I think the readers have earned the little respite its presence provides. Instead, we get Wally wandering out of the kitchen with a tray of telephone pole insulators. At first I thought they were drinking glasses, but Montoni’s is never busy enough to justify owning a whole tray of those.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Now THERE’S the subtle foreshadowing that put Tomban on the comic strip map! Everyone who rents that place ends up making it big in the comic book business so hang in there Wally, you’re time is surely gonna come. I do hope that Buddy isn’t slowly driven insane by pizza fumes, though. And speaking of which, where the hell is that dog??
Note how Boy Lisa has once again been shoved out of his own arc. And by freaking WALLY no less. Now that’s just sad. “Manager”…LOL! There’s a position that will be tough to fill, eh? And whatever happened to Tony? Doesn’t he still technically own the place?
I thought we were done with this Time Pool bullshit. So why am I seeing a younger Funky next to the old, decrepit Funky in the third panel?
Oh, wait. That’s Wally. NVM.
Ah, and now we see the real reason Boy Lisa is leaving town…so the Westview Honeymoon Suite can be vacated for Wally and Nondescript Female Hanger-On #12 (Rachel? I think her name is Rachel…).
Sigh. Nobody wants that crappy apartment above Luigi’s, er, Montoni’s. Comic books are awesome! I wrote a book about cancer. I’m great you’re not.
A couple years back, Spike Lee tossed around the idea of a follow up to his Kobe Bryant documentary with “Crazy Doin’ Work”. He ultimately backed out of the project because he did not want his name attached to the shortest film in history.
In one way at least, this is the ultimate Funky Winkerbean strip. Everyone, and I mean everyone, looks completely miserable. That’s the goal of the whole series, right? Score one for Tom Batiuk! These people look ready to eat poison–the bad tasting kind, too!
And the ironic thing is, Jessica would’ve been perfect for the documentary on Funky searching for a new manager.
Don’t tell me the apartment above Montoni’s is preferable to wherever Wally lives now. And maybe he can get that big promotion and stop being the 40 year old dishwasher?
I guess Chullo kid could be a likely tenant…He *has* to be graduating at some point, right?
It’s very telling how Boy Lisa was usurped in favor of making sure that Montoni’s apartment resident/manager position was immediately filled. Even Batiuk hates poor, poor Boy Lisa. And what’s the deal with Wally anyway? Why the compelling need to thrust him into the spotlight? How many regular FW readers were asking themselves, “hey, I wonder how Wally is doing?”.
We’ll probably end up seeing Boy Lisa again in video chat form or at the SJ premier or something, but his looming “write-out” got me to wondering about how many FW characters were formally written out of the strip? There’s Lisa (ha), Susan, Khan/Kahn, that Liviana person, Coach Stropp and probably some Act II characters I missed along the way. Anyone else?
@Epicus – How about all of Crazy’s kids, Rachel’s kid, Summer and Keisha for that matter are rarely heard from, Chien, etc..
I’m thinking that, as a career waitress at Montoni’s, Rachel knows the operation pretty well and is probably better qualified to take the manager position than Wally, but we can’t have women in positions of responsibility in Westview, can we?
Epicus: Chien, the asian couple who had a restaurant next to Montoni’s,Mooch. Act III would be all of the children of the original cast.
Oh good lord…Wally has been a released POW enough years now…enough for him to have put back a little weight,,,especially that shrunken face look ala Schindler’s List.
Remember he got engaged over a year ago…started Community College 2 years ago….should have received a hefty tax-free back pay check.
But noooooooo, TB makes him a miserable wrench.
Here we are, once again, watching Batiuk write someone out in a very stupid manner just so one of the few people he actually cares about can moan about a non-existent hardship. Another wasted week and another opportunity to show us his love of needless hardship and pants-on-head stupidity.
Epicus: Kevin, the little person. Both of Becky’s parents and, for that matter, Becky.
@Rusty: In the real world, Wally Winkerbean would be set for life. The book about his experience as a POW for at least a decade would be a bestseller. Unlike a comic book (oops, I’m sorry graphic novel) about some mope getting remarried 12 or so years after his first wife died.
@Merry Pookster: If I’m not mistaken, he should get not only back pay, but hazardous duty pay, and a special POW entitlement. So, I would guess that back-pay check would be pretty large, considering he was held captive for over ten years. On top of that, due to his extreme PTSD caused by his captivity, he would probably also be eligible for a disability pension that would be paid for the rest of his life. Finally, his GI Bill (i.e. higher education) benefit would have continued to accrue while he was being held, so that pot of money should be big enough to cover the full cost of just about any bachelor’s AND advanced degree he would want to pursue.
But, then what do I know? I mean, it’s not like I’m a Pulitzer nominated cartoonist, whose stories are “a quarter inch from reality.”
I just meant the characters he bothered to officially write out, not the mob of forgotten side characters he never revisits. There must be at least twenty of those.
@Jim in Wisc–holy cow, you’re right. Wally’s Story, huge blockbuster potential. Buddy the dog, the exwife showing him his grave, married to DSH John. So sad!
How Dickish Language Arts Teacher Met Lisa, remainder bin.
Who the heck is Fedora Guy, and why is his photo hanging on Montoni’s wall?
Also: Darin’s quitting his job and moving his family out West for a 3-week gig doing some storyboards, for a movie whose principal photography has already been completed, no less. What then? It’s not like they can survive on Jess’s prodigious output of hit documentaries. And I’m pretty sure California Pizza Kitchen has an app already.
Nope! No need to plan. When comics nerd Mopey Pete Raksin calls, Durrhey comes a-runnin’! The wife consultation was just to get her womanly rubber-stamp approval, the only decisional authority any woman has in the Funkyverse. Does he seek advice from stepdad twice removed, Punchable Les? Nope! What about actual parents Frd & Fshtck NNNNNnnnnnnnie Frgd? Does he seek their incoherent advice? Nope! He didn’t even bother to taunt his biodad Rapey Frank to gloat over his Hollywood gig.
Still it could be interesting to see their adventures as they hitchhike historical Route 66. I mean, it’s not like he can afford airline tickets, and, on the way, he could write a pizza app for Warehouse Pizza in La Verne, California.
Who am I kidding? Next week, Derplop will already have returned to Westview, holding court at Montoni’s to tell not show us what happened before the Starbuck Jones project ended in a hail of kill fees.
Is Batik planning to switch the action from Westview to LA? First he has Cindy move out there with her new movie star bf, and now Darrin and Jessica are joining her. How long before the rest of the cast escapes Westview for Hollywood? Batiuk is running out of Westview storylines anyway. I’m expecting Bull to get a college coaching job in L.A. and for Funky to open a new Montoni’s on Sunset Blvd. A new start for the series “Funky Winkberbean: The Hollywood Years”
It’s also pretty funny how “Starbuck Jones” has gone from being an obscure cult classic to a valuable collectible to the center of the entire Funkyverse in just a few years. By this time next year SJ will actually be a regular FW character, dropping by Montoni’s and the Korner regularly to complain about his weight or his prostate or whatever.
@Epicus Doomus: Or we could be dealing with a situation in which all of this is a bad dream he’s having because he ate stale pizza.
@TheDiva – intriguing, but you’re forgetting Les. Les, who has been to Hollywood and found it wanting. Les, who is the center of this strip. Les, who is (to Tom Batiuk) the finest character ever created anywhere, and (to Tom Batiuk) the sole reason that anyone reads this strip.
Criswell Predicts! The Starbuck Jones movie will be abandoned by all and sundry because it doesn’t measure up to “Lisa’s Story” in terms of being god-like in its refusal to be “something that people would like to see.”
And everyone will return to Westview to bask in the wisdom of Les Moore. “Yes, that Hollywood is totally full of phonies who don’t respect the awesomeness of comic books/Les Moore, and thus deserve to fail! Better to fail in advance than try something new and risk Batiukian reproval!”