Click here to continue reducing your IQ.
Do you know why a bus load of high school seniors would never be terrified in this situation?
- They know “spacemen” aren’t going to attack Cleveland.
- They know there’s a movie filming close by.
- Teenagers have a natural affinity for explosions.
This quarter-inch-from-reality stuff is wearing pretty thin.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Nothing terrifies high schoolers like smoke. Which is why they stay away from it completely.
This doesn’t even meet the criteria for “mailing it in” anymore. This is “I’ll just write the first thing thing that floats across my mind, draw something and submit it.”
@Gerard Plourde:
I’d say by the end of this summer this strip is just random drawings of spacemen without any dialogue.
Remember, this movie is being made by “Cable Movie Entertainment” and is a low-cost (probably straight to cell phone) production. Some things were not included in the budget…
And just to be clear, I did not “retouch” the image of Space Warrior #2’s… ummm… defecary region… in any way.
They’re all hoping they’ll die before middle-aged ennui and cancer sets in.
He’s not even trying to make it funny, it’s just infantile stuff that’s happening. Little children would roll their eyes at this, but fortunately for them they don’t read FW as small children don’t ordinarily have attention spans tuned to follow stories that take literal years to unfold (so to speak).
Pretty sorry stuff. The guy creates this whole Starbuck Jones sub-universe, he creates movie star characters to inhabit it then he uses it to do totally brainless junk like this. Why even bother?
I’m still waiting for the big Winters bimbo reveal. And Cody and Owen are usually portrayed as being afraid of their shadows.
It’s the actors who should be afraid of a bus barreling headlong into their scene through thick smoke. How many extras have been killed so far?
He’s not even trying to make it funny, it’s just infantile stuff that’s happening. Little children would roll their eyes at this, but fortunately for them they don’t read FW as small children don’t ordinarily have attention spans tuned to follow stories that take literal years to unfold (so to speak).
Yeah, this isn’t the first time this week that I’ve thought that at about the age of six, kids usually lose the notion that films could only document what actually happened. Somebody who gets shot with a gun in a film had to actually get shot with a gun. In order to have a full out battle in a bombed out city, you actually had to find a bombed out city and have a battle there. To show a house exploding, you had to take a fully-furnished able-to-be-lived-in house and blow it up. They don’t understand visual effects and trickery. To them, Ian McKellen really is two and a half times taller than Elijah Wood, and those orcs? Those are people who really look like that. That guy in Braveheart really lost his hand filming that battle.
So good job, Batiuk. Seven year-olds would think this is stupid.
@Charles:
When I was a kid, after seeing Jurassic Park, I was legitimately terrified that somebody would get a hold of the dinosaur robots and go on a rampage with them.
It’s not bad enough that people think other people are too stupid to understand special effects without having to go to the other side and have Jeff thought-bubble that not even the most powerful doctor drugs can make Rose calm and quiet.
@Charles:
When I was a kid, after seeing Jurassic Park, I was legitimately terrified that somebody would get a hold of the dinosaur robots and go on a rampage with them.
And to demonstrate the difference in our ages, I saw Alec Guinness on the set of Star Wars wearing a white keffiyeh and thought it was a head bandage from David Prowse wrecking him.
Owen looks rather spruced up in the header; and is he wearing glasses? Please don’t tell me he gets cast as a young Starbuck Jones…
If you don’t know how movie-making works, don’t tell stories about it. Of course, this is the same strip where the football team’s mascot won the championship, so expecting anything at all is a fool’s errand.
Well at least “The Nostalgia Critic” is getting good work.
“I help produce this shitty Flash Gordon ripoff so you don’t have to!”
I’m gonna jump on ‘the defender’ soapbox for just a second, to play devil’s advocate. I really don’t have a problem with the lack of realism in having a school bus come barreling into an exploding movie set and the director thinking it’s great. That’s the kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that sitcoms and comedies regularly play in, and if this kind of thing is what always populated Funkyverse it would be a much more bearable comic. Look everyone is actually happy, and excited and alive! They’re not sitting around moping over pizza, and talking about people we haven’t seen in-panel for months, if ever.
I’m guessing that in order to show this many panels of joy in Funky, TomBat had to pour all of the misery from the strip into Crankshaft. Law of Conservation of Awful. The breakneck pace of Rose’s decline and presumed death, right around Mother’s Day, is possibly the most horrible thing I’ve read ever. And not just because I have a beloved 93 year old grandmother who also loves Lawrence Welk.
Cody, unhinging his jaw like some kind of python man, will be offered a role as “The Pythonian Ambassador” in the film. Pete will complain about having to alter the script and then slip into a Batom Comics day-coma, never actually writing Cody’s lines. Mr. Director doesn’t even bother exclaiming “this isn’t in the script!” this time.
@ComicBookHarriet
You’re right that weird and implausible plot twists are part of a brand of comedy that regularly is found not just in sitcoms and movies, but has always figured prominently on the comics pages. The thing that is so frustrating about FW (and now the current arc in Crankshaft) is that The Author randomly changes direction so much almost as if to troll his readers. The “Time Pool” arc from last fall is a prime example. If it was, as was later disclosed, all coming from Les’ unconscious, then the heart-to-heart the Cindys had at the time concerning Funky and the fleeting nature of popularity is stitched together out of whole cloth by Les. (Given The Author’s love of superheroes and identity with the character, The Lord of Langauge could be endowed with omniscience.)
This troubling aspect of The Author’s makeup is going full-bore in the current Crankshaft arc. It’s almost as if he knew he wanted to have Jeff experience one of life’s major passages but couldn’t be bothered to actually develop a storyline. If he wants to devote time to his real passion (which appears to be the Silver Age of Comics), he should just go ahead and do it. He could convert Funky into a strip about Batom Comics and begin an arc in Crankshaft where Jeff (and vicariously, the reader) reads his entire collection of Starbuck Jones as therapy. Those tow arcs could be drawn out until he’s eligible for his lifetime achievement award and could actually be entertaining.
@Hannibal’s Lectern:
I thought CME was the network doing Les’ aborted Lisa biopic, and some big studio was handling the SB project? Or maybe CME was an in-house subsidiary of Mega Movie Studios or whatever??
This HAS to be big budget, given that there’s pre-release “buzz” an A-list starlet opposite of Mason Jarr the actor, and the fact that they weren’t satisfied with Pete Rattabastardo’s script and sent it back to him a hundred times … Besides, only a big-budget studio could weather so many delays that the movie is already two years past its scheduled release date…
@beckoningchasm:
And don’t forget a few seasons before that, Bull had some girl in a prom dress (only wearing cleats and a helmet) diving in a muddy end zone to score the winning TD…
I’ve always wondered how god-awful Westview’s conference is for opponents to keep losing games in this manner…
You know, now that I think about it none of this makes sense. Westview is obsessed over comic books, especially Starbuck Jones. There’s no way that anyone in town would not know all the details of the shoot, particularly the location(s).
@Gerard Plourde: This not bothering is why we had the time frog in the first place. He couldn’t be bothered telling the story of Les having to raise Summer alone or the story of Funky’s idealism shrinking while his waist line ballooned but just skipped over because it was too haaaaaard.
@ Gerard,
Making fun of Funkyverse reminds me a lot of the Red Letter Media reviews of the Star Wars prequels. It’s easy to point to something like Jar Jar Binks, or horrible dialogue, as the prequel killer. But when you dig in deeper, and look at the work from a structural, storytelling standpoint, you realize that what actually destroyed the movies were broader pervasive flaws of tone, characterization, cinematography, and writing.
What I’ve noticed a TON lately with TomBat is that he CANNOT write an arc of anything to save his life. He always is writing the beginning of an arc, the initial conflict, like some kind of movie pitchman, but NEVER following through on showing a progression of the action to the conclusion. Instead he jumps from the pitch to somewhere BEYOND the conclusion. Some kind of dull flat scene where everyone is sitting TALKING about how the story concluded off panel. It’s like if the first avengers movie went from a portal opening in the sky, then jump-cut to eating shawarma.
Actually there are some times where there is an accident and it gets in the final film – in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – there is a scene where a helicopter came into land but clipped its tail rotor and started spinning and then crashed. some of the footage ended up in the movie.
A very old advertisement for Colt 45 had a man sitting at a table in a bullring – the idea being that he wouldn’t be impressed by the bullfight but by a waiter serving him a Colt 45. Turns out Bulls don’t read very well and charged the man crashing him and the table against the wall of the bullring. Some months later when he got out of the hospital they finished the ad.
that is the one thing that is accurate in the strip you keep running film until the director yells cut.
@ComicBookHarriet,
You’ve touched on my exactly my concern. I followed Act II which actually had content that overcame any flaws. Sure there was melodrama (but melodrama comprises a lot of successful storytelling), but The Author did address issues – marital strife and divorce (Cindy/Funky), the journey of finding your way in a profession (Lisa practicing law), addiction and recovery (Funky/Wade). There was effort expended in creating each of these arcs and they gave the reader something to consider.