Today’s strip has words, which is interesting until you read them.
Grandpa Google tells me that Funky’s thoughts today are not quoted from someone notable (shocker!), or from a dollar store rip-off of the Book of Lamentations, but I’m pretty sure I read them on someone’s LiveJournal page 15 years ago. It was probably TB’s page.
I guess/hope Funky has satisfied his curiosity about this ramshackle house. I know mine was satisfied before I’d finished reading the third panel on Monday.
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Well, now I won’t say that I, um, understand everything, but it was certainly uh, different, and – oh! yes, well, well worth a dollar!”
I’d like to give props to Tom Batiuk for at least attempting something different; I certainly can’t recall anything like this in any other comic strip. So, well done for trying.
The problem is that it really added up to nothing. Funky came out with the same outlook on life that he went in with. He’s the same miserable, depressed sad sack that he’s been for years. This dialogue sounds like it was culled from the “killer shark issues” bit.
Had he changed even a little bit–had he realized that, yes, life was fleeting, so maybe he should do something with it before it’s gone, then I’d have said this is the best thing in Funky Winkerbean in years.
But this strip can only have one achiever, one pinnacle of accomplishment, and that’s Les Moore. Anything that takes away from Les’ luster is to be avoided at all costs.
So, instead, what we got was a week of even more nothing than the strip usually carries. Numbers that were never meant to add up to a sum. No plus signs, and never an equals sign.
Oh well. “Funky Winkerbean” – another comic strip swept away, like old wheat in a field.
So, in the words of Livia Soprano, it’s all a big nothing. No wonder FW is so beloved by dozens. And he didn’t even take the painting. What a waste of time.
They wasted six stinking days to express an idea that could’ve been expressed in a Sunday strip! THIS IS SH!T! Batiuk should be embarrassed by this week’s strips. And if he believes in the sh!t Funky is spewing out, maybe he should just kill himself.
The wheat in the field, in the painting, is still there. So it’s lasted.
“all our dreams and proud plans . . . in the end don’t change a thing. When all is said and done . . . they’re swept away like old wheat in a field.”
Wow, what a downer. I had no idea that Funky suffered from depression. He doesn’t recognize that even small anonymous acts can have lasting consequences on societies.
Old wheat in a field isn’t “swept away”, it is harvested and turned into bread and other foodstuffs that people eat. This allows said people to live.
Some of these people do things that positively impact the lives of others, some even do things that change the whole world. Others draw maudlin comic strips, hoping to be viewed as profound, and are roundly mocked by the few who don’t ignore them.
billytheskink: Funky sees an old painting of a farmer toiling in a wheat field and all he takes away from it is “everything sucks and we’ll all eventually die”…talk about Batiukian. So why didn’t Funky just kill himself the day after he graduated from WHS, seeing how that was his high-water mark and all.
His characters all endlessly dwell in the past, wallowing in pointless nostalgia while constantly bemoaning their wasted lives. Cliff Anger sat there being surly for sixty years until given the chance to re-live his past glory. Les can’t stop thinking about Lisa. Cindy never stops worrying about growing older. Dinkle and Bull constantly blather on about their glorious past accomplishments. And Batiuk himself always comes back to his two noteworthy (in his mind) arcs, both involving a character he chose to kill off ten years ago. Like you said, it’s so maudlin in a really stupid and annoying way that’s just relentlessly depressing. I mean why wouldn’t he WANT to do an arc where Funky experiences a victory? Why CAN’T Bull just retire contentedly and happily? Why CAN’T Les write something uplifting that isn’t all about his dead wife? Is it just how Batiuk is or is it that he’s been doing it for so long he just doesn’t know any other way?
All of this so a depressed goof could reaffirm being Nordic. Batiuk can’t look forward because doing so would mean that the past shouldn’t loom over his every waking thought and thus allow the sportos and pretty girls to win.
Lines like “All we are is old wheat in a field” really drive home why Dakota never matched the success of their sister band, Kansas.
Wow. Is Batty ending this strip? Sure looks that way. Tomorrow he will announce his next project: a modern strip that follows twenty somethings as they try to cope with the world. Depression, breast cancer, are sure to be explored. All he needs is a name that will date the strip, Besties? Something with Millienial in it?
Maybe he’ll launch a rip off of Dykes to Watch Out For featuring Summer and her college friends. I would read that.
@rusty
I’ve never seen so many girls with short hair like that seen in FW. Cindy is the only one with a feminine hairstyle.
Once again a term came to mind, here a passage that TB thought deeply profound, and he was determined to write it into the strip come hell or high water. I have no doubt TB awoke this morning, anticipating the calls and emails from friends nearly weeping and wanting to tell him how moved they were but today’s strip. Memo to TB: that deafening silence, that absence of cellphone tinkles and inbox dings, is not the sound of misunderstood genius. Everybody thinks up mundane philosophical shit, typically while in college and tripping on shrooms. And most people realize it’s mundane by the next morning. Nothing wrong with putting it down in your journal. But you are not obligated to share it. Hey, I write down great truths and pearls of wisdom every week in a journal I’m keeping for my kid after I’m gone, so he’ll have a sense of what his dads interior life was. But I’m certainly not going to force it upon the world even though I do blog and I do publish in magazines and papers from time to time. But I keep the existential shit to myself except when being ironic or poking fun at my own lofty thought processes. If a writer turned in stuff like this, I’d gently suggest they try again.
A whole week for this? He could have reached the same conclusion by looking at a pepperoni pizza.
Pompous, ham-handed rubbish. Pointless and inept in every way. The amount of self-delusion required to think that this stuff is clever or profound or interesting in any way at all remains fascinating.
Funky (or TB) has cancer. It’s the only thing I could come up with.
TB: Hey Pulitzer committee did you see what I did today? Look…you aren’t looking…look, please.
@ the two Rustys: won’t happen, because TB would have to learn to draw cars well enough to depict a recognizable Subaru Outback.
@Hannibal: I drive an Outback. An old Forester is the correct cliche.
I was kind of holding out hope that Sunday’s strip would give a nice coda to the Funky-Wandering arc. So that I could say, “Wow, was I wrong! Tom Batiuk has hit this one out of the park!”
But..no. It’s about how valuable comic books are.