Apologies for the late post, but after reading today’s strip you may want me to apologize for posting at all.
Phil gets a final farewell for 45 years of (poor) service at the station. OK, I get that.
He is given a gag award (swiped from a cameraman’s daughter’s bedroom no doubt) for said service. I’d get it if it was played as an inside joke, but it is clearly intended to be an insult, so… what?
Then an anchor airs some of his dirty laundry on the air. Uh…
This strip took 100 steps and went nowhere. Phil’s award, at least, was better than the gift Coach Stropp got at his (forced) retirement party.
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It seems to me that when I described what would happen to Phil as being boring, stupid and unrealistic, I forgot to add in the adjective ‘insulting’. My bad.
Unseen last panel: The sports anchor kicks Phil in the balls, then the camera crew strings him up. We get it, we get it — He’s bad at his job and they all hate him. We get it.
Batty aims for “comical sendoff” but hits “sadistic bastards.”
BurchHack probably spent a week talking Batty out of having Phil kill himself on camera.
“BurchHack probably spent a week talking Batty out of having Phil kill himself on camera.”
We haven’t gotten to Saturday yet. It could still happen. Isn’t this the author who had Westview’s valedictorian commit suicide before Les’s graduation?
The valedictorian suicide thing comes up from time-to-time here, and even made the strip’s summary on its TV Tropes page, but it didn’t happen.
Barry Balderman had a nervous breakdown and locked himself in the yearbook office just before graduation, but was eventually coaxed out and taken home by his parents. He did not graduate with the class because of this (not really sure why), but remained alive and relatively well. In fact, he regularly participates in Westview’s incessant class reunions into Act III.
I think the alleged suicide story is the result of crossing Barry’s nervous breakdown thrusting Les into the valedictorian role and Susan Smith’s attempted suicide, as Susan eventually became the valedictorian of her own class.
Once more I must bow before your mighty Funkyverse knowledge.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Take a drink every time Batty says “the COMING reunion.”
It would be amusing if they didn’t add they lawsuit part.
That would improve it, certainly. Joking about a hostile work environment lawsuit doesn’t work so well when everything we’ve seen indicates that one may well be justified.
He did the same thing during the “Cindy gets fired” arc too. He has a weird sort of glib attitude about this topic, like “oh well, whaddya gonna do?”, like all you can do is accept it. IMO it’s very strange.
“100 steps and went nowhere” is right. This week has been one of the largest pieces of nothing to ever appear in “Funky Winkerbean”.
An old guy is let go from his job of many years. That’s it. No point, no pathos, no jokes. Not even an attempt at any of those things. He’s unpleasant, incompetent at his job, held in contempt by his co-workers and customers. We’re supposed to care about this?
If not for the Son of Stuck Funky historians, we wouldn’t even know who he is.
This ongoing, lazy and bungling attempt to produce a comic strip continues to fascinate.
So, according to what’s disclosed here, Phil had filed a lawsuit against Channel 1 alleging a hostile work environment. Channel 1 then lays him off (which would trigger an additional suit by him for retaliation). He then decides to withdraw his action for hostile work environment and then Channel 1 proceeds to humiliate him on-air (which provides grounds for a new hostile work environment suit, an action for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and retaliation). But “it’s called writing” (just not reality).
Now we know the REAL reason Jeff loved his Starbuck Jones memorabilia so much and yet stashed under the floorboards of his bedroom, and couldn’t move it from there until after his mother had died.
That crotch-thing looks like a human heart.
This is one of those cold, bitter and cynical FW strips that nicely highlights BanTom’s cold, bitter and cynical nature. Oh sure, he hides it very well behind that wholesome veneer of jovial central Ohioian jocularity (unlike his sneering eye-rolling avatar Les) but I know the deal. He loves to inflict pain and humiliation upon these characters and never let him convince you otherwise.
This is boring and insufferable. So on to the other comic…
For Christmas I would like ‘Crankshaft: The Last Leaf’, a collection of all the strips where a senile old man obsesses over a dead leaf. It would be twice as long and ‘Funky Winkerbean: The Last Leaf’, and three times as interesting.
Remember last year where he tried to rip it down manually and then hung from it until the fire department arrived? Classic.