Today’s strip shows Batiuk at his most daring – a strip about how cafeteria food is terrible! Who else but Batiuk would have the fortitude to take on this controversial, multitudinous topic?
Anyway, he blows it by having the cafeteria lady herself refer to the slop in front of Bernie and the random lumpy black guy who hangs around with Bernie as “Mystery Meat”, “Cafeteria Cod” and “Leftover Drum Rolls”. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of Bernie and Lumpy commenting on it, doesn’t it?
“What are you serving for lunch?”
“Something terrible.”
“Wow, you’re serving something terrible for lunch.”
Son of Stuck Funky 
Looks like an old-fashioned WHS hi-jinx grab bag arc featuring the latest WHS student cafeteria food gag conduits, Bernie and that other kid. They’re the new Owen and Cody (with Maris as Alex), who were the new Darin and Pete (with Jessica!) who were the new Les and Funky with special guest Crazy, but with none of the background and character traits those characters had. Shudder.
Tomorrow should be all about those darned locker combinations, then a bully gag or two and maybe a vendo or cell phone gag thrown in for the sake of “modernity”. It’s just so weird how he’s still trotting out these musty old high school gags, I mean who is this for? It makes you wonder why he bothered aging his original characters at all, which in hindsight was a totally catastrophic mistake. Someone with a touch of ambition might have ran with it but this guy? “Cafeteria Cod”??? No f*cking way.
I agree, but Batiuk and Burchett did anyway.
I’m reminded of a fairly early Simpsons episode where Lunchlady Doris is preparing some mystery meat with the label on the package proclaiming “Now with more horse testicles.”
“More testicles means more IRON!”
Huh, I’d always heard balls were made of brass.
And thus we go back to our roots as we trudge through a lunk-headed photostat of the Archie comic strip. No wonder Batiuk is obsessed with the evils of people enforcing their copyrights……
Bland, flavorless and forgettable. Huh? The food? Yeah, sure, but I was talking about the strip itself.
Bernie is struggling through the fifth grade, by all appearances.
Will tomorrow see Maris and her film crew bursting into the cafeteria to demand to know the real story of the mystery meat?
Despite today’s tired, unfunny strip, the absence of Less, Dinkle, or Durwood earns a thumbs up from me.
I’m pretty sure that despite the wide number of newsworthy stories at Westview daily we’ll never, ever, EVER see Maris do on-the-spot gotchas again…
Besides, the only news worth talking about in the Funkyverse is who the Browns are taking in the draft, and the latest updates from the set of the Starsuck Jonez sequel…
1. Because I didn’t get to say it on Saturday, motherfuck this storyline, seriously… Doesn’t Les owe his supervisor an apology since he first assumed there was some monumental counting error with the machine because there’s no way he ever made that many copies?
2. Given Batiuk’s fetish for old technology (as shown by the Sunday strip), he missed a golden opportunity for Les to run down to storage and un-retire the school’s old Ditto machine… He could have easily squeezed another week out of Ditto jokes alone…
3. As for today, these mooks either need to brown bag it or just go out to eat… And for the record, the “all school food is bad” -trope was a cliche when I was in school 30 years ago…. It hasn’t gotten any better with age.
4. Tune in next week when these two nerds try to ask the most popular girls in school to the prom and a couple of football linemen stuff them into lockers for their trouble…
5. Can I say how god-awful the Sunday art was? Those horse-faced girls are gonna haunt my dreams…
Mystery Meat isn’t really Full Disclosure. Full Disclosure would mean that the students would have access to the labels. They would be able to read the packaging for the ‘Mystery Meat’ and know that it contains chicken byproduct, soybean meal, and chicory root.
Soylent Green ain’t got no labels…
Further to your point, ‘cafeteria cod’ while I guess wins one or two points for some alliterative wordplay, also fails to set the ‘joke’ up properly.
“…drum rolls left over from the band banquet”? The band banquet was last May, for cryin’ out loud!
An obscure Terry Pratchett’s Discworld reference: I’m imagining Dwarvish warbread, Drum Rolls harder than rocks meant for pelting enemies with…
So Batty tells us he is tired of the gag a day format, then he proceeds to make us gag with bad gags.
Then he says the comics a can be more, which is why he switched to telling deeper stories. But all we get are recycled Lisa stories and go nowhere nonsense with lots of words.
Conclusion: Batty needs to retire now. He is unable to support either format.
To be fairer than I need to be to Batiuk, back in Act 2 he really did address varied stories that were unusual for comic strips. There is of course the cancer sequence, but he also had stories about political violence, stories about landmines and POWs, teenage pregnancy and suicide, etc. The problem with those was not that he addressed them, but that his complete lack of understanding and investigation into those issues revealed his transparent motivation. He didn’t care about those issues then because he obviously would have done more research about them, or any research, really.
But yeah, nowadays he just mentions that Lisa died of cancer and it makes Les sad or mentions that Bull has CTE and leaves it at that. I wouldn’t be terrifically impressed if Hi and Lois mentioned that Alzheimer’s is something that exists and leaves it at that.
True, and I didn’t mind some of these, but like Johnston, Batty is just too ham fisted and one sided with these stories—and way too serious. A lighter touch would have gone a long way.
OT, but does anyone know what’s happened to “Comics I Don’t Understand”? For the last couple of weeks it was WordPress gibberish, now it’s a completely unrelated website.
“We have snot soup, barf burgers, and shit on a shingle, plus some fish heads left over from the band banquet.”
“I’ve got some coin-o, Bernie. Maybe we should hit the vendos.”
“I don’t know. The barf burger sounds intriguing.”