I do not even want to know what Lefty and Dinkle were doing in the band office prior to today’s strip that alumni band practice so rudely interrupted. Whatever it was, it was surely negative amounts of interesting, and we are better off having missed it. If only that could have continued for three more panels…
I’m amazed that TB hasn’t hatched this alumni band thing before. It is full of his favorite FW comfort foods: Dinkle, Lefty’s pinned-up sleeve, old old old people, wistful reminiscence about high school band, petty high school grudges, more Dinkle… Just throw in cancer, comic books, and Les smirking a couple times and you’ve got the complete FW meal.
I suppose it is too much to hope for an appearance by Jon Glaser’s “Score Settler”.
Alas, there is no gold to be found here… there’s not even a creek.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Nice of Dinkle to take time off from his job as a flight attendant to visit the ol’ stomping grounds!
I know it wasn’t on purpose, but the way Dinkle is drawn he looks like he is pain for delivering that line.
It’s penciler’s projection. The artist was in pain while drawing it.
Dinkle’s going to be in pain if he steps out onto the field. If there is a score to be settled, it will be against him.
Crankshaft: ha ha ha, Lena sucks at everything, ha ha ha. Sucks to be Lena.
Please, please, PLEASE let this be foreshadowing someone settling a score with Dinkle, permanently. I’d even put up with the inevitable “Death of Superman” ripoff cover, and the puns about Dinkle being “at rest”.
A good point. Dinkle ought to fear meeting up with band alumni who have escaped to a world where they aren’t constantly treated like garbage. I mean, in the real world he would have been sued and fired long ago.
Specify issue of ‘The Death of Superman’? Because if it’s the cover I’m imagining how is Lefty Lane supposed to clench Super Dinkle’s battered corpse to her chest with only one arm?
That’s the one I’m picturing. She’ll manage, somehow. Maybe she’ll have her prosthetic for once. Or it could just be Les in Lois’s place. The name is practically the same, and he’d definitely be writing a book about it.
Some will be settling old scores, others will be speaking of band candy.
Based on the artwork in the second panel where Becky’s amputation inexplicably switches arms, it appears Ayers’ spirit has also been broken.
Billybillybilly…no FW meal can be considered complete without Montoni’s Pizza…heapful helpings of pizza.
True, I just couldn’t bring myself to mention Montoni’s and.
Food in the same paragraph.
I’ll see your one pinned-up sleeve, and raise you three epaulets!
Given that Dinkle is a deluded megalomaniac, a pompous ass, a blithering idiot, a crashing bore AND a filthy sadist, I think that it’s all about the revenge.
“Settle old scores,” eh? I’m not gonna dig through the vaults but I’ll wager that TB’s repurposing an old Claude Barlow musical “pun”-chline.
Okay, I have a question. I was never in band, but I would assume that an “alumni band reunion” would be a bunch of folks showing up in a hall, having a drink or so, but otherwise sitting at tables.
This strip seems to seriously suggest that these old band people are going to perform routines? After being away from this kind of activity for decades? After perhaps not even picking up their instruments for just as long?
This is so far beyond stupid I can’t comprehend it. It would be one thing if it was funny, but this strip tries its damnedest NOT to be funny so that’s obviously not the answer.
I won’t vouch for this being entertaining in any way but I can speak to the existence of a performing “alumni band”. My college alma mater has an alumni band that participates in the halftime show at the homecoming football game. They do a short and simple bit of marching while playing the fight song and the alma mater song while the real marching band does the more advanced routine.
But this is Dinkle, so he’ll probably have them all march on a 10-mile Labor Day parade through town and the day after he’ll take them all to the recording studio to cut a platinum record…
I’d be willing to bet that that performance isn’t just thrown together on the spot with the alumni who bothered to show up.
Imagine Becky’s life, where she goes into work every day just to find Dinkle waiting in her office, ready to tell the same five stories he can remember.
Sounds a lot like reading Funky Winkerbean in general.
I was thinking about making a joke about how Dinkle is a Woody Hayes lite type characteristic of folks who manage to accumulate too much power and end up abusing the very people who enable their behavior and how it would be enjoyable to see one of his newly empowered victims shame him for his sins.
Instead, whatever the Score Settler is or was, I clicked through to learn more and noticed, in the bottom of the screen crawl, that the Cubs were beating the Dodgers one to nothing and Pierre had a hit for the Cubs. It took me a second to remember the year Juan Pierre played for them. This would’ve been back when I used to care about sports and, in fact, I kinda sorta got a little mad remembering how ‘we’ traded three good arms – one of whom turned out to be Ricky Nolasco – for ONE year of Juan Pierre. Goddamnit, Jim Hendry was a moron.
JP is a good dude. We used to be acquaintances.
That’s cool to know. Just to be clear I was ripping the GM (I mean this wasn’t quite Larry Himes letting Greg Maddux walk in free agency but…), and not the player. I see that advanced stats don’t look great for him that year, but my imperfect memory was of a guy who had a bigger impact than the stats show.
I always thought Krankenschaaften was the direct spiritual Woody Hayes avatar, especially with the hat, jacket, pettiness and short-tempered, always-tryin’-to-start-shit attitude?
Dinkle running the band like an obsessive fascist despot is pretty similar to Hayes, but he’s WAYYYYYY to nice and cool-headed the rest of the time…
(Why yes, I DID happen to stumble upon “Woody Hayes and the 100-Yard War” by Jerry Brondfield at my college library 20 years ago and I absolutely ate it up!)
Let’s have a drinking game! Have a shot every time “band alumni” or “alumni band” appears this week. I’ll be ready for rehab by Wednesday.
Next week, the alumni football teams from Westview and Big Walnut Tech will square off against each other, led by Buck and Bull.
What was the point of spending a week showing Funky handing the keys to Montoni’s over to Cory and Rocky if we aren’t going to have some hilarity ensuing?
Will we get to see Becky’s mother come down from the scissor lift?
Settling (fictional) old high school scores…the theme of this entire comic strip. Bull is still paying for his high school bullying, Funky is still paying for being so “normal”, Crazy is still paying for being such a nut, Cindy is still paying for being attractive and etc. Holly’s mother has apparently been lying in wait for sixty years, preparing to finally strike down her high school marching band enemies, whoever they might be. I personally hope it’s Dinkle but based on today’s installment it appears that he’s still just hanging around, doing nothing but soaking up that precious WHS air conditioning while Becky shoulders the load, so to speak.
Plus 1,000 points to Billytheskink for his Cheap Seats reference. What a fun show that was!
“Out to the field.” Weather forecast is for Band Weather this Saturday…