Today’s strip was not available for preview, so we’re diving into the archives. What was going on in the Batiukverse on May 1, say, 40 years ago? I’ll bet it was some relatable high school stuff: dopey students, stuffy teachers, Billy Carter, M*A*S*H, Galaxian, disco, the second oil crisis… something, anything far removed from this ridiculous multi-week Free Comic Book Day arc.
Or not…
Yes, the computer later known as “Holtron” temporarily replaced Les as Westview High School’s hall monitor, (retroactively cardboard) machine gun and all, because Les was so bad at the job. It mused about keeping Klingons from sneaking off to the restroom to smoke (Holtron was into Star Trek and, apparently, Brownsville Station) and threatened a hall pass-less Funky with the desk-mounted machine gun. What a time to be alive.
Son of Stuck Funky 
I’m gonna be Tom Batiuk for this entry and say, I can’t read any of Holtron’s font so I’m going to assume that it praised The Flash and was sorry about Lisa’s cancer.
I used the enhance function, but it made the text worse.
It’s called “legibility”.
For the record:
Panel 1:
being a hall monitor is a very important responsibility!
Panel 2:
i have to be sure that everyone has a hall pass!
Panel 3:
we don’t want any klingons slipping into the building!
Now I can’t wait until Free Comics day, when greedy fans take advantage of auteurs.
Now I will definitely be there. I can’t wait to trade Jansel Camteson’s signature for a few sheckles on Fleabay!
Who is Jansel Camteson, you ask? Exactly!
If Panel 2 isn’t Mason trying to bang a presumably underage girl, I don’t know what it is. Leering like that while rambling on about how meaningful the interaction between the two of them is will probably give me nightmares.
Also, what happened to Fleabay? Did even Batiuk finally realize that’s not funny at all? Damn.
Speaking of the hall monitor retcon, though … I was startled by the Comics Kingdom Vintage Funky reprint two weeks ago. The strip from the 28th of May, 1973 has Les tell Funky that it shoots neither blanks nor real bullets. Instead, “you turn this little crank here and it plays the school fight song!”
… I had been interested in finding just when the Cardboard Gun Retcon was made, but then I ran across a September 1999 patch of Jedi Jokes and I decided maybe I wasn’t the person to bring this information to the world.
The artwork is so much better (aside from the bricks, which I guess shows where Batiuk thought he needed to go, art-wise). But the sentence structure, oy. “Actually, Funky, neither” should have been caught right away.
More boring nonsense that betrays how little Batiuk really knows about just about anything? Must be Wednesday.
Basically recycling the gag from October 2017:
…though at least that guy paid for the book that Les is signing. This beef is no doubt inspired by Batiuk having browsed eBay and coming across all the item’s he’s signed that are listed (and attracting zero bids).
I especially like this one, from the terrifying future of 2990 where Funky Winkerbean is still published.
That letter has been for sale on eBay for at least 4 years, by the way. The seller was once trying to get north of $400 for it. Hilarious.
Even his fan letters are boring.
Once again Batiuk can’t hide his disdain for his fellow comic book fans. The way he sees it they’re (especially the younger ones) nothing but speculators, looking to flip their treasured childhood memories for easy, easy cash. No one genuinely enjoys the hobby…except for him, of course.
Then there’s is obvious disdain for his own readers, as evidenced by how he re-runs the same dumb gags over and over. He clearly threw in the towel years ago, apparently after realizing that no one cares anyway.
The author really does hate human beings doesn’t he? And not in an amusing “I’m surrounded by idiots” way Blackadder was but in a mean crabbed dyspeptic way that is painfully unfunny.
Other than Crazy Harry (and that Jff guy from Crankshaft) no one in Westview even seems to enjoy comic books, they’re all a bunch of cynical profiteering assholes who can’t wait to cash in and defile the hobby with their greed. Like everything else in FW, there’s no happiness, joy or light in it at all.