I suppose one could make the argument that this installment does actually move the story forward, albeit very slightly. I mean one COULD make that argument, but let’s be real here…no one will. Anyhow the real issue here is the incredibly annoying way that Linda feels compelled to make these dumb feeble jokes to punctuate everything she says. An “anger board of directors”…yeah, hilarious. Would their also be anger stockholders who receive quarterly anger dividends too? It’s supposed to be a Very Serious story yet BatYak just can’t holster the wry wordplay for even a day. I mean come on, no actual people speak (or type or think) like this. What’s next, a gag about Bull being “tackled for a memory loss”? (If he uses that one I will demand compensation). It’s interesting how he supposedly DOES have an editor yet no one ever stops him and says “hey, maybe tone down the wordplay a little and just do some plain old dialog for once”. Sigh.
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Days until Funky Winkerbean’s 50th Anniversary
Funky Winkerbean made its debut on March 27, 1972. Click here for a countdown of days until the fiftieth anniversary and hopefully Tom Batiuk's retirement.
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This is how Batiuk does all his jokes. He takes a word, finds a way to extend it to something else (“management” – “board of directors”) and craps it out on the page.
I can just imagine him smirking as he typed this out. “Hey, let’s have a little levity in my total serious…and award-winning!!!–story arc.”
“Management” and “board of directors” are the same thing. A board of directors is management. Linda is basically saying “he doesn’t need anger management, he needs anger managers!” Yuk yuk.
Wordplay requires a change in meaning or exaggeration. If Linda says “he doesn’t have anger issues, he has entire subscription,” that works because subscription is a more extreme commitment to a magazine than an issue is. It exaggerates the original word, in a different way. We’ve all heard that one a million times, but it was clever at one point.
This is just… nothing. It’s like listening to a four-year-old who’s discovered that words can mean more than one thing, and is now putting together a list of them. God help me, the Family Circus does this better. THE FAMILY CIRCUS.
And Jeffy has been recycling Bil’s gags for years.
And this helps the other folks in the CTE support group HOW?
Maybe this is why no one wants to help her.
“I hope I can get my husband to the head of the class…action, that is.”
“PizzaFanInOH, this is your final warning about that.”
And Sunday’s quantum multiverse strip pays off, as the story takes a jump into the left. It lands in a universe where Bull has been angry and Linda has a sense of humor. At least it sounds like the things I’ve said while dealing with my mom. (Don’t worry, I’m in therapy, and my chances of recovery are considered somewhat better than the chance Batiuk will tell a good story some day.)
This might not be quite such a terrible joke if we had seen Bull doing anything but watching tapes of old football games and doing laundry 24/7. Where is all this anger she’s talking about?
Ah, that Linda has always had it in for Bull. Back when he was just a dunderheaded oaf she’d look at him with weary disgust and disdain and now she’s all pissy because their fabric softener bills have skyrocketed. She’s impossible to please, that one is.
Batiuk is saving the anger for the next time he’s denied a Pulitzer Prize.
He’s walking a fine line here. He can’t show Bull being too much of an angry asshole, because that would alienate his audience and make them actively root for Bull’s impending demise. But he’s got to make living with Bull on paper bad, or the arc looses what little punch it had.
BatYak would never depict any sort of actual violence or even the threat of it. The farthest I can recall him ever going was with the Frankie/Lisa stuff and in those arcs Frankie was supposed to be a despised villain. He might raise his voice and stomp around but I guarantee it’s as far as it’ll go. BatYam always errs on the side of banality, I think you have to agree to it when you become a comic strip author.
Wait, you’ve forgotten when Bull smashed a glass. That level of violence is right out of a Tarantino movie.
And that tennis racket came unstrung during his rage. That took guts!
It would also make Linda sympathetic if Batiuk showed her as the target of a threatening tirade, much less a physical assault. I don’t think Batiuk wants us to see anyone but Bull as a victim. Plus he lacks the guts to shock his audience with anything realistic.
I think the easier way to show Bull lashing out violently while keeping him relatively sympathetic would be to have the story be told from Bull’s point of view. That, of course, would be a good idea with this story anyway, but we see how well Batiuk does with that.
Considering how much he whines about people thinking comics are supposed to be funny, crap like this is particularly ironic coming from him.
Another good point. As much as he likes to claim he left the old “gag-a-day” humor behind, he never really did. He just squeezes it into stories where it seems forced and awkward instead.
Instead TomBat puts all his gags in Sociopath Senior Bus Driver
A big, hearty, F*** You! from me. My father had the kind of dementia where he was angry 24/7, yelling and screaming instead of having a conversation. Believe me, there are no wry smirks and jokes about that kind of anger. If you lived through something like that, you know what an a**hole BatHack is being on this topic.
My dad was the same way in his last year or so. Mom is that way now (although she’s more likely to hurt herself than me). I’ve coped by making some bad jokes about it, but there weren’t any smirks to them. Batiuk shouldn’t do the same thing, not unless he has the guts to show the violence you survive.
Sorry for you guys. 😦 ❤
Thanks. It helps to know that people take these situations seriously. It helps to know that Batiuk is loathed for his cavalier, exploitative attitude toward so many problems. It also helps that after I made that post, I spent an hour curled up on the floor with my cat, listening to her purr. (I don’t mind talking about these things, because it’s going to hep some people, but I don’t like dredging up the memories that makes it necessary.)
Yes this is such a hard thing to deal with. Do take care of yourselves.
“Bull is a shadow of the loving man I used to know”? Seriously? That goes against about 45 years of characterization.
In a Very Special Funky Winkerbean, coming next summer, Linda reveals to Buck that she’s a heavy-duty masochist. It happens when Buck catches her listening to the audio-book version of “Lisa’s Story,” as read by Les Moore.
I guess we all should have known that Linda, the most morbid (living) female character of the strip, would eventually be given a reason to get even worse and stay that way. Ironically, she now has more “punch lines” than she’s ever had! I guess TB needs a new kind of protagonist to take over since he still likes Les, Summer, and Funky enough to not do away with them.
I wonder if there’s going to be another time-skip…
Let’s see. Telling us something instead of showing it. Not doing a lick of research. Answering people who’ve lived through the stuff he’s getting wrong and pissed off at his refusal to care about their concerns with a smug line about how ‘it’s called writing.’
I call that “Tuesday” as well.
And he is recycling one of his trademark layouts: someone sitting at a typewriter, computer, usually sipping a hot beverage and typing away. It always ends with a bad pun. That’s our Batty.
Can we just pause for a second to marvel at how incredibly stupid it is for Linda to be doing this crap in the dark? You can practically see TomBat’s thought process of Darkness > No Light > NO LIGHT OF HOPE!
Maybe we were led astray by the article telling of Bull’s suicide. Perhaps it was … murderrrrrr……
I’m just saying. The chimp is still out there. Never let Batty forget.
Listen, and understand! Zanzibar is out there! He can’t be bargained with. He can’t be reasoned with. He doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!
Off panel Linda expertly doctors the brake cable.
Okay, that’s Bull’s face in the banner, so he has to show up this week. And Sunday’s preview featured a burned meatloaf in the first panel. My guess is that while Linda diddles around on the internet, Bull will emerge from his man cave, see the charred meatloaf and get enraged. Linda has ruined his dinner! He’ll grab the car keys and take off for the Toxic Taco. He’s so addled that he crashes and dies. Linda doesn’t notice his disappearance because she’s been distracted and the TV is still playing.
In other words, Bull won’t commit suicide. It will just look that way. His death will be a stupid, pointless accident, but Linda will get the blame for not preventing it.
Wake the kids and phone the neighbours….WE HAVE A WINNER!!
(After all, simple minds like Batiuk’s are really easy to read)
Interesting theory, but it doesn’t explain the helmet. The police bring Bull’s Westview helmet back to Linda.
My theory: while Linda is moping in front of the computer, Bull slips out of the house. When Linda realizes he’s gone, she also sees an empty shelf where his helmet was. Nothing triggers him, he just wanders off to the high school and ritually does the deed. Cue the Sunday strip.
That fits the unretconned facts, too. Another preview panel (from Saturday?) shows the state trooped picking up the helmet while he stands in front of a line of trees. Which could be trees near the “scene of the crime,” as Buck Futt called the stadium.
If the trooper finds the helmet on Saturday, Bull’s only got two days left to whack himself.
Once again we have tell not show…and really since the last we saw of Bull he was watching TV and before that he was taking a walk with he bestest friend and before that he was doing laundry, it’s kind of hard to see the Angry 24/7 that Linda is talking about – still it being a visual medium the could maybe show in a flashback mode perhaps Bull yelling at Linda while Linda’s words about him being angry appear overhead we wouldn’t to actually hear what Bull says and the flashback mode would distance it if you are worried about how the reader would react to this. Honestly it’s not like there are budget constraints. Its a comic strip you can pretty much show anything you want, even a talking murder chimp. (spin off strip idea – the murder chimp hires out as a hit chimp, after all who would suspect a monkey? Or how about a Dick Tracy One shot? To make up for the tragic misuse of Tracy in the FW crossover.)
yes i suppose it would be harder to draw then a woman in dark room but what the hell else are the going to do with their day?