Today’s gonna be a short post, since I’m fighting the evil forces of My Grain valley.
Plenty of humor to wring from this weird weird situation.
Even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while.
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Son of Stuck Funky · The web's premiere source for Funky Winkerbean snark
Son of Stuck Funky 
I feel like I’m missing something here, but I also know I’m not, so I dunno. This is one of the more surrealistically weird strips in a while. “Dinkle learns all about squirrels”…there’s an arc no one saw coming. It’s so wildly random, like BatYap checked out a book about squirrels from the library or something. While it’d be pretty funny if he was laying down the foundation for some sort of Dinkle dementia arc here, I don’t think so. Whatever it is will be way dumber than that, methinks.
Right now I’m leaning toward “Dinkle says they can use the idea of squirrels against Big Walnut Tech in the next Battle of the Bands. He’s even composed ‘The March of the Nutcrackers’ Symphony for the event!”
Yeah, I can’t predict where this is going…except that it won’t be any place interesting. I’m pretty sure everyone knew that about squirrels.
Something about band members only able to find a forth of the measures?
It’s one of those FWs where you stare at it for a few extra seconds to make sure you’re not missing the gag. I don’t think there is one, though, it appears it’s just Dinkle talking about squirrels. Maybe it’ll turn out that Dinkle can’t remember where he stashed the band candy or something, otherwise I’m baffled.
“In fact, I found a hole in the football field where two squirrels dug up a patch of sod and took back their nuts! Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?”
“Fourth” sheesh.
Shoulda took the Fifth. Or drunk a fifth.
Uh . . . Batiuk? That question was answered long ago, and that was the answer. Those lost acorns get spread around and buried by the squirrels, and some of them sprout, helping oak trees to spread. It’s a fact of nature, unlike anything in this strip.
They say even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. Blind squirrels can not, however, read this strip. I envy them.
1. So, apparently the Band Room door has the poster on the interior (yesterday’s strip) and exterior (today’s)?
2. Is that deceased former football coach “Bull” Bushka’s long-lost younger brother, “Broom” Bushka, working as Westview’s janitor?
3. Has Battyuk really given up on jokes and turned the strip into a daily storehouse of squirrel trivia? If so, I say it’s about time!
Please. Please, please, please. Let this be leading up to Dinkle and an army of squirrels taking over the school Willard style.
Let it be a long con. Let the seed be planted now, and let the whole strip series end as the squirrel army is unleashed on the town.
It would be glorious
As others have already speculated maybe he finally drives Becky around the bend and gets reprimanded for wasting her time which prompts him to drive off a cliff or something, but that just seems way too ambitious for late Act III Batom. Maybe a Saturday gag where Becky goes home and complains to John about how that “nut” Dinkle is driving her “squirrely”, which seems like a far more likely outcome. Because he would totally do five days of squirrel trivia in order to set that up, you know.
The sad thing is that Becky is too respectful to come up with the obvious rejoinder to this time-wasting idiot. Someone less spineless would have asked “They must have buried the point to your visit.”
In a mistimed comic strip crossover, Funky Winkerbean talks about squirrel facts, right after Mark Trail leaves an amputee in the woods to die.
The Dr. Camel storyline becomes infinitely hilarious once you know just what exactly prompted Jams to write that story and how thin-skinned he is.
And that sounds *exactly* like something modern Marcus Trailius would do… God, I just remembered how much I miss hate-reading that strip… In fact the hate I had for it was lowkey love because the storylines were SO outrageously over-the-top and convoluted beyond all recognition…
Unlike say, Luann which I hate-hate because Evans insists on making the legacy characters college-age while keeping their mental/emotional ages in the 6th grade, or the Phantom which I hate-hate because of the shameless racism and oddly patriarchal and despotic attitudes of the Ghost Walker, or Judge Parker which I hate-hate because God damn it, Ces…
I only read Marcus Trailius for five years and I saw bank robberies, hostages, kidnappings, drug cartels, tidal waves, human traffickers, poachers, earthquakes, hurricanes, elephant stampedes, a rhino killing a Jeep, getting trapped in a giant underground cavern in Mexico with no food, water or change of clothes for weeks, Marcus getting every kind of gun pointed at him from Uzis to AK-47s to .357 Magnums to Moisin-Nagants, and so many bullets dodged (luckily the baddies in the strip have worse marksmanship than Dick Tracy villains)…
Never actually saw it, but didn’t the rhino kill the jeep by giving birth in it?
No, I think that was a manatee.
I thought it was a walrus.
But it’s wrong. https://qz.com/1462091/how-do-squirrels-find-their-nuts-in-the-winter/
Squirrel “facts”? Since when did Funky Winkerbean become Mark Trail? What next, is TomBat going to do what Jams Eallen recently did and put someone who made fun of them online into their comic, and then proceed to write a story about how social media influencers are attention-seeking jerks?
After this exchange, there’s a moment of silence between these two idiots. Then Young Lad BECK pulls her severed arm from her desk drawer and beats Dinkleberry to death with it.
Nobody presses charges.
If this arc ends with Dinkle frenetically running into traffic, it will be worth it.
So what caught TomBa’s attention last year that prompted this weird shaggy dog story of an arc? The final years of “Apartment 3-G” were more coherent.
I only ever knew the last few years of A3G but I was utterly shocked to see some reprints from the early 60s when the girls were young, hot, and had their sexuality just oozing out of their pores…
If there is any strip that is dying for a modern reboot, it’s A3G…
This strip begins the long-awaited collaboration between Todd Battocks and Jef Mallet, “Frazz In Hell.” Over the next six weeks, we will learn how Frazz was fired from his job at Rodney Elementary over a #MeToo complaint from Mrs. Olsen, lost his insurance and spent all of his song royalty wealth on medical bills after he blew out his knees, hips, and lower back doing triathlons, and ended up as the part-time janitor at Worstview High.
(Sound of Battocks running around his mom’s attic, whispering “this one’s gotta get me a Pulitzer…”)
I think it’s a Dilbert crossover. Specifically, the book “Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons.”
Ugh, you can almost read Batiuk’s mind: “So, readers are tired of seeing middle age comic geeks go batshit insane over their geekery, eh? Maybe they’d like to chew in Dinkle for another couple weeks instead!!
Hold up…
Yesterday, Banana Jr. 6000 told me that Dinkle was re-hired in 2008 and he’d been drawing a FULL paycheck from the school system since that time?? Who the hell goes that long getting a paycheck for doing absolutely nothing without somebody somewhere noticing?
And exactly what the hell does he do to earn this paycheck? He doesn’t direct the band, hell he doesn’t even assist with directing the band… HELL, he hasn’t even been seen TALKING to a student in the entire time since I started reading this strip again (2011). FFS, HE DOESN’T EVEN TEACH A CLASS IN SOMETHING BASIC LIKE ‘MUSICAL THEORY’ OR WHATEVER!!
Batiuk needs to fix this ASAP…
The comic strip of Dinkle’s wife wanting him out of the house was in 2008. To be fair, he did try to be retired for a couple years. I remember the school giving him some kind of title, though it may have been a couple years after that. By 2013 he was going to the annual Ohio Music Educators Conference again.
What a god-awful blunder…
Dinkle can’t ever leave because Batiuk needs a ‘funnyman’ to work opposite of Becky’s ‘straight man’ routine…
WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED: Dinkle goes off in the sunset and becomes an “Appears once every two years on special occasions” kind of character because then readers would value his appearances more… THEN, the stresses of trying to teach a bunch of untalented slackers gets to Becky and she eventually morphs into a half-crazed, obsessive-compulsive Napoleon of a band leader, thereby cementing her place as Dinkle’s spiritual heir…
And then the road would have been open to keep Bull Bushka alive, because as cliche as it is, if there is one character type who deserves to have a cushy job for life at Westview with no real work asked of him ever, it’s the old jock…
I get the bad feeling that this arc will be used to justify Dinkle coming back full time as something other because he’s losing his mind in retirement. I think the author actually floated this idea a little while ago. Otherwise i can’t imagine why he’s doing this. Last weeks pointless arc actually had a reason: to humiliate Funky, this unless it’s a ham handed attempt to make Dinkle a full time employee again is pointless even by FW standards.
It’s not visible in today’s strip, but yesterday people were asking if Hairy Tinkle was now wearing a Worstview School District ID. Upon microscopic examination I have concluded he’s not. It’s actually his credentials from the Lower Ahia Music Educators, Assistants, Students & Singers (LAMEASS) convention, which featured into the last Tinkle & Beck series.
Tell My Grain that you’re on a grain free diet.