Sorry for the late post, today’s strip was not available for preview, but I
was already up late bingeing cartoons, so decided to wait around for the exciting next installment of Twin Boobs: Fire Drive Through Me. But the darn strip refused to drop. And when it finally did, it’s just two panels of ridiculous action. DOES ANYONE EVEN CARE ABOUT THE LAWS OF CONVECTION? The reason cars can drive through fire in the movies is that the type of incendiaries they use are meant to burn up quickly.
But it’s just another strip of MEN BEING MANLY, BY SAVING THEIR HELPLESS WIMMENFOLK, FROM FIRE BAAAAAAAD.
A single story, or even two, of a brave Les running down the street screaming, “USA! USA!” would be fine, if it was balanced out by some feminine heroics. Can anyone think of an instance? Because all I’m thinking of is Lisa giving Les a ghostly phone call from beyond the grave to warn him not to get on a plane that didn’t end up crashing anyway. So basically she saved him a couple hours sitting on a plane that refuses to leave the gate. HEROIC.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Don’t worry about Cinders and Mariash! They escaped the fire by hiding in the refrigerator!
Heat, flames, smoke, carbon monoxide–a firefighter wouldn’t be caught dead in this situation. But Les and Mason aren’t firefighters, are they?
Les will save the day by getting out and talking. Come on, doesn’t he always suck all the oxygen out of a conversation?
“Fire Drive Through Me”…that’s a good one. Good thing Mason sprung for the extra fire-proof under-sealant when he overpaid for his Batiukmobile. As I assumed, the hapless gals (who were outside, mind you) were apparently blissfully unaware of the raging inferno closing in on them from all directions, presumably because they were busy doing their nails or the Macerena or something equally frivolous. Man, being a woman in the Funkyverse sure is a thankless task. Lisa, Cayla, Holly, Becky, Cindy, Mindy, Marianne, Linda, Summer, Jessica, Adeela, Rachel…that’s a real litany of woe right there. Perhaps Susan Smith was lucky.
That’s not a Batiukmobile. That’s a Scion XB from the mid-2010s. So Batiuk has his ludicrously wealthy Hollywood star, who owns two LA mansions worth tens of millions of dollars and a private jet on 24 hour standby, driving around in an SUV that costs less than $20k when brand new.
I can only imagine the damage it would sustain in reality if you drove it over flames that large.
I still want to know what happened to Masone’s silver 2005 Porsche Carrera GT… Or is it too valuable for him to subject to this abuse?
Never mind all this. What happened to the three golfers!?
It’s extraordinary to me that he spent three days with those guys. I’m sure those first two strips in the sequence are jam-packed with utterly essential information for this story.
They respectively finished the Par 72 course with scores of 90, 95 and 99; then they went to the clubhouse and downed multiple overpriced cocktails then they went to the changing room to shower and swapped a bunch of lewd/racist jokes with Rodney Dangerfield…
The first dude goes home and argues with his wife about him golfing all the time and never taking her anywhere, the second dude never figures out while he’s out golfing his wife is getting stretched out by the teenager next door, and the third dude goes out to buy another $2000 worth of useless crap and gimmicks all for the sake of “improving his game”…
Did any of them get the free bowl of soup that’s supposed to come with the hat? But on them it looks good!
Maybe Mindy will, I don’t know, save Pete from having the expensive rare comic book he just bought singed or something.
It IS amazing how he consistently finds the least interesting way to tell a mostly stupid story. And, as the second panel helpfully reminds us — if you somehow enjoyed these two panels, there’s *decades* worth of uninteresting reading to be found at funkywinkerbean.com/books
I’ve always wondered about this. If you had the complete FW run in book form, how long would it take to read the entire thing? There are roughly 17,500 individual strips so if you needed twenty seconds to read each one (and that’s generous) you’d need around four days. I think I could easily cut that in half, so essentially IMO I’d need two full days to read forty-eight years worth of FW.
I bought Volumes 1-26 of “The Complete Peanuts,” which covers that strip’s 50-year run. If it’s all the same to you, Epicus, I’ll read that instead, give you a time count, and you can estimate how long a FW slog would be by comparison.
Careful … that sort of prolonged FW exposure could do some serious damage to the story-processing and logical reasoning centres of the cerebral cortex. This is why experts recommend no more than five minutes of FW viewing a day, preferably through specially constructed viewing spectacles made with Number 14 welder’s glass or aluminized mylar plastic filters. Side effects of prolonged FW exposure may include mopeyness, ennui, and spontaneous word zeppelins; if uncontrollable smirking develops, consult your physician IMMEDIATELY,
I can vouch for this. I often walk into glass doors after diving through the archives for old strips. Take about 3 days to fully wear off…
Funky Winkerbean: Mostly filler, all killer!
I posted this yesterday, but that was one day too soon.
The only “interesting” thing in this nonsense installment is that odd little smoke demon next to the curb in the second panel.
I’m sure this has real significance.
We’re all in for a big surpizzzzzzzzzzz
In the real world, Mason would be chastised for endangering himself and Les by playing hero. Even in a world a quarter inch from reality, that would happen. Here, where the prime directive is eating up the clock, his stupidity will be transmuted into heroism.
Well well well… whose stock is down now? It’s not rapper Hershey Barr or Alt-Latina singer Bubu Zayla, I can tell you that.
Even by Batiuk’s standards, those were some lazy assed name puns… Put them on the top 10 list with “Diversity University International”
I never did get that one. Enormous Midwestern University worked as a satire of Big Ten-type schools. But what the hell was Diversity University Ironton supposed to be? Is he mocking admissions quotas? Foreign students? Drunk driving? Ironton, Ohio? State universities even less prestigious than Kent State? It doesn’t even sound like a real college name.
And a DUI joke/pun when he’s got a regular character who lost her arm to an accident that involved alcohol and another who is a recovering alcoholic? Really, dude? Forget how long it takes to read his entire collection; Batiuk himself can’t even find the time to look back in his files.
Good point. And a great example of Funky Winkerbean‘s overall confusing tone. It wants us to take Funky’s alcoholism and Becky’s accident seriously, as it makes cheap jokes about there being a university called DUI. And not in an way that creates a dissonant effect. It just looks like nobody knows what tact is. Least of all the writer.
Well, he doesn’t actually care about Funky’s alcoholism or the manner in which Becky lost her arm. It’s just a means to inject drama into the strip. The practicalities don’t matter at all.
I imagine the strips are being hidden for a longer time because Batiuk whined to the syndicate. “They’re making fun of meeeeeeeeeee…..make them stoooooooooooooooooop.”
I don’t see either Cindy’s or Marianne’s car in the drive way – It’s too much to hope that they have long since left the building and are at this moment heading for the studio while Mason and Les end up burning to death in the house victims of their own self importance.
It won’t happen but a man can dream
Actually I can only assume the helpless ladies are cowering somewhere near the pool.
Dear lord this is such a dumb story arc. I can’t wait until Pete has to go rescue Jff from the caverns. Heart stopping thrills galore.
I do like the fact that 25 minutes earlier when Masone was frantically trying to call Marianne there wasn’t a single smoke puff to be seen or smelled for thirty miles from the balcony and now the whole neighborhood has flashed over.
It’s a pity Mason and Les didn’t blow up real good.
We need SCTV back now more than ever…
We sure do, because life right now is scary, kids, scary!
BWAWHAWHAWHAW! It’s funny because Masone Jarre missed his calling of Gobbles the South Park turkey!
Have you noticed there’s absolutely zero tension in this story? Les isn’t even reacting to Mason stupidly driving him into an inferno. Perhaps that’s because the fire is now so small, and has a perfect little opening for them to safely drive through. The fire is avoiding Mason’s home as well. And the story wasted so much time aimlessly yammering about unknown golfers, secret decoder rings, the new Starbuck Jones premiere, Pete and Mindy bickering, and other bullshit that there’s no sense of urgency. Batiuk couldn’t foreshadow any harder that nothing is going to come of this.
That’s what pissed me off, too… Masone and Les have never been known as bold, take-charge kind of guys running into danger but somehow they both got secret ballsack transplants?
Based on Mason’s ability to drive through it and the affected areas shown in Panel #2, I think we have to assume that this is some mutant variety of fire that only burns lush, green, well-watered vegetation.
In what world are you able to, in LA, drive straight to West Hollywood with no stops? And during a fire, when everyone is driving, trying to get out? Gridlock City! And where are the police and fire people? I’m going to so pissed if the womenfolk are still outside, tanning themselves, only to be save the manly men!
The cops are way too busy apprehending teens who were assaulted by a man coming after them with a knife.
When I was a young teenager, I used to love Starsky and Hutch, but even at that age I noticed that, in “Bay City”, which was surely meant to be either LA or San Fransisco, whenever there was a high speed car chase on major city streets, there was inexplicably almost no other traffic. It just seems to be something that mysteriously happens when a story needs it!
And in an emergency there would be roadblocks, to prevent idiots like Mason from driving into the danger zone. Amazingly, authorities don’t want people “trying to help” because they just put themselves in danger, and create more work for rescue teams to do.
Look at these videos of evacuees driving near the Woolsey fire:
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/pa5dm8/california-wildfire-video-driving-paradise-evacuation-camp-fire-vgtrn
People are crying, praying, talking about their tires and windows melting, and generally scared out of their minds. They are not furrowing their brow and saying “hang on! we’re going through!” while their passenger looks on in mild annoyance. It cannot be overstated how suicidally stupid this is.
Instead of patronizing Batiuk’s fantastical bullshit today, I want to leave you with a story about a real actor stepping up during a disaster:
https://www.businessinsider.com/on-911-people-remember-how-steve-buscemi-searched-for-survivors-2017-9