Mela
August 26, 2020 at 11:22 am
…Jeff is not going to die in a cave. Comic book nerds and sci-fi geeks do not die in Funky Winkerbean.
The part of the blind firefighter will be played today by Ringo Starr
Face it. It would have been cruel even by Funkiverse standards for Pete to invite his prospective father-in-law all the way to California only to have him die in a fire. Looks like Skppy’s survived too. Who’s paying his airfare back to Ohio?
Son of Stuck Funky 
DamnDamnDamnDamnDamn.
Oh, of course, the ol’ air pocket at the back of the cave trope. How the f*ck did I not see that coming? Sigh.
If Jff is incapacitated how can his imaginary young self still be conscious and walking around? I just wish we’d get one FW story arc that doesn’t end with way more questions than when it began.
An air pocket would actually have made a little bit of sense had it been an actual cave. Of course it would have made dang near impossible to find Jeff, but you can’t have everything I guess.
Skippy’s still a hallucination. The rescue team is paying no attention to him. Kids are always looked after first, unless this is an ICE team..
So there’s no interaction with Queen Tika, and we’re left to deduce that Jfff was hallucinating. Well, Skppy has been a hallucination all along, so why do we see him when Jeff is unconscious and unaware of his surroundings? And he’s awake in panel 2, but why is he sitting up? When you’ve been oxygen-deprived and unconscious, and have been strapped to a stretcher, nobody makes you sit up. They put an oxygen mask on you and ask you some really disturbing questions: “Can you tell me your name?” and “Do you know where you are?” and “What day is it?” (Okay, how would you like to have your life depend on someone who doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t know where you are, and needs to be told what day it is?)
I don’t pretend to know about the characteristics of a fire, but it seems to me that if the fire engulfed the entire canyon, the existence of a front and a back exit to the tunnel probably wouldn’t make any difference in survivability. I would think it just provides two places for the smoke to enter. Does our eclectic group have anyone who might know if this is the case?
He makes it sound like a second entrance would create some sort of pressure difference or vacuum that would keep oxygen from being sucked out, but I don’t think it works quite that way (but I’m no firefighting or science expert). I think what he’s really trying to say (and I’m guessing here) is the back entrance allowed enough oxygen in to save Jeff and that the smoke apparently didn’t know there was a back door.
I’m going to guess that it could have some effect, just because air would continue to be able to circulate through. Smoke could get it, but so could oxygen. Whereas a fire outside a tiny cave would just suck the air right out of it, like one of those fire cupping massages. Depending on winds, and maybe how fast the fire burned through the canyon, I’d much rather take my chances in a tunnel than a cave.
Wouldn’t that just act like chimney and pull the smoke in? Isn’t that why buildings have fire doors that close when the fire alarm trips—they help contain the fire rather than allowing the oxygen to feed it.
Yeah. But that smothers the fire by denying it oxygen. So it would smother poor Jff too. The chimney effect through the cave would pull both smoke AND potentially oxygen through. It’s better to breathe both smoke and oxygen than to be under a candle snuffer.
Thanks
When you’re talking about a fire this huge, think Dresden. People were asphyxiated in deep basement shelters before they could die from the heat.
So using that analogy, Murania would be the worst place you could pick, since it’s deep underground and would be dependent on the surface to replenish its oxygen supply.
If they use a ventilation system that has induction vents on the surface, they’d suck in a lot of smoke, soot and toxic gasses. But I’d also expect somebody to have noticed those vents over the past few centuries, as well as any matching exhaust vents. They’d do a lot better to use their magical superscience to create a closed environment that recycles their air.
Of course they’re five miles below the surface of the Los Angeles basin, an area renowned for its fault zones and earthquakes, along with universities and colleges whose geology departments are well-equipped to study temblors and related events. If Murania’s cavern didn’t collapse from earthquakes, or have its contact with the surface cut off, somebody would have noticed odd results from seismometer readings and done a paper on it.
And then there’s the issue of geothermal energy. Just googled this: on average, the subterranean temperature increases fifteen degrees Fahrenheit for every mile you go below the surface. For Murania at a depth of about five miles (25,000 feet) that’s seventy-five degrees above the average surface temperature. So it’s at least 140 degrees F. down there. Keeping Murania habitable would be a major problem.
You’ve put waaaaay too much thought into the habitability of an underground city below Los Angeles. This is the quality content I came for. Bravo.
And of course, its creators didn’t consider the logistics. They didn’t have to. After all, this was just something that would hopefully help the kids get settled before the real movie started.
Oh, look, Jeff just miraculously survived. This would get a D-minus in a fourth-grade creative writing class.
It’s over already? He just got there on Thursday. Typical TB ADD.
And not even one day of Ringo there searching the caves wearing sunglasses.
It don’t come easy.
“Got to make the scene if you wanna play the ‘bean
And you know it don’t come easy”
And it takes 8 weeks to get there.
And on the third day, Jfff emerged from the cave.
Wait a minute…when did Queen Tika order her robots to make an air hole in the cave and carry Jeff and Skppy back up to the surface?
Skippy will get a child/hallucination rate. Now to get everyone onto the boat to discuss the most important thing: the fate of the Lisa’s Story movie.
One word: Fucking Stoopid
“And by some miracle, we’re okay too! We don’t need to wear masks or anything!”
“Wow, you’re right! It’s almost like the fire that was an all-consuming inferno just moments ago has been retconned into a few harmless puffs of smoke!”
“Yup! So let’s just causally hang around and not do any firefighting or rescue work!”
Hey, they finally stopped eating s’mores and put Jfff on a stretcher with some oxygen; what more do you want?
Here we see an example of the author actually writing to his strengths.
If anyone knows about the dynamics of sucking all the oxygen out of an enclosed space, it would be him.
Well, Battyuk sucked all the humor out of this strip years ago, so that follows.
It’s nice that Skippy is okay, since we’re still not sure if he exists.
I actually think this is the best (almost only) good visual representation of Skippy as a hallucination thus far. Firefighters are ignoring him. He is unburnt, unmarked, and not coughing. He’s completely fine!
Why is Skppy there at all when the person hallucinating him is unconscious? Why is he still present when they’re not in the fantasy world anymore? Why is he only in one of the two panels? Why is he reacting to the rescue team? Leave it to Funky Winkerbean to get a hallucination wrong.
Thanks for letting me have the lead quote! I feel a bit honored! While I wasn’t overly worried about Jeff’s fate, I’m glad he’s OK-it would be wrong to die in the Batcave.
To date, the only fatality in the Bat Cave was Jill St. John.
“What a terrible way to go go!”
Beat me to it 😜!
“Poor deluded girl. If only she would have let me save her.” It’s funny when Batman says it.
Unless he were to fall in the nuclear reactor. Then Jff could’ve met Jill St.John.
Oh, a miracle! Well, let’s not ask any awkward questions, like “What sort of sick, perverted deity would save Jff?”
To quote the great Ringo Starr in 200 Motels: “Everybody needs a little poosy!”
And so we end the week looking forward to Pmmmmm getting a bug up her arse about that silly movie that she can’t get because she’s a stoopid gorl. Thus do legitimate complaints about pants-on-stupid behaviour get transmuted into being a buzzkill by a pea-brain who never bothered learning anything about women in the first place.
And so the Author does NOTHING with an underground empire and robots just cuts to the surface to show “it was all a dream’ or some such. It’s S.O.P. for this strip. Anti-climax thy name is Funky Winkerbean.
I mean why not give jff a moment of joy exploring the underground empire? You could even create suspense by cutting back and forth between Jff being given oxygen and the scenes in the underground empire showing that if he stays he dies. But no we’ve got this deus ex machina moment with Jff saved by the cave having another opening – and by the by wouldn’t that feed the fire making the smoke WORSE? I don’t know enough to say.
Bah. it’s a train wreck.
Over on BattyBlog, Batty casually mentions that hedge funds destroyed newspapers. Interesting theory, but I suspect he hasn’t realized that the loss of subscribers and advertising dollars is what killed them. I don’t think Batty knows much about the internet beyond blogging, which itself has moved on to social media.
FWIW I’m a former newspaper reporter and what killed newspapers is the TeleCom Act of 1996 which was the beginning of the end, even though not many people knew it at the time.
It’s just more of Batiuk’s self-aggrandizing worldview. Boo hoo, poor little creative people are always being destroyed by big mean corporations. As with most things, his opinions have little contact with reality, and are mostly him stroking his own ego.
Nobody destroyed newspapers. Newspapers destroyed themselves. They spent 20 years acting like new media was beneath them, even as new media proved its worth, and took most of their readership. Now the newspaper industry is so backwards, it’s content to stay there. Which is great news for Tom Batiuk, and other syndicated purveyors of deathless garbage legacy content. Believe me, Tom, the last thing you want is for newspapers to start caring about quality.
And he can fuck right off with his “DC was built on the
backsdreams of two kids from Cleveland” horseshit. A lot of people made DC what it is, but Batiuk only values the ones he sees himself in: the comic book creators from Cleveland. And he doesn’t value them that much, because he couldn’t get Joe Shuster’s name right. They’re just placeholders for himself.Crossing out “backs” and replacing it with “dreams” is telling. It’s a statement that talent is more essential than hard work. Successful people simply do not have that attitude. Read any interview with a famous performer or artist, they’ll all tell you that once you reach the level where everyone is talented, hard work makes a big difference. And other skills, like willingness to learn.
Batiuk is absolutely disdainful of hard work, and it permeates everything he does. It’s why he’s so obsessed with handing out awards and mass media contracts and recognition to his characters. He thinks they are automatically entitled to it by virtue of being “talented”, despite having no other professional qualities. Atomik Komix has no management, no direction, no discipline, and in real life it would have no customers. And the idea of a record company signing a nursing home is too stupid for words.
And it’s why all of Batiuk’s work is so ridiculously half-assed and lazy. He puts no effort into it, doesn’t see a reason to, and no one in the newspaper world is ever going to make him. So we get what we get.
Aw crap! Jfff saw his shadow! Six more weeks of this arc!
This presumes there’s anyone in LA with value to society.
1. It’s a short tunnel and not a cave
2. GOD DAMN IT SMOKE AND BREATHABLE AIR DON’T WORK THAT WAY!!
3. If the queen herself carried out Mr. Decoder Ring in a bunch of stunned firefighters, it would have been more plausible…
4. Somewhere in Santa Monica, Pete and Masone and Cindye are STILL standing in a smoky motel parking lot hearing Mindy scream that her father is out there somewhere…
Are we going to ever have the conversation about how an 80-year-old dude and his wife of similar age have a 25-year old daughter in Mindy?
Speaking of such, how old are Cindye’s kids? They must be well past 40 by now?
Do firefighters in California really dress like that? They look like everyday workers from the phone company! No heavy overcoats, masks, oxygen tanks, hoses and is that one asshole actually wearing shades?!