Given the fact that Jeff nearly died during his trip, his reunion with Pam is…sort of lowkey. Very obliging of Pam, though, to feed Jeff his straight line. As promised, here is that neato rock that Batty pictured on his blog. Jeff’s souvenir appears a lot bigger than the one brought back by Batiuk, and this is a good thing, because in unseen Panel 8 Pam will use it to bash in Jeff’s head.
I Got a Rock
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
Husband: “Look what I brought back from my big trip to Hollywood! It’s a rock!”
Wife: “Look what I had drawn up while you were away in Hollywood! They’re divorce papers!”
Weeks of build-up that culminates in one character handing a rock to another. Welcome to Funky Country. When did he pick up the rock? Before he fell unconscious or after he was strapped to a stretcher? I don’t read Batom’s other strip so I don’t know, but is this guy supposed to be brain damaged or something? Because if not, you could have fooled me.
Jfff is supposed to have a traumatic childhood, thanks to a comic-book-hating mother, This is probably the closest Batiuk has ever come to showing any form of recognizable family behavior.
There was the time granny-cheatin’ John Howard ignored his drunk mom when she got a komix-related cake for his birthday. That was realistic, if unpalatable.
An injured man who is able to keep hold of a significant rock despite being unconscious and carted around by emergency personnel? Someone enjoys the cinematic stylings of Neil Breen.
And TFH, you panel edits have been gloriously on point all week. Bravo.
Yes, I have to second that on the panel edits!
It occurs to me that you have coined the universal Funky Winkerbean punchline. “Go fuck yourself, Les” works in any strip Les appears in, like “Christ, what an asshole” for New Yorker cartoons.
“I thought you were worried I was going to run off with a Hollywood actress.”
“Go fuck yourself, Les.”
“Now that we’ve destroyed the planet, what’s next to come will be the new normal.”
“Go fuck yourself, Les.”
“It’s outta here!”
“Go fuck yourself, Les.”
“I can get her there faster myself!”
“Go fuck yourself, Les.”
“Did she say something?”
“Go fuck yourself, Les.”
Try it! It’s fun.
Oops, I left my italics tag open. Go fuck yourself, Les.
Batom should be careful bragging about his rock. According to
“SEC. 63.44. REGULATIONS AFFECTING PARK AND RECREATION AREAS.” for Los Angeles, “12. No person shall remove any wood, tree, shrub, plant, turf, grass, soil, rock, sand or gravel.”
So Skppy wasn’t real and this shows Jff is really suffering from dementia? Or is Batty using old people who are fading as a source for humor and yet once again?
Skippy returns! Why?!
It was good until he brought out the rock. Dumbass. But Pam knows what she married.
So now L*s can fly home and prep for classes instead of giving environmental speeches that would make Greta Thunberg throw up her hands, say “to hell with it”, and go eat a Big Mac.
Look at the banner. Les is going home to play softball. The one character seems to be wearing a pink ribbon, so maybe the Lisa Lunacy Race is branching out into other fields. Meanwhile Les is trying to steal second base, unware of how baseball works.
OK, I see him there. Good, this arc will end eventually.
I spent longer than I wanted and couldn’t find the image to confirm it, but I believe that current banner image comes from a Sunday strip that ran some 10 years ago, when he overcame some sort of writer’s block for My Dead Wife’s Cancer Book by writing a passage about “not having the right words” (indeed) and then having that illustration serve as a metaphor for his auto erotic satisfaction.
The DVDs are still en route via physical mail to some still standing address in Los Angeles, which I’m sure will be of great comfort to Marianne after we may or may not ever know if any of her family or possessions have survived the fire.
Couldn’t let it rest.
4/21/13
God, what a conceited jackass.
It’s actually worse that Les is congratulating himself for that pedestrian line: that was a word for word repeat of an Act 2 strip where Cindy says those lines to Lisa.
So really, he’s praising himself for his ability to recall verbatim conversations from 15 years earlier.
It’s painfully obvious that neither Les nor his creator ever considered the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson on writing: “‘Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'”
On top of that, this was the first attempt at making the movie. Les did such a bad job writing the script they turned it into a porno movie. And Mason didn’t even let him write the script this time around. Mason Jarre, whose lips are permanently affixed to Les Moore’s ass, hired someone else to write the script and gave Les no involvement. Keep running those bases, Les.
That panel looks like a big mix-up happened at the Make A Wish Foundation. As if somewhere, there’s a very disappointed 9-year-old Colorado Rockies fan who got a copy of the Lisa tapes, and his vision back.
I think Jfff is confused. He didn’t pick up that rock at the cave. It was in his head with all his other souvenir rocks.
I hope that souvenir is in fact a lump of Muranian radium and it gives Jfff all sorts of cancer. Little stone, you rock!
“You’re my rock…by which I mean you’re a burdensome load I’ve had to drag around for decades, and my poor old body is stooped over from carrying you. Now, let’s find a ‘special place’ for this cheap-ass memento you brought me…how about the tank in the guest bathroom toilet that won’t flowing? This should solve that problem. Oh, and speaking of problems, I see you’ve brought another pre-pubescent ragamuffin home with you. I’ll chain him in the cellar with the others.”
AAAAA-bner!!! Jeff Murdoch is back, and he brought his wife a ROCK! And there’s a strange balding boy standing next to him! Aaaaa-bner!!!
Brilliant!
Where’s Mindy? She still lives with her parents!
If she moved out when she got a job with Atomik Comix and/or when she started dating Mopey, what does it say for her that she lived with her parents for the twenty some-odd years after she got out of college?
That she’s a smart girl who knows how to save money?
Okay, I guess ‘Smart’ and ‘Mindy’ don’t really go together. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a sign of arrested development for a single adult to continue in a household with their parents. In fact, for most of American and world History, it was the norm.
I only moved out in my late 20’s, and I have a sister who is still at home. We get along with our parents. They didn’t baby us or set more than ‘house courtesy’ rules. We could do our own thing. If we weren’t living at home, our old bedrooms would just be sitting empty. And it let us save up thousands of dollars that we would have spent in rent for the future when we would NEED to move out.
Late 20’s, sure, but Mindy’s around 40. And if either of those two precipitating events was the motivation behind her moving out, that means she hasn’t had a job or a serious relationship in about 20 years.
Although honestly, it’s probably more that Batiuk just forgets about his characters for literally years and during that time they don’t age. Characters age only when he thinks about them. So Funky goes from 37 to 66 in about a decade while some characters stay college age for twenty years.
Yeah, Summer’s been in college a long time.
I forgot the most obvious answer: that she lives with her parents until a man takes her off their hands, even if the man is Mopey.
It is rather odd. I think Mopey has been the only single, never-married character to live by himself in this strip. Perhaps that’s why we don’t see Summer or Keisha graduate. They’d have to move back in with Les and Cayla and that would cramp Batiuk’s style. He’d have to include them in everything or come up with TWO marriage sequences!
BatYarn most definitely has a thing about pairing his characters up. There are very, very few single people in the strip. Even Owen has Alex. There’s Summer, Keisha, Cody, maybe Klabichnik and Adeela. And four of those are barely even characters at all.
IMO Pete and Mindy are the dumbest pair yet. There’s the unnecessary Crankshaft connection, then there’s the comic book connection which quite frankly just makes me sick.
Because the idea of a young woman being happily single or moving out of state is just too weird to him. I still think Summer gives off gay vibes, but that won’t happen either.
I really do think that Batiuk planned to hook up Summer with mini-Les Cody, but he dithered and took so long in getting Cody out of high school that he had simply lost interest in telling the story by then. His laziness is not creating new high schoolers did him in.
Summer and Cody both attended Westview High at the same time. Summer graduated in 2012 and Cody didn’t graduate until 2016.
What in the hell happened to Skippy after leaving Murania?! Just look at him!
I guess it’s nice that Jeff and Pam still have the ability to feel love and affection for each other after a lifetime of dealing with that horrible old bastard Crankshaft.
This would be endearing if it wasn’t the coda of a story so insufferably stupid. And also if it was endearing…
I don’t know, the hug was pretty sweet. The most non-snide romantic affection we’ve seen from spouses for a good long time.
I also have no problem with the display of affection. But I do wonder about the “You’re my rock” line. It implies that she was contemplating the possibility of Jfff’s death. Given the short duration of events, would Pmm even known contemporaneously that he was in danger?
And just to quibble further, maybe giving Jfff that line would have provided a rare example of men valuing women and actually expressing that sentiment in the strip.
Giving Jfff that line would have played much better as you’ve stated, and also would make more sense coming from him.
What’s worst of all is that hackneyed “hey that reminds me” turn. Really, Jeff, you needed to be reminded of the rock from the cave that should have killed you?
Oh, this story gets even more insufferably stupid. Wait until you see next Sunday.
Unseen Panel 8
JEFF: Haha, that’s right, voice in my head, you were right! My wife did like the rock I brought back for her, just like you told me! No, I don’t think I should tell her how you and I took turns making out with Queen Tika and her robot guards, she’d get very jealous!
PAM: *swoons, because her husband is obsessed with almost-century-old pop culture which makes him deep, and she thinks his hallucinations are quirky character development that make him endearing rather than a symptom of something seriously and probably dangerously wrong with like any sane person/any one who reads this strip would immediately understand them to be*
“Hey stranger!” “You’re a sight for sore eyes!” I greet my own mother more passionately than that, And I wasn’t just miraculously rescued from an all-consuming wildfire.
Yuck, Just what we needed. Dialogue that makes Anthony and Elizabeth’s “I guess we’re engage/YEEAAAARRRRGHHHHH” sound like epic romance. Why do I not have trouble believing that this is Batiuk’s reality?
“Hey that reminds me, I brought you something… a new grandchild!”
I hope to Christ his wife is a fuckin’ geologist…
ONLY IN THE FUNKYVERSE can a woman receive an honest-to-God worthless rock with some vague sentimental connection with a long forgotten sci-fi movie she never saw in the first place as a souvenir from Los Angeles, and show genuine gratitude with zero irony…
Oh, I’m sure Jfff made Pam watch the movie at least once.
Nah, she’s seen it. She was in the Valentine Theatre in Crankshaft, asking whether Jfff realized that Murania was not a real place.
Guess Jfff got the last laugh this time!
Well, to be fair, she’s been married to this doofus for about 50 years. She’s undoubtedly used to this now.
But considering how she reacted to watching the serial in Crankshaft, the only value she would place on this thing would be that it obviously meant a lot to Jfff.
“My gift to you! The bag of pretzels that Tony Cardoza left on the flight to Hartford fifteen years ago!”
“Who’s Tony Cardoza?”
“HE WAS IN SKYDIVERS!”
“Was that a show?”
“It’s as if you don’t even know me!”
“Tony Cardoza? Producer and co-star of ‘Red Zone Cuba?’ Kiss me, you magnificent bastard!”
“Didn’t Coleman Francis leave one? Couldn’t you get that?”
“I TOLD YOU SHE’D LIKE IT!” said Dennis the Menace…
Is this his wife or his mother, because ee-www?!
And for her birthday, Pam’s getting men’s underwear, some Old Spice, a new belt, a framed photograph of Queen Tika, and an Ikea bed kit for Skppy.
Yeah, it would have been just fine if Jfff kept this for himself and apologized to Pam for not being able to pick up something pretty in LA.
And he’ll probably take it back for himself five minutes after giving it to her.
“I’m home!”
“Jesus H. Where have you been?” “You could of called!” “God, you are an insufferable pain in my ass!”
“That reminds me.” “I got you a rock.”
Pm’s expression in the last panel doesn’t look pleased at all. It looks like she’s thinking “Oh God, another piece of crap I’m supposed to be impressed by. *sigh* Remember, humor him, humor him. Where the hell can I put this?”
All the men in Funky Winkerbean are little boys, and all the women are their mothers.
And yet the women are also depicted as barely competent. Huh.