Good Lord. No one else tells stories like this. No one else has ever even considered it, in fact. He telegraphs exactly what’s going to happen days in advance then takes for-f*cking-ever to get there. If she just says “hmmm, looks empty, I’d better call them” in the first panel the story is suddenly going three times faster. But our pal BatHak simply doesn’t do things that way. If he ever made a movie it’d be thirty hours long AFTER editing.
And it’s not like we’re gaining any insight about the character here, as she’s just thinking out loud for some reason. Those word balloons really should be thought bubbles.
Son of Stuck Funky 
If this was handled by a competent story-teller, this would actually be suspenseful.
The important word in the above is “If.”
If the delivery is a setup, what does ICE accomplish by waiting with all the lights off?
Actually, what is this address? A vacant store in a strip mall? Why not a motel room?
Pizza delivery for I.C. Weiner. Aww, crud.
Does this mean Adeela will be the only current character making the “Phase IV” time jump to 1,000 years in the future, where delivery boy-turned-author Les J. Fry will be trying to turn his non-selling memoir “Leela’s Story” into a 3-D holofilm starring the legendary Funky Zoid?
This is bad enough to be the opening scene of an especially bad “Law and Order” episode. Seriously, she’s going to sit in a deserted parking lot and make a phone call, with no suspicion that this might be a set-up? Drive out of there, kid, and call when you’re safely on the road.
I watched a police procedural the other day. It had a part where the detectives found a phone number and said “we need to interview this person.” They picked up the phone, and – swear to God – the story cut right to them interviewing her!
They didn’t show anything about the detective dialing the phone, the phone ringing in the person’s house, that oh-so-ironic shot of the phone ringing in an empty room, her walking over to pick it up, speaking into it, negotiating the time and places of the meeting, her looking on GPS to make sure she had it right, or her walking into the front door and asking to speak to the detectives. And last week’s episode wasn’t an hour of her talking about getting her driver’s license. And yet, somehow, I was able to follow the story! Weird.
“Cooty? This delivery address is in a very bad part of town!”
“What, like Westview has a good part?”
“The GPS indicates this was the Woolworth’s that closed in 1991. This must be the right place. I’ll call back this customer named Possible Spam.”
“To avoid the possibility of roll-overs, the NTSB advises Plotnix owners to limit turns to twenty degrees or less.”
As deadly dull as this arc is, it’s giving me heebie jeebies because here in Jersey over 20 years ago, a couple of skells ordered pizza to an abandoned house, then ambushed and killed the two deliverymen. Doubt that even Batiuk would go that dark.
It would require storytelling skills not in evidence.
But that would actually make more sense given that if robbery and ambush were the motive it wouldn’t matter who was driving. If this is truly the ICE waiting to nab Adeelar, how did they know she would be the one making the delivery-especially since she offered to take the delivery at the last minute?
It’s like the episode of the Prisoner, when the computer predicted his every move.
“What do you want?”
“Information!”
“You won’t get it!”
“We will make you read the last six months of ‘Funky Winkerbean!’ Over and over!”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know! The names and addresses of our sleeper agents! Which of your agents really work for us! Our nuclear codes! Anything!”
This story couldn’t be be saved if Rover itself arrived to capture Adeela.
Nevermind the fact that ICE in 2020 would have BEEN grabbed her right out of one of her JuCo classes…
I’d prefer if it was FBI or DHS because some informant dropped a dime connecting her to Islamic Jihad or whatever (which would be a VERY 00’s storyline, but anything would be better than this…
The really annoying thing about this whole stupid scenario is that Adeela isn’t supposed to be some dumb hayseed who just fell off the turnip truck. She’s an architect who grew up in the most violent and strife-torn place in the entire world. Yet there she is, about to stumble into a trap that even the dumbest rube would see coming a mile away.
TB did do that back in 2000, except that Lefty and Rachel roundhouse kicked all of the ambushers with their “Tae-Bo kickboxing” skills.
Then it turned into a story about Montoni’s redlining because Funky had failed to warn Rachel and Lefty that his computer program flagged the address where the ambush happened as dangerous… Cindy overheard him talk about it and then brought it up to her news producer.
I can’t find a link, but right about that same time in the late 90s when I was a college student in Atlanta, a couple of lowlife pieces of shit ordered like ten pizzas from Domino’s and killed the deliveryman for the pizzas and his cash, which couldn’t have been much… They used the address of a real apartment complex (in a shady-assed neighborhood) and ambushed him in a dark part of the parking lot.
The sad part is this driver was sort of similar to Adeela in that he was much older than you’d expect a driver to be (late 30s, iirc), because he had only been in the states a few years after BARELY escaping with his life from Rwanda or Ethiopia or whoever was warring at that time, he had of course lost everything in his former country and was desperate for every last dollar he could earn to send back to his family members who were still alive…
So, is all this meant to imply that ICE discovered Adeela received her driver’s license and set out to arrest her, so in the matter of at most a couple of days they rented space in a strip mall, determined where she worked, and then took a chance that by ordering a “pizza” she would be working that day and make the delivery herself, even though Montoni’s apparently has a regular (if heretofore unseen) driver, all for one woman who at worst may have overstayed her student visa?
Okay, that all makes perfect logical sense.
So, I guess ICE set her up to deliver the pizza to a deserted address and then they’ll pick her up there? Except how did they know she was going to be the one delivering the pizza? Actually Cory was originally going to be delivering the pizza and he would have been the one who went to the deserted location. Were they just going to keep ordering pizzas until they saw Adeela bring the pizza out. even though she’s the manager and wouldn’t normally be delivering pizzas anyway? This is worse than Masone driving through a wall of flame to rescue the helpless wimmen folk from the burning building.
This would be a great arc if Corey made the delivery himself, but wrapped a scarf around his head because he had a bad toothache, and the ICE agents mistook him for Adeela, swept him up, and deported him to Iraqistan or whichever country she was originally from.
Even BETTER: If Wally made the delivery and got deported back to Afghanistan! Third time’s the charm!
That would be legit funny.
This is another endless failing of Funky Winkerbean: its cruelty never goes far enough to become dark comedy. Cory being shipped back to Afghanistan and becoming a POW twice, over an ignorable paperwork problem, is just mean. Cory being shipped to Afghanistan and becoming a POW three times, over a pizza delivery intended to catch someone else, is so horrible it actually becomes funny.
It’s called “Crossing The Line Twice.” Batiuk only crosses the line one once. He knows how to put his characters through terrible experiences, but doesn’t know how to make it dramatic or funny.
Did that really happen? Cory was a POW more than once?
Because the second time it happened, the U.S. Army should have (rightfully) assumed that he 1. Was a really shitty soldier, 2. Was treated so well as a POW he wanted to go back, or 3. Became sympathetic to the enemy cause and was trying to defect…
And wouldn’t a multiple-time POW be a *MAJOR* freaking celebrity in America and never have to work a day in his life again? Distinguished Service Cross? Medal of Honor? A 4-5 rank jump in promotion? Book deals? Primetime interviews? Documentaries? Speaking engagements at $40,000 a pop? Democrats, Repubs, Libertarians, Greens and LaRouchies all trying to woo him for a U.S. Senate run? Get played by Tom Hardy in the real-life Hollywood story?
As I understand it, Cory was found to have been released from military service one day early, had to go back into the military to serve one day, got sent to Afghanistan, and got taken POW again.
And yes, everything you say is correct. On top of that, when you’ve been a POW, the US military does NOT send you back into a combat zone where it can happen again. This comic strip runs on not doing any research whatsoever.
That was Wally. That saga went on for years. Cory enlisted at the county fair, then joined the bomb disposal unit and came home a far different and way more bland man.
How did [ICE] know [Adeela] was going to be the one delivering the pizza?
The same way Les knew the driver following him around wasn’t going to beat him into pudding. The same way Mason knew driving through fire wasn’t going to cause any problems. The characters in Funky Winkerbean have an weirdly omniscient kind of plot armor. They take risks like Batiuk told them beforehand it won’t hurt them. In Adeela’s case, she’ll stupidly go into this sketchy building knowing that her eventual arrest by ICE will be a temporary inconvenience at worst.
The same way we knew some doddering old man walking off on his own and surrounded by tidal waves of flames, toxic smoke and 400-degree superheated air would be saved and protected by magical sci-fi serial fairies…
The same way the Three Stooges know they’ll always come out all right, even if they get eaten alive by lions. Except nobody will laugh.
If there was some way for Les to get kidnapped by the Saudis and chopped up in their consulate, I wouldn’t complain…
And could Adeela look the least bit concerned in panel 3? Does this situation really call for that tired-ass heavy-lidded smug face? This is her first time driving a car alone, drives into a sketchy situation, and she looks like Dieter from Sprockets.
Or, she knows what’s about to happen, and is intentionally doing the least enthusiastic line delivery since Jon Gosselin. “This is the right address. But. It looks closed. I’d better give them. A call.”
And again, why is she saying everything out loud? These are thoughts, not dialog. They require thought bubbles, which are just as easy to draw as regular word balloons are. The whole scenario is really making Adeela look like a total idiot.
The funny thing about this strip is that the last customer Montini’s had, 4-5 years ago or whenever it was, said the exact same things Adeela says here when they pulled up to the restaurant.
She has to use GPS to find the location? Maybe things are different in TomBa’s area, but pizza places usually have limited delivery areas and hire drivers who know the neighborhood. Which brings up another flaw in this story. Why would Cory think it’s a good idea for someone who has just gotten her license and is probably not that familiar with the local geography to be able to make a timely delivery?
Nobody who works at Montoni’s uses “timely” and “delivery” in the same sentence.
Norma Desmond’s epic screenplay comes to mind.
Where is Admiral Ackbar (not to be confused with his Muslim cousin Allahu) when you need him?
This set-up was too fishy for him.
Note also that Adeela’s “pizza delivery car”, which the DMV had never seen anyone take the test in before, is just a magnet on the door.
For the same reason that in WWII movies everyone speaks English. For the same reason everyone in Mulan spoke English. For the same reason every alien race in Star Trek spoke English. For the audience.
Granted, given that TB does f-all for his presumed audience, that is rather a leap of faith.
Iztahh freiac moluska hein???????