Mistaken identity, the cold unfeeling hand of law enforcement and government red tape, the forces of The Universe constantly conspiring to destroy the spirits of the little people…(zzzzzzzzz).
Oh, where were we? Oh yeah, Adeela got arrested and they’re going to deport her immediately unless…(zzzzzzz). Oops, sorry, that keeps happening for some reason. Methinks this ponderous story might have a wee bit more “impact”, let’s say, if I or anyone else actually gave a shit about Adeela and her sad cadre of annoying Montoni’s pals. But we don’t and it doesn’t. Like every Act III prestige arc, it has all the impact of a soggy paper towel landing in a wastebasket and unlike the soggy paper towel you don’t even get the satisfaction of making the shot when you toss it in.
Coming soon: Adeela continues being worried. The Gang continues to be concerned. Someone tries to help but is thwarted by The Universe, then someone else somehow saves the day. Pizza is served and consumed and smirks are exchanged.
Son of Stuck Funky 
That’s not how it works.
[Note to SOSF staff: please autopost this comment every day until this story line is over]
Link goes to yesterday’s…which, considering the glacial pace of this thing, is probably an ironic commentary on this idiotic comic strip.
If I cared about ANY of these characters, this might make me interested, but I don’t. Adeela least of all, since she was introduced to be a gimmick and nothing more. I’m hoping she gets deported and is never seen in the strip again, but that’s way too much to ask.
Fixed. They’re starting to all look alike to me now.
I wish they’d deport her too. While we’re at it I’d like to see Wally, Rachel, Cory and Rocky move away…far far away. Like how Summer did.
Then I’d thin the herd even more. “That’s too bad” re: Buck. See ya, Ruby. Mindy? Died of something a while back. I’ve never heard of any “Skyler”. Then the Death Of Dinkle prestige arc (parade float disaster). Cliff Anger? More like Cliff Off-Of. Chester? How about way less-ter. If you’re not front and center in at least two arcs a year you’re gone. With anon-o-characters in the background you can be a sloppy as you like and no one cares about inconsistency.
The comic strip is the same as yesterday. Is your link wrong, or is this story moving so slow that it actually stopped?
I can see how immigration has confused Adeela with Ziggy, but I have to say that I did not know that Ziggy had a deportation order. I assume it pertains to his refusal to wear pants…
Lucky for Ziggy, he has stolen the identity of the depressed Zoloft blob mascot, now he collects SSDI every month.
If Wally had any real spine he’d say, “That’s really too bad. Keep in touch, OK?”
Missing Panel Four: Wally at the Valentines concessions stand, stopping to buy a box of Jujyfruits before leaving for the ICE Detention Center. “Well, as long as there’s time before they can arrange a flight for her…,” he thinks to himself.
This is an opportunity! Adilly can go back to whatever quagmire (giggity) country and design pizzerias.
“America rejected me… So now I reject America! And I will never stop until every American institution is under Iraqi control! AHAHAHAHAHA!”
“Aunt Adeela, can we stop building ‘pizzerias’ yet? I had an American-style pizza once and it wasn’t even that good.”
“I think that might have been the point, actually. I’m at least 90% sure the place I worked at in America was a money-laundering pit.”
In case you’re paying attention, ICE, I heard from a good source that Les Moore is an anagram for “I love ISIS”.
I don’t know nothing, but I heard he sometimes shows up for work at Westview High and more often than not can be seen moping around a garage studio.
Deported as soon as a flight can be arranged? She’s going to be deported in hours or days when in reality it would take months. Adeela is entitled to a hearing which would take a long time to schedule
But, you see, facts and logics get in the way of plot convenience.
Hey, Batty has a story to tell and so there is no time to look at facts or logical consistencies. Batty wants to preach and espouse his beliefs, however poorly thought out they may be.
ICE has been empowered to do some seriously effed up stuff, and the DOJ has argued that noncitizens do not have a constitutional right to due process, and the immigration court system is separate from the more familiar federal circuit court system and the Attorney General can do a lot of tinkering with it. So the situation that Adeela has found herself in could indeed proceed quickly and with few of the safeguards we like to think are built into any judicial system. Of course, Batiuk will still manage to screw up how it would proceed in reality.
Right, we should be offended by what is going on. A more nuanced approach would be to point out that these abuses have been going on since 2002. Since then we’ve had Republican and Democrat presidents and yet the abuses continue.
How about having Adeela ask Wally why our foreign policy remains the same no matter who is president? That if we stopped meddling in the Middle East we wouldn’t drive people from their homes, thus forcing them to emigrate to the US or the EU.
Instead we will get a half baked message delivered with a smirk.
What we’ll get will be a denial of widespread, systemic problems. Dillydally will have been arrested by a few bad apples who wanted a Montoni’s pizza and made some bad moves. They will be penalized in some vague way, everyone at Mntoni’s will be happy, and Batiuk’s fanbase will feel assured that the horror stories about ICE are nonsense.
YES. This is the worst thing Funky Winkerbean: it is so poorly researched and written that it trivializes its subject matter.
Somehow this will all boil down to that pizza. “Forget about charging us for the pizza and we’ll drop the charges against her!” Or, “Our team just wanted a pizza, so let’s forget about this abuse of power, m’kay?” Or, Adeela wakes from this absurdist nightmare and swears off pizza forever.
I improved the dialogue in several strips that Adeeler first appeared in. I hope it’s ok to re-post a few here.
These are great! And I see that Les’ Dad teaches at the community college or wherever.
Well, Batiuk could have used Khan, and even would have had the potential for an interesting story, given that Khan was originally presented as a gun-runner. But he got bored with him and packed him off to Kevin-the-Dwarf-Land.
Dig that bank of phones. And Adeela happened to choose the one with her caller ID for Wally to see.
Meanwhile, over in Crankshaft land, Batty rummages through his junk drawer and finds inspiration for a month’s worth of strips. But no laughs there either.
You know, I wasn’t planning to rant about this but I can’t figure Batiuk out… In his world all modern technology is evil, needlessly complicated, and prone to failure — And on the flipside anybody with outmoded old tech (even senior citizens who have every right to still own “old” tech) are subject to endless ridicule. But we’re still supposed to respect his universal decree that all post silver-age comics are trash, and any sci-fi movies made since the original Star Wars is trash?
Les starts an office revolt over modern copiers that limit how many copies an employee can make per month (which has been the case for damn near every state employee *myself included* for 20+ years) and he’s a hero…
Masone wants the world premiere of his billion-dollar comic book movie to be in some backwoods Ohio movie theater from the 1930s and he’s a hero…
Wally bitches and moans and rages over the oppressive, impossible task of registering for his JuCo classes online and he’s a hero…
Dinkle and Funkmeister have their issues respectively getting a new passport and drivers license and they’re good guys screwed by a newfangled system…
and MEANWHILE, Krankenshaaften is getting clowned on air by some random dumbassed reporter (who should be offended for being assigned news this soft and fluffy) for having a landline telephone with a rotary dial (he actually gets legit hipster points for that but IIRC old-school rotary dial phones aren’t compatible with modern fiber optics so it would have to be a modern “retro” rotary dial), for having cassettes and a CD discman (for someone of Krankenshaaften’s age he’d be much more likely to have 8-tracks and vinyl but Batiuk doesn’t dare make jokes about that lest the hipsters swarm all over him like flies on shit.
And now we get to the fax machine… If Batuik ever spent five freaking minutes in a newsroom, he’d know that fax machines are essential because believe it or not the only way some people can send a story idea or business opportunity is through a fax.
And I hope Miss Millennial TV reporter isn’t from Cleveland’s WEWS-TV ABC News 5, since their fax number (216-431-3640) is plainly listed on their own fucking website! The same for WOIO-TV CBS News 19 (216-436-5460)… Need I go on??
“Well gee Adeela did you deliver the pizza? you did. Good. Good luck with everything else.” Hangs up.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody important Becky, now let’s go watch that movie”
Damn! And to think I have to wait in airports forever if my plane is delayed or canceled! Adeela gets a special plane!
Apologies if someone here has suggested this already, but…what if Wally’s not Westview’s only Iraquistan vet who is triggered by Adeela’s presence? What if this whole ICE raid is an elaborate setup engineered my that little shit Cory? It would explain a lot of these plot irregularities…
That would be awesome, and fully in keeping with Cory’s character.
However, it also requires thought and planning, and those make it a no-go.
If only…
I agree with BC. It’d be great, but it’s way, way too complicated for BatHam.
If only ICE actually worked this way.
Remember this isn’t ICE, it’s the POLICE ICE and they operate by a different rulebook
I’m beginning to think that Adeela will get deported. It fits in with the outcome of Lisa’s death penalty case in which, if I recall, there was some question of the condemned’s innocence. TomBa appears to thrive on misery caused by bureaucratic mistakes.
Why did Lisa send someone to death row? Is that what she does to people who won’t watch The Tapes?!
(I thought that she was in Family Law, but I guess that there’s not a lot of point in learning the characteristics and activities of characters in the Batiukverse…)
The “Women’s Legal Clinic” that Lisa worked at lost its funding and closed down (natch) back in the fall of 2003, so she took a job with the state public defenders office where she was immediately placed in the capital cases department (natch) which was run by a jaded misogynist (natch). She was then immediately assigned to the appeal of Danny Madison, who had been convicted of murdering a clerk while holding up a party supply store (natch). Lisa happened to mention the case to Principal Nate, who had a flashback to his service in the Vietnam War (natch) the week before this murder case business started while insulating his home’s crawlspace, a flashback that involved fellow soldier/tunnel rat… Danny Madison (natch). Nate recalled that Madison had suffered a bad head injury from a booby trap (natch) while infiltrating a VC tunnel and Madison confirmed that he had frequent Vietnam flashbacks when Lisa visited him in prison. Lisa spent a week working on Madison’s appeal, which was denied (natch). After being denied by multiple appeals courts (natch) over the course of a month, Ohio’s governor signed the order to execute Madison within a month (natch) just as Lisa prepared to bring the appeal to federal court. The Supreme Court denied to stay the execution (natch) and Lisa decided against appealing to the governor for clemency because it was an election year (natch). Madison was executed just before Christmas (natch), singing “Silent Night” while the lethal injection was being administered (natch). Lisa then quit the public defenders office because she felt the state had used her to speed up Madison’s execution (natch) because her hard work had covered all of his remaining appeal options in a matter of months (natch).
Oh, Act II…
Wait.. So she didn’t appeal to the governor because of a half-assed assumption about an election year??
Did she ever produce any explanation or evidence that might have proven his innocence?
And just because she lost that appeal didn’t mean she had to pout and quit out of protest since God forbid she actually save the NEXT person on death row… Oh who am I kidding? Quitting after a first setback is a Funkyverse trademark!
Lisa argued there was doubt around Madison’s guilt because the eyewitness who identified him as the person running from the scene of the party supply store murder was an elderly woman who was agoraphobic and in need of cataract surgery at the time of the murder an because the fellow inmate who claimed Madison confessed to the murder in prison was given a reduced sentence for snitching. She later argued that his frequent Vietnam flashbacks could have explained why he could not formulate an alibi or a reason why or a timetable of how long he was jogging through the neighborhood near the store after the murders.
Also, because of Lisa’s workload Les had to take Summer to a playdate when it was Lisa’s turn to bring snacks. Much drama ensued.
Oh, and you know what I *REALLY* love? The fact that there is almost certainly a 0.000% chance that Les put this little episode in his bestselling “Lisa’s Story”! Why the hell didn’t Les mention this during those endless weeks of pitch meetings? Hollywood producers would have been jizzing themselves to film the story of a PTSD Vietnam vet who got railroaded by an indifferent legal system to the electric chair! THIS is the shit that has “OSCAR” written all over it! This is the role Masone was born to play!
You know what I would really love? To see Mason play the electric-chair scene without a stunt double.
LOL man oh man, that Lisa was just a melodrama fountain, spraying pathos all over the place on a regular basis. He always gave her the wildest stories.
Holy shit.
It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? And Lisa had tons of arcs like that. It’s impossible to overstate how totally whacked-out Act II really was, back when Batiuk was still all full of piss and vinegar.
I had forgotten all of those off-the-rails details. There is no way that Lisa would ever have had such a prominent role in the Madison case. Death penalty litigation is a very specialized practice. Most states require extensive experience before an attorney is permitted to be court appointed in these matters. Lisa bopping in from a shuttered women’s law clinic most likely wouldn’t even have the training to be court-appointed for a misdemeanor matter let alone the most serious felony on the books.
Wally: “…And you decided to call me instead of your immigration attorney? Sounds like you’re completely fucked, madam!”
Special Agent Sergeant-Captain Konstantinos: “And that was your one phone call!! Come along, Miss Samir Salah al-Aziz Osman Naswal Belhadjali Elchoufani Chang da Silva Mohammed Vettel Dondeti Favre Olatunde Babayale Khabibulin Paul Korea! We’ve got to ‘expatriate’ you back to your nation of origin and by that, we mean ‘Send you skydiving without a parachute 12,000 feet above the Canadian side of Lake Huron!’ You’re Trudeau’s problem now!!
“You’re Trudeau’s problem now!!”
You mean they’re transferring Adeela to “Doonesbury”?
On the other hand, have any of us stopped to consider that the last time Adeela meddled with Rachel’s Big Date, she got an upgrade from “let’s eat at the restaurant we work at every day” to “let’s go see a movie”?
Once Wally hangs up the phone, there’s going to be a smash cut to him sitting with Rachel in a restaurant with tasteful mood lighting and tablecloths.
@billytheskink: Okay, that’s actually quite thin assuming his original defense already brought it up. I’d have thought her case was much stronger than that.
Regardless, nothing excuses her from taking her ball and going home just because she didn’t win a damn-near impossible appeal…
Friendly reminder: regardless of the subject matter in the strip, no politics please. Thank you in advance.
In other news bound to shake the Funkyverse, Alan Moore, author of “The Killing Joke” (which he has long disavowed), in a recent interview stated that, in his opinion, the best iteration of live-action Batman Adam West’s version.
https://comicbook.com/movies/news/alan-moore-the-killing-joke-adam-west-best-batman-/
That Alan Moore’s a caution, ain’t he? Bemoans the current obsession with comic book-based movies and never watches any film based on his own work, saying that they violate the original creators’ intentions for their stories and characters. Meanwhile, he has no trouble turning Alan Quatermain into a senile drug addict, Mina Harker into a bisexual immortal, and Mr. Hyde into the Invisible Man’s rapist.
Or making an extremely NSFW compendium of the sexual escapades of Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy.
No, I didn’t downvote your posts. No, I’m not triggered by your posts. These or otherwise.
Replying to yourself twice in a row with a string of emoticons each time is not a good look.
Just saying.