So, Funky was determined to know who the Pizza Monster was, so he got John to hire someone to hold the Pizza Monster at literal gunpoint? Is John somehow Westview’s version of the veterinarian on Better Call Saul? Did John just go with the first person he knew who owned guns and was willing to commit a felony for Komix Korner store credit?
Oh, and the “joke” of this strip is beyond nauseating. Apparently, there is no such thing as a geek woman. Given that Batiuk has posted super creepy pictures of female cosplayers bending over on his own blog, you’d think he’d know better. But I kind of have the feeling he’s the kind of man who doesn’t think women or girls can be “real geeks”. I would love to forward this strip to Noelle Stevenson, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Amanda Conner, Gail Simone, Fiona Staples, Louise Simonson, Ann Nocenti, Rachel Dodson, Jo Duffy, Babs Tarr, or any of the other women in comics who have had much more successful careers than Batiuk.
I Wish Funky Winkerbean Folded
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Folded like a New York pizza?” Well, it could be worse. He could have erupted like a Montoni Vesuvius.
I thought “Montoni Vesuvius” was what customers left on the restaurant bathroom floors once a few bites of the “specialty of the house” leaves them with two exits, no waiting…if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Funky has some strange Halloween decorations. A fedora and a witch hat with legs?
No doubt this is a classic homage to the actual Luigi’s.
No, they’re not Bathak. This utter ignorance at its best and Batty will think he’s so clever.
It doesn’t even make sense either, as the entire strip is populated with comic book geeks and the women who love them. Name a single Westviewian comic book geek who isn’t married or otherwise paired off. I can think of one, Cody, and he’s not even really a character anymore. John, the biggest comic book dork in town, even managed to steal a war hero’s wife, although in fairness she was in no position to push him away.
Yes, why use the most tired comic/geek stereotype when it doesn’t even hold true in the strip? Did John forget he’s married to a woman?
I wouldn’t be surprised if he has forgotten. Becky could probably count on one hand the number of times they’ve appeared together in the last five… Oh, sorry, Becky.
Also, the joke is demonstrably untrue in real life. Almost every fellow comic geek I know is married with children, and in some cases, grandchildren. And the comic shop we frequent is co-owned by a woman.
He’s also forgetting his own reveal of my avatar, THE ELIMINATOR, as a girl.
And it’s such a gynophobic strip for a guy who spent weeks using an old dingbat as a mouthpiece to screech about misogyny in comics creation a couple years ago.
No matter what he does, he’ll never get it right, because he’s never internalized that women are just people who exist in the same world he does.
What about Owen the Idiot?
And that counter-polisher Cory, who bonded with his girlfriend Rocky over their mutual love of Mr Sponge(bob).
Maybe the takeaway is that girls can love comics/geeks, but comics/geeks will never love them back.
Perhaps, in Batiuk’s classification system, it is the lack of social skills itself that distinguishes the “comic geeks” from the “comic lovers”.
Or perhaps he uses “comic geek” as his baseline negative stereotype, and thinks of anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotype as “one of the good ones”.
Given Batiuk’s own love of comics, you could try to put a psychological angle on this, tying his use of the “comic geek” stereotype to some level of internalized self-loathing…but since I’ve never met the guy personally, I feel like I can’t say anything definite on that front. So I won’t.
His attitude towards comics fans is … ambivalent, to say the least.
It is maybe supposed to read as good-humoured teasing, but (as usual with TB) it comes across more as disdain, as if he is trying to signal that hey, he isn’t like _those_ geeks, he reads the _good_ comics (in the attic while drinking hot chocolate that his mommy brought him).
This is one of those blow-off strips that explains nothing and creates a slew of unanswerable questions instead. Skunk Head John was behind Mr. Monster? How so? And why? Funky endorsed this whole scheme? Is BatYam saying that Ohio pizzas can’t be folded or is he trying to say folding a slice is wrong and/or a regional thing? Mr. Monster is a comic book geek? And shouldn’t it really be “comic book geeks are like kryptonite to women?” instead of the other way around?
What a stupid story. Even when his imagination “runs wild” he’s a confusing plodding bore. The best thing about today’s strip is that it marks the longest possible time between pizza monster strips.
Hey, the Frankenstein’s Creature mask fell from the band box and hit a customer on the head–oh, that’s Skunkhead. My mistake.
But I kind of have the feeling he’s the kind of man who doesn’t think
I think you could have left it right there and been accurate. He’s been in his editor-free desert for so long it has become his oasis.
I have a feeling he pawned his work off on some poor, deluded Kent State student (or more likely a local elementary school student) years ago in exchange for an autographed copy of Lisa’s Story.
Which is now in a milk crate in the closet after being placed on Ebay and generating zero bids. Just last week we were riffing on how FW reads like it was written by a child. This week is even dumber.
“The pizza monster comes in and no one knows who it is and it wants to steal the pizza so the comic book store guy gets Mr. Monster to come with guns but he’s afraid of girls and the pizza monster runs away!”
I’m not even really sure what happened here. I mean if you want to write a pizza monster story then by God just do it, man.
I thought Buck had come back with a Beatle wig on his head and was on his way to try to play “trick or treat” with the Widow Bushka.
That face, and the one in panel two, make me want to put my fist through the comic page. “Look how seriously I take this! Look how droll I am! Look how emotionally invested I am in the question of whether or not the guy I hired to dress as an obscure superhero solved the mystery of who the pizza box monster is! Even though it could have easily been solved a dozen different ways, and I couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger myself!”
Funky Winkerbean is like a bad wrestling show, that’s too dumb or oblivious to notice that the audience isn’t buying what they’re trying to sell.
Pete also went to DSH to get a Xaxian cosplayer minister for the Masone-Cindy and Cliff-Vera “double Starbuck Wedding”, so yeah he seems to be the guy Westviewians turn to when they need to hire a comic geek for an appallingly stupid job.
Good point. I would assume he has a whole old-fashioned Rolodex containing the numbers of every comic book weirdo in a hundred mile radius. Need a Xaxian minister, a gun-toting coward or thirty superhero costumes for a wedding on short notice? Better call John!
Well Funky looks like a bobble head in the last panel.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP._3DYXsTCMXDM9YPSfyor6gHaLJ%26pid%3DApi&f=1
Hoookay. So, to sum up: Someone dresses up in a “costume” of (presumably unused) pizza boxes and enters Montoni’s every Halloween to pick up a pie (do they actually order it?). Funky has no idea who it is.
Rather than invite family and friends over for dinner at the restaurant to ask their opinions and maybe narrow the suspect list down, he gets the owner of the comic book store upstairs to have a nerd dress up as an obscure imaginary character and point (fake?) pistols at the PM in order to…force a confession? Hold them for the police? Shoot them in the box?
PM implies they might be female, which causes the pseudo Mr. Monster to fold “like a New York pizza” (unlike a Montoni’s pizza, whose crust has a density similar to sidewalk concrete and doesn’t fold so much as crack). PM runs off gleefully into the night, seemingly sans pizza.
That’s what those of us who don’t have Apple TV but wanted a comic-themed Halloween story had to settle for this year (Thanks for holding the Great Pumpkin hostage, Apple)?
Also, “women are geek Kryptonite”? What would Ruby Lith have to say about this storyline?
Holy cow, the resolution of this story IS “girls have cooties!” I was just joking about that!
To John and Funky: Relax. Stupidity produces antibodies.
It’s psychosomatic. They need a lobotomy. I’ll get a saw.
You’d think that by now the tribble living on John’s head would have moved on.
Just when you thought that this strip couldn’t get any more juvenile (with apologies to all actual juveniles). . . Will John’s next comment be about “cooties”?
Maybe the Pizza Box Monster is actually Zanzibar The Murder Chimp.
I’ll try to state this simply, but will probably fail. It’s Friday! Hello, Mr Alcohol!
Tom Batiuk for the most part convinces me that people–especially women–who like comic books are losers who should be banished (Batiukished) from any discussion of ideas.
ComicBookHarriet, BatGirl and many females who post here (I apologize for forgetting your names) tell me otherwise. That comic books might be vital and have a future.
Batiuk tries to convince me that women are terrible. CBH, BG and the others say “Hold on.”
Thank you, CBH and BG (“and the rest”) for convincing me otherwise.
Awww. Thanks BC!
In my nerdtime I’ve seen so many awesome geek women of every stripe, and also the same sort of entitled and socially awkward shrieking banshees that give geeks of either gender a bad name. Comic books do have a future. No matter how much the market shrinks, they will always be around because they’re cheap to make relative to movies or cartoons. They’ll always be the testing ground for weird and awesome new ideas, AND the platform for bad authors to try hamfisted social commentary. Anyone who has ever went fishing through the long boxes will realize that the 85% of the comic output of any generation was trash. But when a good story breaks through, it can be magical.
You are most welcome, CBH. And what you’re describing is Sturgeon’s Law, attributed to SF author Theodore Sturgeon. When pressed by a fan who said “Ninety percent of science fiction is crap!” he responded “Ninety percent of EVERYTHING is crap.”
Yup, Sturgeon’s Law! It’s something I like to point out when people bemoan the state of modern comic book stories or writing, that they’re comparing the dregs of the present to the cream of the past.
What percentage of Funky Winkerbean ISN’T crap, I wonder?
An awww thanks from here too!
I still have a box of comics from the 70s and 80s (in the attic, of course) which I shared with my son, rather than tossing out his, as TB would have expected.
I wonder what John stocks in his Komix shop? Clearly he wouldn’t carry Lumberjanes, or Paper Girls, or Saga (it has S-E-X!). Somehow I imagine him having only used copies of Silver Age comics, and bound volumes of newspaper Spiderman strips.
Belated awww thanks from here too, bc! This blog is proof that adversity builds community!
What the holy fuck is this shit??????
Haiku of the Day:
Why’d I pick a geek?
Should have outsourced to the mob.
They can handle broads.
Wasn’t it Montoni’s that folded in New York?
Badum CHING!
BWAWHAWHAWHAW! It’s funny because DSH John should’ve gotten an Elvis impersonator. You know, because of Girls! Girls! Girls!
These inane and unfunny bits and storylines — goddamn, did anyone pick up the littered pizza boxes? — only serve to undercut the creator’s work when he tries to delve into the awards-rich domain of seriousness. Like helmet-wearing Bull at the wheel on Nobottom Road.
So, is Comic Book Batman Dude wearing a Harry K. Dinkle mask in P1? You be the judge.
Clearly, Batty never watched The Big Bang Theory. By the end of the series, three of the four main geeks were happily married, two of them to women hotter than they deserved, and the fourth had been in a few serious relationships. And I guess John, Crazy, Pete and Darin arent geeky enough, since they all have relationships withy members of the opposite sex.
“And I guess John, Crazy, Pete and Darin arent geeky enough, since they all have relationships withy members of the opposite sex.”
The inconsistency is another example of TomBa’s “churn it out so I can get back to my Flash collection” attitude toward this strip.
And when did Becky actually last appear in this strip? Has it been this year?
As long as the Ohio Music Educators Association doesn’t send Batiuk a cease and desist, Becky (and Dinkle) will never be gone for more than a year.
Wait a minute. Dead Skunk Head John “picked a comic book geek” to do all this? He didn’t even do it himself? Who was in the Mr. Monster costume, then? I guess we’ll never know that either.
I want to know who was in the Mr. Monster suit. In fact, I find this a far more interesting question than who the Pizza Monster is. Even in this nine-year-old’s fantasy world, I want to know who is paralyzed by the mere suggestion that an unknown person might a woman – AND has that set of muscles.
So I thought I had no fucks left to give after the “ICE is a actually a bunch of Clinton fanbois” conclusion, but fortunately I found a few for this steaming pile.
Wouldn’t the Pizza Monster’s gender be pretty evident to everyone when she actually spoke?
Remember the good old days when we thought the L.A. wildfire was the low point of 2020? The way things are going, that storyline might not even make the top five list…
Why are all the characters drawn lately to resemble Funky?? Also, has Les joined Lisa in the big pizzaria up in the sky????
You want to see Les again? Be careful what you wish for…
Since I haven’t seen anyone else mention it: the lenses of John’s glasses are colored in a mismatched way. I assume the syndicate would be to blame for that.