Apparently Dinkle has suffered from these band turkey dreams nightmares leading up to Thanksgiving every year, even unto a decade or more into his retirement. Harriet knows that, now that Thanksgiving’s behind them, Harry’s PTSD (Post Turkey Sale Dementia) will start to lessen. Unfortunately, her “sugarplums” reference has triggered in Harry’s dream consciousness a truly nightmarish scenario, in which the box he carries door to door is crawling with large spiders!
Plum Nasty
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
If you really think about it this is probably the best gag of the week, which is one of the most depressing sentences I’ve ever written. It’s just so weird how he’s turned one of Dinkle’s lifelong passions into this burden that haunts his dreams and influences literally every single family interaction he has, but it was inevitable I suppose. It’s almost as if BatScam is saying “heh heh, remember those dumb band turkey gags I pounded into your brains for five hundred years? Man, they sure were stupid, you know?” like we were all in on the gag all along, which is, uh, debatable at best.
Coming soon: haunted by the fact that he only owns two shirts, both of which he wears every single day without fail, a despondent John begins to question whether he’s thrown away his entire life on comic books. The answer turns out to be that yes, he did.
It’s not so much the best gag this week as the only gag this week. There’s a discernible setup and punchline. So much of Funky Winkerbean is just banal conversations that are of no interest by themselves and don’t contribute to any larger story.
Good point. When there’s an actual joke in a FW strip, no matter how terrible the joke is, it stands out. Lots of his “gags” are really just references to old gags thus they make no sense unless viewed in a larger context. I mean if (purely hypothetically) you just started reading FW this year you’d have no idea why this peculiar-nosed man is dreaming about selling turkeys. And I envy that hypothetical reader, I really do.
I wish Mrs. Dinkle had worked “The Twelve Days of Christmas” into her attempt to comfort Stürmbandführer Dinkle. Imagine a dozen days of Harry going door-to-door with ever-increasing burdens of maids a-milking, lords a-leaping and Batiuk laying goose eggs
The suckatude of this week is high, even for this brain-dead comic. To think, for a year he knew these “comics” would appear this week, and yet, he still couldn’t improve them. That takes some weak ass skills right there.
More evidence to support billytheskink’s theory that Dinkle is actually Wally Winkerbean Jr. in the year 2055. In panel two, he seems to have married Peppermint Patty.
“Well, tonight you won’t have to worry about any band turkey dreams. You can just have visions of me in my comfiest flannel nightgown. Grrrrowwwll!”
Really, just because it’s the day after Thanksgiving has no bearing on whether Dinkleberg still has turkey-shilling nightmares; I’ve had winter dreams in June and so forth.
Also, did anyone else think–as I did–that sugarplums were made with actual plums? Imagine my surprise to read that they’re just hard candies, a kind of “hardened sugar ball” which “often surrounded a seed, nut, or spice.” That being said, what ARE those spider/star things on the outside of the box supposed to be?
I think the sugar plums are just…sparkly. So sparkly that they sparkle right through the cardboard. Or maybe it’s Christmas magic, I dunno.
Really, just because it’s the day after Thanksgiving has no bearing on whether Dinkleberg still has turkey-shilling nightmares; I’ve had winter dreams in June and so forth.
Hell, I still have high school nightmare dreams and I’ve been out of high school for decades. I suspect I’ll have the “finding out the term project is due tomorrow and I didn’t even know about it” and “I have a final exam tomorrow and I never attended class through the entire term” recurrent nightmares for the rest of my life.
Dinkle grimaces at the thought of sugarplums but was honored to have a raisin candy bar named after him? This guy is not human.
Another old arc I completely forgot about. Didn’t he go to Belgium or something?
He did. The company that made the band candy gave Dinkle a special award for his record-setting sales. It happened in Belgium. Now if he’d gone to Germany, he could have visited Nuremburg for a proper recognition of his sales.
I remember it only because it was the arc that I felt was the most punishing for interesting discussion here. For arcs that kill discussion here, that sequence was the ne plus ultra.
In his conscious mind he relishes fundraising, but his dreams haunt him with the truth. Door to door fundraising is just trick or treating for rejection.
Help me out guys. Is that Holly or Crazy Harry’s wife in bed with Dinkle? They all act the same and are now looking the same…
So what happened to the chocolate bar dreams? Didn’t Dinkle get a freaking award from the Belgian government in Bruxelles for selling a zillion candy bars?
It wasn’t for selling the most candy bars. It was for BUYING the most candy bars.
https://images.app.goo.gl/TSJJnkgGvrFiLYMk6
Which is actually a very backhanded compliment. Congratulations, Dinkle, you’re the easiest mark on Van Houten Chocolate’s marketing list! Year after year, nobody grossly overestimates their needs and wastes their school’s money on unsold product like you do! Westview isn’t even that big; how is he outspending these massive high schools in Texas that have 15,000-seat football stadiums? Why wasn’t spending authority taken away from him years ago? It’s insane when you think about it.
You’d think this would make Dinkle question what he’s done with his life, or at least if he needs to rethink his fundraising approach. But we all know Funky Winkerbean doesn’t work that way. Dinkle is awesome! Dinkle gets to go to Europe! Dinkle gets an award! And Dinkle gets a product named after him, even though he has one in real life. Just another awful character who isn’t even good at their job and gets endless, unearned praise for it.
Having it both ways, Part Gazillion: A while back, Dinkle traveled to Europe to receive an award recognizing his ability to move fund-raising candy (even though he’s been retired for years). This week: Fund-raising, like this strip, is a nightmare.
Just to show what’s possible in the funny papers, look at this trippy old Garfield arc from 30 years ago: https://thehundreds.com/blogs/content/garfield-abyss-reflections-scariest-garfield-comic-strip-series-ever
For crying out loud, how boring is Harry Dinkle that all he can dream of is knocking on doors and getting lame rejections?
Those strips are so striking because they are such an utter departure from the standard tone of Garfield, both before and after. FW, on the other hand, has been tackling “serious” issues for so long now that there is no longer any shock value in doing so. And it mixes its “serious” material with gags in such a way that I’m not even sure what tone you would be trying to violate.
Now that I’m thinking about it, we get weird, Twilight Zone-esque interludes from FW pretty frequently: Funky getting in a car accident that seems to catapult him back in time, the Act I cast appearing at the class reunion, underground civilizations, jogging robots, murder chimps…
“Ha ha! There’s spiders on the box! What a funny photoshop job! I’m going to go check what the box actually looked like in the real strip and- WHAAAAAAT?!”
I’m guessing that if anybody does buy band fundraiser food from Westview High, they don’t make that mistake twice.