I have no idea what a “sanctuary pizzeria” is supposed to be. Once again though, we see someone stick their tongue out while doing menial tasks, it looks just as stupid as it did before.
And once again, it’s Montoni’s and Adeela is front and center. Why? Easy.
Adeela is one of two characters in this strip who is to be treated with kid gloves, whose beliefs and thoughts are always to be held in high regard, while everyone else gets kicked in the guts and has to say they like it. She’s here so Batiuk can get awards for “inclusion” and “diversity” and that’s the only reason she’s here at all. Nothing is ever done regarding her character except bringing up her religion, and that’s just so everyone can tiptoe around it.
(Note: I have nothing against “diversity” among characters. But they have to be characters first.)
Well, this strip is never going to win awards, because the person behind the “writing” can never come up with good characters or a convincing scenario that would appeal to anyone. So, yeah, Adeela will be in every Montoni’s strip from now on, because someone has to have an award they’re really desperate to give away, and one of these days that person might read this strip.
There’s one other character who is treated the same way, and that’s Les Moore. If that doesn’t give you incentive to hate Adeela, nothing will.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Adeela’s nose becomes more like a casaba melon with each passing day.
After tasting a Montoni’s pizza Quasimodo fled to the roof, shouting “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”
Yup, because at “the end of the day”, as they say, Adeela is a “Muslim immigrant” and that’s it. She’s not the “wisecracking Muslim immigrant” or the “wise Muslim immigrant” or even the “jittery Muslim immigrant”. She’s just a plain old Muslim immigrant and that fact shapes her every interaction with everyone she crosses paths with.
By now Wall-eyes should know how Adeela feels about Christmas, serving haram foods and pretending that Les Moore is a welcome presence in anyone’s life. But then that would require Batiuk to write characters who like one another.
Unseen Panel Two: Tony hangs garland in the front window, looks down, and exclaims “Hey, what’s this goofy “All colors, genders, races welcome” rainbow sign doing here? Do you want the place to be overrun with Albanians?”
On a related note, what the heck is a “sanctuary pizzeria,” anyway? If Adeela had just said “Montoni’s is my sanctuary” or “my place to learn about America and her people” (assuming we ever see a customer in the place), it might have made some sort of sense.
I’m guessing she means ‘sanctuary pizzeria’ like some cites are ‘sanctuary cities’. Meaning she’s still in the country illegally, and if she takes one step from the greasy confines of her brownstone prison, ICE will scoop her up again .
This seems like one of those conversations where the second person’s statement doesn’t quite follow from the first person’s statement. “Let me know if you, as a Muslim, feel uncomfortable participating in Christmas activities.” “Are you kidding? A restaurant has shielded me from deportation!”
I guess the idea is that she will happily do anything to help Montoni’s, or be part of Montoni’s, because of her bottomless gratitude. I suppose if Funky told her that taking her hijab off would increase salad dressing sales, she’d do that too.
Adeela will never remove her hijab. Faith has nothing to do with it, unless you mean everyone’s faith in the artist’s inability to draw a new and different version of a character.
I read it the same way Harriet. Apparently Batty is ok with illegal immigration.
On second thought, nah, he doesn’t care. Pre covid times this was the outrage of the day and he just wanted some of the action in the hopes he gets an award or an interview. But his laziness works against him and a year later nobody cares.
Thirded. “Sanctuary cities” were a big news item 2-3 years ago, so it makes sense that a forced, badly worded, incoherent turn of the phrase would show up in Funky Winkerbean now.
Another thing: “sanctuary city” isn’t a compliment. It’s a perjorative term used by opponents of immigration to describe cities that, in their opinion, are too tolerant of it. It’s a slur. Yes, slurs can be reappropriated by the slurred party, and turned into a positive term. But I don’t think that’s what Adeela’s trying to do here. And Tom Batiuk is simply too poor a writer to pull off that kind of subtext.
“Wally, why do you keep asking me the same basic things about Islam over and over when you did a deployment in Afghanistan AND you have a daughter who is a Muslim?! If anything, maybe you should have warned me about the Pizza Monster, because I’m pretty sure that guy had a gun.”
“Wally, why do you keep asking me the same basic things, despite us knowing each other for the past ten years?”
Wally did deployments (and was captured in) both Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I like comic strip characters that weren’t captured.”
“Captured” — More like “Trying to defect”…
Nobody gets fuckin’ captured by the enemy *twice*…
Adeela says this now, but she’ll take any excuse to bail once Tony sets the jukebox up to play Lou Monte’s “Dominick the Donkey (The Italian Christmas Donkey)” on a loop.
Look, as long as it’s not The Christmas Shoes, we good.
Thank you. Now that I have heard “Dominick” once, I hope to never hear it again.
Meant to upvote billy
Whoah! is this the Fungyverse? Wreaths and garlands are green, not their usual, mournful black.
Never mind: clumsy wordsmithing like “sanctuary pizzeria” that we are in the domain of the lard of langwidge.
The role of Adeela is played my Mopey Pete.
FFS. Having spent 2 Christmas seasons in the ME, I can tell you that the locals decorated and did ‘Christmas-like’ activities as well. It’s not against Islam to hang lights.
“There’s one other character who is treated the same way, and that’s Les Moore. If that doesn’t give you incentive to hate Adeela, nothing will.”
In order to hate Adeela, I would have to care, and I just can’t muster that kind of energy.
Batty is the anti-Dickens when it comes to character development. There is nothing to like or hate because his characters are all so flat and boring.
George Carlin once observed that it’s possible to make sentences that have never been spoken before in the history of the English language.
I submit that “sanctuary pizzeria” is one of those.
Try it in Google. If you search for that phrase, with the quote marks, the #3 hit is this thread – which is 11 hours old as of right now. Other than that, the only matches are random jumbles of words, or cases where the two words are adjacent but part of different phrases.
Congratulations, Tom Batiuk: you invented a phrase that no one has ever used before. And no one will ever use again. Unless they are arrested in a case of mistaken identity in a pizza delivery sting, and their employer calls a former United States president to get them out of jail. Then they’ll say “this place is my sanctuary pizzeria!” But that’s it.
Some years back, that was a pastime on the internet, finding a phrase or sentence that occurred only once. Googlewhacking, was it?
I came up with a couple on my old blog – “one lonely washtub” and “pubertal thigh trauma” if I remember correctly.
Just for fun, I translated the tweet from Tony Montoni in the sidebar.
“See how we are drawn in today’s strip. Especially how he draws me! I look like a lunatic.”
You know what? This should be a good strip. There are two great sentiments here: Wally wanting to respect Adeela’s religion, and Adeela being grateful to the people who rescued her from a nightmare.
But that stupid phrase just ruins it.
All Adeela had to say was something sincere. “Being at Montoni’s will always feel right!” Bang. Perfect. It took me 5 minutes to come up with that.
So Walleys sign in the strip from a few weeks ago says welcoming all beliefs. How about people who believe in blowing up pizzerias?