Haha, because everyone confuses bands and football teams, they’re basically the same thing, right? I’m assuming this is supposed to be a “pun” on alternate meanings of “scoring” (which isn’t funny even if that is the case, a word can mean two things, that’s not automatically funny), but even if Batiuk was determined to do this strip there’s a much better way to go about it.
“Scoring for smaller bands”. “Not with groupies”.
And for all that Batiuk talks about how his strip transcends the stereotypes of the art form, or whatever crap he says on his blog these days, strips like this are just an insult to the art form. Literally no art is needed. This kind of “humor” is appropriate for an AOL email chain. It doesn’t need art at all. When your sequential art gains literally nothing from having art, you’re doing it wrong.
Scoreless
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
There’s no play like wordplay. No, seriously, I mean it. There’s just nothing you can compare a gag this bad to, it truly stands alone. “Scoring”…sigh.
This whole strip should be scored with a very rough grade of sandpaper.
^
This Batty. This is how you pun.
Geez, is Battyuk using an animation cel overlay of Dinkleberg and Becky and plopping it over the day’s lame musical bon mot designed to appeal to a microscopic sub-section of the reading public?
Also, is the guy in the green shirt one of Bec’s students who finally found their way out of the convention center lobby? He’s drawn to look about 30 or so, so I’m assuming that’s the case (Nevermind. I just checked and that token black male wears glasses. Guess they’re all still in the lobby.).
I laughed at today’s strip because it looks like someone’s first attempt at a meme generator.
Green-shirt guy has come to participate in the amused sign-gazing, despite the fact that he’s standing at a 90-degree angle to the signs and couldn’t possibly read then.
Funky Winkerbean… Not to be confused with a good comic strip.
Isn’t this the exact same art he used last year, only with different {{shudder}} puns?
Isn’t this the exact same thing he accuses those “lesser strips” like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes of doing? Continuing without changing?
I think you’re right about the art being a duplicate of a strip from last year’s OMEA gag-a-day offerings. Today’s strip is quintessential TomBa mailing it in.
You mean it’s postage dupe?
I actually checked just now because I was half-convinced that he was using the exact same drawings of Dinkle and Becky as YESTERDAY.
Oh great, another panel of these two dullards smirking at a sign. Comic art!
“And anybody attending this session likely won’t be scoring WITH the football team.”
Aaaaaaayyyyyyoooooooooooo
In panel #2 we meet the ghost of Bull, wearing a dented football helmet.
“Wooo-o-o-o! Is this the session for smaller football teams? Woo-o-o-o!”
Check out the goatee on the guy behind Dinkle. I wonder if Lord Satan is a presenting a talk or is simply an attendee?
Goatee Guy looks like Les to me…in other words, you’re right. Definitely Satan.
At least Becky’s smile isn”t weirdly high up on her face, like it was yesterday.
Hmm…now that I’m looking more closely, there are a lot of differences between yesterday’s Becky and today’s Becky. The shape of her nose, the thickness of her neck…
This gag sounds like it was written by a non-English speaker. It makes absolutely no sense. I don’t even know what to say about it besides that.
Commandment 4: if the joke doesn’t fit, make it fit.
So we’re just going to forget that busload of students she arrived with never existed??
Yes! Yes, we are. The students, the app, and the goateed man from earlier in the week are all gone now, never to be seen or spoken of again. At least not until next year’s OMEA, when they will again deliver a punch line or be used as a prop, and then disappear. There is no story here. Nor any jokes that even an Ohio band director would find funny.
By the way, I see that Funky has an eyepatch in the banner, which must mean we’re going back to the cataract surgery plot next week. Which in turn means that Batiuk put that plot on hold to take us to this damned band convention. Say that out loud to someone sometime: “the comic strip paused the cataract surgery plot to do the annual band directors’ convention plot.” Because that actually happened.
What even is Funky Winkerbean anymore? It’s not even a soap opera strip, because it can’t do soap operas right either.
FW is whatever floats Batty’s interests at any given time…and this is subject to change often!
Batty and his editor have cushy jobs, that’s for sure.
BWAWHAWHAWHAWHAW! It’s funny because Todd’s applying the second gag of the comedians’ rule of three. Can’t wait for tomorrow’s strip!
AOL email you say? Hmmm. I guess we better alert Pluggers.
If all they wanted to do was wander up and down the halls smirking at funny signs, they could have stayed home and looked at the convention’s Facebook page! Who will answer for this waste of public education funds?!
Just out of curiosity, what do you suppose a “smaller football team” would be? Fewer players (somehow) or made up of midgets?
I thought maybe it was a 7-man or 8-man football team, but that’s more of a Texas and great plains thing.
This just in from the Funkyblog: Tom Batiuk has a brand new post congratulating himself some more!
If someone (in 1996-98) had offered me a million dollars to pretend that (aging his characters past high school) was just a dream
Well, Batiuk certainly didn’t have a problem using the “it was all just a dream” copout in later stories.
and to return my creations to their Westview High setting, I swear I wouldn’t have done it
Maybe he should have. Because the end of Act I is largely when Funky Winkerbean turned from a decent gag-a-day strip into the inept Peyton Place it is now.
now I was writing about my grown-up kids out in the world. Having my characters grow up afforded me a cornucopia of ideas and opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise been available
Serious question: who ever complained about this? Aging the characters out of high school into adult lives was a perfectly valid creative choice. And as I often argue, no one seems to have ever stopped Tom Batiuk from doing anything he wanted. It wasn’t a big deal. Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side were actually retired by 1996, Dilbert had taken off, and actual comic strip controversies like Lawrence’s coming out in FBOFW, had already happened.
Once I’d started the clock ticking, the passage of time became the current in the river that carried all of these stories forward.
Except for the unexplained time skips, people from the same high school graduating class being vastly different ages, Ed Crankshaft being over 100, and so on.
Not only is aging your characters not nearly as important as Tom Batiuk thinks, but he doesn’t even do it well!
Things began to take place that for better or worse
Yes, he actually said that.
would forever alter the lives of my characters (I said, trying my best not to sound like…
Oh, so he’s actually doing a bit of self-aware meta-humor here! Carry on:
…the latest Marvel Comics superhero crossover event.
:HEADDESK:
Translation: “I ran out of jokes for my characters, so I thought I’d change them and see if I could come up with new jokes. I couldn’t, so I said the heck with it and just started opening the dictionary.”
Yeah. Aging the characters was never the problem. The problems began when he ran out of things to do with them besides giving them diseases and failed businesses.
Plus, if “Funky Winkerbean”had remained stuck in time, it wouldn’t have fared much differently in the long run. It would have been “Luann.”
Diseases, failed businesses, and publishing contracts. Don’t forget those.
And Luann is an interesting comparison. Supposedly the characters have grown to junior college age, but they still act like 14-year-olds in every possible way. It has the same problem as Funky Winkerbean, whose characters have reached their 50s without ever growing the hell up.
Agreed… As a longtime (former) Luann reader and daily commenter, I thought graduating the legacy cast was a HUGE mistake since the strip has always been G-rated and there’s only so many things you can write about before getting to some gritty real-life college issues (tuition, loans, academic failure, cheating, uncertainty about the future, sex, alcohol, light drugs, hard drugs, rape, racism, sexism, Greek life, college sports, etc.)
And not only that, but Evans kept inventing excuses to keep almost the entire core legacy crew around when he had this golden opportunity to ship most of them off to far-away colleges and bring in some new, fresh, god forbid interesting characters, so the storylines have been generally unreadable, and not in that “so bad it’s good” kind of way… If y’all ever search the archives over at the Curmudgeon, you’ll find plenty of my classic rants…
But I get it — Authors age… You saw the severe dropoff in quality when Lynn Johnston’s real-life kids grew up, just like when Evans’ daughter (who is actually writing the strip these days) grew up… And as much as Batiuk wishes he could reboot and start all over again with the cast in 9th grade, it would suck horribly since he is 100% out of touch with the mind of the average 21st century high schooler… And even if he wanted to base the reboot in 1974 or whatever, it would still suck because all the 70s gags would be cliché and lame to us, and indecipherable to younger readers…
Hey there’s Les and Holly in the back there