It always kind of amazes when Batiuk does this kind of thing. I think he is the absolute last person who should be making fun of anyone else for being in a cloud, considering he can’t even get his own character’s names right anymore. Or when he’s just finished his third consecutive day of “two uninteresting, unattractive people stare silently at signs”.
I don’t quite get what Becky and Harry’s expressions signify here. Are they both just baffled and confused about what “the cloud” is? That’s probably it.
I wonder if the OMEA even knows they’re featured in this strip anymore. If they did, I can’t imagine they’d like being associated with it. I have to imagine the main emotions it elicits in readers are “nausea”, “annoyance” and “bafflement as to how it still exists”, which usually aren’t what you want people to think of when they think of you.
Clouds and Clods
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
Yes, yes, Tom, vey witty. Benchley or Woollcott couldn’t have done better. But…WHERE ARE THE WESTVIEW STUDENTS THAT BECKY SHLEPPED DOWN TO COLUMBUS, THEN LEFT IN THE CONVENTION CENTER LOBBY?
And a woman whose hair is a cloud walking into the session. How appropriate.
The expressions on everyone’s faces are “abject misery.” Tell us again, Batiuk, how you are moving comic strips into a new, uncharted realm.
As always, they secretly hate the thing they love the most, like how Les hates writing, Boy Lisa hates his family and Cindy hates herself. There is no path to true happiness in the Funkyverse, it’s all just one wry, weary slog toward an inevitable death, a really quick one IF you’re lucky. But you probably won’t be.
Judy Collins facepalms because it’s Batiuk who really doesn’t know clouds at all.
“Welcome to Session 203 – Teaching Music Using the Cloud. I’m your host, Berry Cirrus. So, by using the cloud, you teach the same way as you always have done, except that you can also do so remotely. That’s it. That’s literally it. It’s exactly the same otherwise. Any questions? … Anyone? … C’mon, people, we have 59 minutes left to go…”
Based on this site’s current title headshot, what are the odds that Sunday’s strip will be a one-panel opus set in the Komix Korner, with an eye-patched Funky bounding up the steps and pretending to be Nick Fury?
He looks like he’s ripped on some heavy-duty drugs. I wonder what it took to sedate him, and if his head will be in the upright and locked position when he lands.
And what are the odds that we’ll see that bandaged eye at least ten times in the next two weeks? Tom Batiuk loves his injury fetish objects.
That’s not even a good eyepatch. A pirate-style eyepatch, with a strap that goes around your head and is contoured for the shape of the eye so as to ensure protection, is about three dollars at your friendly local Walgreen’s.
It’s like they’re as disgusted by the gag as I am, an “artistic choice” BatYam kind of specializes in. “Look how awful my jokes are”…yes Tom, we are aware. Dear God, are we aware.
Again an example of a total lack real effort to tell any kind of story.
“Teaching Music Using the Cloud”…as opposed to “Teaching Music Using In-House Computing”? Just because it’s online doesn’t mean it’s “the cloud”. But that’s the kind of mistake that an actual music teachers’ convention could plausibly make, so I guess I can’t be too picky about that.
I remember when Bach’s ghost appeared and had a fit over the invention of the electric git-tar, so, yeah..,
Another joke that’s undone by reality. Teachers didn’t take seminars to learn how to teach remotely because of COVID; they had to figure it out as they went. The wordplay doesn’t work either. Something like “teaching kids via remote/teaching kids to put down the remote” would make more sense.
Would have been something Batty could have used if he weren’t so lazy.
I wanted to resurrect the discussion from yesterday regarding the latest BattyBlog entry. https://funkywinkerbean.com/wpblog/match-to-flame-142/
Banana made some great comments as usual. Mention was made of other strips like FBoFW. I actually think Johnston did a better job than Batty when it came to aging her characters. FBoFW definitely had it’s cringeworthy moments, but overall there was a logical flow to the strip. Sure she was chasing awards by bringing extra misery in, but even that was better done than Batty’s crap.
Also, she knew when to quit. She tried to keep going but realized it just wasn’t working.
Wow, never thought I would be here defending Johnston, but here I am. Amazing what this strip and those bragging BattyBlog posts will do to your mental health.
The subject came up a day prior and I said it then: Aging your characters is pointless if they don’t mentally mature as well.
Everyone who has graduated high school still acts like high school matters, believe that things which happened in high school still matter, like the things they liked in high school and are still what interests them now. Darin and Jessica have been newlyweds for a decade. Summer has attended college for as long of a period, and still obsequiously took on a basic gift wrapping job this last Christmas because someone else decided that for her and she obviously has no way to decline the offer. Bull quite literally died wearing his high school football helmet. Cindy and Kayla take a moment when they’re alone together for Cindy to mention something she and Les did some forty fucking years ago when both were in high school, of which nothing of consequence happened, and Kayla’s reaction to the inference is to be deer-in-head-lights agog at the revelation.
To apply that same kind of logic to something like Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin would be depicted as a forty year old who grouses at being a wage slave in some basic office job, envisions dinosaurs and Spaceman Spiff to represent his struggles with coworkers and clients, grotesquely lurches away from Susie if she wants a hug, and tells the days woes to Hobbes as he goes to bed each night.
Yet somehow, if that actually happened, Watterson’s strip would still be in print and allow him to continue to have a comfortable life. Nobody would be able to explain why, but it would.
Well said. FW characters don’t make believable adults because they’re so rooted in childish things like high school and comic books. They don’t have adult conflicts. They don’t react to problems like adults would. Even if aging your characters was a virtue – which it’s not – FW has only aged them physically.
Lacking smirks notwithstanding, I called it: the comedians’ rule of three! Now can we expect to see this arc continue to find out what happened to the students, or in typical Bottackian fashion, leave a thread loose for several months?
Loose threads? Got it! The robots from Murania came and “rescued” the students, who are now (thanks to the wonders of magic tunnels) slogging through ankle-deep ash in the ruins of Los Angeles.
And it turns out the robots are being led by Becky’s mom.
Speaking of slow moving stories. I took one month to get here but things are finally getting interesting over on Mary Worth. For those who don’t normally read this strip, now is a good time to jump in.
It’s been months since Batiuk even attempted a longer story. “Funky Winkerbean” is in the midst of its longest run in probably twenty years, of looking just like a joke-a-day strip. So of course Batiuk chooses now to fill the blog with bragging about his amazing long-form story-telling powers. It’s just bizarre.
Not just bragging – copy and pasting bragging which he wrote several years ago.
If the subject is aging and maturity: Has the author matured in any way from then until now?
But if it’s true that he writes the strip a year in advance (and it must be, because what else could explain the absence of COVID), then his blog probably relates to what he’s doing now, which we’ll get to see in a year. It isn’t really surprising that he wouldn’t think about that disconnect.
The only problem with that theory is that the blog post is a itself a reprint from the Introduction to Volume 9 of The Complete Funky Winkerbean. And that “Match To Flame” post bumped his regular “Flash Friday” installment to Saturday.
“Students are so lazy,” say the teacher and the chaperone who left the entire band club in the lobby and haven’t seen or heard from them since.