Let’s just leave aside today’s weak gag. I want to talk about what’s going on with Crazy Harry’s head.
As a teenager in Act I, Crazy was never seen without his trademark hat: an olive drab, military style fatigue cap, similar to those worn by Fidel Castro or Beetle Bailey. As an Act II young adult, Harry ditched the cap, but kept his Crazy cred by sporting a beard and ponytail. His forelock was noticeable but not distracting. In Act III, he complimented his postal uniform with a jaunty snap-brim cap over longish, but not ponytail length hair. After getting dumped by the P.O., Harry went mostly hatless, and his hair and beard began to gray. After Chuck Ayers reunited with Batiuk, Harry’s hair at last went totally gray, and that forelock has taken on the appearance of a casque, the bony, keratin-covered protuberance on the head of a cassowary:
Son of Stuck Funky 
Wait, Crazy is just asking this now? What kind of conversation IS this? So the reno has already started? Is it even the same day here? Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?
In around two months he’ll revisit this one and I’ll see the word “reno” again and I’ll shudder. I’ve grown to hate that “word” so much that I’ll never be able to look at a map of Nevada again. “Reno 911” reruns are out of the question and I’ll never be able to listen to Johnny Cash’s “Live At Folsom Prison” again either. So thanks for that, Tom.
I might be with you on Reno, but never allow anyone to disrupt your enjoyment of the Man in Black!
How much better would this strip be if Harry ultimately completed his transformation into a Corythosaurus?
Sorry, Billy, didn’t mean to step on your paleontological toes with my Cory comment below.
Well, you know what they say about great minds… that they certainly don’t write or draw Funky Winkerbean.
You know, Funky, it is YOUR house. You’ll have to live with the results. And pay for them. You could get involved. Just saying.
A cassowary? Granted that this strip is for the birds, but wouldn’t a dinosaur like the chirostenotes be a better choice for this strip? After all they’re as fossilized as these characters.
Maybe the crest on Harry’s head is used to signal family members and for mating purposes, like the one on the head of Corythosaurus.
Did Battyuk spill his hot chocolate on his original script for today’s strip and have just a few minutes to write something in the balloons before the FedEx driver arrived to pick it up? “Fixer-upper/fixer downer” isn’t even a weak pun, it’s a non-pun, the total absence of humor.
And to ditto Epicus above, this is the fifth straight strip with Harry in a black sweater and white collared shirt underneath eating pizza and drinking a soda while Funky stands there in a blue shirt under his Montoni’s maternity apron, which implies this is all one ongoing conversation. Yet today Harry asks how the “R-word” is going, suggesting at least 24 hours has elapsed since yesterday. Can TB do nothing to suggest passage of time: background characters, new clothes, a coffee cup instead of soft drink glass, anything?
Cobwebs, growing thicker in each panel. Or show the moon through a window, its phase changing every day. Or a flock of geese migrating–south in the first panel, north in the second, south again in the next. Or the glaciers returning to grind Westview into oblivion, but that might take a full Sunday strip.
It’s another one of those brain-warping Batiuk mind puzzles he cooks up in that studio of his. There’s no reason to believe that this isn’t the same ongoing conversation, yet it can’t be.
I had the same questions about continuity. Monday, Holly is out choosing countertops. The next three days, the guys discuss renos and women’s attitude towards same. Then today, “So…how’s the reno going?” And Funky says it’s been difficult, but not how or why. Doubtful the reno would be in progress if Holly’s stull shopping, right? Hey, you try filling up 6 or 7 panels every damn week!
I mean he could have plopped a “two weeks later” bubble in there and changed their clothes or something, because as written it implies that the reno started DURING this conversation, which while not impossible sure does seem very odd. The impossible part is Funky expressing mild annoyance re: living with the reno, which couldn’t have even happened yet.
Something as simple as Funky looking drearily at the phone as he hangs it up would be enough to imply the passage of time and establish a point at which Crazy’s question could be at least somewhat plausible to be asked.
But no. We’re not too far off from a proto-strip that can just be rerun every day:
Panel 1: “hi funky”
Panel 2: “thing good?”
Panel 3: Funky – “no! thing bad!”
You just made me see Funky dressed as Lurch: “Thing bad!”
Sooo much Dinosaur Lore… in comments today…
inner paleontologist child mind… squeeing.
What is TB’s fascination with creating his own vocabulary that no one else on the planet uses. Vendos, Reno, Sportos, and the ever popular “I stand in line” are lines no one except TB says in 2021. Making up words doesn’t make you “hip” or “rocking” or “hep.” It makes you just plain sad.
I don’t know why everyone’s complaining about continuity in this strip, I mean, it’s worth throwing the rules out for today’s fantastic joke!
I’m trying to figure out what TomBa intends with this week’s offering. It comes off as an attempt at the gag-a-day format but there’s nothing remotely funny today. So is he trying to reveal some aspect about Funky and/or Harry? Sadly, his characters have no depth and the dialogue is opaque bordering on bleak (par for the strip), so there’s nothing to reveal. It’s as if he took the quip about “Seinfeld” being about nothing literally (Incidentally, that’s not the original concept of “Seinfeld”. It was pitched as a show about how a comedian develops his material from his life experience.)
He intends to fill three panels a day for six day and get paid for it. The end. And it looks like the standards for doing so are getting lower and lower all the time.
Today’s title made me think of this.
And in today’s Funkyblog entry, Batiuk is still patting himself on the back for aging his characters. This time it’s football coach Jack Stropp. He was fired in 1996, made a couple appearances in odd jobs, “but, then after that, (is gone) forever . . . I think.”
Jeezus, Batiuk, how much do you need to humiliate your jock characters? Billytheskink collected the 1996 Jack Stropp finale and shared it here awhile back. https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2016/11/06/mister-e-man/#comment-59896
Now THAT is a humiliation conga. Kevin McCarthy at the end of UHF didn’t get it that bad.
And it gets worse. Batiuk claims not to remember what happened after that, but I do: THEY SPILLED HIS ASHES. On the 1 yard line of the football stadium. Jack Stropp’s dying wish was for his ashes to be carried across the goal line, to symbolize the championship he never won. Bull Bushka, and the new coach were supposed to do this. But they spilled the urn on the 1 yard line. His remains couldn’t even get a touchdown against no opposition.
Can’t win for real. Can’t win on a technicality. Can’t keep the trophy. Can’t get any respect from coworkers after a lifetime of service. Can’t get a clear sky, or any attendees, for his retirement speech. Can’t get a single point in this last game. Can’t get a respectable job. After he dies, he can’t get his ashes handled the way he wants. Can’t get a symbolic victory in a against no opposition. Can’t get any dignity in life or death. Can’t get a dignified burial. Can’t even be remembered for an un-dignified burial. And in a bit of meta-narrative, his creator says he doesn’t even remember him dying.
Fuck this comic strip.
Looking at that final strip in the 1996 series, when he’s having wistful memories of his career…apparently he was almost burned at the stake? And this memory somehow fell into the “wistful” category?
That blog entry is simultaneously pathetic and infuriating. I know his characters are one dimensional but even with that said they don’t deserve to be dumped on like that.
But the most interesting part of it is that it supplanted one of his multi-paragraph “Flash Friday” posts. What’s up with that?
Beautiful.