Day three of Jessica hanging up her coat and getting more and more worried about her marriage, only this time her worry is stoking over into rage. Let’s try spitting, that’s a good trick!
It reminds me of this video of a person using her dog’s favorite words. The dog reacts each time one of them pops up. It’s very cute and it’s basically the polar opposite of today’s thing. Jessica reacts to anything Dullard says with increasing puzzlement and anger–when he’s not talking to her.
This is not a healthy marriage. This is the portrait of a neurotic who is rapidly becoming psychotic.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Jess’ cheer squad rival is back!
Nah, that’d be too interesting.
Was the rival supposed to be black? If Batiuk plans to turn Darrin into his second avatar, replacing Creepy Les, that would make sense. Kill off Jessica and replace her with a black chick, and let her become stepmother to Darrin’s child.
Of course putting glasses on Darrin makes sense, too. Creepy Les wears them. A scuzzy goatee would work, but at the moment that’s too horrifying to contemplate.
Nothing is as weird to me in this strip as the nonsensical evolution of Darrin’s nose.
The rival cheerleader was black in the colorized version of that strip, as I recall. She came on to Durwood by basically saying to his face “I want you because I hate Jessica.” Also, you can’t really tell in the strip I posted, but the rival and Jess are wearing the same sexy French maid costume to the costume party, the idea for Jessica and Durwood being that she was a French maid while he was French fries.
*sigh*
At least Act II was briskly paced…
I read that title as “Is Guaranteed For The Life Of The Witch” and hoped it meant Jessica would be burned at the stake. Or, better yet, Darrin, because if he vanishes, his wife, child and adoptive parents vanish with him.
Even merely speculating on why a guy in his seventies thinks this is funny is a road I’m not all that enthusiastic about going down, as it’s just too weird to think about for very long. The silent third panel really reminds me of the legendary “Skunky Funkybuns” bit…”tension builds”. Sigh.
“Do women just say the same things that men do, but in a higher toned voice? I had no idea.”
Of course he’d claim the exact opposite, but doing a “gag-a-day” strip requires the “writer” to create a fully-formed joke every day, which is way more difficult than using pointless reaction panels to milk a banal premise for another day is. It’s such a cheap lazy tactic, possibly my most hated FW trope of them all.
Batty fails at both. He cannot create a joke strip, nor can he write a believable dramatic strip. Just bad puns and cheap sentimentality…that’s all he has.
It is much easier to stretch out those dramatic strips…see all of the 2021 Mary Worth strips for a master class on stretching things.
It’s tough writing good jokes so I can give a pass there. Shoe has had some clever bits over the past two weeks. Are they using a guest writer?
Oh no. What an unexpected plot twist. An important marriage in our storytelling universe is at risk. I wonder what will happen to their four-year-old child we never see and they have no interest in. Sigh.
Who is watching that kid right now? Are all kids in Funkyverse freerange?
This is just another TomBat play on words. “Darrin is seeing someone likely means he is seeing a doctor from some issue he hasn’t told Jess about. Maybe he needs glasses and hasn’t told her he’s seeing an eye doctor
And he’s relied on the word “seeing” two days in a row now, suggesting that Batiuk can’t think of any other overheard phrase that would make this dumb scenario work. This from a guy who makes puns like McDonald’s makes hamburgers. Can’t we even get a little ophthalmological innuendo here? “I went to her office, she made me sit in the chair, looked deeply into my eyes, then asked me if I could see her D’s clearly.”
Well, we’ve reached the week’s halfway point, and the suspense is killing me. Will Jessica finish hanging up her coat before the office closes up for the day?
Speaking of which, if memory serves me right one goes up a flight of stairs to enter the one-room Atomik Komix bullpen, which is occupied by four or five people at any given moment. How is it that Jess made her way from said door over to the coat closet without anyone noticing she was there? Why IS she there, for that matter? And who’s watching whatsisname, her and Darwin’s kid?
Meanwhile, what’s the status of the Winkerbeans’ “reno”?
Mopey Pete definitely should have noticed Jess. He’s facing the closet. It’s right in his line of vision. Yesterday’s strip shows this very clearly.
Oh, Pete’s more than “facing the closet.” Oh, wait, you meant where he’s standing. Never mind.
Jessica has become so enraged by this situation that she has managed to push the coat hanger into her skin and meld it to her bones! She will now use her mutated appendage to maim Darrin and exact revenge!
Right? That’s a comic book thing, isn’t it? That’s what he’s trying to do, right? … What do you mean, “no”?
You know, even if this is a build-up for the non-climax that Darrin is seeing the eye doctor, isn’t the whole premise weird that he wouldn’t discuss that with his wife?
Talk about phoning it in. This has all the suspense of the 600th viewing of the lamest of a Matlock episode.
“This is the portrait of a neurotic who is rapidly becoming psychotic.”
A caption you could put under a picture of nearly any Funky Winkerbean character.
This is like that one Three’s Company episode where there was a big misunderstanding.
Oh my gosh! I was just about to post the exact same thing. I imagine Batiuk comes up with these arcs after binge watching that show
Oh, I wish Tom Batiuk would watch Three’s Company. The show gets a bad rap, but it actually had some clever writing. And it had something you’ll never see in Funky Winkerbean: likeable characters.
Where the cancer is hers and hers and his!
Seeing someone: his oncologist?
“Come and visit Westview …
Where we’re married to shrews … “