You are looking liiiiive at St. Spires Church and its odd, grass-covered exterior wall in today’s strip…
At least the choir ladies are asking follow up questions now. The last two times Dinkle pulled his “a little” shtick no one pressed him for specifics. I’m half-surprised Dinkle doesn’t carry around a printed resume to hand out to the mere mortals who aren’t familiar with his life story, that really seems like something he would do.
At least we get that brilliant salmonella pun again… 4 and a half months was just too long without it. It’s a true TB original too, you won’t find it anywhere else.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Interesting Funky fact: this strip features the most crucifixes ever used in a single FW strip…three. The previous record was two, during the legendary “Summer’s exorcism” arc of 2008.
But yeah, what can you even say at this point? It’s Dinkle’s greatest hits, as told by Dinkle and it’s leading toward week after week of elderly people selling shit door to door. Now we just have to wait for it to play out, which is way more difficult than it sounds.
All those crosses and still Dinkle was able to get into the church. Where’s van Helsing when you need him?
I don’t even understand what Batiuk is going for here. Dinkle is so obnoxious, so full of himself, so proud of his irrelevant awards, that it’s like the story is building him into a Miles Gloriosus character. Even the choir doesn’t look impressed. But Batiuk clearly expects the audience to relate to this character, and to root for him. Even though we’ve seen him flat-out abuse these people.
If only the mighty Gloriosus had been the one to take over the St. Spires choir…at least then we’d have a shot at reading some “Comedy Tonight.”
Dinkle saying “Well, for starters…” sends shivers of genuine horror down my spine. Nothing following that phrase can possibly end well.
And it isn’t even a spin on Dinkle’s fund raising antics, it’s just him blathering on about ancient gags everyone was thoroughly sick of twenty five years ago. I mean with a little imagination he could have had Dinkle rigging bingo games or re-imagining the church hymns as Sousa marches or something but nope, instead good old lazy-ass Tom is rehashing that f*cking salmonella gag again.
“Nothing following that phrase can possibly end well.”
Don’t forget “Trust me…” and
“May I be completely truthful with you?”
Just look at Dinkle in panel 3. Smirking (of course), face turned upward, thumbs up, eyes closed, bragging like a jackass. While his audience looks on with bewilderment at his pomposity. In any other strip, we could assume he’s in for a major comeuppance. But not in this strip. (I’m hoping to be proven wrong.)
I have two questions about what’s going on in today’s strip, but first I have to thank Banana Jr, 6000 for introducing me to the Miles Gloriosus archetype. It’s another example of the breadth of knowledge that this community brings to the table.
But back to my questions:
1. If Dinkle is such a master at fundraising and “The World’s Greatest Band Leader”, how come his fame doesn’t appear to go beyond Westview?
2. His tenure at Westview High was longer than twelve years. How come he only has twelve band turkey awards?
Is it only laziness that is behind these horrendous, repetitive strips or is something else going on with TomBa? (Ok. That’s three questions.)
It’s funny because you’d think as much door to door sales he’s done in northeast Ohio, he would have knocked on the doors of some of these women at some point…
Or had their children in one of his classes.
After 40 years of constant door-to-door sales and treating his students like slaves, Dinkle shouldn’t just be known – he should be despised.
Thank TVTropes. That’s where I learned the term, and so many other things. It’s a remarkable repository of knowledge that’s not collected anywhere else. And unlike most things on the Internet, it’s managed to stay on its mission and not become toxic.
“I never heard of that award.” “Same here.” “Me neither.” “Is it like winning a medal for being the best-behaved convict on Death Row?”
No smirking from these old bats.
I would think that being invited to a foreign country to receive an award for chocolate sales would be more impressive than 12 whatever-the-hells, but meh.
Also, I would think that the constant strips which only ever show Dinkle meeting obstinate customers and having literal tons of unsold product would mark him as a terrible salesman (was there ever a strip which shown him being A Completely Insufferable Jackass leading to greater sales? ever?), but meh.
For all the suffering we readers are enduring with these Dinkle stories, here’s hoping that Battyuk suffers today when he discovers that someone miscolored his beloved bricks in panel two.
Clearly the joke here is on Dinkle. He’s bragging about some band-related achievement that no one else on Earth would care about, and the church ladies are reacting accordingly. It’s very Act I. And since Act I Dinkle was the version of Dinkle that actually worked, I guess I’m willing to give this strip a pass.
“The Flying Nun” is Shakespeare compared to this dumb ass shit.
Serious question here… A couple years back, and I am not making this up, the Belgian government literally gave Dinkle its highest civilian honor for singlehandedly propping up their economy with his prolific chocolate bar sales in the state of Ohio… Why isn’t The Big Dink wearing that medal every hour of every day just so he can flex all over these mortals and be as conspicuous as a boner in sweatpants?
The Gross Domestic Product of Belgium is about $500 billion. I’d love to ask an economist how many candy bars Dinkle would have to sell to “prop up” an economy that large.
Sam and Ella were the names of Lois Lane’s parents, but I’m sure Batiuk never read Lois Lane comics because icky girls.
But what if he had? Maybe we’d see endless stips about Lois Lane # 27 (came out approximately the same time as Flash # 123,) and the classic cover story, “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain.”
Never mind that you could set up an online turkey-sellin’ fundraiser with all the trimmings for relatively little effort, these poor bitches gonna be lugging frozen turkeys door-to-door, and they know it. Just look at them.
The comic strip even showed us this! Bandigogo! “Never touch a turkey!” Dinkle was amazed by it. But everything in Westview must be done the old way or it’s not being done correctly. So yeah, tomorrow’s strip will probably be one of those old ladies on somebody’s porch with some crap product.
Tomorrow’s strip? I think you’re being optimistic about the pacing. At most, we might see the giant piles of boxed turkeys that Dinkle bought for them to sell without asking anyone. But I’m placing my bet on “Dinkle explains the concept of door-to-door sales to the church ladies, and then one of them gives a dubious reply.”
Interesting admission on the Funkyblog today:
Another unspoken rule I was breaking was the one dictating that, if you had to do a story, it shouldn’t be any longer than three weeks.
I’ve been wondering why both this arc, and Funky’s cataract surgery, both stopped for a week to do something unrelated. Now I know: Batiuk is adhering to yet another one of his dumb “unwritten rules” that no one else follows or has ever heard of.
And he completely misses the point. Length guidelines exist to make you think about writing more concisely. You’ve probably heard that your job resume should be limited to 1 or 2 pages, depending on your age and experience. This isn’t to save paper. It’s because a longer resume is probably too wordy to achieve its intended purpose. Writing a 4-page resume, and then using small fonts to shrink it to 2 pages, doesn’t make your resume good. But that’s how Tom Batiuk thinks.
Note also that editing is completely out of the question. This whole week has been filler, and the 3 weeks prior could have been trimmed significantly. “Dinkle has fundraising experience” shouldn’t have taken more than one strip to convey. And we’ve already seen his “I’m so offended you don’t know of my greatness” act, so we don’t need to see it again. All this repetition isn’t setting up any future payoff. But every panel gets Batiuk one step closer to that Golden T-Square Award, so nothing is getting shortened.
Just looked at today’s FW Blog post. Dinkle isn’t the only Miles Gloroisus in the Winkerbean universe.
Also, this thought just popped into my head. The Golden T-Square award is a milestone award, like a lifetime achievement award, perfect attendance award, or a participation trophy. The milestone is for fifty years of production. Does that mean that we have to recalculate the timing when TomBa reaches that milestone to account for the times that others filled in for him?
Nah, I think that would be extremely petty. And we’re barely 11 months away from the anniversary date now, so it’s almost unavoidable that Batiuk will get the award. And I don’t begrudge him for it. Funky Winkerbean has spent 50 years doing what it does best: existing.
That’s just plain bizarre. I’ve been reading vintage strips on Comics Kingdom. “Buz Sawyer” is excellent, and just had an arc that lasted at least 10 months, and I was quite sorry to see it end. “Apartment 3-G,” “Big Ben Bolt,” “Johnny Hazard,” and others whose shoes FW is not fit to shine, have arcs lasting 2-3 months at least. Where on earth would Batiuk have come up with this arbitrary rule? Certainly not from any other narrative daily strip that ever existed.
It’s not even the first time. The Funkyblog has at times alluded to the Cartooning Commandments – Batiuk treats it as a proper noun – which he says he found on Google. I can find no evidence that they exist. Who knows how many other ridiculous “unwritten rules” he’s trying to follow? It’s like the golf episode of I Love Lucy. Except that was funny.
Prince Valiant?
The choir hag wearing the green stripes in panel one has such a look of despair. In panel three she’s been replaced by Darrin wearing the same outfit.
But hasn’t Becky been running the band fundraisers for the last 17 years or so? Also, there are a ton of different ways a person can fundraise beyond selling shit door-to-door, but that apparently is the only way Dinkle knows how to do it.
Also, sit down, Grandpa. Your method involved you or some shitty child walking around with a thawing dripping bird carcass underneath their arm asking random adults if they wanted to buy it. No wonder salmonella gave you multiple awards.