First off, major thanks to Comic Book Harriet for her amazing research and erudition. Her posts are always educational and entertaining…two words never applied to Funky Winkerbean.
There’s no way that I can match what CBH offers, so prepare yourselves for disappointment! It is, after all the Funky Winkerbean way. On the plus side, you might get to see some cool animation.
Looking at today’s entry, I think what we have here is an example of the ultimate Funky Winkerbean strip: a strip where nothing at all happens other than wasting a reader’s time and a newspaper’s space. Because I’ve seen Tuesday’s episode, and completely removing Monday’s changes nothing. It’s pointless filler for pointless filler.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Hopefully Mason has plastic sheeting all over everything and he wants to “show them” his collection of Huey Lewis and The News CDs, if you catch my drift. And if you don’t, it means I hope Mason kills them both. Alas, no chance of that happening. But it sure is fun to dream.
“Hip to Be Jarre”?
Here and I was thinking Masonne was going to show them outtakes of this goofball who had a cameo scene as a waiter but kept blowing his one line. But here’s what’s probably what’s going to happen this week:
Tuesday: Everyone Enters the Editing Building.
Wednesday: Masonne Opens the Door to the Main Editing Room.
Thursday: The film’s editor looks up and exclaims “Hey, it’s the goofball waiter from Scene 47!,” leading You-Know-Who to cry that single tear from this site’s banner.
“Hip to Be Square” is on the *Fore!* album. On *Sports,* its predecessor, Huey Lewis and the News perform “Bad Is Bad.”
“Cool is a rule, but, sometimes, bad is bad,” goes the chorus.
(Dave Edmunds’s cover on *Repeat When Necessary* is terrific.)
I hope that the “Tears of a Clown” head in the banner means that Les is about to see the final cut of the movie, and it’s so unlike the book that he weeps in pain. The perfect variation from the book would be to paint him and Lisa as idiots for not catching that paperwork snafu that killed her, and showing her wasting her remaining time of the tapes, and–
Okay, he’s going to weep at its artistic perfection (which we’ll never see).
I just had a thought. If the in-universe Lisa’s Story covers the same material as the real-world comics collection…does that mean that Les’s Depression Cat is in the movie? Is that part of the “artistic perfection”? A talking cat?
Nick Bakay as the voice of the Le Chat Bleu puppet… I’d watch that. I wouldn’t pay to watch it, but I would watch it.
I hope you’re right, This would be the best possible ending to Lisa’s Story: Batiuk has gotten bored with it and just wants it over with, so he can get back to doing comic book stories.
To be fair, this is Funky Winkerbean. You cannot be shown artistic perfection here.
“Now Les, before we go to the wrap party, we need you to go over all 136,000 frames of the finished movie, just to make Lisa is being portrayed correctly.”
Oooooo, the editing room! Now there’s a place neither Les nor TB seem to have ever been.
This is how bad slasher films are set up… but there is no way we’re going to be that lucky this week.
Mason Jarre continues to wither away. The first time we saw Mason (Lust for Lisa) he was a buff Chris Evans type. Every time we see him he appears more frail. Today, it looks like Mopey Pete would give Mason a run for his money in a push-up contest. Mason Jarre played a space opera superhero? Really? Really?!
Boy, they sure do love that powder blue in Hollywood. It’s everywhere.
Who is adding the graphics to my comments? Thank you!
It’s probably Lisa.
If it IS Lisa. If Mason has used her ashes gathered from all their scattered locations, and mixed dark side arts and cloning and the lobotomized body of Summer Moore to resurrect her Rise of Skywalker style.
If she’s now hanging from the ceiling via an unseen contraption, surrounded by hordes of hooded cultists, awaiting Les and Cayla. The two figures whose sacrifice will make her whole once more…
Somehow, Lisa returned.
She might as well at this point. In the past month, we’ve seen that Phil Holt’s death, and the Hurricane Katrina-level destruction of Los Angeles, are not permanent. To say nothing of Dinkle’s deafness.
Phil Holt might even have been a test run for bringing Lisa back. And since nobody cared about his ridiculous story, Batiuk can proceed. He can say it’s an alternate timeline; say she went to Europe for a secret experimental treatment; say that “she’s gone” just meant she went into a coma; hell, make it another faked death, it doesn’t matter. Funky Winkerbean needs Lisa, because without her there’s nothing for Les to do. He’s that much of a one-note character.
A “fanboy lawyer” helped Phil fake his death. Now what was Lisa’s occupation again?
TBH, there was a time when I thought that’s what he was going to do (the asinine “high school reunion” story.) And I was for it then because of the audacity of it all.
But now he blew it on some dumb Silver Age comix jerk, so now it’s not shocking or thrilling or interesting anymore. Not even to the characters themselves, judging by the fact that they only took Phil to a mid-range restaurant to celebrate.
“Proceed, cartoonist..”
Sometime back I quoted Barnabas Collins’s remark on Angelique Bouchard, the Witch (no relation to my father, John Darling): “I said I killed her. I never said she was dead.”
“Dark Shadows” had alternate timelines, too, only they were called “parallel time.”
It also had a character named Sebastian Shaw a decade before Marvel introduced the Hellfire Club.
(No No-Prize for getting the reference, Mr. Batiuk.)
Maybe the Collins family has business holdings in Westview?
And Voldemoore will shed a tear, realizing that Lisa’s aliveness will put a dent in the box office receipts. He’ll then encourage her to “pull a Phil Holt” for a couple of years.
If it is Lisa coming back from the dead, I hope she’s wearing a Darth Vader helmet.
That’s some crazy forced perspective on Mason’s head in panel one. He looks about to shove his head through the fourth wall and wink at us like Pennywise from the photo album.
Everything is grey! Haven’t they washed the ashes off Hollywood yet?
I think whenever the colorist doesn’t know what color something should be they use grey. Buildings, walls, clothes, faces….
Who was it in the comments that said that the next time we saw Mason Jarre, he’d be dressed like a golf caddy? There we go.
And here we go to the special Les-only viewing of “Lisa’s Story: Generic Subtitle” (Cayla will spend the week telling Cindy that she’s so lucky to live in HOLLYWOOD.)
I see that The Fweepmakers, the franchised salon that does Holly’s hair, has expanded to Hollywood. I’d know their sharpened, pointy fweeps anywhere.
It fits with their latest slogan: “From opening a can, to opening a sternum, to opening a movie — You can trust The Fweepmakers for the sharpest, most durable fweeps!”
And their earworm jingle: 🎵 “The Fweepmakers — sharp as a knife! *ding!*
I will literally never be able to look at those hair blades the same way again…
I hope they include my favorite scene. Critics are calling it a “stand-up-and-cheer” climax.
Drat. Was trying to embed a .gif and apparently got it all wrong.
