So, Dinkle enjoys name-dropping, but mirabile visu, refrains from talking about his own OMEA triumphs. Somehow that panel must have been edited out by mistake. Or maybe Batiuk thought, “You know, I think I’ll give Becky a fourth line in this week-long story.” Wotta gentleman.
Of course, Dinkle loves to blow his own…horn, so I’m sure Becky has heard all of this multiple, multiple times. Funny how the actual band director rarely gets woven into these OMEA strips, except to purr how awesome Dinkle is. Ah, the woman’s lot in the Funkyverse: shoring up the menfolk.
Gad, a week of Les then a week of Dinkle. This has been quite a spell in the command chair. But at last we’re out, and Epicus Doomus takes over filling the bird feeder tomorrow. Imperious Rex!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Wow, Dinkhole remembers a lot of stuff about singers appearing at the OMEA thing. But he forgot that he’s deaf. And he forgot that he doesn’t have to hatchet-faced smirk for every single thing he says.
Thanks for your stewardship though this latest shitshow, BC. Best of luck to ED with the coming Flush Floppyhead comix nightmare.
He is deaf, that’s why he has to know them by heart.
“The brain has nothing to do with it.” Well, that pretty much sums up this entire OMEA arc, if not Dinkle’s stories for Act II in general.
Oops, I meant Act III, of course. Everyone–including Batiuk himself–has forgotten Act II.
Becky: I remember some different classic OMEA moments. You got pantsed at the podium in 1986, locked in the custodian’s closet in 1989, duct taped to your chair in 1994, and your ride abandoned you at a truck stop in 2002. *sigh* Good times.
Is it just me or does Becky look a little worse for wear in today’s strip?
I had to laugh at Becky’s expression in the second to last panel. Apparently, there’s nothing wrong with going on a trip with Dinkle that can’t be cured with a boatload of Prozac and a rubber mallet to the head.
Yes, she looks uglier than usual, I guess spending a week around Dinkle will do that to you.
What a contrast between Becky and Dinkle. Becky’s life has been a series of setbacks and disappointments. She’s an underappreciated music director living in the shadow of her predecessor.
Inversely, Dinkle is gets everything he wants on a silver platter. Any job he wants is his. There is a room in his house dedicated to all of his awards. Even though he’s retired, he gets to host a seminar at OMEA.
Every panel with Dinkle today features that annoying, smug, jack-o-lantern 🎃 grin of his. I’d like to put a paper bag over his head.
Scratch that. Make it a plastic bag. Airtight and pulled tight around his neck.
And Becky never complains about her lot in life, while Dinkle constantly bemoans his existence.
If anything, Becky SHOULD complain more. She should have pressed charges and/or sued the Winkerbean family back to a ball of dirt over the car crash. She should tell Dinkle to piss off and let her do her job, the one he trained her to do. She should tell DSH John to get a real job and buy a shirt with a collar.
But Batiuk put Becky on the front cover of one of his Complete Funky Winkerbean compilations. That made it all worthwhile, didn’t it? No? Not even close?
Your comment about DSH John reminds me of an old song. George Thorogood’s Get a Haircut.
Get a haircut and get a real job
Clean your act up and don’t be a slob
Get it together like your big brother Bob
Why don’t you, get a haircut and get a real job
If Batty read your comment about DSH John getting a ‘real’ job, he’d be upset.
Batty: But… But… But… Running a comic book store is a dream job!
Dinkle gave no details for any of his examples. All he had to do was fill in the details on one example and tell us why it was special. (Especially since he knew them by heart!) He still would have had his Sunday Strip, and the readers would have enjoyed the story. Alas, but no.
Beckoning Chasm gets Les and Dinkle!!! Are there awards for gallantry in the face of the enemy? BC, that should teach you not to try to fill an inside straight against Comic Book Harriet!
Oh for Chrissakes, Tom. “Know by heart” means “memorized”, which is not the same as using your heart instead of your brain. Another mixed aphorism that makes no sense, it because it treats different meanings of a phrase as equivalent when they aren’t. Also, Becky didn’t say anything about the brain, so why did Dinkle correct her about it? Because this is abysmal piss-poor hack writing.
Just to be clear, that was directed at Tom Batiuk.
Beep-boop. Looks like the BatiukBot 3000 AI is displaying an error code: ERROR 456 – ‘ENGLISH IDIOM DICTIONARY K-L’ NOT FOUND
Eh, today’s strip ain’t so bad. I’m sick of Harry Dinkle, who’s gotten way too much strip time in the past year. But for once, Batty’s set up and delivered a punchline that is actually kind of sweet.
Just more band director butt kissing. I doubt they even read any of his strips.
TB doesn’t promote band directors; he promotes himself to band directors. OMEA week is nothing but “Hi, band directors, remember me? Remember Funky Winkerbean? Remember that wacky Dinkle? Remember Becky? Remember Holly’s hair catching on fire? I’m so iconic! Buy Volume 11 of my book!”
Yep, Tom is a master of the humblebrag.
I don’t think he’s very good at the “humble” part. It’s more like he’s trying to do stealth marketing, but he’s not very good at that either.
BC, you had an absolutely brutal shift, and didn’t even use a dumb gimmick to let you basically ignore it. I salute you in the customary fashion, by forming a line to stand in.
Semper Funk, good buddy, Semper Funk.
It’s funny because the ONE thing this entire week that had anything to do with music education, Dinkle openly scoffed at. The rest of the time was spent hawking books, on meaningless seminars and telling us for the millionth time that Dinkle is Great 👎
Becky has been in the kitchen trying out the ‘Booster Shot’ recipe for Jell-O vodka shooters. That’s why hasn’t been seen in the comic for the past couple of days. Judging by her appearance she finished the entire batch. Becky is blotto.
BECKY: (slurred) That’s good coffee!
Hey! Quit picking on Becky. She has enough problems.
Look at who she works with. Look at who her mother is. Look at who she’s married to. Look at the town where she lives. Becky is the poster child for the saying, “What’s the use?”
I think Becky deserves our pity rather than our ridicule.
Don’tcha have any feelings? 😂
No.
I meant “No?”
I am very amused by the SOSF Twitter retweet of David Willis losing his mind over the CrankyFunkyTimeCollapse. I actually met David Willis a couple times at Transformers conventions. Probably the only other person on the planet with those same two intersecting interests.
As a child of the midwest, I onetime had the chance to hear William Warfield sing (Old Man River among other songs) during a school trip.
He was amazing.
Funky Winkerbean sucks.
This is one of those weird “to-the-trade” strips, like the one where Dinkle proclaimed that there was still time for band leaders to apply to march in the Rose parade, or the one where he announced that parade route was 5.5 miles long. They feel like he was given a fact sheet and told to put the information into one of his strips.
I have no objection to creators using their creations to shill commercial entities. Charles Schulz did it very successfully with MetLife. But in the actual strip, you never heard Linus asking Charlie Brown whether he knew about the importance of life and casualty insurance, or Lucy explaining that MetLife is among the largest providers of annuities in the world, offering fixed annuities, variable annuities, deferred annuities and immediate annuities.
This should have been a custom job for OMEA, to be published through them, and not broadcast to the syndicate. It’s even worse than my MetLife example above, because most people have some kind of insurance, so the topic is at least relevant to readers. But who sang at OMEA in 1987? NOBODY cares. Not one FW reader. Even the convention attendees don’t give a shit. They’re not thinking about 1987, for Christ’s sake. They’re looking for the Jell-O Shooters booth.
It’s like Steve Martin’s “plumbers convention” bit:
This is how Tom Batiuk actually writes jokes.
“And then there was the time when an entire high school band came to the convention, all packed into a bus. We saw their chaperones unload them from the bus with great fanfare. But that band… those kids… no one knows what happened to them. They were never seen again. Oh, well! Where was that Jell-O School Shooters booth again?”
“Remember that time when a thing happened? I can list the years and details of those things! They existed!” Dinkle doesn’t say a word about what made these appearances memorable, or even who “Chanticleer” or Marian Anderson are.
Funky Winkerbean reminds me of people who are way too into scrapbooking or geneaology. They get so obsessed with documenting other people’s lives that they forget to live their own. And they completely miss the point of it. What will Dinkle say about the 2021 OMEA convention? “We stood around and looked at unfunny signs”?
It’s truly amazing how he over-explains certain things over and over — “the upcoming class reunion,” “the artist Phil Holt,” “John Darling Whowasmurdered, who was murdered,” etc. And he has people introducing other people with tedious, cutesy phrases when the people involved already know each other…
And then he consistently fails to provide context where it might help. “The great contralto Marian Anderson” or “The civil rights icon Marian Anderson” or something similar. I know Chanticleer, but I have no idea who William Warfield is or why it’s such a big deal that he appeared at OMEA. Fortunately, I don’t care, and neither does anyone else. And Batty doesn’t give us a reason to care.
There absolutely should be a tag here for “Remember When”.
I think most of the posts of the last two years would’ve had it, too.
It’s the Funky Winkerbean problem in a nutshell: someone who is a huge fan of something, who believes that everyone else shares his obsession.
I thought mopey Pete was accompanying StinKle but then I saw the pinned up sleeve.