Of course, you can’t have a time travel story without Lisa. It’s inevitable.
It’s already creepy enough for sixty-ish Harry to be walking up to a high school girl who doesn’t know him and address her by name, but telling her he’s been to the school before doesn’t help. Lisa really should know better than to stop and engage some random old guy who’s approaching her, but this is Lisa after all, she clearly has bad judgment when it comes to men.
I’m positive someone Harry’s age is bound to have friends or family who aren’t alive in 2022 anymore, but apparently he doesn’t care at all about seeing them. All he cared about was himself (literally), and visiting high school again, which is so typical of characters in this strip. Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked at all if he somehow enrolled in high school again (it turns out he’s missing a credit!) or becomes a teacher, and that lets Batiuk reboot everything.
It’s been great being able to comment on one of the weirder recent arcs. TFHackett gets to take over tomorrow, when Harry probably tries to make Les and Lisa get married as teenagers or something.
Son of Stuck Funky 
“I just have to see the old high school again,” said nobody ever. It’s exactly the same as it was, and in Harry’s case, mostly populated with the same people,
“I just have to see my old high school again, before the place is demolished and the earth upon which it stood salted.” That’s a sentence lots of us could say. Batiuk just doesn’t know how to write a proper sentence.
I can see it if you don’t live in your hometown again, or if the school had been torn down and didn’t exist for decades, but considering how everyone in this strip probably visits or at least sees the school at least once a week, it’s silly.
I think the Old High School actually was torn down, that one of the last plots before the Lisa Dies Time Jump was about how they were building a new Westview High School and the old one was being demolished.
By setting New Westview to open the September after Dead Lisa Dies Of Death, of course, we were able to skip all the dull storylines about the staff finding their way around a school that’s as new to them as it is to the freshmen and discovering all the new state-of-the-art teaching equipment is stuff that, even if they knew how to use, wouldn’t work anyway.
I have no idea whether this is still in continuity, though.
Yeah, they built a new high school 10 or 15 years ago with all the money from the school levies that never pass.
Truth be told, I thought the commenters who raised the possibility of Lisa appearing in this story were nuts, as why would she? But, once again, I was dead wrong, because there she is, all poodle-haired and unsuspecting of the multitude of horrors Batiuk has in store for her. It’s just so ghastly and weird.
Coming tomorrow: Crazy removes a polonium splinter from Lisa’s toe, thereby forever altering the chronology of the strip. She still dies, but this time it’s in a comic book fire. Everything else remains pretty much the same.
That checks out. If there was a fire comic book store in Westview, we all know what they’d save first,
Of course they’d save the Komix Korner. It and Montonis are the only two private businesses in town. If the comic store burns down, there goes half the local economy.
Creepy certainly describes the premise of today’s offering. Even though my high school experience was good and I enjoy seeing old classmates, I can’t imagine wanting to go back in time to be a voyeur of my time there. And the Lisa encounter has stalker overtones.
Another week of this time story. I actually, had high hopes for Mr. Batiuk to present a gripping story with a beginning, middle, and climax. So naive. Mr. Batiuk removes any incentive to follow this strip. I certainly would not if it wasn’t for SOSF. It is due to all of our wonderful bloggers than my interest is raised from the efforts of Mr. Batiuk to ruin enjoyment. It is just this week that I learned about the life span of a dollar bill, the Red Queen’s Race by Isaac Asimov, Cargo cult writing, and Zazzle cups. Thank you to my fellow posters for a job well done! You are appreciated.
If you read all 50 years of Funky Winkerbean, you would be hard pressed to find something with a beginning, middle, and climax.
If I were writing this I would have had Funky find his old yearbook and start flipping the pages and then transition back to the past. You could fill in some of the old stories—save for Lisa, she’s had too much time in the spotlight.
But what do I know, I’m no Pulitzer nominated writer.
This is more cargo cult writing. Batiuk thinks that if he just keeps trotting Lisa out there, he’ll eventually hit on the magic formula for tugging the audience’s heartstrings. Like the Polynesians who were building wooden airports in 1948, trying to figure out why the nice American soldiers weren’t coming anymore.
C’mon Harry! Give Lisa the helmet si she can zap to the future and not get date raped, blown up or have cancer! Instead he’s just going to tell Lisa that someone wins an Oscar for playing her in a movie…
And if its a school day, why was Young Harry at Montonis and not in school?
Old Crazy Harry *did* tell Young Crazy Harry that YCH shouldn’t skip school so much, so… that actually fits? (I can only assume Batiuk did that by accident.)
“Before I go…”
What makes Kwazy think he’s going anywhere? Maybe jamming that tiny helmet over his massive skull caused terminal brain damage that makes his dying brain think he’s reliving his high school daze. Maybe Batdick has realized that his strip peaked in Act One. Why not cruise to retirement with Old Harry interacting with the high schoolers from the old days? The level of effort would be even lower than what he’s been exerting over the past few years, if that’s possible.
Just kidding. We’ll be back to Hairy Dinkhole or some other shit next week.
Harry is really Tom, of course. Tom, desperately returning to a time when people paid some attention to his comic. Tom, interacting with the one character who people seemed to respond to.
Because she was tragic. Yes, that seemed to do it. It was her tragic nature. So sad.
Revisiting those times makes Tom feel good. People who were important responded to Tom’s work then. Maybe revisiting that work — that wonderful, miserable work — maybe they’ll respond that way again?
It gets harder and harder every year for Tom to find the key to make this all work. He could do it once, couldn’t he? Tom can remember how it was … the characters, the settings. The characters would have conversations — do things. Wouldn’t they?
Tom writes conversations now. Every day.
At least he’s pretty sure he does. Sometimes something that happened twenty or thirty years ago comes through much clearer than the last few days do. But he writes things, and things happen to the people he writes about. Don’t they?
The people he writes about have movies made about them, and travel in time, and march in parades, and buy comic books. Those are things. Right?
Some of them happened to the same people before. But that’s okay. Things keep happening.
Maybe there will be another awards committee that will write Tom about an award. That would be good.
Tom remembers that Lisa is there when the award people write to him. It’s nice to visit with Lisa.
Tom sits down to write. Maybe Harry can meet Lisa.
Tom is really Harry, of course.
It’s like looking into the dick’s brain.
Seriously, I’m picturing all of Y Knott’s post being mumbled into a mirror while a frantic Tom attempts to brush his greying hair into a Crazy Harry looking pompadour.
Tom is Harry, and Tom is Les, and Tom is Dinkle, and Tom is Lisa. Tom is jester, and genius, and leader, and martyr.
All things in Westview are Tom. Westview itself is Tom.
And We Are All Together!
I am the Funkmeister, they are the Funkmeister, I am the Westvew…goo gooj joob…
Sitting in an Ohio gazebo waiting for the battle of the bands…
Is this what appears in the dictionary as the opposite of “concise”? (“No, you idiot”, you say, “that’s not how dictionaries work!”)
8 panels worth of space that could have been condensed into 1 and make just as much sense.
You’re Lisa… right?
Do I know you?/Yes/HELP! POLICE!
Both characters, one panel, done.
Of course, it also could have been condensed into 0 panels and improved even more.
Young Crazy, who he was just speaking to, avoided school at all costs, so naturally it’s Old Crazy’s second stop, presumably so he can remember it fondly, even though it completely contradicts what we just saw. It’s all so Batiukian.
“Hey Lisa! Don’t go on any solo car dates and for god’s sake, stay outta the post office!”
Return to the present, Jessica has married Pete, and Mindy ends up with Pete’s best friend, constant companion, and popular successful businessman, Mooch Meyers…
Darin was never born. And nothing of value was lost.
1. I don’t get it… We know that Harold spent the whole afternoon at Montoni’s so why does it look like students are just arriving at school like it’s 7:45 in the morning? What happened last night, then? And shouldn’t there be a hell of a lot more students crowding the door and sidewalk right now?
1a. Now I’ve really got questions why nobody else showed up at Montoni’s on a bright sunny April afternoon…
2. Harold: “I CAN’T DO SOMETHING THAT MIGHT UPSET THE TIME SPACE CONTINUUM!!”
Also Harold: Immediately seeks out and spends the day eating, gaming and conversing with his “Time-Space Fluid” younger self, (even telling him that Westview’s disguised mysterious video game wizard has titties and other lady bits) and for an encore he’ll creep around his old high school and introduce himself to all his 1980 classmates…
3. Look, I know it was a different era, but some weird looking 60-something year old scraggly stranger in a t-shirt and jeans introducing himself to 16-year-old girls minding their own business and trying to walk to class HAS GOT TO RAISE SOME FLAGS FROM A TEACHER OR PARENT — AS IN, “CALL THE POLICE AND ARREST THIS WANNABE HUMBERT HUMBERT ASAFP” FLAGS…
3a. Oh who am I kidding? Harold is probably going to freely roam the entire school all week and nobody will think it strange because it’s the Funkyverse…
They let Dinkle do it, after all.
At least The Big Dink is drawing a paycheck to roam the halls aimlessly every day and he’s been there 50 years and has his own massive trophy case/historical exhibit/shrine in the lobby so everybody knows him…
Nobody knows future Harold.
Another creepy thing. Not only is Lisa always involved in the time-travel stuff, yet these people do NOTHING to warn her about early detection or bad relationships or…anything.
Oh, well. Happy Easter, everyone!
Is that Les in panel 2- schlepping to school with the posture of a question mark?
It certainly looks like it.
At least Crazy didn’t run up to Lisa and loudly insist that she get a certain part of her anatomy examined. That might trigger some alarms.
You peeked! Stayyyy tuuuunnned…
Can I get a “USA!” “USA!”?
How can we miss Lisa if she won’t go away?
I’m being serious here. She’s been flash-backed, time-traveled, resurrected, portrayed by other people, and driven a multi-year arc. Her constant presence in the strip as a living character has destroyed whatever emotional weight her death might have had. Even if we ignore everything else Tom Batiuk gets wrong in this story, which is a lot.