It comes as no surprise to me that Les enjoys seeing celebrities die, as he’s always been a spiteful scumbag and all. The clumsy dialog in panel two baffled me at first, until I realized it was merely BatYam’s typically oafish way of explaining that Les was more of a beginning obituaries reader, as opposed to being a sad old coot scanning the obits to see which friend, colleague or associate died on any given day. Which is a premise just dripping with comedic potential…all of it unrealized, of course.
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Son of Stuck Funky · The web's premiere source for Funky Winkerbean snark
Son of Stuck Funky 
When it comes to obituaries, I always look at the paper’s first page because there will be a banner headline when Les Moore dies.
“The celebrations over Les Moore’s death turned ugly today, as mobs of delirious revelers looted a local comic book store and pizzeria, and the town gazebo and park bench were set aflame.”
“Early days”? Oh, I cannot stress enough how much that is NOT what I wanted to hear.
I was seriously baffled by this one. I think my take on what it means is what BatHam was going for here, but it’s something no human being has or ever would say, in this or any other situation. I just kind of understand how he operates, at least some of the time.
This is an older idiom commonly uttered by fatalistic fogeys like My Dad.
https://www.theidioms.com/early-days/
The number of times he’s told me… It’s still early days, but we’re planning blah blah blah.
Interesting, you learn something new every day around here! I’d never heard this before, and I was just perplexed.
“Early days” = I’ve just started doing this recently and it’s not something I’m accustomed to…
You watch British TV you hear it all the time.
I took “Early days” as meaning their classmates are just now starting to die off. But ED’s interpretation is equally as valid/unfunny. I guess the funeral for a girl that Voldemoore and Funkface have wiped clean from their memories is too solemn an occasion for actual punchlines.
Yes, I know I was wryly amused when I heard that Norm MacDonald, Betty White, and Louie Anderson had passed away.
What even is Les/Batty’s point here? He’s already declared Mary a nonentity whose demise was only discovered through the newspaper. You can’t assign a Deep Meaning(TM) to this now, you’re just acting like some gross TikToker who uploaded footage of the Kennedy assassination or Bud Dwyer’s suicide 😑
On the one hand today isn’t funny.
On the other hand, I’m currently helping my mom clean out my grandmother’s house, and we found an entire drawer full of clipped out obituaries, and a written list of how old everyone in her graduating class was when they died. Like the world’s most morbid sports standings.
Like the world’s most morbid sports standings.
The 2021 National Women’s Soccer League will be hard to top.
Still more idle chatter during the interment… Why did these assholes even bother to show? I mean, besides the excuse for getting out of work for a day??
I could almost understand if Lester and Funkadelic lived on opposite coasts and hadn’t seen each other for years, but they’ve lived in the same damn small town all their lives and they still only talk to each other maybe once per year…
Well, sure. Would you want to talk to either one of them more often?
Don’t any of these people own a damned umbrella?
Or at least a hat?
“Yeah…but it’s still early days. I’m just hoping I’ll find a fresh idea for my next book. Even after the Academy Award that was so rightfully passed on to me, there’s nothing more I can do with Lisa’s death.”
Thete’s nothing more Les can do with Lisa’s death, so he’s got to find other people’s deaths to make about himself. No wonder he’s reading the obits regularly now.
Why is it *always* raining in TomBat’s funeral scenes?
I suppose we are about to get the obligatory panel where Les visits St. Lisa’s grave
She doesn’t have a grave. She was cremated and her remains were illegally scattered in Central Park, New York City, hundreds of miles from home.
This does raise an interesting question. There was the now-obligatory ceremony during a downpour at a cemetery for LIsa (during which Les attempted to read some selection of poetry but broke down, necessitating Funky to take over). At the time I thought that only a portion of her ashes were scattered illegally in Central Park.
The strip you refer to was on Saturday, October 06, 2007. In the first panel, Les says they buried some of the ashes at Lisa’s funeral and kept the rest to fulfill a personal promise. In a flashback at Lisa’s funeral, Les attempted to read some poetry but broke down. Funky had to finish for him. It was raining.
Les kept his promise and scattered Lisa’s ashes in Central Park (Wednesday, October 10, 2007). This was the infamous strip where Les is on his knees sobbing. It was raining. Funky tracked Les and brought him home.
In the very first Act III strip (Monday, October 22, 2007), Summer sits with Les on a Central Park bench. Summer says, “So this is where you scattered the rest of Mom’s ashes.“.
Wow, my Comics Kingdom subscription paid off today.
Les wanting to read a friggin’ poem at Lisa’s burial always seemed a little… off to me. Even in 2007, Les wasn’t taking her death well at all. Someone should have talked him out of trying to do this. He was grieving too heavily to function, and justifiably so. Do other families do this? Are the people most devastated by the loss of the person expected to give presentations? When my parents each died, I was way too broken up to do anything.
@Banana Jr. 6000,
During the funeral services I’ve been to, the minister/priest will ask if anyone would like to say a few words. There is no pressure on family members to speak.
At my Mom’s funeral, a few longtime neighborhood friends spoke about long ago memories. Mom outlived almost all of her friends. My Dad, my brothers and I didn’t say anything. In hindsight, I wish I had said something.
I did provide the minister with a couple of my Mom’s favorite bible passages. My little brother wrote a really nice obituary and provided the minister with some of Mom’s history to include in the service.
It didn’t rain at Mom’s service. It snowed.
And some of her ashes got picked up by a passing wind* and lofted into the upper atmosphere, where they seeded the rain clouds over the Worstview cemetery.
*passing wind is my usual response to reading this comic
I always thought some of her ashes drifted over to Centerville and landed on Crankshaft’s barbecue grill, which helped set off the explosion that sent it out of Earth’s gravitational pull and on a laugh-filled trajectory towards the Sun.
Oh, fuck you, Les. What is your problem?. Celebrities do nothing but throw money at you, tell you how great you are, beg you to make a movie out of your sick viking funeral, and COME TO YOUR HOUSE TO GIVE YOU THEIR OSCAR. All of which you did nothing but pout about. Now you’re interrupting the funeral of a woman who was basically your sexual harassment victim, so you can mope about how close to death you are at age 52.
Yeah, there’ll be a lot of happy faces in Westview when the local “celebrity” dies. Which won’t be nearly soon enough. Or painful enough.
Don’t you just love it when cartoonists kill off characters once they run out of ideas for them? (Sigh.) This week’s offering would have been bad anyway, but seriously, why is Les always involved? You just know it’s going to end up being all about *him!* The only reason he’s even there is probably because Mary mini-promoted Lisa’s Story!
And where was all this introspectiveness when Bull Bushka died? He was actually their friend. Les made Bull’s death about his own petty high school bitterness despite everything Bull did for him and his family in life (which was a lot). Funky didn’t even show up. But now these two are gadflying it up at the funeral of people one of them doesn’t even know, and the other one acts like they don’t know. Even though they should, because once again, the deceased once did something very kind for them. With friends like Les and Funky, who needs enemies?
I still refuse to believe a local football “hero” and a popular and beloved championship winning coach in Ohio of all places (where the state symbol is literally a six-pack of beer, two grilled bratwursts with all the fixins and a football being kicked through the uprights) could ever have such a sparse and poorly attended service that Lester was allowed to just freely hijack the ceremony for his own gratification…
Celebrity deaths that are news stories and local deaths in the obit section of the newspaper are two completely different things. You can’t check for celebrity deaths on the obit page.
Les just started checking celebrity obituaries? For whom? Marianne Winters? So he can write about Dead Lisa 2.0 when she dies from breast cancer?
Les Moore is just being Les Moore. The biggest asshole on the comics page.
Not a word about the actual woman to whom they are supposedly here to pay respects. They have none.
Talk about a mere yucky girl? “It’s Chintzytown, Jane.”
I wonder how often Batty attends funerals. Doesn’t he realize how disrespectful it is to chatter away like magpies while the ceremony is going on? Batty is kind of dark, so I doubt he’s very religious at all.
Batty: I like to attend funerals when I feel the need to be depressed.
I’d like to see the priest/minister stop the ceremony to look up at Les and Funky and say, “Gentlemen, is it alright if I continue?”
==========================
My Dad had a loud voice. He didn’t have trouble telling people to be quiet on occasions like this. I can imagine him saying something like, “Will you please be quiet. I’m trying to hear. Show some respect!”
Speaking of celebrities, the second panel depicts the headstone of a Post cereal heir.
I wonder how Batty selected Mary Sue Sweetwater. Much like Livinia Swenson/Swanson Jessup several years ago, Mary Sue’s selection seems random.
Does Batty have one of those big clattering spinning wheels with pictures of Funky Winkerbean characters on it? Batty’s Big Wheel O’ Death.
There already is a Carousel Of Death in this strip so why not.
It’s easy to see him gingerly touching the tips of his fingers together with a smirk after he gives it a whirl. “Oh, Mary Sue, yes, it’s time, it’s time for you to go. Hee hee. What a pity.”, he softly mutters to nobody else in his office at 315AM.
Oh right, the high school “vendos.”
I’m not going to waste time commenting on this week’s fail, but I have an off-topic comment on Comics Kingdom. I was half way through reading the comics that I read every day (there’s seventeen of them), and when I got to Rex Morgan MD, suddenly the comic content was replaced with a banner that said “Keep Reading with Premium Access” with a link to a one week free trial. It’s doing this with every comic strip that I try to read now. Does anybody else here use the Comics Kingdom free site, and if so, are you seeing this?
I did not encounter that exact thing, but found that after a while, clicking the left-arrow to read yesterday’s strip took me to the “Give Us Your Money” page. Might have been because I tend to open about six strips at a time in separate tabs, so about number ten or twelve (including the yesterday strips) it shut me off.
There appears to be a work-around, at least on a computer running the Chrome browser: clear cookies from the last hour (or earlier, as needed to clear any cookies set during your CK session). This makes the problem go away… for a while, till you’ve read enough strips to trigger it again. Clearing it a second time fixes it again, and on and on and on we go. Apparently they are using a cookie to count how many strips you’ve read today, and send you to the shakedown page when you’ve exceeded their daily limit.
Considering how comics are currently deserting CK (in the last month or so, the popular “Sherman’s Lagoon” and “Baby Blues” have gone to GoComics), this would seem a not-too-smart move. Maybe the endgame will be a full paywall, with Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean as the only comics left.
Thanks, that seemed to do the trick. I’ve learned that there is a specific url that points to today’s comic (e.g. https://comicskingdom.com/funky-winkerbean), so I took all the urls for the comics I am interested in and put them in a text file, and rather than go through CK’s horrific comic selection menu, I just copy and paste the urls into a browser tab. I guess it finally caught up with me. I’ll be sure and clear my last hour cookies immediately after reading my comics for the day and hopefully that will solve my problem going forward.
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