Today’s strip is all about the numbers for me… and not just the zip code of “Boston, Mass”. We’ve got 3 faculty on stage here, which is what… half of WHS’ known paid staff these days (along with Les, Cayla, and Lefty)? Of course, maybe you only need 4 teachers, 2 administrators, and a Dinkle when you only have 16 students in your senior class. To be fair, only nerds would show up for a school assembly during the last weeks of their senior year, so maybe these are just all the nerds (that would explain why Maris Rogers is having to plan on crashing graduation parties instead of hosting them).
Wait a second, this is the Senior Honors assembly. That explains it…
I thought Principal Nate meant he saw his students behind bars. I was trying to decide if he was commenting on their time in WHS or their likely futures when I noticed the Zoom tag. Then I decided it could be their futures.
Say, just who is Principal Nate talking to in Panel One? He’s not facing the senior (and judging from some of those faces, “seniors” can have more than one meaning) honorees, so are we to assume that the rest of Westview’s Class of ’22 is forced to be sitting in the auditorium watching this nonsense? If so, the “kids” inside those face frames had better pray that no one thought to raid the cafeteria for tomatoes before heading to the assembly.
Can’t wait for September and the introduction of a bright, fresh-faced new cast of thirtysomethings.
I needed a second to grasp that this was a “remote learning” gag. Ha…ha. It’s kind of nice to see Nate again after all these years, I guess. He’s one of the few FW characters who’s never annoyed me in any specific, overt way. At least not lately. It sure beats seeing Flash again, I can tell you that.
His lone, silent, half face appearance in 2021 makes you realize how much Batiuk has stepped away from involving the school.
I’ve been annoyed at Nate a few times, like when there was that horrible PC Holiday Concert arc, but he still doesn’t reach real Les or Dinkle levels of hate.
Nothing negative from me here! Nope. On the contrary, this kind of content is what he did well enough 50 years ago and it’s fine here.
Take a light concept and sell it with some goofy prop. Good! Done! It’s a Funky Winkerbean strip that has no inference to death, or cancer, or inevitable failure, or comic books, or intellectual or moral superiority on the author’s behalf. The dialogue reads as if it was spoken by an actual human being, and takes no more words than necessary to convey the point. There’s barely a full on punchable complete smirk on any of the numerous faces! It’s amazing.
Congrats, TB, you’ve met your quota for one not-completely-and-baffingly-terrible strip per year. See you in 2023.
Y’know what? As a one-shot, this one’s mildly amusing.
Not anything more than mildly amusing, mind you, and certainly not amusing enough to justify the week’s worth of dumb grad gags that are lying in wait. But still — on its own? This is … not awful.
Which is about the best we can hope for these days.
Last Friday I went to a show in the Northside district of Akron at Jilly’s, which
is right next door to…Luigi’s! I went into the Holy of Holies and sat at one of the three stools at the bar. Eat you hearts out!
The small #9 pizza ($12.90) was good and the toppings were plentiful, but the crust was a little too doughy and chewy for my taste. The glass of chianti ($6.75) was mediocre.
Ding ding ding! Congratulations, bobanero! You are hereby nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Power of Observation!
All hail the Imperious, Redoubtable, Indefatigable Green Pitcher! Gaze in awe at its Magnificence!
There is another fascinating thing shown in two of these pictures that I didn’t even notice it until I was posting them. Hmm…
I don’t know. The Ohio and Erie Canal is about a half mile from away. Local historians say that the rooms above Jilly’s were a bordello when the canal was in operation.
Sure looks like it used to be a fire station. The long shape, red brick, high interior ceilings, and overhead pipes (visible via Google maps) suggest it.
Every time I think of Funky coming to NYC and trying to pass that mess off as “pizza” … it’s a miracle he didn’t get run out of town on a rail, instead of just going bankrupt.
It’s an endless source of amusement how fascinated Batiuk appears to be with NYC, while getting almost everything about the city dead wrong. Did he never eat pizza here, even once?
Seriously, who does that? 99.9998% of people, when they want to expand their business, start by opening up a second location in town… But not Dr. Funk; he goes straight for fucking midtown Manhattan…
Did nobody honestly try to talk him out of that shit?
Sorry for the typo and multi-post! Dagnab new-fangled computin’ machines.
Don’t forget to bring cash or a check to Luigi’s. No credit or debit cards accepted!
Wow, didn’t realize they had breakfast all day. It’s been many years since I went there as I just don’t care for their food, nor do I want to stand in line.
The parking lot was nearly full, but at 8 PM I walked right into the restaurant and could have taken a table or a booth. The main room was about half full, but I think the side rooms were more crowded.
I don’t what they thought when I started taking pictures.
It’s not odd (to me) that a restaurant would have coffee all day, and it’s not odd that someone would have coffee at lunch, and it’s not odd that they’d have lunch at a counter and drink a coffee with it. It’s odd that they’d have pizza with coffee, especially if that’s the only beverage.
For the record, when I see what “Montoni’s” pizza looks like, and when I imagine how thirsty it probably makes you, and when I think of washing it down with copious (probably lousy) coffee…
I don’t know which end it’d come out of but I know it would come out violently.
There are three very tall stools installed at the bar. I am not tall (I’m short), but I was almost bending over to get at my food. It would be much more comfortable if the stools were lowered at least six inches. The staff seemed surprised that I wanted to eat at the bar, but it was a better spot for taking pictures.
I know that some businesses hate the processing fee that credit cards charge but the thought of carrying literally thousands of dollars in cash to a bank’s night depository seems like asking for trouble.
Hey, look! It’s the twins! Hard to believe they’re graduating. Seems like only last week they were 8 years old and nominating hateful old harridans for regional author awards.
1. Whatever the joke is supposed to be here — I presume kids constantly posting themselves on social media, I still don’t get it.
2. What the hell kind of “honors assembly” is this?? None of the kids even tried to *halfway* dress up for this special event… There are no parents present with their camera flashes going off so much they make the auditorium look like a dance club, which I already know would be bullshit… And none of the kids are holding little trophies or medals or framed certificates or anything… Nevermind the fact that not even 20 seniors from a student body of at least 2,000 made the honor roll. Hell, my own high school had more seniors on the honor roll and I graduated with a class of 58(!)
The strip itself… I guess I agree with other commenters that there’s nothing particularly infuriating about it, which makes it a contender for best strip of the year. I don’t really agree that it’s funny. It just seems try-hard. But no comics, no Lisa, no Dinkle, no Les…. yeah, that’s refreshing.
The Honors Society must be scraping the bottom of the barrel for members if they included the twins from Crankshaft, considering that most of their characterization concerned how they were both idiots.
Don’t know which is more jarring, the two kids with massively receding hairlines, or the few children who appear to be no more than 12 years old. Bernie looks almost fully grown compared to a couple of them. Do Batiuk and Ayers not realize that these kids are supposed to be 18 years old? And this doesn’t even address how haphazardly drawn all of them are. Which one do you think took Ayers the longest, and how many seconds do you think he spent on it?
And while many of you have said it’s an innocuous joke, the thing that struck me about it is how an audience would react upon seeing two teachers dragging that thing onto the stage, apparently unbeknownst to the students on stage. That’s a lot of work for a weak-ass joke. And Linda and Nate appear to be so proud of themselves over this, which would just get the audience to think of them as huge dorks. Probably the Honors Society kids too.
To be fair, they probably felt that way about them already.
The 18-person frame is too elaborate. But if they just made one frame out of poster board and gave it to one kid to hold around themselves for a photo, I can see it getting a laugh in a boring awards show. At worst, it’s believably unfunny. You can imagine your school’s “funny” teacher trying to impose this gag on the world.
I like the gag but my kids did not Zoom once this year, or last year for that matter; they were in-person every day, so Zoom is a pretty old concept for me; spring of 2020. I guess it depends on the city or state you live in. If Akron is the North Star I looked it up and they went to in-person school in Feb 2021.
There’s Bernie, my chubby little cherub! He’s an honor student too?! Brains and good looks. He’s like an overstuffed teddy bear with glasses. One of you young ladies should grab him while he’s still available.
Bernie Silver, big man on campus. Good lookin’ and goin’ places.
Bernie is almost certainly going to be the kid from this group that we see going forward, if any of them are. I suspect he’ll be a regular presence in the background of future Komix Korner sequences.
Bernie got a family, but Lumpy Black Guy didn’t even get a name.
I agree. There’s a chance we will see Bernie in future Komix Korner sequences. There’s also a chance he’ll come back as an unpaid intern at Atomik Komix.
It’s a shame the poor balding Lumpy Black Guy never even got a name. That stinks. He had how many appearances? A couple dozen? Meanwhile, Connor appears two or three times and receives a name on day one.
Got the reference! Incidentally that zip code is not in Boston and wasn’t when either iteration of Zoom was on either, but the mail always seemed to get there. I know I sent for their little booklets all the time.
Real-life High School Hijinx: when I was in high school, everybody assumed I was an Honor Student and therefore a National Honor Society™ member. I was not, having been blackballed (I was told) by my freshman English teacher. Despite this, I am in the yearbook picture, as some friends who were members decided to rebel by sneaking me into the shot, in a place where I couldn’t be airbrushed out (this was decades before Photoshop). Far as I can tell, the yearbook picture was about the only tangible benefit of membership anyway.
This is exactly the kind of dork-ass thing that school assemblies do all the time. It’s not uproariously funny (or funky), but it’s going to make a bunch of school principals do a sensible chuckle and share it on Facebook.
A good strip, but I am well aware that Les could appear at any moment!
Son of Stuck Funky 
I thought Principal Nate meant he saw his students behind bars. I was trying to decide if he was commenting on their time in WHS or their likely futures when I noticed the Zoom tag. Then I decided it could be their futures.
Say, just who is Principal Nate talking to in Panel One? He’s not facing the senior (and judging from some of those faces, “seniors” can have more than one meaning) honorees, so are we to assume that the rest of Westview’s Class of ’22 is forced to be sitting in the auditorium watching this nonsense? If so, the “kids” inside those face frames had better pray that no one thought to raid the cafeteria for tomatoes before heading to the assembly.
Can’t wait for September and the introduction of a bright, fresh-faced new cast of thirtysomethings.
To me the “we” implies the audience is made up of the faculty.
But then shouldn’t we see Les on stage holding up “his” Academy Award?
I needed a second to grasp that this was a “remote learning” gag. Ha…ha. It’s kind of nice to see Nate again after all these years, I guess. He’s one of the few FW characters who’s never annoyed me in any specific, overt way. At least not lately. It sure beats seeing Flash again, I can tell you that.
His lone, silent, half face appearance in 2021 makes you realize how much Batiuk has stepped away from involving the school.
I’ve been annoyed at Nate a few times, like when there was that horrible PC Holiday Concert arc, but he still doesn’t reach real Les or Dinkle levels of hate.
So this is a Covid joke about Zoom classes. It took me a few moments to figure it out. And when I did…well, OK.
Just think, if the school still required social distancing, this strip would never have happened. Almost makes you wistful…
Nothing negative from me here! Nope. On the contrary, this kind of content is what he did well enough 50 years ago and it’s fine here.
Take a light concept and sell it with some goofy prop. Good! Done! It’s a Funky Winkerbean strip that has no inference to death, or cancer, or inevitable failure, or comic books, or intellectual or moral superiority on the author’s behalf. The dialogue reads as if it was spoken by an actual human being, and takes no more words than necessary to convey the point. There’s barely a full on punchable complete smirk on any of the numerous faces! It’s amazing.
Congrats, TB, you’ve met your quota for one not-completely-and-baffingly-terrible strip per year. See you in 2023.
Y’know what? As a one-shot, this one’s mildly amusing.
Not anything more than mildly amusing, mind you, and certainly not amusing enough to justify the week’s worth of dumb grad gags that are lying in wait. But still — on its own? This is … not awful.
Which is about the best we can hope for these days.
Last Friday I went to a show in the Northside district of Akron at Jilly’s, which
is right next door to…Luigi’s! I went into the Holy of Holies and sat at one of the three stools at the bar. Eat you hearts out!
The small #9 pizza ($12.90) was good and the toppings were plentiful, but the crust was a little too doughy and chewy for my taste. The glass of chianti ($6.75) was mediocre.
Did you see the famous green pitcher, though?
That is a very good question, batgirl!
I do see a pitcher with a green handle in the second to last photo
Ding ding ding! Congratulations, bobanero! You are hereby nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Power of Observation!
All hail the Imperious, Redoubtable, Indefatigable Green Pitcher! Gaze in awe at its Magnificence!
There is another fascinating thing shown in two of these pictures that I didn’t even notice it until I was posting them. Hmm…
Should I be proud or ashamed that I own that exact same green pitcher?
Is part of Luigi’s in an old fire station next door?
I don’t know. The Ohio and Erie Canal is about a half mile from away. Local historians say that the rooms above Jilly’s were a bordello when the canal was in operation.
Sure looks like it used to be a fire station. The long shape, red brick, high interior ceilings, and overhead pipes (visible via Google maps) suggest it.
No Komix shoppe on the second floor? Blasphemy!
Thanks for the photo tour. ‘Atsa thick pizza!
You didn’t get the Italian tossed salad with the half pound of mozzarella cheese? 😞
Every time I think of Funky coming to NYC and trying to pass that mess off as “pizza” … it’s a miracle he didn’t get run out of town on a rail, instead of just going bankrupt.
It’s an endless source of amusement how fascinated Batiuk appears to be with NYC, while getting almost everything about the city dead wrong. Did he never eat pizza here, even once?
Seriously, who does that? 99.9998% of people, when they want to expand their business, start by opening up a second location in town… But not Dr. Funk; he goes straight for fucking midtown Manhattan…
Did nobody honestly try to talk him out of that shit?
Sorry for the typo and multi-post! Dagnab new-fangled computin’ machines.
Don’t forget to bring cash or a check to Luigi’s. No credit or debit cards accepted!
Wow, didn’t realize they had breakfast all day. It’s been many years since I went there as I just don’t care for their food, nor do I want to stand in line.
Was it busy?
The parking lot was nearly full, but at 8 PM I walked right into the restaurant and could have taken a table or a booth. The main room was about half full, but I think the side rooms were more crowded.
I don’t what they thought when I started taking pictures.
You were taking pictures. They probably thought you were a restaurant reviewer. 😁
Luigi’s Manager: Don’t just stand there, you fools. Seat this man and take his order immediately!
So I guess Batty was right to show people sitting at the bar drinking coffee.
Still seems odd to me, but I can admit when I am wrong.
It’s not odd (to me) that a restaurant would have coffee all day, and it’s not odd that someone would have coffee at lunch, and it’s not odd that they’d have lunch at a counter and drink a coffee with it. It’s odd that they’d have pizza with coffee, especially if that’s the only beverage.
For the record, when I see what “Montoni’s” pizza looks like, and when I imagine how thirsty it probably makes you, and when I think of washing it down with copious (probably lousy) coffee…
I don’t know which end it’d come out of but I know it would come out violently.
There are three very tall stools installed at the bar. I am not tall (I’m short), but I was almost bending over to get at my food. It would be much more comfortable if the stools were lowered at least six inches. The staff seemed surprised that I wanted to eat at the bar, but it was a better spot for taking pictures.
I’m always amazed when I encounter cash-only businesses. Do they at least have a fee-charging unbranded ATM on site?
The lower right-hand corner of the menu says, “Sorry, We Do Not Honor Credit Cards – Atm Machine Available.”
Also written at the bottom of the menu is, “We use only 100% Peanut Oil for all our Fried Dishes.” I guess you’re S.O.L. if you have a peanut allergy.
We have a liquor store near us that is strictly cash only. No credit/debit cards. No checks. No barter.
Is there anyone on this Earth who would see a busy all-cash business like this and not think “they’re keeping two sets of books”?
And/or “it’s a money-laundering operation”?
“Two sets of books” definitely crossed my mind.
I know that some businesses hate the processing fee that credit cards charge but the thought of carrying literally thousands of dollars in cash to a bank’s night depository seems like asking for trouble.
No credit cards accepted? What the hell kind of weirdo godless pizza joint is this? And where are the arcade games?
Hey, look! It’s the twins! Hard to believe they’re graduating. Seems like only last week they were 8 years old and nominating hateful old harridans for regional author awards.
1. Whatever the joke is supposed to be here — I presume kids constantly posting themselves on social media, I still don’t get it.
2. What the hell kind of “honors assembly” is this?? None of the kids even tried to *halfway* dress up for this special event… There are no parents present with their camera flashes going off so much they make the auditorium look like a dance club, which I already know would be bullshit… And none of the kids are holding little trophies or medals or framed certificates or anything… Nevermind the fact that not even 20 seniors from a student body of at least 2,000 made the honor roll. Hell, my own high school had more seniors on the honor roll and I graduated with a class of 58(!)
The joke is that because of the pandemic, many schools were closed and some schools did basically an entire year online, primarily using the Zoom app.
You may commence uproarious laughter now.
BTS, today’s title is… [chef’s kiss].
The strip itself… I guess I agree with other commenters that there’s nothing particularly infuriating about it, which makes it a contender for best strip of the year. I don’t really agree that it’s funny. It just seems try-hard. But no comics, no Lisa, no Dinkle, no Les…. yeah, that’s refreshing.
Thanks for the kind words yesterday, TDoD. I’m glad you liked my dialogue improvements.
The Honors Society must be scraping the bottom of the barrel for members if they included the twins from Crankshaft, considering that most of their characterization concerned how they were both idiots.
Don’t know which is more jarring, the two kids with massively receding hairlines, or the few children who appear to be no more than 12 years old. Bernie looks almost fully grown compared to a couple of them. Do Batiuk and Ayers not realize that these kids are supposed to be 18 years old? And this doesn’t even address how haphazardly drawn all of them are. Which one do you think took Ayers the longest, and how many seconds do you think he spent on it?
And while many of you have said it’s an innocuous joke, the thing that struck me about it is how an audience would react upon seeing two teachers dragging that thing onto the stage, apparently unbeknownst to the students on stage. That’s a lot of work for a weak-ass joke. And Linda and Nate appear to be so proud of themselves over this, which would just get the audience to think of them as huge dorks. Probably the Honors Society kids too.
To be fair, they probably felt that way about them already.
The 18-person frame is too elaborate. But if they just made one frame out of poster board and gave it to one kid to hold around themselves for a photo, I can see it getting a laugh in a boring awards show. At worst, it’s believably unfunny. You can imagine your school’s “funny” teacher trying to impose this gag on the world.
I like the gag but my kids did not Zoom once this year, or last year for that matter; they were in-person every day, so Zoom is a pretty old concept for me; spring of 2020. I guess it depends on the city or state you live in. If Akron is the North Star I looked it up and they went to in-person school in Feb 2021.
Yeah, most schools were open in 2022 up here in NE Ohio and most of the other restrictions were lifted in June of 2021.
Principle Nate looks stoned out of his gourd in panel 1. Can’t say that I blame him…
Principal*
There’s Bernie, my chubby little cherub! He’s an honor student too?! Brains and good looks. He’s like an overstuffed teddy bear with glasses. One of you young ladies should grab him while he’s still available.
Bernie Silver, big man on campus. Good lookin’ and goin’ places.
I love you, Bernie!
💘💖🥰😘
Gosh, BWOEH
Get a room!🤪
Get a room? Like for a Magic the Gathering tournament? I wonder if Komix Korner is available?
Bernie can sort Magic cards.
💗😍🥰😘
LOL. You are loved, woman.
Mr. BWOEH is a lucky man!
Thank you!
I am a lucky woman! I’ve been happily married for 35 years. Bernie is just a crush.
Bernie: Ma’am, you’re trying to seduce me!
You’re in luck!
Bernie is almost certainly going to be the kid from this group that we see going forward, if any of them are. I suspect he’ll be a regular presence in the background of future Komix Korner sequences.
Bernie got a family, but Lumpy Black Guy didn’t even get a name.
I agree. There’s a chance we will see Bernie in future Komix Korner sequences. There’s also a chance he’ll come back as an unpaid intern at Atomik Komix.
It’s a shame the poor balding Lumpy Black Guy never even got a name. That stinks. He had how many appearances? A couple dozen? Meanwhile, Connor appears two or three times and receives a name on day one.
I wonder who named him “Thatsnought Hewmore”?
Got the reference! Incidentally that zip code is not in Boston and wasn’t when either iteration of Zoom was on either, but the mail always seemed to get there. I know I sent for their little booklets all the time.
Real-life High School Hijinx: when I was in high school, everybody assumed I was an Honor Student and therefore a National Honor Society™ member. I was not, having been blackballed (I was told) by my freshman English teacher. Despite this, I am in the yearbook picture, as some friends who were members decided to rebel by sneaking me into the shot, in a place where I couldn’t be airbrushed out (this was decades before Photoshop). Far as I can tell, the yearbook picture was about the only tangible benefit of membership anyway.
Fubunky Wubinkuberbubeuban subucks.
Whoever downvoted this, don’t you have some gifts to steal from the Whos down in Who-ville?
This is exactly the kind of dork-ass thing that school assemblies do all the time. It’s not uproariously funny (or funky), but it’s going to make a bunch of school principals do a sensible chuckle and share it on Facebook.
A good strip, but I am well aware that Les could appear at any moment!
Now you’ve done it….the Les summoning spell has been invoked.