I apologize, but I cannot think of much to say about the lame weight gain gag in today’s strip other than that it’s staler than that Montoni’s pizza… Your mileage may vary.
by billytheskink | May 27, 2022 · 10:30 pm
Dubble Bubble-heads
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Tagged as Amelia, anon-o-students, Chinese food, COVID, COVID-19, Emily, flying music notes, fork in pizza, gags that amuse only one person, graduation party, horseplay, Logan, Logan Church, Montoni's, Montoni's logo, music, non-pizza foodstuffs, pandemic, parties, pizza, pizza boxes, references that were real topical a year ago, soda, stupid, sunglasses, swimming, things that were real timely a year ago, those annoying Crankshaft twins, those stupid Crankshaft twins, water, weight gain
Son of Stuck Funky 
Good Lord, these kids are lame. Are they eating mashed potatoes with their hamburgers and pizza?
What the hell is all that shit? Has Ayers ever seen food?
It looks like Left Twin is having some rolled-up hand towels from the gym, mashed potatoes with a pizza slice on top, an avocado pit, and a bandage. Right Twin is having the gym towels, black bean burger, and raw broccoli. Logan is also having the black bean burger, with black beans on the side and more mashed potatoes. And they’re all going to wash it down with store-brand Diet Taupe. Never mind the weight gain: if they don’t puke up their spleens, they’ve got a future in competitive eating. By the way, someone in the background has been stabbed in the back with a hay fork, and their corpse is floating face-down in the pool.
Good. It’s not just me. I’ve endured eating disorders a good part of my adult life. The very sight of those plates makes me queasy. 🤢
God bless the teenage digestive system.
Yeah they are too young to worry about weight gain. That will come once they go to college and start drinking heavily and eating bar food.
@Rusty Shackleford, is Covid 10 an actual thing? During the pandemic, my husband actually lost weight. He ate dinner at home. No fast food on the way home from work.
There’s no universal way that COVID affected people. Some people gained weight; some lost it. Some people craved social contact; others were fine without it. Some were more productive; some less. Some spent more money getting things delivered; others became frugal because there fewer temptations around. Some liked working remotely, others couldn’t get back to the office fast enough.
On a side note, the “freshman 15” is a sexist idea anyway. In my experience, 18-year-old males don’t care if they put on 15 pounds. If anything, a lot of them WANT to gain weight, because they’re trying to bulk up at the gym and think it’s a sign of progress.
@be
Same here. We ate better during Covid, plus it was easier to exercise since I was working from home.
@Banana Jr. 6000
My workplace reopened our offices last fall. A lot of the employees balked at returning to the office full time. Upper management has tried to be accommodating by offering a hybrid schedule, flexible workdays, and a loosened dress code.
I prefer not to work at home. Too many distractions and fewer amenities at home. I prefer speaking to my coworkers in person. I missed my carpool.
As a manager, I have an office with a door. Sometimes it’s nice to shut the door and listen to the white noise of the HVAC system.
===================
@Rusty Shackleford
I missed the all-day cafeteria and the gym at work.
The cafeteria at work has a better variety than at home, and their fruit is always fresh.
I tried jogging in my neighborhood but there were too many issues. People yelling at me to put on a mask. Almost getting hit by cars because I couldn’t hear them due to my iPods. I tried jogging around the lot of a small park down the street but fell after turning my ankle on a stone. I ended up buying a used elliptical machine from a co-worker. Also bought a stationary bike at a garage sale.
@be. I am on a hybrid schedule and have to come in two days a week…but typically I go three days. Two days is perfect as it is good to see my teammates. I also have an office so I can close the door but still, sometimes there are too many distractions.
We have mask Karens too in my neighborhood.
Ayers has seen food… but on as depicted in Joe Giella-illustrated Mary Worth strips.
What? You’ve never eaten purple food before?
I think Mary Worth catered the party
Gosh Mary, these carrot muffins and salmon squares really turned this party up to eleven!
OK kids, our word for the day is “Tone-deaf”
Why oh why, having used the “Covid 15” gag just a few months back, must Batiuk change it to “Covid 10” here? Nobody would say Covid 10. More of TB’s self sabotage. At least he’s had Ayers go to the trouble of filling the panel with bodies in motion, instead of the ol’ featureless void he employs rather than draw a busy background. And doesn’t that food look delicious? What teen could resist a dripping, black pepperoni slice from Montoni’s?
Yeah, he’s not just recycling relatively recent awful gags, he’s modifying them to be even worse. Unless he was trying to make some point re: how vapid and shallow These Kids Today are, but I have to believe it’s just plain bad writing and not a deliberate artistic choice.
And one way to distinguish your hip, cool, Kids-Today-Are-With-It teenage characters is NOT to have them talk like the fat, old, tired retirement age burnout who owns the pizza place.
As it is though, their having mashed potatoes and beans at a pool party just fit with everything else making them smaller, even dumber versions of their elders. Why isn’t Linda at this party? She’d fit right in.
Not having developed any high school aged characters beyond the merest stereotyped outlines once Owen and Cody graduated, TomBa had no idea what to do for his obligatory high school graduation week strips. What we have seen this week is the result.
Agreed. The twins appeared about five years ago from Crankshaft. I know they are named Emily and Amelia, but I’ll be damned if I can tell them apart. Is one supposed to be a little bit country and the other one rock ‘n’ roll? I think there was a half-assed attempt to make one appear goth.
As I mentioned the other day, after several years, one of the kids has yet to receive a name.
One of the twins was portrayed as a shooting enthusiast:
Which makes their appearance in the Guns Are Bad rally a little bit suspect. But that’s par for the course in this comic strip. Nobody has a character trait for more than one day. Unless it’s Les’ or Dinkle’s complete assholatry
Or Lisa’s lecturing from beyond the grave.
I have good news for all of you:
No Les today.
No HIM!!!! sighting!
You are welcome.
Looking at the last two strips, I notice I can’t find Bernie. Was he not invited? Lord, what unimaginable sin must a person commit to be left off the invitation list for a party where Les Moore, the most vile, loathsome creature in all fiction, is welcomed?
So the Twins are finally graduating How long have they been at Westview, must be seven or eight years
Quite the opposite. What towering good works they must have achieved — what an inspiration they are to all of Westview — to receive an invitation to go somewhere off-panel where Les Moore ISN’T.
I’ll give this far more attention than it deserves:
1.Far left: Is that balding 40-year-old proposing to the girl in the pool?
2. Left: Is that other girl in the pool raising her mouth to catch mashed potato droppings from the baseball-capped dork on the chair?
3. Foreground left: The blond girl has stabbed a plastic fork into her Montoni’s, draped atop some bivalves, a pile of cauliflower, a decayed olive, and a rubber thumb guard.
4. Covid IO (10?) girl tears a dripping, melted remnant of Montoni’s from the box while jamming her fingers through a plate containing a burger floating over a couple of veggie wraps and a mound of mushy spinach/seaweed.
5. The girl on the right is dumping mounds of ranch dressing (at best) on her burger/bivalve/coal tailings plate.
6. The dipshit on the far right is beaming lustily at his empty plate.
Correction to #4: I mean the “four more parties” blond, not the punchline-bearing blond.
#3 required the creation of the “fork in pizza” tag. I dunno if it will ever happen again, but if it does it must be documented. For science!
2. I can’t stop seeing this now, and I can’t stop laughing.
Slender teenage girls joking about weight gain? Well that’s sending a positive message…
Covid 10, Survivors 0. It reads so much better as a sports score, doesn’t it?
Or “Covidio”. Lisa doubled her Covideo… and then some, based on how many Lisa tapes we’ve seen in Act III.
Did you all know that Lisa spent all of two strips in front of the video camera shooting the infamous tapes back in late Act II? The whole thing was Les’ idea, of course.
*Good Lord!* The Grady Twins are devouring the Montoni’s Pizza Monster from the inside out! Let’s see Funky Flashman and The Late Phil Holt make an EC (Environmental Comix) tribute cover out of this one! *Choke!*
YES, it is lazily, terribly written.
YES, it is lazily, terribly drawn.
But there is no Dick Facey, no comix, no Dinkle, no Funky whining, and no apparent creeping existential dread. Just some empty-headed kids enjoying themselves at a party. Let’s face it, this is probably the best strip of the year.
It’s all of that, but I still think the entry earlier with the week regarding the Zoom stage prop for the conference was better, because that was a more discernible actual joke.
Today’s strip invokes another English phrase which a human has never spoken as a backdrop for girls to say “like omg we’re gonna be so fat XD”, which is more tired than Lisa’s corpse and the kind of thing that feminists like KFS editor-in-chief @teaberryblue would rail against if she cared at all about doing her god damned job.
I’ve always thought of the blondes as the Shining Twins. But now, in remembrance of the Doublemint Twins, I’ll think of them as the Double-Covidio Twins.
I am very confused by this graduation party.
Around here, there are two kinds of graduation parties. First is the graduation ‘reception’ party where you’re supposed to invite your parent’s friends, your aunts and uncles, your former teachers, church leaders, coaches, and maybe also your own friends.
But the idea is that you will dress nice in a horrible outfit your mom picked out and you will NEVER wear again and let a steady stream of people stopping for less than an hour hand you cards containing 20 bucks apiece. Everyone eats some cake, finger sandwiches, and veggies with dip. The only people who stay for any length of time are family members.
Then you spend all summer laboriously handwriting thank you notes with your own mother breathing down your neck, crossing names off a spreadsheet she made for you. That’s the sort of party you might invite Mr. Moore, your teacher to.
The other is the graduation party with friends. Where whichever student has the largest coolest farm/acreage/mcmansion or the most permissive parents invites 20 or 30 other students over for a night of debauchery that runs the gamut from a drug and booze fueled riot, to all the theatre kids getting jacked up on pixie sitx and Mt Dew and binging all three extended LOTR movies in one day.
You do NOT want Les Moore there.
The reception parties in my (and my daughter’s) day were called open houses and weren’t necessarily formal but yes, those were the ones with the family, friends, cake and food and lots of gifts/cards and lots of thank you notes.
I wasn’t part of the partying crowd, but I did get invited to one mildly raucous graduation party for an older classmate back in high school where the parents offered beer and wine. The grad popped a bottle of champagne in the middle of the street and was immediately told by a relative to get her butt back into the house before any cops drove by. And later when my dad arrived to pick me up, I was mortified when a drunk party goer stumbled out to Dad’s car. I hadn’t been drinking and Dad paid no mind to it-he was cool. I doubt that he mentioned it to Mom though as I’d probably still be hearing about it 30 years later!
Over on the BattyBlog Batty is posting the “Donald” video game strips. Hey, it beats comic book covers.
But no one would invite wouldn’t even invite Mr. Moore to the formal, grown-up party, because he’s just such a condescending prick to everyone. When he shows up to school at all. This whole week is just more character shilling for Les. “Oh, everyone invites me to so many parties”, he says to his wife, as if she wouldn’t have gone with him or not known about events related to the school she works at.
Not seeing that. The FW blog for 5/23 is a John Darling strip that appears to feature the late Scarsdale Diet author Herman Tarnower.
The 5/27 does appropriately reprint the Westview student walkout protesting school shootings.
Today is a vintage “Mystery In Space” Cover Me featuring Hawkman.
Wow, he pulled them down and replaced them with that crap. They were there, I swear.
It was there. I saw it too. My favorite was the one about “Playing Defender with one hand and Pac-Man with the other.” Even though Montoni’s had no Pac-Man machine.
Will check the wayback machine to see if they captured the site yesterday.
Leaving aside politics, since I love how politics-free this site is….
Once again seeing the slogan “Guns don’t die… Kids do” re-confirms my own personal headcanon: that the entity known as Tom Batiuk is a glitchy AI that’s one severed circuit away from warbling “A Bicycle Built for Two.”
It’s amazing how incoherent those slogans are, over such a straightforward and easy-to-understand position.
Crankshaft: Wait till Ed learns that in Ohio, once the fence has been up for 25 years with no objection from him, he loses his claim to the encroached land. Cmon Batty, let’s see that storyline!
Crankshaft and Lillian need to get a room. And close the door.
I love how yesterday, the laser surveyor was some kind of Star Wars device that could blow a perfectly round 2-foot hole in a tree trunk (but nothing behind the tree trunk, oddly), leaving the crown of the tree held up by a toothpick’s worth of wood on either side.
Today, he’s soberly using it to survey property lines and discussing legal statutes in re: easements.
Once again, the Funky Winkerbean Gods conspire to make me look like a fool. Yesterday, I donned my Livinia Jessup Women’s libber cap and called Batty out for being a misogynistic twit.
Today not one, not two, but three young ladies are talking about something other than boys. Who’d a thunk it? Batty has actually passed the Bechdel Test. Will miracles never cease?
It’s like he has some sort of totally useless sixth sense for these things. It really is uncanny.
I know! It’s like the third or fourth time this has happened to me. I’m starting to take it personally.
Yes! It passes the Bechdel Test, but fails Duck’s Corollary.
THE BECHDEL TEST:
A work must have
1) at least two women in it,
2) who talk to each other,
3) about something besides a man.
DUCK’S COROLLARY:
4) …or fear of weight gain, or anything else that might make them unattractive (to a man).
That’s a good point. The gals are mainly written by Batty to build up a guy’s s persona.
Does Mr. Moore find me attractive? He’s so squee! 🥰😍
Yeah, on second thought. 🤢🤮
One detail missing, which this strip just squeaks by on – the female characters must be named. Because they are twins, they have similar names, and TB has used the names in-strip more than once – though I kind of doubt he actually keeps track of which is which when he bothers to give one of them a character trait.
Whew, that’s a relief. Otherwise, John De Hart’s Champagne and Bulletsaka Geteven aka Road to Revenge would have passed the Bechdel Test when that one girl in the bar was objecting to the impromptu strip show following John De Hart’s truly unbelievable singing performance.
Where are you, Bernie?! Where’s my little cuddly teddy bear who walks like a man? 💖😘😍
My fave thing about Bernie is that his adorable bangs mean he isn’t prematurely balding like all his male classmates.