So, did Donna just now notice that they didn’t bring a gift? Did she just tell Crazy Harry that Rocky and Cory had a registry at “Bullseye” (it’s so strange the brand names that Batiuk is okay mentioning) and then never follow up again? When they were getting ready to leave, nobody thought to mention “Hey, do you have the gift?”. I’m not really sure what about Crazy Harry makes him seem like the guy you’d rely on to shop for a wedding gift.
This does make it day four of the two weeks (so far) in this wedding arc where the gag is all about modern technology. At least it’s not comic books again. I’m a little shocked the gag isn’t just “Hey, I brought them something better- a copy of the Superman and Lois Lane wedding special!”.
It’s amusing how on Monday Harry totally forgot smartphones were a thing, and now he’s casually placing same day wedding gift orders. I also find it really, really hard to believe that same-day delivery is available in a town like Westview. I do hope that the delivery person arrives right in the middle of the exchanging of vows, loudly asking where Crazy Harry is.
Missing the Bullseye
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Cut the cake!” Now there’s a clever euphemism for this spectacle! And, really, wouldn’t Crazy have already created a special gift by flavoring the cake with salad dressing?
Well, it is an Average White Band song.
So he can’t say “Target” but he can say “Amazon”? Nice consistency there, Cease & Desist Boy. Too difficult to come up with a goofy take on “Amazon”? He has no problem with the low-hanging fruit, but give him a challenge and he immediately concedes.
This big wedding arc reads more like a grab-bag garbage dump arc, where he uses those terrible one-off gags that don’t fit in anywhere else. And is Donna just realizing now that they failed to bring a gift? Didn’t it dawn on her in like, you know, the car? And why are these two imbeciles interacting during Cory’s wedding at all? How does he always manage to totally run out of material right after he establishes the premise?
For Amazon, I’m surprised he didn’t use “Nile” or “Mississippi-Missouri River System” or something equally as clever for a substitute. I guess he was just creatively exhausted after coming up with “Bullseye.” He seems to suffer from Creative Content Fatigue Syndrome.
In this strip, “Styx” or “Acheron” or “Lethe” would all work better than “Amazon.”
I’m mildly surprised he didn’t thrown in an Ahia reference and say “Cuyahoga.” A river so polluted it caught fire back in the ’60s would seem just perfect for the Batiukverse.
As an Edith Wharton reader, I’d go with Xingu.
The theme is Mary Sue Sweetwater’s funeral, but let’s have Les and Funky smear unrelated bullshit over the entire week.
The theme is Cory and Rocky’s wedding, but let’s spend at least as much time on that as we do on other people who have no direct relationship to them, like Harry for a few days or have Les smirk like an imbecile about comic books (which is fine today – other days, he’s the one to loathe how The Kids Today Are All Idiots). Let’s bring in Rocky’s Mom so that she can have two lines of text in three appearances.
Worthless.
Batiuk loves to write “B” stories that have no “A” story. A wedding story can have some side jokes about the gifts, buffet, dresses, vows, availability of alcohol, and so forth. But they’re secondary to something important that’s going on. They’re not the ENTIRE story, like they are here.
This is one way Batiuk gets away with what he does. He makes a lot of strips that look like they’d work if they were a small piece of a larger story. But there is no larger story. It’s just filler, every single day.
Cory and Rocky are so irrelevant, and their whole relationship is so uninteresting, that there’s no reason for this arc to exist at all. It’s just a dumping ground for TB’s idea of wedding jokes. Which are just an exercise in how many times he can say “Montoni’s” and “comic books.”
The first panel makes it look like Donna only realized they didn’t bring a gift after looking through the table of gifts for their names on one of the tags, which is just wonderfully stupid.
I hope they had laundry detergent on their registry, because that’s what’s available for same-day delivery. Which kind of works as it is from Crazy.
Hopefully it’s the brand of detergent that advertises “GETS OUT THOSE STUBBORN SALAD DRESSING STAINS!!”
Should Mr. Ayers outlive Mr. Batiuk, won’t it be a tremendous “tell all” when he writes his expose of the behind the scenes of FW! (Commissioned and authorized by TF Hackett.)
“Harry, why do you keep poking at my makeup pocket mirror?”
Because I can see myself in your pants?
The way Donna is drawn here makes me genuinely angry.
I feel like you could say the same for basically every woman in this strip except Cindy.
Cayla usually escapes the worst except that she always looks sad.
But at least we can understand why she looks sad.
Well, I sincerely hope that Mr. Battiuk gets a lot of use out of his free three-month Prime membership, or whatever “Orinoco” negotiated with him for today’s blatant product placement. I hear “The Boys” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” are good Prime series to watch.
Also, I’m glad that Harry’s neck recovered from its overextension the other day. Maybe he can offer some advice to the background blonde in Panel Three.
The only people who bring gifts to weddings now instead of just sending them to the couples’ (or one of their parents’) address are people as old as Crazy and Donna look. So people TB’s age.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh…
This could have almost worked as a inch from reality gag if it was a younger single person talking to a friend or parent, and not a wife who expected her husband to remember to wedding gift shop. Maddie would have been a good call. She could have totally shanked it!
This man gave you salad dressing for your anniversary. and you let him in charge of buying a wedding gift for someone else? Well, Donna, that’s kind of your fault.
This joke doesn’t work for a lot of reasons.
Irrelevant details like “Bullseye” should be omitted from jokes. Panel 1 should just be “I told you about their gift registry. I thought you took care of that!”
If the fake store name must be there, then you can’t juxtapose it with a real store name like Amazon. They need to both be real, or both be fake. Or TB needs to do a better job of world-building in general, since it’s not at all clear how Amazon and Bullseye co-exist. Or Instagram and Fleabay.
It’s not obvious that Bullseye is just TB’s stand-in for Target. If Bullseye must be present (which it doesn’t) then Sprawl-Mart would have worked better. You don’t need context to figure out what it is.
The comedy disconnect of Harry pulling out his cell phone to solve the problem when he “keeps forgetting” what cell phones can do just three days ago.
The comedy disconnect of Harry being entrusted to procure a tasteful wedding gift after the salad dressing fiasco.
The comedy disconnect of Harry being entrusted to procure a tasteful wedding gift for a young couple, when he was last seen bemoaning his lack of hipness.
The comedy disconnect of Harry forgetting to procure a gift for these known comic book fans when he was just in 1980. Never occurred to him to think about anyone else, did it?
Funky Winkerbean thinks it runs on its own history, but it really ignores it. It doesn’t make callbacks that would make good jokes, tie stories together in a way that makes them feel like part of a connected whole, or even use characters consistently. Every story is standalone, and every story contradicts everything else.
Yes. There’s a passable joke buried under all of this — saving face by getting Amazon to deliver a same-day wedding gift. With the right set-up and execution, it could be a neat little character gag.
This strip is almost a master class in the wrong set-up and execution.
Tom Batiuk’s blog has not been updated since last Sunday. Which means he has nothing to say about “unification display”, after it caused so much confusion at Comics Curmudgeon, Comics Kingdom, and here.
I’m reminded of the “Cow Tools” incident in The Far Side, where readers were puzzled as to what the cartoon was even about. Gary Larson was forced to admit publicly that it was a joke that didn’t work. He says in one of his books that he thought the strip was doomed, but this incident showed that a surprising number of people were paying attention to it.
Unification Display probably got more people talking about a Funky Winkerbean comic strip than they have in 15 years. And Batiuk ignores it, because he’s only interested in praise and awards. Or his head is so far in the sand that he doesn’t even know he caused a little furor. Pathetic. But I’ll bet you his weekly post about The Flash is right on time.