“Who cares about my son getting married, I’m hungry!“. Get it, everyone? Funky is fat, and apparently doesn’t give a crap about his family. Did Batiuk just skip right over the actual ceremony, or is everyone just posing for the photos beforehand? If that’s the case, then Funky isn’t eating any time soon.
I really hope Funky is blurting this all out really, really loudly, just stealing all the focus onto himself. I also like that Holly ask to ask for clarification about Funky’s comment, rather than just assuming the wedding is his dream come true, like any rational person would.
Funky Likes Food
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
This suggests a fraught marital life for Funky and Holly. Does Holly make Funky sit with an empty plate waiting until she is finished eating?
I hope that Funky’s words lead to terrible food and a grotesquely bloody slaughter. What better way to end the Dread Wedding?
Wow, he’s just throwing in the towel altogether today. Talk about a lack of effort. Just dismal.
Haha, why is Durwood there? Has he ever said a single word to Cory, or vice versa?
Cory was sort of a fairly major early Act III character, but here in 2022 he doesn’t even rate a normal human interaction or two. No old friends, no sepia-toned flashbacks, no other “army buddies”, nothing. He’s just the guy getting married, and that’s all. I mean, why even bother with bringing him back at all?
Is that shadowy figure in Panel One supposed to be Darwood? I assumed those were the ghosts of Dead St. Lisa (she shows up to every big Westview event) and the Cartoonist Phil Holt (his spirit having been de-aged like Anakin Skywalker in the revised “Return of the Jedi”). Yes, I know Phil’s was alive recently, but one can dream, can’t one?
I was wondering that too. Just some random ghosts I guess.
Also appalling was Gross John in the background yesterday wearing what appeared to be a t-shirt and jeans.
No points if you could guess which t-shirt it was.
It’s handy that the wedding is held in a public park (though it might as well be called the Westview Wedding Chapel) because it means any of the habitues can be used as background filler. They don’t have to be established as wedding guests, they might just be at the park for a walk or a picnic or on their way to Montoni’s (where Wally, Rachel, and Adeela are holding the fort).
Adeela got deported. They just waited for Bill Clinton to leave town and then they grabbed her.
Maybe it’s what’s-her-name, you know, the one who birthed Dullard’s son. I suppose we don’t see the kid’s ghost because he died of neglect in their Hollywood apartment.
Panel 1: Is Rocky wearing a dead albatross on her head? Cory looks like a ventriloquist dummy (or Ventro, I suppose). Holly’s Hair Horn has morphed into something truly insane.
Panel 2: Uh huh.
“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.”
I get the reference! It’s “The Rind of the Ancient Marinade” by Calvin Coleridge, right?
The Wedding Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the Loud Buffoon.
“O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.”
“Shut up and sit down, Les!”
In the main, I like where this is going!
Is Bautik seriously skipping the wedding vows and just cutting to reception?
Granted, since he handled “Les wins an Oscar” by showing the actress was nominated (learning secondhand), take a bit of time for other nonsense, then smash-cut to “And the Oscar goes to…”, I guess it’s not unsurprising at this rate.
Hey, we just saw a week supposedly devoted to wedding planning with no actual planning in it. Why not have a wedding week where Summer Moore (!) shows up in as many strips as the actual bride and more than the actual groom? I swear, if Battiuk had written the screenplay for “Casablanca” the damn thing would have opened with (SPOILERS!) Ilsa and Victor on the plane to Lisbon, with Victor saying to his wife, “Gosh, honey, it sure was nice of your old flame Rick to give us those letters of transit that cannot be rescinded, not even questioned, wasn’t it?”
Looking forward to seeing Chester Hagglemore offer to buy the newlyweds’ combined comic book collection during the reception tomorrow.
The whole story is dripping with contempt for itself. It pays the bride and groom no attention at all, and doesn’t even show any interest in the event. Instead it just drones on about whatever it wants to talk about. Technology is bad. I like pizza. I like toys. I like comic books. To borrow a line from the Angry Video Game Nerd: this story doesn’t even care that it sucks.
Why is Cory even a character in the strip anymore? He has no personality whatsoever, he never “does” anything of note, he’s basically a less interesting Wally, which shouldn’t even be possible. No one’s interacting with him or his bride, no one’s talking about them, this could be anyone’s wedding. It’s just unbelievably pointless.
Like I said earlier in the week, it’s a “B” story with no “A” story. If this were a half-assed side joke in the wedding episode of a sitcom, it would be minimally acceptable. But there is nothing else going on. There is no development of Cory and Rocky’s relationship. There’s no tension or mystery about what will happen. There’s no antagonist. There are no stakes. There is no theme. There’s no larger story that this wedding is a part of or will affect. There’s nothing about weddings that’s being explored. It is complete filler.
Batiuk talks about it on his blog like it’s some sort of long-awaited conclusion. He said “it might be nice to take a look back over the shoulder to their time serving in the military where they met and fell in love.” That could be interesting, if Funky Winkerbean had ever bothered depicting it! Batiuk admits this in the very next sentence, when he says “Here they are returning home from Afghanistan and being met at the airport.” Falling in love as soldiers and coming home aren’t the same thing, Tom! On top of that, the coming home bit is devoid of anything interesting. It’s a rote retelling of landing and going to baggage claim. It’s just filler in every direction.
Well today’s Crankshaft wasn’t bad…
If the art wasn’t so atrocious. And if impatience was at all consistent with Funky’s character, I wouldn’t mind this one so much. It feels like this should have been a Crankshaft gag.
My older sister was married during the height of Covid. The reception was limited to 30 people. My dad thought it was the greatest thing ever. He got to spend the whole reception talking to my brother-in-law’s dad about architecture. He didn’t have to make awkward small talk with 100 relatives. He got to go back for seconds TWICE, and there was NO LINE! And no one made him dance.
I feel like a lot of the strips lately aren’t quite that bad, if you don’t read the strip regularly and don’t have the context. Once you get the context and follow the strip a little bit, you realize how many strips are about comics, and how almost all the characters are interchangeable, and how little effort seems to be put into the whole thing.
To an extent. Some of the Graduation Sweeps Week before the Not-Racism Racism arc was relatively fine, and some strips this week like today’s are nothing offensively bad, given the conceits you grant of it being in isolation without any context.
Even then, the other recent strips like Let’s Make Jokes About The Word “Hip” For An Entire Goddamned Week were dreadful, and the Three Weeks Of Irrelevant Time Travel Which Has Every Specified Detail Totally Wrong Because Fuck You were likewise awful.
But the underlying point is that, upon the author’s insistence, the context is relevant and is what elevates his strips above others, and that is what makes everything so especially bad and needs to be reiterated and reinforced at all times. He gets every bit of scrutiny and criticism which he deserves (and I argue, far far less than that extent) because of that assertion.
You want the world to appreciate your story? You got it, asshole.
This is weird because it seems to be both the wedding party reception table and family photographs combined. But it’s not the party’s reception table unless Holly was the Best Man. And it can’t be the official family photographs because the table makes any photo utterly awkward and poorly framed.
Anyway, if we go with it being the reception table for the wedding party, I don’t like the chances of any marriage where the groom’s mother’s sitting closer to him at the reception than the bride. Good luck with this, Cory. You’ll be needing it.