Here’s another complete waste of a strip. Kitch Swoon found something in Phil Holt’s studio, but she’s not going to tell us what it is yet. Like Monday’s strip, this one should have been left on the cutting room floor.
If you missed any of the five strips this week, here’s everything relevant that happened:
That’s it. There have been 13 panels so far, and these three are all you need to know. Everything else has been aimless talking.
“We need more Roy Lichtenstein prints! I’m going to Atomik Komix! Hey, it’s Kitch! Hi, Darin! Hi, Kitch, I want more money! Sorry, Darin, I need to speak to Phil! He’s over there! Hi, Phil, I want your old comic book pages, even though I said I came over here for Roy Lichtenstein prints! The comic book pages are at my house! Okay, can we go to your house? I’m sorry, my house is such a mess! That’s okay, I wish I was a real estate agent! And what’s this? It’s nothing! No, it’s definitely something!”
Good Lord, get on with it!
Funky Winkerbean loves its needless conversation. Especially in Tom Batiuk’s publishing stories, where he re-creates his own fantasies for his own entertainment. He’s far more concerned about meticulously outlining every single step of his ego wank, than he is in telling a story anyone on Earth wants to hear.
Tomorrow, we learn what Kitch found. Maybe.
Son of Stuck Funky 
“And what do we have here?”
“Oh, that’s just old garbage.”
“It’s actually priceless comic book history!”
“Meh.”
Sigh, the most predictable sequence of events ever. And it’s never going to stop, either. This will still be going on weeks from now, mark my words.
Child porn stash unfortunately.
Tomorrow, Phil flashes back to when he got that piece of paper…
I for one am impressed to see a 1950s-vintage drawing of a raccoon-skin cap!
No, that’s just Kitch Swoon’s wig and scarf.
Batiuk has a lot of writing quirks that irritate me but this – when he goes out of his way to make a character hostile/arrogant and then tries to make them self-effacing about their *brilliant* contributions – this is probably the worst thing he does.
Knowing your worth doesn’t make you an asshole! Being an asshole makes you an asshole!
And every single published person in the Funkyverse acts like this. They’re all full of arrogance, disguising itself as self-deprecation. And every other character indulges them in it, when this “disguise” wouldn’t fool the most imperceptive person in town.
Creative people have all kinds of personalities. They can be be introverts or extroverts, humble or arrogant, friendly or reclusive, open or aloof, optimistic or depressive, encouraging or demeaning, sloppy or neat, improvisational or meticulous, lazy or hard-working, formally educated or self-taught, and any other personality dimension you can think of.
The Funkyverse is full of “creative” people, who all came about their careers in different ways at different times, But every damn one of them is the same. It makes me wonder how many people Tom Batiuk has met in his life. I’ve met writers, actors, comedians, sportspeople, politicians and so on, mostly just from being a fan. My 10-year-old self could have envisioned a wider range of personalities for talented people than we see in the Funkyverse.
A proto-Spiderman layout, done before Stan Lee created the character. Or Iron Man, or Hulk, or some other Fifties/Sixties character. There will be an insinuation that Phil Dolt’s work was somehow ripped off and he never received credit for inspiring the famous character. Wake up, sheeple! It’s one more tragic example of how Big Comic Book crushes the little creators!
I could totally see that happening. If only those big evil publishers hadn’t ripped me off….blah blah blah.
Whatever she found is going to necessitate a trip to New York and a visit to the Palm Restaurant which was apparently a hangout for cartoonists in the ‘40s and ‘50s. TomBa blogged about it last June and lamented that the impromptu art made by cartoonists (including some legends in the craft) had been painted over in a recent renovation. I share his sense of loss. https://funkywinkerbean.com/wpblog/ghosts/
What a nightmare pairing: Kitsch Swoon (worst comic strip name ever? Worse than Aldo Kelrast?) and The Very Late Philled Hole.
And today we get to look at the back of a Very Interesting Something. What will it be? How long will this tedium be drawn out? Why would anyone care? I know I don’t care. Wrap this up and move on to the next subpathetic arc already!
Sorry, Aldo Kelrast was the best comic name ever. And certainly the best Mary Worth arc ever. Drunk Wilbur falling off the cruise ship would have topped it except he survived.
Aldomania hooked me.
Me too!
Aldomania cemented the good/badness of Mary Worth for me. I’ll never forget Mary telling Aldo off by saying, “I’m not interested! Capisce?”
Aldo Kelrast was a much better story than anything Tom Batiuk has done since. It featured something you’ll never see in Funky Winkerbean – characters questioning their own behavior. They wondered if their intervention with Aldo was too harsh, and if they drove him to his death. That’s pretty heavy.
They concluded it wasn’t, because Aldo was completely out of line, and it was his own decision to drive drunk. But they were human enough to care about the man. In Westview, everything is “oh well, it wasn’t my fault and I can’t do anything about it anyway (smirk) (eyeroll) (comic book reference). Whose funeral is this again?”
At least Aldo had the decency to die and stay dead!
“Wait.” — Wednesday Adams
Luann gave us “Ann Eiffel”, a pun name that my mid-Atlantic dialect can’t make work, for a character who looked like anyone else in Luann so I didn’t even realize for years it was supposed to be wordplay. So that’s a bad name by my lights.
Oh, “an eyeful.” I didn’t even get that until now.
“What have we here?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“It’s a Funky Winkerbean strip from 2022. It’s NOT nothing…”
“…”
“It’s LESS than nothing. It’s the nothing that nothing itself desperately excreted, flushed down a non-existent toilet, then blew up the non-existent toilet AND the entire non-existent house it was in — and for good measure burned down the non-existent town the house was in — all to completely ensure that this particular piece of shit would never return.”
(TO BE CONTINUED …. SEEMINGLY ENDLESSLY)
How I wish wish wish wish wish this were true!
I think it’s funny that Batiuk had Ruby working for ‘Capitol Comics’ back in the day, so the his precious Batom imprint would be free of the taint of 50’s era sexism.
Oh no, he doesn’t get let off the hook that easily. Back in the 50’s everyone was sexist, weren’t they?
The Funky WInkerbean remixes are awesome. Amazing that entertainment value can be created from such unpromising raw material!
“Oh, that’s nothing.” I automatically assumed The Late Phil Holt was talking about today’s strip, so I stopped reading.
Way back in 1970, (Be Ware of Eve Hill hadn’t even been thought of yet. ComicBookHarriet’s parents were trying to clean out their first room.) I was in Biology class. One of the studies was determining how low the amount of sugar in H2O would entice fruit flies to feed. (If I remember correctly, proboscis was used many times [or as the French say: probiscuits] I digress…) I believe this captures FW’s charm: how little content can Mr. Batiuk include and we still will read it. (Some as early as 930pm CDT the night before. I am looking at you first poster Epicus Doomus! (By the way, you are loved, sir!) So we expect little, and he lowers our expectations.
But not this week. No. This week he trains us to anticipate Art Nouveau, or as the Catalans say Modernisme Catalá. In some obscure languages, Kitsch Swoon is translated: Behold the Gem! (The exact same thing said about CBH’s truck, but I believe hers was, Behold the GMC.) Kitsch is going to reveal, and I quote Mr. Howard, “It’s terrific! It’s stupendous! It’s colossal!” She’s going to reveal art so nouveau that mere troglodytes like myself, we peasants, us hoi polloi, everyone of us plebes, will have to admit, “I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it for myself.”
I am prepared to be slobberknockered tomorrow!
(One last compliment to Banana Jr. 6000, and it’s the highest compliment a writer can get: I can’t wait to see what he writes tomorrow.)
“We’re terrific!” “We’re colossal!” “We’re even mediocre!”
It’s clear which of the three Batiuk aspires to reach.
Thanks! I do my best.
You’ve been doing phenomenal all week!
I stand in line!
Lisa would have liked that.
“I believe this captures FW’s charm: how little content can Mr. Batiuk include and we still will read it.”
I ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE!
1. Wait, so are these artwork prints that were already published? Rejected concepts? Or just random stuff Phillips 66 did when he was bored that was never intended to be seen by the public??
2. Shouldn’t Phillips 66 have some stuff already in mind that he’d want to put on display? Or is he content to let this weirdo lady rummage through all his life’s work like it’s a garage sale?
3. For someone who’s quick to remind us about how much he’d been financially screwed for decades over his time and labor, you’d think Phillips 66 would be asking what’s-her-name about negotiating some recompense…
3a. And now would also be a good time for him to mention that there’s no “hometown discount” and he’ll be charging at least the same fees for her as he would for the Art Institute of Chicago…
4. Spoiler Alert: This “magical panel” what’s-her-name is holding won’t be any different from any of the other hundreds of generic campy half-assed comics panels/covers we’ve seen from Batom and AK before…
The question is, will we see the magical panel (most likely as a Sunday special, with Phil and Kitsch nattering about it) or will Batiuk leave it to our imaginations (because he has none to spare for the artwork)?
I’m betting we’ll see it. Remember, Batiuk’s imagination doesn’t come into play — he’ll pay someone else to do the actual artwork.
Dialog scene below the art panel:
Kitsch Swoon: “If only you could have used this twenty-first century style back then! You would have blown every Silver Age artist out of the water!”
Phil Dolt: “I thought you already blew them.”
This story arc is like the world’s worst Indiana Jones episode. Endless blathering has replaced all of the action sequences.
Indiana JonesKitch Swoon and the Lost Art of Phil HoltI doubt we’ll see the “artwork” in question tomorrow. You can bet your bottom dollar we’ll see it on Sunday. Sideways. Ugh. 🤦♀️
Phil Holt isn’t dead. Roy Lichtenstein isn’t dead.
Phil Holt is Roy Lichtenstein!!
So is the floating head in the masthead Ghost Phil or Flashback Phil? Since the grumpy bastard has that sh*t-eating smirk, my guess is Coked-Up Phil.