Link to Today’s Unbearable Punning.
After a week of Holly being cripplingly insecure, she now is trying to infect others with her self-doubt.
Cindy is a good call to try and make self-conscious. Her entire tenure as character, Cindy has been consistently portrayed as brimming with self-confidence ONLY when arbitrary ‘success’ conditions she’s built up in her mind have been met. She’s like a popularity Pharisee, as long as she’s safely within the Talmud of Flawlessness, she’s a self-righteous zealot.
But you take her ONE INCH from the straight and narrow, and she collapses. And this was worse when she was younger. When not having a date for New Year’s Eve had her hiding out at McArnolds with LES MOORE, because it broke some unwritten mental rule of hers.
And she has a history of jealousy when it comes to her romantic partners.
But yes. Cindy’s jealousy. Maybe not completely misplaced when it came to Funky and Rachel.
But, of course, she’s also been jealous of Masonee Jarree.
But it is LAUGHABLE that Cindy would be jealous of the Westview Women Lumps on display today. Marianne and Rachel were both women YOUNGER than her and lauded as attractive. Cindy is still miles above anyone else female at the reunion. Even with the crippling scoliosis she’s been stricken with in panel 1.
This, this is the ultimate power FANTASY. Parading your delicious arm candy to all the dowdy hausfraus in Ohio. Beneficently allowing all the ugly old geese a moment to pose with your prize.
I mean, who could be jealous of ‘scribbles’ and ‘Jan’? Who even is Jan?
Is she some late Act I graduate I’m unfamiliar with? Why not Cindy’s old wingwoman, Carrie?
Or Les’ senior prom date, Melissa.
Because the only Act I Jan I can think of is Ladies Club, Rap Cellar, Jan. As in Jan and Marcia.
So that is my headcanon now. These two ladies posing with Masone are Marcia and Jan. They crashed the reunion in order to meet a movie star. They’re a good 8-10 years older than everyone else, but everyone is so dumpy looking no-one can tell.
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Does it bother you that all the women here want to bang Mason?”
“Nah, because I’m the biggest sex object here.”
Real progressive there, Pulitzer (nominee) Boy. Mason is a huge movie star, and seeing him at a shitty class reunion would be a huge exciting thing for most people, and Cindy, who’s been with him for years and is a celebrity herself, obviously understands this. But in spite of that, Holly has to ask, so Cindy can once again remind us about how hot she still is. Because if Cindy wasn’t hot, what, pray tell, would she be? The vapid one? Funky’s first wife? Not in the strip at all?
And as I and everyone else saw coming from a mile away, Captain Courageous aka BatYam has already punted on the transgender thing. He brought it up, dipped his toe in, then got the hell out of there before anyone was compelled to send a letter to the editor or something. It still counts when it’s mentioned during the next puff interview, though. Nicely done.
Flight 372 on Batiuk Air to the Isle of Forgotten Characters now boarding at gate six.
Rolanda Matthews: Oh, that’s me. Nice seeing everyone again. Let’s stay in touch.
(everyone awkwardly smiles and waves without much enthusiasm)
Everyone: Bye, Roland.
Rolanda Matthews: It’s Rolanda now.
Everyone: (without enthusiasm) Whatever. Say Hi to Adeela, Amicus Breef and Ruby Lith for us.
Everyone forgets Kevin the dwarf.
But… but… but… Kevin Brown isn’t on the Isle of Forgotten Characters.
A couple of years ago in the Comics Kingdom FW discussion, you told us that Kevin is on a Bonnie and Clyde style crime spree with Chien in the American south. 😂
Sadie Summers’s day will come, just you wait, Henry Higgins!
Your post reminded me of the Batty blog, where he considered the creation of Sadie Summers the worst mistake he ever made in creating a character.
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/match-to-flame-116-2/
I discovered something kind of interesting in that blog.
Cindy, the most popular girl in the school, was coming on like gangbusters at this point, and I felt that I had barely scratched the surface of her potential as a character. I didn’t want to lose all of that, so I did something stupid. I cloned her and created her little sister/doppelgänger Sadie. Flash Fairfield, the editor who way back when had tried to school me on character development, would have been spinning in his grave at that move, and, if he weren’t in his grave, that would have probably finished him. Mea culpa, Flash.
Flash Fairfield? That was the name in the window of the Dibbs Gallery in the Friday, July 29, 2022 strip. Instead of the expected “Flash Freeman”.
There was a real-life person named Flash Fairfield? Did Batiuk have a synapse misfire and inadvertently use the wrong name?
Hunh. Interesting.
Also, Batiuk had an editor?
You got it!
It’s precisely that Batiuk comment about Sadie (to Batiuk what Jose Peterson was to Schulz) which causes me to trot her out when I wish to allude to something not likely to happen.
But you never know…in comics, villains can return after nine years (the Looter/Meteor Man in *Spider-Man*) or eleven (the Miracle Man in *The Fantastic Four*), while Liz Allan, who in High School was something of a Summers girl, returned to *Spider-Man* after eight-and-a-half years.
And we did ultimately learn how Gabe Jones brilliantly defeated the Secret Empire…
Presumably Eliza did tell Higgins where his slippers were.
Funny thing is, though, that during that era BatYam created a whole shitload of equally useless characters, something he continues doing to this very day. Owen, Cody, Alex, Wedgeman, Buck, Cliff, Vera, Flash, Phil, Ruby, Adeela, that’s eleven right there, just off the top of my head, and that’s just in Act III.
Although I do enjoy the really weird ones, like Boy Lisa’s creepy half-sister or Frankie’s smarmy sidekick Lenny. But they were just one-offs, not recurring characters.
@Epicus Doomus
Boy Lisa’s creepy half-sister
That took me a minute. 😉
I had completely forgotten about Ruby Lith!
I like the balloons floating around the room, apparently tied to nothing. It’s like a metaphor for how this story arc is going to last longer than the National Helium Reserve.
If it’s Comic Book Harriet headcanon, that’s good enough for me. After 45 years, the Rap Cellar Ladies return! And, er, just as funny as ever!
God as my witness, I thought the broad on Masonne’s left was supposed to be Rolanda.
Also, isn’t Mr. Jarre a big-time action star a la Cruise or Stallone or one of the MCU’s many Chrises? Not one of the Westview men–90 percent of whom seem to be comic book nerds–want to get a selfie with Starbuck Jones himself?
Also redux, and forgive me if someone brought this up last week, but since when is a high school reunion scheduled for late August, at the crest of the summer vacation season? My experience has always been that such events are usually held in conjunction with homecoming weekends or the weekends after Thanksgiving, when people may more inclined to be visiting their hometowns if–again, unlike 90 percent of the Westview alumni–they don’t live there?
Or Batty could have had it on the strips actual 50th anniversary.
My class reunion was last week after being postponed for two years because of Covid. Even though I have been careful I caught Covid about a week and a half before the reunion, and I was still coughing and sneezing, so I couldn’t go. A few days ago there was a post saying that one of the attendees had tested positive, so everyone should test themselves. So it goes.
The reunion committee posted a list of people who were attending. Out of a class of 850, they got the best response ever and had about 150 there, although that number included spouses and guests. In a class and a school that big, there are a lot (hundreds) of classmates I don’t remember at all.
Out of the people at the reunion there were only a handful of people I knew well. I am Facebook friends with some of them now but I only have only kept in contact with (and actually seen in all those years) is a neighbor who was in the class after mine. (He just went to live in a memory care unit. Sigh.)
The closest friends I had in high school have never been at any of the three reunions I have attended. Searches for friends with common names Watson and Wilson are tough. Some of the Polish and Ukrainian names are a much easier search. There were girls named Ljubinka, Valentina, and Ingeborg, and I knew three guys named Bohdan, two named Orest, and one Zenon. None of them were at the reunion. I can still order food and beer in Ukrainian.
There has been activity on the Facebook page, and one woman posted this yesterday. “Does anyone follow Funky Winkerbean? He is celebrating his 50th High school reunion, funny.”
Mason once told Cindy that he loves Westview because of its old-fashioned, small-town virtues. So shouldn’t she be scared that when he visits Westview he’ll find a woman who’s closer to his age and more species-appropriate than she is? Someone who doesn’t get violently jealous or spend much of her life and income on maintaining her perfect youthful image? For that matter, how does a younger star get fixated on an elderly, narcissistic shrew who disrupts his on-set performances, and not have his agent tell him to see a shrink?
Somebody call the police. Someone at the reunion has absconded with Masone’s hair fweep!
Missing: One hair fweep. Reward! Contact movie star Masone Jarre for details.
Has Masone always had the hair fweep or was that something he developed via osmosis after he met Cindy, she of the Act I hair unihorn?
In mid 2014, during the Lust for Lisa farce. Masone did NOT have a hair fweep.
Mason Jar, first seen Sunday, June 29, 2014. No hair fweep.
Better view of Mason, Friday, August 08, 2014. No hair fweep, but looking really jacked. BEEFCAKE!
I’ll have to try posting strips someday. Not now, time to sleep.
There’s no need for Cindy to be spittingly jealous of any ladies here. No one is under the age of 40.
Cindy is as superficial as they come and is completely flattery operated.
Does it bother Cindy? Um, yes, it does. Am I the only one who remembers when Cindy yellled cut?
Thanks CBH for the retrospective. There is so much Batty could have done to commemorate 50 years on the comics page.
He could have brought back some of these older characters and filled in their backstory. But no, we get comic books, comic books, Lisa nostalgia, and Dinkle.
Does anyone understand today’s Crankshaft?
Not really. “Ransomware attack” makes sense, but it’s not clear how this affects Channel One if it was aimed at the parent company.
Interesting that they only sent the text to the man and didn’t even tell whatshername. Never mind that neither of their jobs would involve dealing with a network breach. As best as the story told us, they’re a camera person and a director.
This is going to be another ill-informed shitshow full of internet-bashing, and these two dumbshits solving a problem they have zero knowledge about because They’re Just So Talented. And because Tom Batiuk thinks every career other than writing, making comic books, and being the world’s greatest band director can be done by any bozo.
I wonder if their first idea will be to run Phantom Empire on an endless loop while they work on the problem. Which honestly wouldn’t be the worst idea; it’s public domain so it’s free; it’s long enough to fill up several hours; and it’s so badly out of format that viewers will know something is seriously wrong at the station.
I can’t even parse Panel 3. I guess he’s saying “the servers are down”, in a way that reinforces the underlying sexism and ageism of it all.
I still have no idea what is going on. Yeah funny how they just waltz back in and score a good job.
I guess the fired the nerdy guy who maintained their computer equipment to make room for these clowns.
In the early 1930s, movies sometimes shot foreign language versions of movies at the same time as the English edition. I’ve heard many good things about the “Spanish” version of “Dracula.”
Maybe there’s a German “Phantom Empire” which is a classic waiting to be discovered.
I’ve seen Spanish versions of Laurel & Hardy featurettes.
The Laurel and Hardy had become wildly popular all over the world during the silent era, and after the introduction of sound, producer Hal Roach sought to retain Laurel and Hardy’s enormous worldwide audience by making companion versions of their new films in Spanish, French, German and Italian. Ten of the team’s releases were given the multilingual treatment between October 1929 and February 1931. Since Stan and Babe only spoke English, interpreters would write their dialogue phonetically on a blackboard just out of camera range.
There are episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in German.
Let’s address the elephant in the room. If this is Cindy’s 50 year reunion, that means she is pushing 70. Mason would probably be in his 30s. His early 40s at the most. Which means this is classic cradle robbing. (Not that Cindy has seemed to age a day since Act 2.) How much longer until Mason realizes Cindy is old enough to be his mother (if not old enough to be his Grandmother) and dump her for someone closer to his own age? Or is Mason older than he looks?
Talmud of Flawlessness is now my new band name.
The most ridiculous part of this entire arc is Masonne actually wearing a name tag with his first and last name. Like everyone in the room doesn’t know who he is.
BatHack, getting the details wrong for 50 years!
Brian Setzer went to his wife’s high school reunion and wore a name tag said “Stray Cat Guy” because he’s a cool rockin’ badass.
That is great. If Masonne had a tag that said “Starsucks guy”, “Space Dude”, or “Cougar Bait” that would show a sense of humor, something we know BatHack does not possess.
Dinodeer Dude!
My Dog Pookie Person!
1. Somewhere back in Los Angeles, Masone Jarre’s publicist has gone into cardiac arrest seeing Hollywood’s biggest, coolest A-Lister absolutely destroy his Q-Rating with all these old fogey selfies…
1a. And isn’t the Hollywood tabloid press supposed to be at least a little curious about a 68-year-old woman with the face of a 34-year-old woman and the body of a 23-year-old woman that doesn’t have a single wrinkle, sag, or ounce of cellulite? I’m not saying that women can’t “age gracefully” or that there aren’t any hawt 60-somethings out there, but come the hell on…
1b. It’s funny because Cindye Sommerse-Winkerbeane-Jarre LITERALLY LOOKS YOUNGER THAN THE GROWN CHILDREN OF HER FELLOW CLASSMATES…
2. As for the trip down memory lane, Pete Rattabastardo’s reaction for seeing a real live nekkid lady for the first time would shame even the most hopeless permanently virginal geek loser… In the next panel he’s almost certainly trying to stroke his boner through his shorts…
re: 2) Pete looks like he’s 11 years old at most in that panel. A slingshot in his back pocket wouldn’t have been out of place. Revolting.
Goodbye Rolanda, I will never forget you.
I will also never forget Zanzibar, Amicus Breef, Tika the Queen of Murania, Adeela, Susan, Original Cayla, Khan, Kahn, Kahan, Kan, Robbie, Billy, Wally Jr., Bill Clinton…
I’ve forgotten most of the post act 1 characters as they are nothing more than cheap cutout characters pasted in when needed to save on character and story development.
Not to forget the three men I admire most, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who caught the last train for the coast the day Saint Lisa died.