I’d argue that today’s strip is the product of an AI tasked with generating images for the word “wistful”… but that’s an insult to artificial intelligence and I don’t want to be responsible for unleashing Skynet. This is just completely sad, but in the stupidest way.
Mindy is the one that really punches up the stupidity here. First, “when” Ruby retires is essentially right now, it doesn’t need to be discussed as if it is well in the future. Second, Mindy also draws a paycheck from Atomik Komix… so does she dramatically underestimate the financial resources it takes to travel extensively or does Chester really pay that well?
And if Chester pays that well, why can’t he spend some money on an office that doesn’t look like a dungeon crawl game being played on a vintage grayscale Macintosh? Maybe everything in the office is made of stone. So that’s why they called him “Chester the Chiseler”!
Son of Stuck Funky 
This has to be one of the grimmest, bleakest FW strips ever. Everything is dark, muted, and black, foreshadowing Ruby’s imminent, inevitable death, while the dialog gives us our first real glimpse into Ruby Lith’s broken husk of a soul. A life squandered on an unfulfilling, unrewarding comic book career, and now even that meager skill has eroded to a point where she has no choice but to retire to her vivid fantasy world, where she visits all the places she’ll never go and experiences all the things she’ll never experience. If she’s not dead by morning, I’ll be flabbergasted.
Once again I’m contractually obligated to suggest the possibility that BatHam has totally lost his mind, but honestly, it reminds me of old Act II FW lately. Crankshaft is doing suicide gags, Montoni’s is closing, and Ruby is taking a knee and passively running out the clock. It’s the kind of dark, morose stuff he used to do all the time. Doesn’t make it any less weird, though.
Panel 2’s depiction of Ruby is truly bizarre. Are we seeing a cubist rendition of her glasses situated at an absurd angle away from her hatchet-face? And why is her drawing board drawn as being flat instead of at an angle…never mind. Ruby, just do us readers a favor and have your head travels off-panel, please.
Cubist FW? Knock-off Picasso meets the Real Ayers. Tell me more…
“Cubism in the comics” is a thing Bill Watterson could (and did) pull off, to great comedic effect. Batiuk/Ayers, not so successful.
I don’t think it’s bleak, because it’s too incoherent to be bleak. What the hell is Ruby even saying here? We know nothing about her personality that would make this make sense. Was she unable to travel but wanted to? Is she proud of her imagination? Is it a reference to her rewarding career as a comic book creator, or decades of drug abuse from her implied hippie past?
I don’t know, and neither does Tom Batiuk. It’s another one of his meaningless aphorisms that sounds like fancy writing and takes up space in a newspaper. I doubt he put any more thought into it than that.
“I don’t know, and neither does Tom Batiuk”. —> another byline for the entire collection.
“I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Somehow, I don’t think that’s the traveling Ruby’s done.
When Bull died, we had a quotation from Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand.” At the start of his career, Dylan wrote a song for Woody Guthrie, appropriately called “Song for Woody.” It concludes:
Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
I don’t see that sort of traveling for her, either. Or for the Atomik Komix folks. I do see it for Green Lantern, Green Arrow and the Black Canary, but that was in another decade, and, besides, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams both are dead.
Damn, her mental energy is so low that her cap’s “Battery Low” light is dimming faster than her brain! I warned her to recharge yesterday, but would she listen? Of course not!
“Ruby, why are you sticking that fork into an electrical outlet?”
“Uh… I need to recharge? Yeah, I’m recharging, definitely not trying to get out of this dystopian nightmare of a town.”
“Battery low” light! Perfect! Magnifico!
She can’t recharge because Chester never installed a 50 Hz East German power supply in the Atomikkk Komixxx office. That’s the real reason she’s quitting.
This is horrible.
I can’t speak for everyone but to me the free time and (hopefully) 401k/social security stipends that would allow for travel would be the most appealing part of retirement.
Ruby’s attitude of “my fantasies are better than real experiences” is both appalling and 100% on brand; apparently she’s become yet another author avatar.
It didn’t even need to be traveling. Maybe she could have said she’d be devoting more time to her feral cat rescue group or playing the slots or something. Instead, he gave her nothing. Apparently, Ruby will run out the clock at home, imagining she’s someplace else. It’s f*cking depressing as shit.
Besides the Lisa You-Run-But-You-Can’t-Escape-Death Run, do Westviewians ever do anything for other people? My retired relatives and older friends give a lot of their time to church and secular organizations that help children, seniors, or their community in some way.
My mom and dad were not too happy about retiring, but they got involved in a couple of organizations that let him use his talents to help people. And they still find time to “travel” in their minds through books (although, admittedly, not Silver Age comics…)
* their talents, not just “his.” Mom has a lot of talents that I’ve consciously tried to copy and hone. (Typing not being one of the ones I’ve copied, yet, obviously.)
This is a point I’ve banged on about more than once. The Crankshaft character who buys a bike for his long-dead son and puts it under his own Christmas tree instead of donating it to a family in need. Cranky himself seeing a co-worker having Thanksgiving dinner alone at a diner and just going home to his own (undeserved) family dinner without inviting her.
The only characters I can recall taking action for others are either extremely peripheral or ones we’re supposed to be unsympathetic towards – and it’s generally on the behalf of a central character. The nameless neighbour who filled the Moores’ birdfeeder so Les could be comforted. Bull Bushka supporting the Dead Lisa Run. I suspect Bull taking Summer through her post-injury rehab was meant by TB as restitution for his (re-re-retconned) bullying of Les than consideration for Summer, for that matter. (I’m also on record believing Summer to have been emotionally and physically neglected by Les and by not-dead-yet Lisa.)
I also remember the man who bought a copy of Lisa’s Story to give to his dead wife.
Westview residents actually have a lot of empathy. But only for the dead.
Perfect examples, batgirl. I remember the bicycle arc now that you mention. Talk about morbid. I kept expecting him to give the bike to a poor family or at least to a local organization after Christmas, but Batiuk loves to focus on single deeds that symbolize sadness and suffering and leave it at that. I also agree that Summer was neglected. There’s certainly no evidence of Les ever giving her more time than he gave his writing. I think Batiuk expects us to assume he was a great dad, b/c Les!
Augh. Wanted to reply to you BJ6K, as well, but cannot do so under your post. You are, pun intended, dead right. A book as a gift for a dead person? How totally Batiukian. If someone I loved did that I’d try to get them into therapy.
Exactly. And it’s not like you can’t have real experiences AND spend plenty of time with your imagination. You can even- hold onto your hat, Ruby- do both at the same time. Hike. Walk. Sit outside for once in your life and appreciate being able to feel the sun on you still while most of your cohort are dead or dying.
Ruby sounds like someone who survived solitary confinement in a dark, quiet cell by letting her imagination run free. Except what we’ve seen of her work suggests that her imagination is slogging through a hip-deep swamp.
Solitary confinement in some place quiet is preferable to the average Funkyverse existence.
To return to Thoreau, there’s “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Should it be “all Westviewians lead lives of quiet desperation?” I don’t think so: Becky Blackburn Howard seems to be trying to make the best of a bad bargain.
I want to like Becky, but I can’t get past her being married to John Howard. A strong, self-motivated woman like that wouldn’t tolerate a lazy, overgrown, slovenly manchild who plays with comic books all day and wants nothing else out of life. She’s basically supporting him, and has even said so in the strip.
I would love to hear that Becky is leading a double life, and she married Skunkhead because he’s too self-absorbed to notice her secret. Yes, at times she’s meek, mild suburban housewife Becky, but when she answers a phone call and hears only the quick, terse words “Wrong number” she transforms into the Beckster, a mutant secret agent who battles evil throughout the space-time continuum. (Hey, for once we’d have a reasonable explanation why a Westview woman avoids attention and vanishes for long periods.) And by Westview standards, it would be too ironically funny for the comic-book geeks to not notice a superheroine in their presence. (“Can’t be! She doesn’t wear spandex!”)
Has Batiuk covered marital infidelity in Westview? The theme would give Shrike Batiuk a whole tree of pain on which to impale his hapless characters.
I have to wonder which is the worst. Losing an arm, putting up with the meddlesome Dinkle, or being married to Dead Skunkhead John?
If I were Becky, I’d fake my death and disappear in the middle of the night.
Sorry, Becky.
I do get a kick out of the implication of Mindy asking this question. Mindy, of course, was the one who “discovered” Ruby and brought her to Atomik Komix. She ought to be the closest anyone here is to Ruby… and yet, she knows nothing about what Ruby might want to do with her remaining years.
In fairness to Mindy, I’m quite sure TB doesn’t know what Ruby wants to do with her remaining years either.
Epicus Doomus, I was going to say the same thing but, as usual, you say it with more eloquence and depth.
I have a confession to make: The first week or so that I read SoSF I thought some of the comments about TB’s state-of-mind might were speculative, even borderline ad hominem. (I certainly did not see the work as above criticism.)
Within another week I realized that I was wrong. Wrong with a capital W and with no space for being even a little bit right.
It’s quite reasonable to question the emotional well-being and general state of mind of someone whose art consistently portrays everything as a source for sorrow.
If he were a Buddhist, he’d show how the very understanding that life is pain and sadness is the first step to walking the path to transcend it. Instead, he just breaks every moment in the lifespan of a middle class person into its constituent parts of “woe is me.”
50 years of making a living off his creative talent, of never working in an office or on a shop floor, much less toiling away in fields or mines, and all he can think of is variations on death.
Rules of the Funkyverse
1. No one ever wins.
2. No one ever breaks even.
3. Wry resignation and accepting your fate is the best you can ever hope for, and even that’s real iffy.
4. It’s all out of your hands.
5. The past was way, way better.
6. High school forever permanently shapes us.
7. It’s going to rain or snow today.
8. Trying is hard.
9. Avoid fried foods, as they angry up the heart.
10. Don’t look back, death might be gaining on you.
LOL!!
Thank you, Epicus Doomus. Here’s a smirk so you’ll know we’re on the same page: 😏
Actually, there’s an irony inherent in reading that list: It takes me way past smirking and into out-loud laughing (esp. numbers 4, 7, and 8.)
Credit to Satchel Paige for inspiration, re: 9 and 10.
Oh, wow, a Satchel Paige reference. Very cool. Seriously, I cannot believe how much delicious food-for-thought that SoSF gives to readers daily.
I was in 6th grade on September 25, 1965. The KC Athletics signed Satchel Paige age 59, to play one game. He pitched to 10 players on the Red Socks. No one scored. Carl Yastrzemski doubled. Satchel retired 7 players in a row, one of whom was Tony Conigliaro, a personal favorite of mine. Satchel leaves the game in the 4th inning to a standing ovation. I think I saw the game on TV, but that is doubtful. It was a home game, so I must have listened to it on the radio. But it was spectacular. Satchel Paige: greatest of all time.
@sorialpromise You remember it well:
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1965/B09250KC11965.htm
Amended Rule of the Funkyverse #1
1. No one ever wins … except Les and maybe Dinkle. But even when they do, they will complain about it, dismiss it, ignore it, or forget about it.
Les and Dinkle bear the cross of humanity’s successes so the rest of us don’t have to. We are already forgiven for any wins we may create or, more likely in Westview, have handed to us on a silver platter.
Also, those wins will usually be entirely undeserved, and usually achieved through someone else’s capriciousness, not through any effort on their own part. (“Hey, Les, here’s an Oscar that I won, but I’m giving to you because you wrote the book that the script for the movie I was in was based on, because you’re just that godlike!”)
“Hey, Dinkle, we’ve chosen you to be in the Rose Parade!” Which he gloats about, even though it wasn’t a competition of any kind.
“Hey, Dinkle, here’s a free trip to Europe and a gold medal for selling so much chocolate that you single-handedly saved the Belgian economy!” Which he gloats about, even though the GDP of Belgium is over $500 billion, and his students would have done much of the selling.
“Hey, Dinkle, here’s a job as our new choir director!” Which he gloats about, even though his skills don’t fit the job in any way.
“Hey, Dinkle, here’s a bunch of money so your bunch of no-talent old farts in a retirement home can make a record, and take a completely unnecessary trip to Memphis to do it!” Which he gloats about, but I’ll allow it because fundraising is the one thing he’s actually good at.
“Hey, Dinkle, here’s your hearing back!”
I don’t even think Batiuk is, at his core, that depressed or dark. He just saw too many Woody Allen type movies in his youth, and decided that wry cynicism had more artistic merit. Like by pointing out the shit on the sidewalk he was revealing a level of perception and an ability to face reality above the people who ignore it. He’s a 75 year old edgelord.
Fair point with a solid reference. I like your take as it blames the sin and demonstrates compassion for the sinner.
If what you say is the case, then Tom reminds me of a friend I had a long time ago who was extremely intelligent, and had a heart of gold. But he could not do any kind of ironic, sublime, or satiric humor. Totally tone deaf in attempted deliveries so, when he did try to be ironic, he came across as a pompous jerk. Which, in fact, was my impression of him for a few months until we had the chance to get to know each other. (We ended up sharing a house with a couple of other friends for two years.)
So, I can see how TB would lock onto an idea of what art should be and then, reinforced by his initial successes, and becoming less flexible with age, never be aware of it.
Have you ever met TB or attended one of his talks?
Edgelord! I’ve been learned again! Had to look that up. Thank you. I’m going to have start attaching -sensei to your name.
I think he’s just running a program at this point. Stilted out-of-nowhere question, first half of answer, wry smirky continuation of answer. None of which relates to anything we know about these characters or the situation.
It would be interesting to see if AI can generate plausible Act III strips. The writing is so formulaic and empty that it’s almost a perfect use of modern AI.
Yeah, he likes Woody Allen only because he thinks he has to in order to fit in with the right people.
CBH, You said what I was thinking. I think Batiuk is not especially depressed or unhappy. In fact I think he doesn’t perceive how bleak and hopeless life in Westview appears in his comic strip. What I think is that, in the beginning, when FW was supposed to be funny, he thought bad luck and losing made better jokes than success. And, in fact, it usually does. Isn’t there a comic called “The Born Loser”? Think about a strip like “Mutts”. When the dog looks outside and says “ The world is so wonderful!” it’s cute (sort of), but definitely not funny. But in “Pearls before Swine”, when Rat goes on a rant about hopelessness and inevitable death, it can be funny. (Yes it can also start getting old after a while. Not my favorite strip.)
Now that FW is Serious and Important and Realistic, I think Batiuk feels that woe and suffering equals drama and weight. And helpless stoicism equals profound philosophy. Because there’s so much he doesn’t seem to understand about people and real life it comes out nothing like he thinks it does.
I think one reason is that, if you look over the kinds of fiction that are typically given awards, it’s always a bleak and depressing view of “the fallen state of man.” Comedy rarely wins in a general contest.
Since he clearly wants awards, the path is obvious.
He must not have seen “Manhattan,” in which Tracy tells Isaac (hmm, the Lord allows Abraham to spare Isaac…is that a ram I see before me, or merely a scapegoat?): “Not everybody gets corrupted. You can have a little faith in people.”
If you scratch a cynic, you’re supposed to find a frustrated romantic.
Comics note: there’s an issue of *Starman* in which a group of super-heroes (and one reformed super-villain) name their favorite Woody Allen film. The Floronic Man’s favorite is “Interiors,” which he thought was very funny. (The last time I saw it, I tried to see it in the spirit of his comment, and I enjoyed it very much. Cologne, as a rule, does not permeate a house.)
The Batman refuses to play initially, but admits later that he does have a favorite, “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which taught us that if it bends it’s comedy, if it breaks, it’s tragedy.
🎶Destination Unknown….
Is this the “Ruby songs in your head” thread? It is now. Here’s a piece of my childhood for the rest of you all –
Metro Milwaukee? A fellow Dairylander! I was born and raised just outside of Madison. No local Ruby references that I recall, but the TV ad that is still stuck in my head is Crazy TV Lenny for American TV & Appliance.
Anyway, everything in that ad is taking ownership of the 80s. Love it.
mosiwake arimasen demo I’m actually a Chicago South suburb person myself (one year stint in MI being the lone exception). Somehow I knew I should have mentioned that at the outset. But yeah, those commercials reached all the way here back then.
Also I can’t have fun and type J words at you or else it’ll get eaten by the filter. I don’t know much anyway.
None-san, did you study Japanese or spend time here? Proper use of a “moshi-wake” is not taught in JAPN101. Anyway, I wonder how many Chicagoland sales Ruby got. Growing up we spent more time in the Windy City than we ever did in Milwaukee. Chicago suburbs always remind me of John Hughes movies (which dates me perhaps!)
All self study. I’ve been a specific type of video game nerd all my life, and I’ve been buying J consoles and games since Saturn. Hell, I’ve only purchased two games this year, and one of them is the PS4 Densha De Go release that flew under my radar last year.
Never been there and maybe I never will. But I still listen to radio broadcasts and drill on flashcards a bit every day to keep lying to myself about ever learning the language beyond kindergarten level.
Bob Barry—-the self-professed Fifth Beatle.
Now I have this Ruby Song in my head…
“I traveled the world in my head! I went to Italy and ate pizza at the Leaning Tower! Went to Paris and had the best French bread ever! Tried chop suey in its native Hong Kong and found the place in the Sandwich Islands where they invented the sandwich! Saw genuine Australian ostriches bury their heads in the sand! Bet none of you had experiences as rich as mine!”
Yeah, I bet Alice B. Toklas here has been on a lot of “trips” in her life.
By the way, the “B.” stood for “Babette.”
I learn so many things from this blog.
Okay.
There’s almost something here, underneath all the poor execution.
Tolkien almost never left the UK after moving there at the age of three from South Africa. He took a vacation in Switzerland in his teens, served in France in WWI, and I think took a vacation to Italy in the 50’s. But that’s it. For a man who dreamed up entire continents, he was a real homebody.
My dad hates the idea of travel. I’ve asked time and time again, if you could go anywhere…and he shrugs and scoffs. Spending money just to go somewhere and look at stuff is foreign to his brain. You ask him now, and he’ll say he’ll want to visit my sister and the grandkids.
Some people really do all their travelling in their minds, and don’t want the hassle of dragging their bodies along.
But the way it’s presented today, it’s an incomplete thought. Because we aren’t getting confirmation that Ruby lacks the desire or means to travel.
We don’t know anything about Ruby that would put this remark into any context. It sounds like something Morgan Freeman would have said in The Shawshank Redemption. There it would have made sense, because we know why he couldn’t actually travel if he wanted to. Without knowing anything about Ruby’s life, it’s like a punchline that had no setup. We don’t know why this is poignant, relevant, or even what it means. So much of the writing in Funky Winkerbean depends the reader knowing things the story never told them.
My dad worked for a company that wanted him to go to Belgium and set up some machinery they had sold to a firm there. He said he didn’t want to go so I said, “Dad, you’ll be getting a paid trip to Belgium!” I shut up after he answered, “I saw Belgium in 1944.”
Love the avatar! And respect and gratitude to your father. When I was a teenager, I did summer work for a veteran who’d been a tank commander in the Battle of the Bulge. We spent all day together every Saturday. He talked about his war quite a bit. The education he gave me was invaluable.
This reminds me of Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs in Thornton Wilder’s *Our Town.* (Wilder figured in SOSF recently. A literate community is so delightful!) He’s content to stay in the U.S. and visit Civil War battlefields; she’d like to venture abroad and go someplace where they don’t speak English at all. They don’t have to! They don’t want to!
A variety of things — unemployment, pandemic, etc. — have kept me from traveling the last few years, and I miss it. Maybe “there’s no place like home,” as Dorothy Gale put it, but maybe Wreckless Eric was right, after all:
When I was a young boy
My mama said to me
“There’s only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti”
I’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world just to find her
For Foxglove, Hazel and Alvie, wherever they are.
it’s an incomplete thought–> Another byline for most of the FW oeuvre.
This would mean more or, for that mater, anything if she were a person and not a plot device.
I agree though “plot” is something readers of FW would love to see. It’s a pretty thin concept in Batiuksville.
Now all she has to do is put on her Ruby slippers, click her heels three times, and repeat three times “There’s no sensitive genius like Les Moore whose sufferings are so profound.”
Just dropping by today. As it happens, I chose a particularly pathetic strip, didn’t I?
I’d say for recent strips, it’s not really more pathetic than average. It’s harder to notice when you’re following it daily, but FW’s downhill slide has been slow, steady and consistent.
Come back in six months and see how pathetic it is then!
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/11/17/50-funky-years-done-batiuk-retires-winkerbean/
Color me skeptical until further notice. As of now, tombatiuk.com has nothing to say about it (but has two new posts about other things). The source link in the article goes to a defunct/non-existent Google group. None of Mike Rhode’s eight blogs has a post about it.
Now that I read the dailycartoonist.com story more closely… it looks like Batiuk emailed the news to his inner circle only. This included D. D. Degg, or someone shared it with D. D. Degg. I’m guessing the public wasn’t supposed to find out yet, which is why no confirmation on TB’s own blog or anywhere else. I suspect it will come soon.
Those quotes are such absolutely perfect Batiukish, that either they come from the man himself, or one of the contestants in the recent SOSF “imitate TB” contest. I believe it could be either one, except that – though this is all snark – the regulars/leaders here wouldn’t do something that deceptive. (And I also knew that, even though I saw that announcement on FB just now, others here would already have caught it.) Mr. The Sink, I suspect you will have a lot to say tomorrow…
He has posted it to his blog: https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/fifty-years-before-the-masthead/
The strip won’t be missed but I wish and hope that somehow this little community can continue… It’s my first visit every morning and such a welcome refuge from the conflict and stressful news everywhere on the internet.
He also did fix the unreadable mess that was the header image on his blog, so at least we have that…
Well. It’s clear that he’s been spinning his wheels on FW for quite some time. And — judging by the level of effort put into it — that he probably hasn’t really enjoyed working on it for a while now.
No confirmation yet, but it’s certainly plausible, and would actually explain a fair bit.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Funky and friends popping up every now and then in that irascible school bus driver’s strip.”
Is… is that a threat? Is Batiuk threatening us with this? That sounds like a threat.
CBH and I were right, Crankshaft stays and FW goes.
Had to read the strip a couple times before I noticed that Ruby says “I’ve ALREADY traveled the world.” Past tense. I take that to mean she spent much of her career huffing ink and paint at her drawing table, and has to retire while she’s still got a minimal number of functioning brain cells left.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2022/11/17/akron-comic-strip-artist-tom-batiuk-end-funky-winkerbean-comics/69657981007/
THE FUNKYVERSE IS ENDING.
LONG LIVE THE CRANKSHAFT CONTINUUM.
It’s apparently true, folks. More to follow…
Ho.
Lee.
Sheet.
We saw it coming, but I am still shocked. I expected a year long victory lap.
You and I both. Typical Batiuk, confounding and weird to the bitter end. We’ll be doing something, although at the moment, I don’t know what. After that…well…
I’m glad to be with you, Epicus Doomus, here at the end of all things…
Wow.
The Funky Apocalypse.
My new website: Ed’s bathroom.com is now up. Your one stop for Crankshaft snark.
No problem. This site becomes “Son of Stuck Funky Classic.”
Good time to try out that AI idea. Every day the AI generates a new “Funky” strip and we snark on it/try to make sense of how it fits in the FW universe. In other words, nothing really changes.
Or…
Start again at Act II, where the original Stuck Funky began?
Or…
Snark on Act I strips that are currently running on CK? (Very few are snarkable; they’re actually not bad.)
Or…
Become a Crankshaft snark blog? (Still snarkable, but less meat in terms of continuity.)
Or…
…Freeform Funky Fanfic?
…Random farm-adjacent chitchat?
But surely our gracious hosts knew the Fünkerdämmerung would be upon us someday, and had contingency plans. I humbly await the day of revelation.
Restart Act III (or II?), go in order, Crowdsource them in the comments for the day before then post the winners. How could we do any worse?
Lynn squeezed another decade out of FBOFW, we’ve got a ways to go yet.
The news of retirement kinda explains the de-aging of the Crankshaft characters relative to the FW characters. Now 65 year old (give or take 10 years) Les can easily converse with 70 year old (give or take 10 years) Crankshaft who is no longer in a nursing home or wheelchair. The school bus driver will never get older, but Pam may still get cancer because…well…TB.
Well if nothing else, Bautik managed to find a way to make this week interesting.