I tried to come up with some thoughtful commentary here. But I just cannot get beyond the fact that Crazy Harry is mooning over what is ostensibly an eleven (and a half!) year old boy in a space helmet.
How I (Hel)met Your Mother
18 thoughts on “How I (Hel)met Your Mother”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
Um yeah, I know he didn’t mean it that way, but yikes, this is a tonal disaster. Crazy swooning over an eleven year old is just a real bad look. There’s such a thing as trying too hard there, BatBrain.
I read “tonal disaster” as “total” but, yeah.
So did I, and I wrote it. Six of one, a half dozen of the other. He keeps rehashing this tedious story, but in all the rehashes, he’s never really added any new twists. Or gags. Or reasons why it exists at all. Harry was the Defenders champion, the Eliminator came along, it turned out to be a girl, Harry married her, they had a bunch of kids who vanished, and here we are.
Hey, remember SoSF’s The Defender? We had a commenter called The Defender, who pretended to be a legit fan of the strip. And it was an amusing shtick for a few days, but alas, he (or she, but probably he) got all carried away, and had to be banished. And that’s why we’ve always frowned upon novelty commenters who always do shtick. Gotta nip that shit in the bud, I always say.
Great title today, BTW. The post titles are what I miss most. Nothing like the thrill of totally nailing a classic post title. I still do victory laps over “Killing Ed Softly With Baton”.
My own favorite title is also a music reference: “I’d Like To Find Your Inner Child And Kick Its Little Ass.” It perfectly suits that noxious character, and my hatred of him. That whole song is hilariously angry.
My second-favorite title is a music reference I don’t think anybody got: “Get The Funk Out.”
This strip is great! There’s nothing creepy about it at all!
Tom Batiuk’s terrific!
The whole time-is-whatever-I-say-it-is thing is cool! Yeah!
I never get tired of Montini’s!
Can’t hear enough about video games and comic books! Can I get an “Amen”???!!!
Whoa, hey! Maybe tomorrow Dinkle will be in the strip! Or Batton Tomas! Or Les Moore! Whoo!!! Talk about making a good thing even better, amirite?
Yeah! Whooooo! Yeah! All right! This is… this is…
…actually, this is hard to keep up. Forget it!
Today’s FW Untold Story
The Daily Bleak
Beardo McMailman Arrested For Turning Out Just Like That Fat Pedo Who Ran A Comic Book Store
E. D. and TF,
I am going to politely disagree with both of you. We know and they know who the youngsters actually are, so I do not see a tonal disaster. It’s kind of a time travel staple. They go back and sees their younger selves. Particularly sweet in hind sight, if they are romantically involved as are Donna and Crazy. As others have mentioned, I see salad dressing coming into the story. This can turn out well. Who wouldn’t want to see their parents as teenagers, or visit grandparents in the prime of their life, and see themselves from 50 years ago?
TB has the makings of a good story here. He is setting it up nicely. Perhaps this guest artist is making TB actually put some effort into the plot.
I know that is probably a bridge too far, but one can hope. It’s day 4, and it hasn’t collapsed yet.
I agree with SP that this is pretty benign. As is often the case in the Funkyverse, it has the makings of a good story… that Tom Batiuk never gets around to telling. They go back in time to stand around and watch themselves play a video game, in a contest that has no other bearing on their lives. The end.
Banana Jr 6000,
I try to have high hopes for TB’s story, but if TF is correct and this is the finale to the arc, what a nuthin-burger. Giving him credit, TB can set a stage and build up my hopes, but his delivery falls flat: My wife and I are using Time Travel, let’s go, and watch us play a video game? What? There is no scrap book of the event? What’s wrong reliving the moment at a real restaurant? One could say that does not merit an arc. Yet this does! I mentioned I had high hopes for the arc, but that is the magic of TB. Build them up. Crush them. Then have them come back again and again, expecting a different outcome.
I believe the fact that Defender was nearly a decade away from release in 1973 was pointed out yesterday… but for additional context, the overwhelming majority of arcade video game cabinets sold in 1973 (they were an extremely new novelty at the time) were either Pong or some variation or re-titled rip-off of Pong.
Had TB gone with a period-correct Pong cabinet we might finally get some proper English in TB’s work…
Had TB gone with a period-correct Pong cabinet we might finally get some proper English in TB’s work…
I see what you did there.
Yeah, this one was certainly a choice, that’s for sure. I mean, it’s (likely) supposed to be the same as looking through someone’s old photo albums and saying “you were so cute back then”, but… I dunno, it just kinda hits differently. (Crazy’s posing isn’t really helping matters there, either.)
Tone deafness comes with being self-contained. Batiuk cannot understand how others think.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
Pete wears the same shit every day, he should go to the laundromat to wash them
Why even use 1973 for this date? What made that number feel significant when ’72 was last given for the graduation date?
This also hammers in how I still feel the plot point Timemop told us that young Donna swiped her helmet from his high school office when she was only eleven incredibly contrived. We can easily mock Defender not being invented ’till the 80s in the same way claiming Funky and Crazy had childhood exposure to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn’t even make sense in early Act 2’s framework of “Class of ’88”, but I feel I’ll often come back to that bit of an eleven year old somehow being present in a high school to grab the key piece of her years-long disguise.
Also in Funkyshaft, is this a joke about women needing all the closest space? Because that’s what it feels like at first glance.
Re this week’s Funkyshaft, I’m still stuck on yesterday’s revelation that MoPete sleeps on a mattress on the floor. In particular…
a) is this a DinklePedic™ fund-raising mattress, stuffed with turkey feathers (that only smell a little bit like rotting birds; you’ll never notice if you share the bed with MoPete) and dragged through the neighborhood from Worstview High to your home by an exhausted sophomore saxophone player?
b) there are two pillows on the mattress, in a configuration that does not suggest one person sleeping on both. If Mindy was unaware that MoPete sleeps on the floor on a mattress, then who’s using that other pillow? His partner, the Pizza Box Monster?
The American public demands an answer!
Pete probably doesn’t want to waste money on a bed, so he got a mattress on the floor