The sickening mess of regurgitated Dinkle glurge of the last two weeks has finally, (and hopefully only briefly,) broken BJ6K. I shot him an email this afternoon, asking if he had anything cooking, and the reply I got was as defeated as a starving spider trapped in the bottom of a slippery bathtub, crouched over the drain, exhausted and silently begging you with all eight of its beady little eyes to finally turn on the spigot.
Getting geared up for the Holiday Season has been slow going all across the board. I went out and bought a nice live tree, as tall, slim and shapely as an evergreen supermodel. We got it all set up in my living room last weekend. And have been avoiding eye contact with its bare branches ever since. Maybe we’ll get lights on before New Year’s.
To help all of us get in the festive mood, I thought it would be fun to go back in time to the first Volume of Funky Winkerbean and pull out some classic Christmas strips to festively rate them on my guaranteed objective festivity scale.
And for the Cow Watch Report. We had an adorable little snow baby right after Thanksgiving. Very late, but very welcome.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
I could say that this heaping pile of shit is over but I better trust my instincts and the possibility that we’re in for another week of Dinkleshitfuckthatguy
Today’s random Batiukverse Strip: the May 21st and 22nd 2004 strips of Funky Winkerbean (if you ask why the quality is so shit, then I got it from the Toledo Blade)
Kara: (starts panicking) PLEASE DONT KILL ME!!
Ha ha it’s funny because now Dinkle is gonna murder Kara
Love the taped on Band Room sign. Most schools would just put a sign outside next to, or above the door. My high school just had a room number posted. It’s these little details that confirm that Batty is a poor writer and cartoonist.
This raises a question the strip never thought to answer: why doesn’t Big Walnut Tech want to hire the World’s Greatest Band Director? Why is someone with Dinkle’s ego so unambitious that he stayed in a dump like Westview his whole life? The obvious answer is that Dinkle isn’t as great as he thinks he is, but the strip never acknowledges that otherwise.
why doesn’t Big Walnut Tech want to hire the World’s Greatest Band Director?
Because Big Walnut Tech hates Dinkle’s ass and they want him to die in the most prolonged and painful way possible
It could be worse. They could think he’s a ridiculous idiot who’s only fooling himself.
It is weeks like last week where we are all Big Walnut Tech.
Big Walnut Tech is like Hilary Duff’s even less talented sister in Napoleon Dynamite. She doesn’t really do anything bad. She merely wants something the supposed hero wants. Even though we have no clue why they want it, or why we’re even supposed to be rooting for them.
Big Walnut Tech differs from Westview only by having minimum requirements for competence. But that’s all they need to crush Westview every year, and make the people below that line hate them for life. They don’t hate Westview; their feeling is more like bemused pity.
Today’s Other Past Batiukverse Strip: October 2nd, 2015 of Crankshaft
Absolute Cinema
A contender for “Best Crankshaft strip ever”? (Seriously, Ed, use that thing more often. If you wait for Les, Dinkle, Batton, or Skip to come by, we’ll even pay you.)
So they’re both horrified by what this did to the squirrel, and Ed’s next line is “how about Lillian?” If that’s what Ed’s really thinking, shouldn’t he have more of a Calvin-style “evil grin” face?
Ed tased Lillian purely by accident
Oh, I missed the AUGGGHH. Did he tase Peppermint Patty?
And for the love of God, Batiuk, draw some action every once in awhile.
Tasering Lillian? I’ll allow it.
Classic Crankshaft. Back in the days when Loathsome Lil was the victim of Ed’s shenanigans, not the usurper of his comic strip.
The first panel of the bottom comic has a couple of problems. A window with curtains is seen behind Kara. This implies Kara and Dinkle are inside the band room, not in a hallway.
Problem #1: The taped band room sign is on the inside of the door. If the door is closed, people in the hallway can’t read the sign. Why would somebody inside the band room need to know they’re in the band room? As @Rusty Shackleford suggested, the sign would be best on the wall over or outside the classroom door (as viewed from the hallway).
Problem #2: The classroom door opens into the hallway, which could lead to potential accidents. Imagine a student running down the hallway or another student distracted by their phone, only to collide with the classroom door when it swings open. Westview High, can you spell “lawsuit”?
TB has repeated these same errors, time and time again.
WTH? This reply was supposed to be in reply to @csroberto2854’s strips with Dinkle and Kara in the band room, the first comment in the discussion. I could have sworn I clicked the correct reply link. Has anybody else ever had their replies reassigned by WordPress to the wrong comment, or am I losing my mind?
For those of you who upvoted:
Are the upvotes because you agree that WordPress has at one time or another misplaced your comment?
Or did you upvote because you agree I’m losing my mind?🤪😆
Mine was a general expression of solidarity with your opinion that WordPress does strange things sometimess.
Christmas decoration video:
https://tinyurl.com/4mt29t26
Do you think that’s supposed to be Ed?
Snow baby is good size for being less than a month old. Congratulations!
In his honor:
Snow baby, Snow baby you are a catch!
Hide in the grass, we’ll find you a lass.
Snow baby, Snow baby, walk to the brook.
And give your dear Mom a break.
Snow baby Snow baby you are a catch!
You need a scratch under that branch.
Give Mom a bleat, ready for teat.
They’re the envy of all you see!
I’ll keep my phone handy the next time I see it (her, we think), maybe we’ll get snow baby frolicking in proper snow.
The Rural Professional And Her Cowphone (G. Larson, ink on paper, c. 1988)
Ah, yes. This was back when he still remembered what the narcissism of minor differences is. Back then, it was just a slightly better place but not by much.
I went out and bought a nice live tree, as tall, slim and shapely as an evergreen supermodel. We got it all set up in my living room last weekend.
I have an artificial tree that my family sets up a few weeks before christmas
My Xmas tradition is to go to GC and Deck the halls with bowels of morons!
(My banned comment was nothing. I implied that the latest “I come here just to complain about complaining!” commenter wore cologne that was lavender-scented, as it calms the pretty sheep. On the net, that’s nothing)
Hey, some of these comics are actually amusing!
Not as amusing as Harriet’s impromptu ratings systems, though, which collectively score Moore than anyone thought possible out of Les!
BatYam always seemed like the kind of guy who spent the two weeks before Christmas complaining about commercialism, and the heinousness of malls, and now complains because the malls are gone. He’ll never be happy anyway, so what’s the difference? His FW Christmas strips always seemed to embrace the inevitability of his endless ennui, so at least it was consistent with the rest of the strip.
The most memorable Act III holiday strip was probably the 2010 Airport Courtesy Phone Bomb Threat arc, which was a real trip. The strip was way more psychotic then, as there were still some Act II fumes in the air at the time. I looked through the Act III archives to see why I wasn’t remembering any other Act III holiday arcs, and the reason, of course, is that they were all instantly forgettable dreck.
Dinkle rehearses the Bedside Manor band for a Christmas concert that winds up being for an audience of one; Sunday, Crazy and Dead Skunk Head talk comics.
Mort gifts Funky with a copy of the Bedside Manorisms “Greetings from Memphis” CD, thus allaying his son’s suspicion that the entire Memphis escapade was a figment of Mort’s deranged mind. Holly and Mort commiserate about what a prick Harry Dinkle is.
An end-of-year burnoff of miscellaneous gags, some holiday-related: Summer and Keisha are home for Christmas; Les still shilling his book; the band’s Christmas concert, another gratuitous shot at the USPS; Skyler is a brat; and a Montoni’s riff.
Christmastime in Westview. Becky chats with Dinkle before John arrives to pick her up. Cory, Rocky, and Mort celebrate at Funky and Holly’s house and get snowed in. Funky and Holly have gained even more weight over the holidays.
Ugh. I honestly don’t remember any of it, thank God. As much as I miss the old SoSF, I can’t lie and pretend I miss slop like that. I always felt bad about giving those weeks to our guest hosts, but hey, they knew what they were getting into. The guest author cycle was often a cruel and harsh mistress.
And it looks like this week is more of the same generic Christmas dreck, featuring Lillian and her troubling “volunteers.”
Today’s Crankshaft
ED CRANKSHAFT IS BACK (at least for today, I’m afraid)
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strip: March 12th, 2000 of Funky Winkerbean
Apparently, just looking at Rachel exercising turns every unnamed male in Westview into Killer Diller (I bet that if Killer Diller (who might as well be the vessel of the sin of Lust in the funny pages) tried to make Rachel date him, she would beat the crap out of him)
I think this is the very first time that Rachel’s hair was miscolored as blond
Crikey, that’s creepy. Of course Puffy’s incapable of imagining how this feels to Rachel. Ew.
Judging by the strip below, she’s gotten used to it
Ha ha! Men be horny, women be jealous, and then do the dishes! What a Utopia 1963 is! (Tom screams: “MILK AND COOKIE ME, MOM!”)
To be fair, Allison looked like “Juliette Binoche, but cuter” according to Les.
Actually, that’s not fair at all. Mostly to poor Juliette Binoche.
Who the hell is “Juliette Binoche”? It sounds like some gooey thing you’d buy at the pâtisserie.
(grandpa googles)
Ah. Tom is now the only person who ever publicly declared that he got horny watching “The English Patient.” I haven’t seen that, so let’s check…
Ah. Apparently about a woman who dotes on a helpless man. Does she bring him milk and cookies and introduce him to comix books?
Tom, how them mommy issues working out for ya?
Batiuk is incapable of imagining how anything feels to anyone but himself. The Funkyverse runs on this. Everyone stands around, and lets themselves be insulted by these grandstanding, incompetent clods. Or said clods stand around and let their lives be destroyed by the most basic challenges in life.
And when they run into opposition, they whine about unfairness.
TB: Look at me, Feminist of the Year! I fought retroactively for the right of women 80 years ago to be taken seriously as comic artists! VICTORY LAP!
Also TB: A young woman trying to work out in a gym finds herself surrounded by gross sweaty men all leering at her. She looks a little startled and perhaps frightened. GOD I’M FUNNY!
I have a friend whose looks are best described as “jaw-dropping.” We have had some odd experiences in public. They’re mainly “Dude, her eyes are up there,” not her shirt, or your keyboard because you’re afraid to even look at her. Maybe, hmm, treat her as a regular human being and make eye contact? She’s been married 22 years to a really average looking guy, that strategy seemed to work.
But holy shit, that gym one is like the Captain America: Winter Soldier’s elevator scene. Nothing good is going to happen! Or maybe that Phantom strip from Friday, where in the “Skull & Jaw Pub,” all of its patrons being thugs that the Phantom stomped the asses of, and Diana says “Darling, I’m starting to…get the idea we’re…?” Kit: “Surrounded?”
Would you call that “how to write a sequential comic strip”? How would you call “Dinkle had either a very bad show, or a very good one, who knows? We weren’t shown. BUY BOOK, OLD LADY NOW BACK”
Only certain women in the Batiukverse have the right to sympathy when they’re threatened by men’s unwanted advances. Generally the whole topic is a laff riot.
Buck Bedloe moves in aggressively on the grieving Widder Bushka 10 minutes after the funeral? He seems like a nice romantic guy!
Big fat Mort Winkerbean physically corners and menaces a frightened, frail Lillian, trying to get her alone into a van so he can do the full Weinstein? Old men, ain’t they a hoot! LOL!
But Lisa decides to date the Big Man on Campus and regrets it? RAPE! RAPE BY THE MOST EVIL PERSON WHO EVER LIVED!
Today’s Funky Crankerbean
I think it’s been a while since we’ve had a pun in Crankshaft
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strips: September 20th and 21st, 2013 of Crankshaft
ED DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE
On TV Tropes, Ed trying to run Mary over is considered to be his Moral Event Horizon
If killing a fellow bus driver didn’t put Ed over any Moral Event Horizon, this won’t.
Cranky man really knows how to knock ’em dead. No wonder she fell for him.
Given that she survived, she must have suffered one of those “immortal wounds”.
RE: Tuesday 12/17’s ‘Shaft:
Well, on the positive side Ed’s back. Too bad it’s only for another “Lena Stinks at Something and No One Will Ever Tell Her the Truth, Instead Making Caustic Jokes at Her Expense, Often Right in Front of Her” routine.
This usually leads to something I call Batiuk Irrational Ill-Thought Out Vengeance Rage Face. Suicide Girl was wearing it when reality got in the way of her doomed crush on Dick Facey and she decided to pull the same shit Lilian Lizard did.
I like to think it’s the characters silently rebelling against the world they’ve been forced to inhabit. That is the face of “I’m being insulted to the very core of my being, but I have to just stand here and take it, so here’s your smirk face, asshole. I hope someone in Winnipeg has the good taste to abandon you in a snow drift.”
I see it is the only sane reaction to the presumptuous oiliness of a grandstanding and inept clod. It’s a look that says “I wasn’t put on this Earth to feed you milk and cookies while you dull what little mind you have reading about dueling scientific impossibilities.”
Today’s Crankshaft
Today’s strip is just like that “How are going to tell him” meme from SpongeBob except it’s not funny
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strip: March 15th, 2004 of Crankshaft
I have a template for others to make their edits right here:
Today’s Other Past Batiukverse Strip: September 12th, 2002 of Funky Winkerbean
Nah judging by Dinkle’s smug grin he’s the one who planted the adult magazine into Kara’s score
Today’s Crankshaft
Didn’t the Men In Black (the Three Stooges version) do this already?
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strip: January 6th, 2002 of Funky Winkerbean
Funky: Rachel, what are you doing?
Rachel, why are your eyebrows on your forehead?
Good lord, what is this? John Byrne’s idea of sexy?
That strip was drawn by Chuck Ayers before Byrne briefly took over in 2003
I’m gonna side with anyone who thought this was a Byrne: Redhead, Sex-Ay for No Reason, and WEIRD Hairy Eyebrows. Where’s she going? I bet somewhere where she falls in lurv with a man 30 years older! Maybe–a comics artist!
What the hell is going on in this strip? It’s all sexy and realistic, but all she’s doing is putting in a hair tie (which she took off her wrist?). And then she’s either going to Montoni’s or leaving it, I can’t tell which. But it’s sexytime in Westview, so you’d better believe you’re going to see Montoni’s before you see a partner.
And in the last panel she’s drawn in the strip’s usual cartoony style again, it looks like there’s a child in the backseat, and she’s smiling like she’s psyched that “Tubthumping” came on the radio. And does that license plate say “No Fear”? The strip is from 2002, that all sounds about right (already five years out of date).
Nah, “sexy” to Byrne is “Sue Storm is 8 years old now.”
Related to the Batiukverse: A week long strip I got from The Toledo Blade where Cindy tries to email Funky a love letter but fucks up badly
top ten pictures taken before disaster
(Ron’s grin becomes incredibly similar to the Joker’s smile)
(Cindy sprints to her computer, and finds out that she accidentally sent the email to everyone she knows)
Cindy: (falls to her knees as Ave Maria plays) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cindy: “sob”
I continue to be baffled and somewhat repulsed by the language Tom Batiuk apparently finds erotic. This strip takes me back to some of the supremely squicky language used in the Les/Lisa “seduction” and the infamous Lisa comment about getting in their gross ya-yas before the “playground” closed.
(I don’t remember the exact words of the abovementioned strips, because I have some kind of trauma-induced amnesia.)
Batiuk’s sex dialog is like that of Steve Carell in The 40-Year Old Virgin. Carell’s character knows nothing about love or sex, and it shows when he tries to talk about it. Except that the story acknowledges how bad it is. It’s funny for the right reasons.
Also, the story makes more sense if the office is laughing at Cindy instead of leering at her private sex talk. What the hell is “break out in monkey bites”? That’s not a sex move; that sounds more like an appetizer you can get at Chili’s.
You don’t get it! It’s funny because a woman is humiliated in public! Why, I bet that slattern doesn’t even wash her man’s dishes!
That is not a double-entendre. In Tom’s world ALL women wash their man’s dishes, while he stares quietly into the distance. (The stare is because it’s 1963, and every dad came home from work drunk)
Tomorrow’s Crankshaft:
Oh, lord have mercy. The Lisa tapes are reproducing! They’re spreading all over Ohio. Soon every attic, every basement, every crawlspace and storage locker will be bulging with VHS tapes bearing instructions on life’s minutiae, delivered by a gaunt, grey apparition in between weak, hacking coughs.
If the Dead Lisa Tape kills everyone who views it a la The Ring, then I’m all in favor of it.
Today’s Crankshaft
Mindy: Gramps, what is a VHS?
Today’s Past Batiukverse Strip: February 11th, 2005 of Funky Winkerbean
In my opinion, Wally’s expression in panel 2 looks like a sleep paralysis demon and one of the most terrifying faces Chuck Ayers ever drawn
These are great, but throw us a bone here! What’s the context? I thought “Rachael pretties herself up with a scrunchie and weirding her eyebrows,” followed by “Wally shits his pants because Rachael’s coming to date him, but he remembers trauma from his 10 (or 20) years as a POW,” but the strips are years apart. No connection at all. Not the whole arc, just give us a synopsis please.
“As always, she gussied herself up before she drove the garbage bags to the Montoni’s dumpster. Little did she know that it was Wally’s favorite spot to shoot up heroin! And sweat! Coming to Hallmark this December: ‘A Trashmas Miracle’! Starring Juliette Binoche, with SFX master Rick Baker doing eyebrow effects.”
the strip above was a part of a storyline where Wally has his first PTSD episode in 2005