Today’s award had the most nominees, but that’s because I’m an egotistical jackass who wanted to show off my google-fu skills at finding reference material. Deal with it.
You nominees for the….
Dangerous Dan Award for Best Tracing
Black and White Warbler
Captain Ez Confectionary
Greyhound
House Under Construction
Howard Johnson’s
Jason Miller
Mayflower II
Napoleons
Scaffolding
Pickleball
Table Tennis
Twistee Treat
Winnipeg Skyline
Mike O’Shea
And your winner is…
Mike O’Shea!
The head coach for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for the last 12 seasons, Mike O’Shea, has many awards and accolades under his belt: Two Grey Cup Championships as a head coach, two time Annis Stukus Trophy winner for best CFL coach, three Grey Cub Championships a player, CFL Hall of Fame, five time CFL All-Star, and the second best Rookie of the Year of 1993, (the best being the Gary Busey sportsball movie)
And to all this…he can add one more feather to his headdress!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Crankfuckery
(ZZZZZZZZZ)
2/18: Today’s strip is a contender for next year as it uses tracing to make the subjects look stupid.
The Twistee Treat one is just weird to me. I’ve driven by it for years and always kind of made fun of it for being incredibly Kitsch Swoon, not realizing it was a small chain mainly centered around central Florida. Apparently most of them are in Orlando but I never get out there so it was always a weird ice cream shaped building sitting in the middle of a random strip mall that I assumed was just a one off.
It’s just such a weird and hyper local thing to one general area of one state that’s not anywhere near the Cleveland/Akron area where 99% of Batty’s reference for anything comes from. The Blue Bombers story he tells (he caught a CFL game and got hooked) is at least plausible in comparison since CFL games are shown on TV in America.
That building design looks like something Batiuk or Davis Googled up, or saw somewhere and liked the the design of. Nothing in the Funkyverse is sacred, not even its uber-Ohio-ness.
I greatly appreciate Harriet’s Google Fu! I think the number of nominees in this category is the entire point. Which is that one person with Google can easily find many examples of copy-and-pasted art in the Funkyverse. And none of these things is particularly hard to draw!
What I voted for: Dorian Greyhound, just because it was such a stupid joke.
What I should have voted for: Mike O’Shea. Because no professional football coach would ever, ever, ever have a whistle in his mouth during a live game. Whistles in football exist for one reason: to signal the beginning and end of play. And since that sound dictates whether or not it’s okay for huge, fast, muscular people to violently smash into each other, that’s kind of a big deal. The source photo looks like it’s from a practice, where the coach *would* use a whistle to signal the beginning and end of drills. The image was taken out of its proper context. And Batiuk is so clueless about football that nobody noticed.
What I would have voted for, if the vote was for the best re-used image: Captain EZ Confection. When your world runs on nostalgia, you should make an effort to reproduce the past as accurately as possible. So this is an appropriate use of a reference photo.
A worthy winner, even though It looked to me as if Dan were trying to draw Coach Beard from Ted Lasso, but couldn’t find quite the right image to trace.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but I’ll say it again: given the scripts he has to work with, Dan Davis puts in every bit of effort the drawing of this strip deserves.
I voted for a variety of contenders here, but I agree that the winner is probably the most egregious (in large part because, as BJ6K points out, he has a whistle in his mouth during a game). I did give a lot of votes to both Table Tennis and Pickleball because tracing provided absolutely no benefit to the details of those scenes. A lot of these fall into the category of “lazy, but it probably looks a little better than what Davis could do untraced”, those two fall most squarely into “lazy, plain and simple”.
Krankenschaaften doesn’t really make his dog sleep outside in a house during a snowy freezing suburban Cleveland winter, does he??
No worries – Crankshaft’s dog will be forgotten by next week, and we’ll never see it again. Until Batiuk comes up with another high-larious week of strips that requires the existence of a dog!
Remember, the last time Batty started randomly bringing back obscure and long forgotten characters, Funky was over in a few years. Just saying.
I honestly would have guessed that the warbler was traced from an old Mark Trail strip. It just has that look to it.
I have to ask: CBH, how long did it take to find these source images? I can’t help but think you had to put as much effort into it as Dan Davis probably did*: put the term into Google Image Search, then pick the very first result. Were there any of these that didn’t fit that pattern, or did Davis do exactly as much effort as we assume he would?
*(I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m slighting you; you truly go above and beyond for these. As always, WE STAND IN LINE.)