Author Archives: billytheskink

by billytheskink | December 4, 2022 · 10:30 pm

Nudge, Nudge, Say No More… Please

Hey folks, billytheskink here… I’m back for at least one more post so I can tag the ever-loving dickens out of today’s strip.

Lest we think Harley only takes agency and free will away from women, we learn today that he did the same to DSH and to the various members of the Westview High School class of ’92-’88-’78-’72 reunion committee. Since TB is looking back, let’s step into our own WABAC machine and see what exactly happened in the these two events that Harley interfered in.

First off…

Great Moments In FW Arc Recap History

November 19-December 20, 2012
An extended Crazy Harry arc begins. Harry explains to Donna his love of old comic books. The next day he walks into Montoni’s to inform Funky that USPS is shutting down the Westview Post Office and he’s out of a job. Harry decides he must sell off his beloved library, spending a week sorting and packing his books and his comics before schlepping them off to John, who offers Crazy Harry a job at the Komix Korner.

Granted, I cannot say what she was thinking, but back during this story arc, Donna never talked about leaving town. She didn’t do much of anything, really, except try to come on to Crazy while he moped about and spout off about how his political beliefs had changed with age. Also, is Harley admitting here that he “nudged” long-time Komix Korner employee Kevin out of existence to clear the way for DSH to hire Crazy? There are consequences to this time-meddling, Batiuk!

Now for the star flashback of the day…

We’re looking at August 21, 1993, when Les and Lisa reconnected at one of the incessant high school class reunions.

^{In the original strip, Les hung the moon for Lisa… in today’s flashback, he hung the “Westview Reunion” banner next to the moon.}

Should we assume the committee back in 1993 (holding what was then a canonically a 5-year reunion) was the same cabal Les was drafted into replacing Cindy on in 2015: Cindy, Mary Sue Sweetwater, Junebug, who I think is Cindy’s frizzy-haired minion Carrie, and abdicated valedictorian Barry Balderman? Eh, why not? Barry wasn’t at this reunion, though, he had a cool job.

I’ll give Harley/TB this, his intervention into giving that crew Lisa’s Seattle address makes some level of sense as Lisa wasn’t close with ANY of those committee members (even nerdy Barry) and Les didn’t have her address until after he broke his hand punching Bull at the reunion for reasons that still defy explanation. In a rare moment of common sense, Lisa actually chided a deserving Les for still being stuck in high school. This moment passed quickly, though. Lisa was practically apologizing to Les for being upset even before dawn and the next week Bull was practically apologizing to Les for getting punched. What a time to be alive that was…

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Tagged as Act II, Act II tragedies, bad hair, Classic Les, Classic Lisa, comic books, comics, contempt for comic book nerds, Crazy, Crazy Harry, Dead Skunk Head, DSH John, enraging hair strands, flashback, flashback thought bubbles, gradient voids, gray ashen landscape, Harley, head up own ass-ery, helmet, helmet hair, John, knowing smirks, Komix Korner, Les, Les being a giant smug douche, Les' Slob-ass Tie, Lisa, long-winded babbling, Now Crazy Harry, retcon, retcons of retcons, reunions, sepia-toned flashback, smirk, smirking, smirks, smirks exchanged, Summer, the comic book industry, the lisa, the single most objectionable fictional character of all time, things that take an unnecessarily long time, time travel, times I wish I'd never discovered FW at all, weird time anomalies, Westview H.S., Westview High School, word zeppelins

by billytheskink | November 19, 2022 · 10:30 pm

Meta-mucil

TB goes full on meta in today’s strip… could this be a preview of what we’ll see over the next few weeks? Is everything else from here on going to be bizarrely (and blandly) self-referential? Are we in for even more unnecessary acknowledgements that these characters all of a sudden know they are in a comic strip? I suppose we will have to wait and see, though the wait won’t be too long now.

Meta references can certainly work, but are not inherently interesting or funny, nor are they funny in the context of this strip and story arc, or in the context of TB’s real life partial retirement for that matter. What is funny, however, is that Ruby joined Atomik Komix over 3 years ago to much fanfare, specifically to draw Wayback Wendy I might add, and she’s peacing out after drawing the cover of issue #4! And we all thought Phil Holt was a slow worker…

And that’s a wrap for my latest and possibly last time blogging here at Son Of Stuck Funky. No goodbyes here, but I do want to thank some folks. Thank you to TFH and Epicus for running this place for the past 12 and a half years and for trusting me as a guest writer here over the past 8 years. Thanks to my fellow guest writers for keeping this site reliably humming for years and much thanks to all of you SOSFers for coming back and reading day after day in spite of my silly wonderings and regular typos. I’ve written over 500 of these things, believe it or not! But for me these posts are mostly a glorified header, the best content generally comes from you all in the comments. I can only hope that you have enjoyed reading some of my words even 1/100th as much as I have enjoyed being a part of this community.

And so, I will close this post the same way I wrote my entire first week of posts…

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Tagged as Atomik Komix, author avatar, Batom's bizarre comic book fantasy world, Batton, Batton Thomas, bullpen, Chester, clouds, comic book art, comic book cover, Comic Book tribute, comic books, comics, Comics Code Authority, contempt for comic book nerds, Darin, Darin's blue shirt, Dawn Of Time, drafting table, Flash, Flash Fairfield, Flash Freeman, Funky Felt Tip, glasses, meta, Mindy, Minty Pete, Mopey Pete, multiple characters neccesitating many tags, Pete, Pete's Plaid Shirt, Phil, Phil Holt, Pun, punnery, puns, retirement, Retro, Ruby, Ruby Lith, sad-sackery, seldom-seen characters wearing hats, self-references, silly names, Sunday comic book covers, the end of Funky Winkerbean, The Grand Finale, the inevitable death of the universe, tiny hands, unnatural hand gestures, unwarranted wry sarcasm, Wayback Wendy, women in comics, wry banter, wry self-deprecation, wry weary snideness, wryness

by billytheskink | November 18, 2022 · 10:30 pm

Ruby the Grate

In case you missed it, we are in the final weeks of Funky Winkerbean. Tom Batiuk appears to be reluctantly retiring the strip much in the same way he’s written Ruby as reluctantly retiring from Atomik Komix this week and in today’s strip. The timing of this thin gruel of a story arc and TB’s fairly muted announcement is certainly no coincidence. Most all of us here at SOSF, despite speculating for over a decade on when and how this thing would end, are probably still processing the suddenness of the announcement, how soon it will become reality, and what that means for this wonderful community going forward.

But enough wallowing about, let’s leave that to the strip and try to get back to business as usual. I guess today’s strip is aiming for bittersweet, but it largely is coming across as just bitter. You can’t mask your true feelings in a wall of smirks, TB… And even if the strip wasn’t ending at the close of this year, I’m guessing we were never going to see Chester meet with the building manager by looking in a mirror anyways. I’d say “a pity”, but, you know, it’s not. It’s really not.

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Tagged as Amazon smirk, arcs that go on too long, Atomic Comics, Atomic Komix, Atomik, Atomik Komix, author avatar, awful wordplay, bad wordplay, Batom's bizarre comic book fantasy world, Batton, Batton Thomas, buildings, cavalcade of characters, Chester, Chester's intrigued face, Cleveland, comic books, comics, Darin, depression, eighteen different characters, extremely high character-to-panel density, Flash, Flash Fairfield, Flash Freeman, glasses, gradient voids, jaunty scarves, knowing smirks, lame wordplay, malapropism, many tags, Mindy, Minty Pete, misappropriated wordplay, Mopey Pete, multiple characters neccesitating many tags, one of those arcs that just never seems to end, Pete, Pete's Plaid Shirt, Phil, Phil Holt, poor female characters, retirement, Ruby, Ruby Lith, sad-sackery, scarf, seldom-seen characters wearing hats, smirk, smirking, smirks, smirks exchanged, sub-moronic wordplay, terrible wordplay, the untimely death of Phil Holt, word zeppelins, wordplay

by billytheskink | November 17, 2022 · 10:30 pm

Excre-mint

Here is today’s strip. You all go ahead and tear into it. Not sure I could do much better than the post title anyways.

Sorry, two days to go on my stint and I’m already running on fumes. Even WordPress knows this, somehow. It’s kind of creepy, to be honest… I’ll press on these next two days, but I’m going to set a spell today and see you in the comments.

Speaking of running on empty (and burying the lede, for that matter), Tom Batiuk dropped some news late yesterday that may or may not be relevant to this story arc, the last several months of speculation in the comments, and the future of this website. Some of you all commented on it yesterday. I have plenty of thoughts on this, as I am sure many of you all do. As with today’s strip, I’ll see you in the comments to discuss.

^{I’m guessing this will get more ink than the strip…}

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Tagged as awful wordplay, bad wordplay, Batton, Batton Thomas, Boy Lisa, Chester, comic books, comics, Darin, Flash, Flash Fairfield, Flash Freeman, gradient voids, gray ashen landscape, knowing smirks, lame wordplay, laptop, Mindy, Minty Pete, Mopey Pete, mug, Pete, Pete's Plaid Shirt, Phil, Phil Holt, quarter inch pinch, retirement, Ruby, Ruby Lith, slapstick comedic gestures, smirk, smirking, smirks, sub-moronic wordplay, terrible wordplay, tiny hands, unnatural hand gestures, wordplay

by billytheskink | November 16, 2022 · 10:30 pm

What’s in your head, in your head? Ruby, Ruby, Ruby-y-y-y

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”!

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Tagged as arcs where nothing happens, Atomik Komix, Batton, Batton Thomas, boredom personified, Chester, Chester's 'intrigued' face, comic books, comics, comma eyes, curmudgeonly oldsters, disembodied hand, Dreadfully unimaginable scenarios, enraging hair strands, eyelids, gradient voids, gray ashen landscape, hatchet face, labored setup, lack of imagination run amok, Mindy, muppet profile, Old dying people, pen, pencil, pens, retirement, Ruby, Ruby Lith, seldom-seen characters wearing hats, silhouette, silhouettes, tags you never thought you'd use, travelin, uninteresting stupid anecdotes, unnatural hand gestures, wistfulness

Author Archives: billytheskink

Nudge, Nudge, Say No More… Please

Meta-mucil

Ruby the Grate

Excre-mint

What’s in your head, in your head? Ruby, Ruby, Ruby-y-y-y

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