Author: billytheskink

Les Quizérables

Hello SOSFers, billytheskink here to ponder the ponderous ponderings of this comic strip with you all for the next couple weeks.

Why does Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat, he doesn’t have a job. His owner doesn’t have a job that keeps him from making lasagna on Mondays (or a job at all, even… is Jon still supposed to be a cartoonist?). I guess Mondays are when Nermal shows up, but that happens on rare occasions and Nermal always sticks around for at least a week anyways, making whole weeks terrible.

I have just now realized that Garfield hates Mondays because he read today’s strip, and it is hard to blame him. I think I hate Mondays now too.

We have seen Les berate his students before (including just under a month ago, in fact), but this time he has decided to leave the classroom door wide open so passers by can hear him humiliate every single student he has been charged with teaching. You know, maybe this is TB’s attempt to bring a balanced perspective to this strip. He’s done an anti-bullying story arc, why not a pro-bullying one?

There You Go Again

Leaving meaningless oil paintings behind in the dilapidated shacks that they deserve to be housed in, today’s strip brings us back to art’s purest and most meaningful form and in its most hallowed of temples…

Well no wonder DSH couldn’t cover his rent back in 2010, he hates the actual function of his business. That 2010 story seems especially relevant to this one, as Funky covered DSH’s rent (and some of his own expenses) by doing exactly what DSH had apparently been failing to do, sell comic books. Now we know that he can hardly bear to part with the things that his business is supposed to part with.

I do not recall this “McKenzie Collection” but I assume it has something to do with Crankshaft’s elderly neighbor. I’d try to track down more info but I’m researched out right now, sorry.

Thanks for sticking with us through the last month, which included a couple of the most asinine and one of the funkiest strangest weeks in recent Funky memory. Sosf David O will be your driver starting next week, and should do a better job steering around the potholes than I did… and there WILL be p(l)otholes.

And Ennui Go…

Today’s strip has words, which is interesting until you read them.

Grandpa Google tells me that Funky’s thoughts today are not quoted from someone notable (shocker!), or from a dollar store rip-off of the Book of Lamentations, but I’m pretty sure I read them on someone’s LiveJournal page 15 years ago. It was probably TB’s page.

I guess/hope Funky has satisfied his curiosity about this ramshackle house. I know mine was satisfied before I’d finished reading the third panel on Monday.

Just Trespassing Through

After verifying with the city that the old house on the hill is structurally sound, Funky makes his way inside in today’s strip. One can only imagine what he is thinking. “When was my last tetanus shot?” is my guess.

A comic strip title character wandering alone through an abandoned house… am I reading Funky Winkerbean or that one week of Garfield in 1989 that Jim Davis assuredly wrote after watching a Twilight Zone marathon and telling himself “I could do that!” This set a dangerous precedent for comic strip artists, one that TB himself would employ after catching Love Story on cable back in the mid-90s.