Author Archives: comicbookharriet

Link to today’s strip

I’m a little ashamed to say it, but I chuckled unironically at the strip today. Well, it wasn’t really a chuckle, more of soft snort complete with an eye-roll. But props to Batiuk, this came within sighting distance of comedy.

Ayers deserves more of the credit though, the dead-eyed, wide-mouthed Dinkle in panel three hits my funny bone when partnered with the blunt punchline.

I wonder about the premiums paid out. It seems like even more fundraiser money sucked away from the band. I remember getting promised dumb prizes for selling enough during school fundraisers, but no one could sell enough to earn them.

Cabbage Jack yesterday in the comments pointed reader to Tom Batiuk’s blog. I’d never given it much of a look, but I browsed back a few months and it was quite a trip; an inane mishmash of narcissism and comics related shitposting. Most egregious are the little excerpts from his Funky Winkerbean volumes, where he deconstructs the history of his own creation like an art restorer painstakingly scraping the macaroni off a kindergardener’s project.

“The scenes with Fred and Ann and their son Darin were reflective of a different part of my life with Cathy and Brian that I was beginning to draw upon. Change was becoming a palpable part of Funky, and the biggest changes of all were just about to unfold. I didn’t have a master plan exactly, but I could see daylight ahead, and I was beginning to run toward it.”

“As was my habit, new characters continued to appear. Cindy Summers, the most popular girl in school, and Bodean, Westview High’s resident hood, joined the cast as the polar opposites of the high school continuum. Big hair was starting to come in for girls, and Cindy’s hair soon became the biggest of the biggest. Her tenure in the strip was destined to be remarkably long.”

And taking the cake, yesterday’s offering, where Batiuk goes borderline biblical talking about trying to renegotiate a contract.

“And lo, there came a day when the prophecy of the attorney in the beginning times came to pass.
It’s been said that the past is a knife (as an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, I’m all in on that one), and at the beginning of 1990 I was definitely feeling its point in my back.”

Today’s strip, when it drops.

Today’s strip wasn’t available for preview. I asked my Zoltar machine about it, and he quoted Macbeth, “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

Then he turned me into Tom Hanks.

As boring as the perfunctory band strips are, at least they’re only depressing in an abstract way.

Link to today’s strip

Becky is preening with pride today. So smug at having found a great, time and hassle saving, idea that Dinkle never considered. I wonder how much this Bandigogo service takes away from their fundraising bottom line? The employees at the frozen turkey warehouse distribution center need their pay, as do the desk drones processing these orders, and the numerous fast talking sale pitch charlatans who undoubtedly prowl the band conferences looking for harried Band Directors juggling too much one-handed who can be persuaded to outsource.

But on the other hand, they’re probably saving a bundle in people suing the school for attempted negligent manslaughter due to virulent food poisoning.

Look at Dinkle in panel three though. He’s saying amazing, but something about his facial expression tells me that he’s secrectly repulsed by the idea of never touching a frozen turkey again.

Never feeling that rock hard, frostbittten flesh slowly defrost beneath his plying fingers as the glistening breastmeat becomes pliable and eventually supple with the warmth of his wrinkled hand. Freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing, over and over again.

He can’t imagine life without a freezer full of round blobs of pink dead flesh in his basement, a box of death resisting decay, ready to melt in his grasp.