There’s probably a more banal and even moldier observation to be made about the plethora of televised college football bowl games on New Year’s Day but for the love of everything I hold dear I can’t think of one right now and neither can you. Linda has been married to that addle-brained dunderpate for half a million years, surely she didn’t just totally forget that New Year’s Day is traditionally packed with college football bowl games. Because that would be, you know, really stupid.
Author: Epicus Doomus
V.P. at SoSF. Does not approve of new WP layout at all.
Auld Lang Wry
Mother-in-laws….amirite? I mean come on. What’s a fella to do? One dame at home is plenty and I already have a dog to fetch my pipe, slippers and tumbler of scotch, thank you very much. What an old bag and so forth. And now the Copa is proud to introduce…Mr. Henny Youngman!
So another three hundred and sixty-five FW strips are in the bag. It sure looks like a lot when you spell it out like that. I mean you can say the same thing about any Act III year but man, 2018 was a real shit pile, even by FW standards. Exactly four things happened in FW in 2018.
Pete and Boy Lisa left Hollywood and began working for a whimsical Ohio-based komix book company. Mindy later joined them. They presumably still work there.
Wally, who may or may not be over the worst of his PTSD, invited his apparently estranged daughter Rana to Thanksgiving dinner. She accepted.
Bull’s rushing record was broken.
Funky’s mother-in-law visited Westview for a band competition and may remain there until she dies.
Pete and Boy Lisa’s unholy alliance with Chester was by far the dominant story arc of 2018 but even so, after all that time and all that toil he’s still only at the “they work there now” part of the story, which is exactly where it’ll resume and exactly where it’ll end next time as well. And what did we learn about our old pal Wally during his nearly two month long forced march of an arc? Well, apparently he’s “almost” about to graduate and he “seems” to be “doing better”, which is hardly news. He did invite his apparently estranged and seldom-seen daughter to dinner, though, which is where the story left off. Yup, that’s some real compelling character development right there.
Pervert Mort made a late run there at the end but the RRRRRRRR thing in the Wally arc was probably the single dumbest FW moment of the year in my opinion. 2018’s SoSF Most Reviled Player award (the “Les Moore Award”) goes to Les Moore, obviously, although the overall lack of Les was 2018’s sole bright spot. Pete and Boy Lisa are co-runners-up, though. It’s easy to forget now but that AK idiocy went on for freaking months.
There Is A Season (Twirl Twirl Twirl)
Yup, Holly sure was something back in high school. Her whatever Dinkle exploding baton trick was the capper to many a 1970s FW football arc way back in the day. I can see why she needs to keep talking about it and displaying her old high school trophies in her living room for thirty-five years, as it really was just that hilarious and compelling. Back then Sundays were kind of dull, what with the gas crisis and blue laws and all, but Holly’s antics in the Sunday funnies really lifted the nation’s spirits after Watergate and Vietman. The tall ships during the Bicentennial helped too, as did the Fonz. But I digress.
This one would be a lot less odd if they were just going through an old box labeled “band awards” instead of treating us to the unlikely and time-warping sight of Melinda appearing to notice Holly’s living room baton shrine for the first time, which seems pretty implausible at best. That Holly would maintain a living room high school baton shrine is no surprise, as she is after all a Westviewian. But given how it’s all they appear to have in common, how could her mother not have noticed it before?
IMO Holly would have been the perfect wife for Bull, as they both peaked in high school and both sort of blither their way through the strip in a stupid and annoying yet sort of relatively inoffensive manner that makes them slightly more difficult to despise in the same way we despise Les and Darin and Dinkle and Lisa and Funky and you get the idea. And Linda would have been a perfect Mrs. Winkerbean, as her obnoxious brand of wry defeated cynicism and spiteful condescension would be a perfect foil for Funky’s all-encompassing sad-sackery. That’s always been one of BatNom’s problems, his refusal or inability to think this shit through before he felt-tips it out.
Grave Concerns
Impending climactic doom, neglected old gravesites hiding the bones of dead friends…Happy Holidays from your friends at Funky Winkerbean and King Features! Man, this Melinda sure is a barrel of laughs. You already know how I feel (and vice versa) regarding Author Guy’s reliance on adorable old coot humor so I won’t go into that again, but they’ve been popping up like mushrooms in the strip for the last few years. Cliff, Vera, Phil Holt, New And Improved Morty, his pals at the home and now Melinda. The average age of the characters in FW must be up around seventy or eighty by now. Even if it were funny (and it isn’t) it’d still be weird, especially when you realize he already has another comic strip that’s jam-packed with zany and depressing old coots. Which is already one too many.
They Have Hotels In Florida Now
Holly’s look in panel three really says it all. I’m assuming that The Corporal is approximately twenty-three or twenty-four years old. He defused live bombs in Afghanistan and he is currently engaged to a mute woman. Yet for some reason he’s almost infantile today, blubbering about “visiting Disney” which, to my knowledge, has never “happened” in the strip. And Cory, bless his pointy little head, never came across as being a Disney World kind of guy either.
IMO the way everyone just completely ignored Cory’s miraculous transformation has been one of Act III’s more annoying (recent) developments. For a few years there Cory was the strip’s “bad guy”, an incorrigible scowling hoodlum who (gasp!) stole from Lisa’s Legacy, always had his hair in his eyes and had no use for anyone, generally speaking. Then he comes home and he’s suddenly Opie Cunningham but no one seems surprised in the least. It’d be like if Summer suddenly re-appeared with long curly hair and a jaunty sundress.
Son of Stuck Funky 