Son of Stuck Funky – Page 390 – Son of Stuck Funky

Total Recoil

So, as everyone immediately ascertained yesterday, Chester’s idiotic rings are radioactive. Now I would think that sending Atomik Komix readers deadly poison through the mail would be considered something of a public service but apparently these jerks aren’t nearly as cynical as I am, so there’s going to be a recall, followed by lots of lawsuits and federal government involvement, which sounds pretty funny on paper but won’t be in Batiuk’s hands. But, of course, you already knew that.

Coming soon: the gang can’t figure out why their official “Rip Tide-Scuba Cop” miniature compressed air scuba tanks are so popular until it’s determined that they’re actually full of nitrous oxide, which explains Rip’s popularity on the summer jam band circuit.

Atomic Pile

Link To Today’s Strip

One of (one of) the worst things about being a daily FW reader is waiting for Monday’s new strip to drop, then seeing Pete and Boy Lisa’s boring tiresome old mugs again. So Chester actually purchased nuclear waste, which means his staggering lack of business aptitude was already firmly in place long before he exposed himself to massive levels of comic book ring radiation. Maybe this will play out like in the comic books BanTom adores so much and Chester will develop superpowers, like the ability to ruin a comic strip, hog the limelight for years at a stretch and have someone write a maudlin best-seller about him…but if history is any indication he’s gonna have to have a baby first.

At last the collection is complete.

Link to Today’s Comic.

Today we get a wonderfully detailed Sunday strip about an absolutely mundane thing. You’d think that if DSH John was easily annoyed by Crazy Harry’s personality they wouldn’t be able to work together long. I mean, it’s not like they ever have customers in the store to distract them from each other.

I assumed that “Mr. Monster” was a fake comic book, but the Dark Horse logo piqued my curiosity, and sure enough, Mr. Monster is a real comic book. And the art today does a decent job of copying the front cover of issue 2.

Never heard of this comic before, which means it is insufferably obscure. Of course Tom Batiuk would devote an entire Sunday to comic book hipsterism.

https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=263261

Well, it’s certainly been a interesting couple weeks, and an apt time for me to be at the wheel. But I really can’t take it anymore driving the Stuckfunky bus so I’m going to tuck and roll and hope that Epicus Doomus can grab the wheel and get us back on track.

Scintillating Spinthariscope Action

Link to Today’s Comic.

As Stuckfunkian William Thompson pointed out earlier this week: “The ring is safe now; after seventy-one years, the polonium-210 isotope (which would have been a fraction of the commercially-available polonium back then) will all have decayed to lead. Just like this strip.”

Though lead isn’t the ‘safest’ material to have inside a children’s toy, at least it’s not radioactive. But this also means that there won’t be any polonium alpha particles left to strike the zinc sulfide screen and create the light flickering. So I’m guessing tomorrow we’ll be blessed with a Sunday Strip of speech bubbles over black as all three of these guys cram together into a pitch black closet hoping to see the tiny flickers of an atom ‘splitting’.

Which is really false advertising to begin with. Polonium 210 is named because it has an atomic weight of 210, meaning it has 210 protons and neutrons in the nucleus. In order to become lead, it sheds two protons. If a 210 pound man lost two pounds, you really couldn’t say he’d been ‘split’.

What they should be worried about is the ad Chester is holding. That paper is GLOWING with radiation! Darin already takes after his mother in so many ways, he doesn’t need cancer too.

But, then again, maybe he deserves it, because in panel three Darin appears to be stroking his chin with the tiny severed hand of a child .

If you feel like giving me a letter of devotion…a second-hand promotion.

Link to Today’s Comic.

There is almost no better metaphor for the way nostalgia farming is an inherently parasitic enterprise than Chester thinking giving out antique items they didn’t make, manufactured for a completely different product and IP, would be a great promotion for their comic company. They’re not selling to readers based on the quality of the stories being told in Atomik Comics, they’re marketing based solely on their ability to provide a pastiche of an era that they can’t possibly hope to equal or overcome. They’re repackaging someone else’s toys and regifting them to the people that already have them.

When an IP stops growing and changing, it dies, like a massive oak that has fallen in the forest. As it decays from public consciousness it often sprouts the little mushrooms of nostalgia grabs, some delicious and innocuous, like the Brady Bunch movies, some poisonous and nasty, like Ghostbusters 2016. But all of these mushroom reboots will never replace the oak tree, they can never grow that big, and they can never last that long, because they can’t make their own food, they can only feed off the carcass of the original. And if remembered at all it will be as a tiny footnote to a larger story.

And sometimes the oak tree thinks it’s still alive, still growing, when really it’s nothing but a rotting skeleton of an idea sprouting little mushy mushrooms of nostalgia and telling itself they’re leaves, as Tom Batiuk’s universe crumbles away into banality.