Hiking boots? Who needs hiking boots?
No one in today’s strip seems to. Mason and Cindy have sauntered up the side of Mount Lee in loafers and ballet flats respectively. In fact, nary a bramble nor briar has scuffed Mason’s chinos or Cindy bare legs. I drastically overestimated Marianne’s ninja skills.
Also, Marianne is fine. Mason is a confirmed drama queen. Another Funky Winkerbean story arc winds up being all sizzle and no steak. Carry on. I
The wavy panel border returns in today’s strip.
Again, I do not understand exactly what this is supposed to mean. In the visual language of comics, the wavy border should signal Marianne’s scaling of the H as a dream, but it really comes across like it is just signaling the shift in setting from the studio lot to the Hollywood sign. It’s like telling someone you “dreamed of Portugal” when you really mean that you physically went to Portugal.
Day five in grayscale, and I’m actually starting to appreciate it. Seeing Funky Winkerbean in black-and-white on my local paper’s color comics page is like watching an infomercial for an as-seen-on-TV kitchen product. You know how those ads always begin in black-and-white or muted color, showing a frustrated person trying and failing to use common kitchen utensils to measure flour, slice a tomato, take a bite out of a sandwich, or some other non-difficult task… then the ad switches to color to espouse the virtues of how easy it is to eat eggs or to prevent your children from choking on hot dogs if you just owned this amazing new product?
That’s what it feels like reading this week’s FW strips right next to a bunch of full color strips.
Does your comic strip ignore it’s own continuity, reasonable plausibility, and all good taste? What you need is the…
…overly broad Danish humor of WUMO!
…12 year old political and pop culture references of Get Fuzzy reruns!
…first world problems of Dustin!
…awkward innuendo that populates every conversation in Luann!
…hack-y mundanity of Garfield!
…Phantom‘s striped codpiece!
Sorry, snarkers: the catfight between Cindy and Marianne will not be televised, or uh, comic-strip-tized, uh…we don’t get to see it. It doesn’t happen, apparently, because Mason’s explained to Cindy that it’s not as it seems, and very quickly and convincingly, too. This plotline has become a complete shit show, even by Batiuk’s nonexistent standards. He spends months setting up this conflict between Cindy and Marianne, brings it to a climax in the most contrived way, and then Mason explains it all away and Cindy buys it…offscreen. The paternalistic Director Guy chimes in: “Hey! Hold it down, kids. Don’t get excited! (Who’s excited?) We’ve already put out a corrected story.” Who’s “we“? Don’t “corrected stories” come from the source of the incorrect story? Is he talking about their publicist? “We” have no idea. Nor have we any idea why that massive-headed freak in panel 3—we’ll have to assume it’s Marianne in a “wife beater” undershirt—is just now seeing and is completely aghast at the “DMZ” story.
Is it possible that today’s strip is the last we’ll see of Bull and/or Bull’s retirement ceremony? Who knows? T-Bats stretched a three-panel story about Durwood running out of pens into two solid weeks of shitposting, so anything is possible.
Once again, though, we’re shown that Bull really is a solid dude, having established (with Linda’s help) an equipment fund that will provide future Scapegoats with state-of-the-art noggin armor. I swear, Tom never builds up a non-Les character like this unless he’s setting him up for a fall. The suspense is killing me! Or would be killing me, if I really cared about this half-rate storyline.
And someone help me out here…who dat in Panel Three, basking in the sunshine far from the Ohio night? It’s not Jinx – she had straight black hair, as befits her stereotypical ethnicity. Could it be Crazy Harry’s daughter Maddie? Has any other FW girl worn a billed cap? If it’s Maddie, why isn’t her hair red anymore?
So in today’s strip we finally get to the particulars of DSH’s actual compensation for being a part-time researcher. This is the third consecutive strip in which the DSH’s compensation has been discussed, by the way. On a scale of molasses to SR-71, the pacing of this week’s story arc is Rex Morgan.
A trip to Comic-Con is on tap in the near future, oh boy! The way this strip works, it may just wind up being DSH talking about his trip to Comic-Con. Lefty tries to guilt her husband into taking her as the one “friend” he can bring by using a tactic she saw on a Dumont Network sitcom. Will Crazy counter her move with something he cribbed from a Burns and Allen routine? Tune in next week (probably) to find out!
Of course, none of this is happening until the movie rolls out at Comic-Con. You know, back in 2014, the release date was supposed to be “next summer”. Considering the work we’ve seen done for the film thus far and the fact that they are just now hiring a researcher, I’m guessing the actual roll out will be sometime around 2025.
Son of Stuck Funky 
