Son of Stuck Funky

Advanced Studies in Tom Batiuk’s Funkology 5.0

CLICK HERE TO SEE HOTTIE BUDD IN A SKIMPY NIGHTGOWN!!!

ComicBookHarriet here, reporting for duty! Ready to tackle whatever twisted bit of nonsense the bloated Diane Keaton look alike in the header presages.

First of all, many kudos to Billy the Skink, for seeing us through some peak Funkyverse navel-gazing. He was able slice these two terrible weeks to their awful core, and do it with twice the jokes and one third the words of my average post.

Please accept this AI generated award in my appreciation for your hard work.

Everyone has gradually noticed a problem with this year; a bland malaise only broken by Les winning an Oscar, a long awaited wedding, and random racism. I couldn’t put my finger on it, since no one week was THAT off the mark from things we’ve seen before. But I think I finally figured it out.

When the 50th anniversary of Funky Winkerbean hit this March we were all stunned that Batiuk let it pass uncommented on in strip. He leads into the day with a week of flashback pandemic grocery shopping and then celebrated the day itself with a nondescript bit of sub-Lockhorns level marital hijinks.

But a few weeks ago I realized this entire year has been, off and on, one big, unspoken, 50th anniversary ‘celebration’. We’ve gotten two times that “Summer Hears About Dead St. Lisa”, the entire Eliminator time travel arc, Batiuk digging out his ancient ecology strips to show off how he’s always been preaching from his soapbox, Dinkle reminiscing about the school computer, Crazy remembering his pizza spinning days, Mary Sue Sweetwater’s funeral, staring at the dry, empty, wreck of the old pool as a huge metaphor for what this strip has become.

Act I reminiscing is as old as Act II. That’s why a single week of this didn’t really stand out.

*1998: Lisa’s groundbreaking tragic past prestige arc being replayed for an encore of backpats? We’ll never see this again.*

But this year we are INUNDATED with it.

And, so far, none of it has had any deeper meaning or purpose other than member.

Batiuk broke his arms patting himself on the back over how he let his characters age, and broke the UNWRITTEN RULE OF COMICS that time is not allowed to pass.

The Second Cartooning Commandment: Thou shalt return to “Go” at the start of each new strip, and your characters shall never grow up.

I refer to this as the “Peter Pan Principal,” and it’s one of the reasons that the newspaper comics have been relegated to the stagnant backwaters of the entertainment industry. Okay, before I continue, I should acknowledge that I’m speaking in the broadest of generalities here and that there have been, and still are, obvious and wonderful exceptions to what I’m about to say. I get that, I accept that, and I don’t care about that. I’m trying to make a point here, and I don’t want the waters muddied with contradictory facts and stuff. Simply put, I had moved my characters into their adult lives and was on a roll with the work collected in this volume as I attempted to plot their futures. Meanwhile, their companions on the comics page were on a roller coaster that returned to the same starting point every day. Every. Day.
From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 9

This has been posted before, maybe even by me, but every time it makes me roll my eyes. Because yeah, maybe Mary Worth, or Dicky Tracey, or Spiderman or Gil Thorpe are always some ambiguous age within an established decade of life that they’re not allowed to progress beyond, but comic book time passes for them. A character from a previous storyline shows up years and years later, and what happened in that previous story is relevant to the plot.

Tommy the Grocery Store Delivery Boy, 2020.

And with that….I have to close. We have cows out over at the Van Fleet Place and I gotta run dad some flashlights.

See yalll tomorrow!

Jumping’ Jack Flashback

Today’s strip was shot in Kodachrome… despite being set even further back in time than this past week’s sepia-toned historical revision. Really sets the mood for imagined fiery death, doesn’t it?

You would (not) be surprised at how often TB goes to the well for Holly’s Act I flaming baton trick. It wouldn’t shock me if it has appeared as a gag in Act III more often than it ever actually did in Act I. But hey, after this past week, I’ll take some Sunday Funky-Holly filler, even if it involves flaming batons.

And with that, I cede the podium to Comic Book Harriet, a master of both Batiukverse history and the entertaining anecdote. I expect we will enjoy a good bit of both from her in the coming weeks.

Credit Fraud

Today’s strip concludes (we hope and pray and hope and wish) this latest visit from the Ghost of Distress Past. Her Royal Wryness. The VHSaint herself.

Special thanks go out to Summer for being a prop with no impact on the story whatsoever, she has already collected her prize of appearing in a full 3 panel strip this week (panels will not necessarily be consecutive).
Special thanks also go out to Les for having such an insatiable ego and such milquetoast friends and family that he will continue to receive the unearned praise he has been given for decades now.
And extra special thanks go out to Crazy Harry, who demanded nothing but 18 panels of our precious time in return for his brilliant idea of pretending Isaac Asimov invented the concept of recording video using already obsolete technology.

On the subject of 18 panels (well, 16, thanks to a couple of 2 panel strips), this new Lisa tapes origin story actually takes up more column inches than the entire original origin story AND depiction of the recording of the tapes! That took just 16 panels in four strips. For all its faults, Act II got to the point…

The Les He Knows, The Better

More word zeppelins in today’s strip… Not as bad as yesterday, but still, get your bookmarks out, folks!

You know, this is actually one of TB’s tidiest retcons, probably because it is one of the very few intentional ones he’s ever undertaken. It takes the original scene and changes its context (slightly) by depicting a previously unseen scene. Tidy. The pieces actually fit together. There are no loose ends, deleted original context, or unresolved conflict with the originals scene. See? That’s not so hard.

Heck, as a bonus it even (unnecessarily but adeptly) explains a silly detail from the original scene, why Les has a camcorder and this Hari Seldon story readily at hand as if he was waiting for Lisa to lament about all the things ~~Summer~~ she will never get to experience. Turns out, he pretty much was just waiting on the chance to whip that camera on out.

Tidy as it is, this retcon was no more entertaining or less irritating because of it. In fact, it makes the origin story of the Lisa tapes tremendously off-putting. The focus shifts away from the impending reality of Summer growing up without a mother seen in the original scene to the needs of Summer’s nogoodnik parents… First, Lisa wants to record the tapes so she can live vicariously through Summer’s adolescence in her imagination. Then, Crazy and Lisa hatch this cockamamie plan to let Les take credit for the idea to record the infamous tapes, which only soothes his ego and bolsters his hero complex. These people are awful and I hope I never wind up sitting next to any of them on an airplane.

Hari Don’t Care-i

I’m surprised it took until today’s strip for the word zeppelins to arrive… but one has docked right at Crazy’s mouth and is unloading such a tremendous volume of technobabble that it threatens to lift the roof right off the porch of the Taj Moore-hal! In explaining the concept of recording Lisa’s advice on video, Crazy somehow spits out 60% more words than Les did in the original take on this story back in 2007. It is almost enough to make you pity Lisa, who apparently had to listen to this verbal assault twice.

Hey, I said almost…

I’m not a big Isaac Asimov guy or a sci-fi reader in general, I’ve always been very much a non-fiction reader when it comes to things that aren’t comics, so I cannot tell you how accurate or apt or idiotic or unnecessary Crazy’s rambling is (I can tell you it makes for miserable comic strip reading, but that should go without saying). I suspect we have some folks much better suited to that than me in our comments section, so I will now turn this over to my fellow SOSFers.