How the Mighty Have Fall In.

Link to Today’s Strip.

Comic Book Harriet here! Ready to aim aim high and kick it off, hopefully without slipping and breaking a leg. I wanna thank our resident Spaceman Spiff for caring for us all over the last couple painful weeks. He brought us comforting sarcasm, and a barrel full of witty insights to dull the ache of Batiuk’s broken humor.

Today we get a real treat. The Passion of the Dead St Lisa movie bombed. So all of our comments about Funky Winkerbean gradually morphing into a Judge Parker, where characters are gifted success without merit, must have struck a nerve. Or Batiuk just finally remembered who he was, and is back to his old yanking-the-football ways.

But today is just PACKED with non sequiturs.

The only thing that confused me at first, but that I could make sense of after thinking about it, is that the release date of Lisa’s Story got pushed back. The movie just wrapped a few months ago, so it didn’t have any time to sit on the shelf mostly finished ala No Time to Die or Wonder Woman 1984. But then I remembered that movies get release dates well before they are finished, or have even started filming. And the great LA Firedemic of the vaguely defined ‘last year’ apparently shut down movie production long enough for Marianne Winters to be treated for early stage breast cancer. So yeah, the release date would have been pushed back significantly.

And it is an accurate and believable rendering of what did happen to a bunch of movies in the last couple years. There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the movies, cancelled, delayed, suspended, and/or dumped to streaming because of the pandemic. I’m actually surprised Batty didn’t decide to go topical-to-the-max and have it released directly to PicFlicks or Hula or whatever the Funkyverse equivalent of a streaming service would be. But apparently it was released in theatres.

And that is what is confusing me. There is no way Les and CauCayla would be learning about the movie bombing from an EMAIL from MASONEE. They went to a wrap party, but didn’t go to the premiere? They didn’t bother to check Box Office Mojo, or Rotten Tomatoes to see how the movie was being received critically or financially?

Les knows what it’s like to drop an anvil in a lake?

It that a popular idiom? I didn’t really know. So I went to grandpa Google and did a phrase search.

It really isn’t that common. Only four pages of results. I found it used a couple times in news articles because Judge Napolitano said it about Russiagate. A really sad blog about a sick kid. A few links to some fanfictions on wattpad…

And then things got weird.

What does this mean? What does any of this mean? Is it poorly translated from a language with ideogrammic elements? Is it some kind of secret code? Some kind of communication between hidden agents among us? It Funky Winkerbean PART of whatever this is? When Tom Batiuk ended today’s strip with “an anvil in a lake,” was he sending a message, recognized only by the few, that now, at last, was the time?

If you’re interested to see what dropping an anvil in a lake looks like, may I suggest this video. Where two Finnish people speaking nearly unintelligible English drop a red hot anvil into a lake and film it, just because, why not? Why not do that? Why not watch that? It makes a lot more sense than Funky Winkerbean most days.

Winkerbean’s Wieners

It really does amaze me how much mileage Batiuk has gotten out of a man cooking peas and hot dogs. It made no sense at all with Les (did he serve Summer nothing but peas, hot dogs, and Montoni’s pizza the entire fifteen or so years before he married Cayla?) and even less sense with a literal restaurant owner. And it is fun that Batiuk is able to get yet more “humor” out of Funky being in AA.
That fourth panel is going to haunt my nightmares. That is an absolutely horrible expression for Funky to be making when he’s talking about wieners. I’m sure people who are more skilled with Photoshop than I am would have absolute field day with it.
Comic Book Harriet will be taking over tomorrow! Hopefully she won’t have to deal with an entire week about wieners and legumes, but you never know.

Pea-Brained

So, do you think it’s just Melinda that forgets what Funky does for a living, or Batiuk himself? I know Funky currently owns and manages Montoni’s, but I guarantee he’s done more than his share of cooking, and I don’t get at all why Melinda is so shocked she’s literally covering her mouth. But I guess it’s worth scrapping years of character development for the bad sitcom level hilariousness of “men don’t know how to cook”.

Not a Kneeslapper

I’m not sure how great it is of Funky to be getting Holly something for her knees, if he’s known about this for a while and it literally took her breaking her leg for him to do something to help her. Also, iff her knees have been bothering her, I’m not sure why her doctor didn’t recommend something..
I really don’t get why Holly cares that the pills are made from pigs’ feet (other than to set up the weak punchline). Given that the majority of her diet is probably Montoni’s pizza, I don’t think she’s too picky about what she puts in her body. Unless the majority of pepperoni and sausage Montoni’s buys is made from pigs’ feet and she’s concerned about there being a scarcity.
Oh, and we finally learn what the actual injury was. A broken leg. Not that it matters, but it sure seemed like the cracking sound game from her foot, and it sure looked like an ankle injury.
And it also makes Funky’s “break a leg” joke even less funny, since she actually did break a leg.

Joke Free Day

I don’t quite get today’s strip. There really doesn’t seem to be anything more to it beyond “haha, wouldn’t it be funny if drug stores had free ice cream days?”, which is slightly amusing but not super funny. Based on his facial expressions, this does seem to be the happiest Funky has ever been in his life. I’m guessing either he just flat out stole the medicine, or the reason why Holly is taking barrels of Advil is because Funky swiped her painkillers.