Son of Stuck Funky

CATalogue of Nonsense

I’m sorry, WHAT?

In what place in this tiny choir loft was this cat hiding?

The church allows a cat in the choir loft? Thereby excluding anyone with feline allergies from choir participation, if not church attendance?

These ladies force a cat that appears social to live alone in a tiny choir loft, with companionship only a couple hours a week during practice and services?

These dumb ladies never thought to mention their cat to Dinkle, their choir director of weeks, if not months, (if not years, given Sunday’s strip)?

They’re still insisting that the Choir Loft is a perpetual man-free zone only recently invaded, when Dinkle has been their choir director for weeks, if not months, if not longer?

Even if the cat was hiding, Dinkle failed to notice litter boxes, food dishes, cat beds, an omnipresent layer of fine black hair covering every surface?

And, the most important question of all: Mopey Pete and Minty’s middle-aged daughter travelled back in time to before her birth to participate in the all-female church choir in Centerview?

Is this an extended, Back to the Future incident?

Or has she come back to prevent some kind of horrifying future apocalypse?

Does she have to work to ensure her own birth?

Does she have to work to PREVENT her own birth?

Is Minty Pete the CAUSE of the horrifying future apocalypse?

Is this poor middle-aged woman in a weirdly tight striped shirt actually burdened by the deaths of a thousand future innocents, and carefully planning her own temporally displaced suicide for the betterment of future mankind?

Wouldn’t that be a much better story than what we’re getting this week?

‘Sometimes dead is better.’

Link To Today’s Strip

Happy May, Funkysnark Fans! Comic Book Harriet here, ready to push us through another couple weeks of this horror show, much like the shambling hulk that pushed the cart through the haunted murder attraction in House of 1000 Corpses.

Prepare yourselves for…. Strip of 1000 Smirks!

Many thanks to Spaceman Spiff for guiding us through two weeks of some of the weirdest storytelling to come out of Funky Winkerbean for a while now. It was like each day brought us another level down deeper into another tangent of meaninglessness. Never has a story that begins with a man buying doughnuts for alcoholics and ends with him nearly dying to save a CD player been told with such astounding lack of passion or sense.

Now we’re back to the Dinkle pandemic that has been sweeping this strip for the last year. We’ve had nearly 50 days of Dinkle since November (the traditional start of Dinkle season.) This is my third shift in a row where I’ve gotten Dinkle arcs. First he was teaching piano lessons, then he was substitute teaching, and now I get my chance to get in on the ‘Dinkle scores a choir harem’ action.

But maybe the Dinkpocalypse is coming to a close soon. Today we get an exciting celebrity cameo: the undead hell cat from Pet Semetary, Winston Churchhill. I, for one, am eagerly anticipating Dinkle getting his scrawny arms ripped to shreds like chicken drumsticks.

Zoom and Gloom

A few things strike me as funny about this strip. I think it’s funny that a year or so ago, when Batiuk wrote this, he thought everyone would go straight from social isolation to meeting back like normal, with nobody wearing masks in between. And in all that time never thought maybe that he should have the artist go back and draw masks on the characters.
The second thing is that the CDC this week specifically mentioned singing in a choir indoors as something you should still wear a mask while doing, even if you’re vaccinated.
Oh, yeah, the “old person doesn’t know how to use technology” “gag” didn’t strike me as funny much at all. CBH takes over tomorrow. I wonder how many weeks of Funky monologuing at AA she’ll have to endure . . .

Nobody is Fine in Westview

Haha, wives sure are heartless, am I right? I really, really, do not understand what the point of this story was. People in the real world don’t usually tell stories that highlight what clumsy buffoons they are. Or that their wives don’t care if they’re injured (and are incapable of telling if the wall in a room they’re in is damaged and have to ask someone else). The only way this would make anything close to sense is if Funky really was dying for a beer when he was on the treadmill, and this whole story is actually about him relapsing.

Her Father, Moving Treadmill, Who Was Moving Treadmilled

Wow, using the phrase “moving treadmill” three times in three consecutive panels seems like bad writing to me. If you have to signal the setup for a joke so obviously, it’s probably not a very good one, and you probably don’t have too much faith in the intelligence of your readers. Like, if he’d referred to it as just “the treadmill” once or twice his readers would have been too confused and not understood that Funky hurt himself.
I always wonder about the genesis of these storylines. I assume this is something that happened to Batiuk in real life. I do wonder if he replaced “Flash action figure he placed on the treadmill to pretend it was a Cosmic Treadmill” with “Discman”.

Oh, and telling a story at AA about how you had to interrupt your exercise because you needed “a drink” so bad that you ended up injuring yourself and (presumably) a prized possession seems problematic.