Dinkle’s back. We’ve had to suffer through an inordinate about of Dinkle this winter. From piano lessons to turkey shenanigans to OMEA. It almost seems like Batiuk is intentionally giving us a break from Lisa’s Cancer Movie Extravaganza. Is he trying to reset our sensitivity to the storyline? Like letting a prisoner stew in the hole for a few weeks before bringing them back out for another round of enhanced interrogation.
Had a moment of confusion on my first read. Who the heck is Mrs. Howard? You mean One-Armed-Becky? The wife of Dead-Skunk-Head? I’m so far removed from thinking of either of them having surnames. I can barely remember DSH is named John.
I don’t think that this is a Dinkle strip that’s going to get cut out and pasted on many doors. The joke is anemic, but tolerable enough. Shrewd old teacher is down with substitute pranks. But this must either be a Freshman band class, or Dinkle hasn’t substituted for three years straight, otherwise the kids should be wise to his wisdom.
The real thing holding this strip back is the atrocious art in panels one and three. What is that hand in panel one? I could draw a better hand left handed. All the poor kids have horrible receding hairlines. I half expect that panel two was changed to black outline after the fact. After Ayers drunkenly turned in a scribbly panel of twenty mangled high school students as seen through a cracked funhouse mirror.
To celebrate the holiday of love and romance, Batiuk has graced us with a touching strip of an ommetaphobic man who has completely lost his mind after days of being forced to self-apply eye drops.
Remember this is a guy who had to be physically restrained a month ago by multiple people to have drops put in.
That explains his increasingly erratic behavior since the surgery. And the slow decline of his joy since Monday. Every single day, hour after hour, forced to pry his squinting eyes open with trembling fingers. Forced to carefully drip chemicals into the waiting lids, staring up at the nozzle of the dropper, the fear and nausea triggering a flight or fight response that he can’t let his body obey.
Our drip torture is about to end though. As I’ve peeked into the future and it seems the cataract saga is finally drawing to a close. At least, I hope it’s ending. I suppose we could be up for a repeat in a month, when Funky goes in to have his other eye done. I wouldn’t put that past this strip.
So relax, everyone, tomorrow is a brand new day! A day filled with Dinkle.
Good. I was worried I wouldn’t get to have any Les Moore action during my stint this time.
That was sarcasm, in case you were wondering. If I’m ever actually happy to see Les Moore, I’ll let you know so I can be transferred to the appropriate facilities.
At least he’s keeping his smug stupid mouth shut.
And Funky’s so unimpressed to see him, that he’s not even bothering to get his ass out of his chair.
In fact, this entire strip has a weird manic energy to it. Les just…smiles. While Funky, apropos of nothing, grimaces and waves his arms, and rants about seeing through walls. You could edit Les out of the strip entirely. He’s just a prop for Funky to use. He could have been anyone. Swap him with Harry, Holly, Corey, Garfield. It wouldn’t change a thing.
It’s almost like…like Les Moore isn’t there at all. And Funky is ranting at an imaginary Les he conjured up in his delirious need to have someone smirk beatifically at his stupid joke the very moment it entered his mind.
Poor Funky’s fallen down the subjectivity vs objectivity hole. His dual vision has left him with the niggling suspicion, and growing fear, that everything he had hitherto seen and labeled was merely him giving voice to his own perception. And in telling that label to another person, he could never truly know if the red he told them about was the red he saw. And when you think about it, what is red anyway?
And Crazy’s just like, “The healthy human eye sees red when it looks at light with a wavelength between approximately 625 and 740 nanometers. Any object that reflects light at this wavelength is red. Now shut up, Nightwing’s talking!”
Pretty sure it’s Nightwing on the TV in Panel One. The hero persona of the grown up Robin, Dick Grayson, for the uninitiated. Which means we’re getting to the end of our Batman TAS binge. Gonna guess we’re supposed to think these two just watched some of their favorite episodes, since they’re both in the same clothes as Tuesday, but it’s pretty fun to think that these guys have been parked in front of the TV for 45 straight hours binging feverishly on their drug of choice.
I mean, if you’re watching your favorite Batman episodes, and it doesn’t include a Nightwing one, I don’t know what to say. You’re missing out. Dick Grayson is such a great character, when written by a competent author. A boy with a backstory similar to Bruce Wayne, who becomes a hero without becoming vengeance or the night. Instead, usually being presented as warmer, more open, healthier, than his foster dad.
Before we’d like to close out our Batventures through the Batverse, please allow me a completely self-serving story.
In 2016 I was able to go to a small Wizard World Comic Con being held in my state. I went with one of my nerdtacular besties, who is one of the biggest Nightwing stans in the universe. Stars of the convention were Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman, and Loren Lester, the voice of Robin/Nightwing. So of course, we went to their joint panel. It was great, except for the omnipresent voice actor panel questions of ‘BuuT hOaw Do U Git inTO VA WRK PLZ?’ (Seriously, if you are ever at a convention. Just don’t. It’s been asked a million million times, and everyone knows the answer.)
But as the panel progressed I couldn’t help but feel that Conroy was monopolizing things a bit. Understandably so, maybe. Questions that were nominally posed to both men, were obviously directed to The Batvoice. But Lester is an accomplished actor in his own right, and I couldn’t help but feel like the charismatic Conroy was getting a little puffed up on all the Batpraise. The man is talented, friendly, and gracious but DANG, you could see his ego from space with the naked eye.
So, I got in line for the mic. And as luck would have it, I was the last question of the panel.
And because it is modern day, some stranger I didn’t know was filming, and posted the video to YouTube, where I could find it this evening, and post it back to some niche comic strip blog.
Time stamp is 44:22 to hear an invisible Harriet offend Kevin Conroy.
Funky Winkerbean, a strip that only addresses the most current and topical of issues. Bringing us hot takes on the cultural debates that shape our world today. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, restored and conserved in the 80’s.
And Funky has to be one of those weird romantic hipsters that preferred the ceiling dark and dirty as the original sin it portrays. Not that he’s really alone. Go online and you will find entire cabals of passionate folk nitpicking the way they cleaned that ceiling, and they will never NEVER stop. Because there’s a genuine debate over if the ‘one solvent solves all’ approach of stripping the ceiling of anything that wasn’t painted on when the plaster was still wet erased details that our favorite pizza-loving, sewer-dwelling, turtle went back and put in there, rather than just erasing the heavy handed touch ups of early restorers.
Debate
There are others who thought that aggressively cleaning the ceiling at all was wrong. Some objects: furniture, coins, leather, firearms; collect a patina over the years that collectors consider a sin to remove, no matter how much time and oxidation have changed the appearance of the object. The ceiling as it was before showed its age, showed the hands of time and the hands of hundreds of tiny touchups by dozens of different humans through the centuries. It had accumulated a story. Who were we to erase that history?
But on the other hand, a painting is a statement by the artist. Mikey boy painted that ceiling to put into the physical world something in his mind and heart he had decided to say. If we had allowed time and grime and 18th century hands to obscure that work, we were changing the message of a man who could no longer speak for himself.
And Mikey was one odd duck, and not a guy we should ever talk over. The best story in the Sistine Chapel, one some of you might have heard, is actually on The Last Judgement wall fresco. It’s said that when Pope Paul III and some of his retinue were previewing the not complete work, the Pope’s Master of Ceremonies, Biago da Cesena, complained about all the naked people, saying the equivalent of ‘this doesn’t belong in a church, but in a bathhouse’.
Michelangelo heard this and, (In the words of my tour guide from my visit) ‘painted that man in the darkest corner of Hell, right above the door, where everyone would see him when exiting.’
A little bit of a prickly reaction. Kinda petty. Kinda vindictive. Sounds a little like something Tom would do.
But then again, Tom hardly has the artistic chops to back up his bluster. He’s no Michelangelo, a man so talented that, when poor Biago complained, all the Pope could say was, “I have no jurisdiction over Hell.”
Son of Stuck Funky 