Pizza, Actually

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Or it might be when you give your oldest childhood friend your treasured copy of “Contrivance Man Vs. The Zanthian Blorks” # 1 so he he can complete his collection even though you could have easily gotten $125 for it on FleaBay. It depends on where you are in Westview at the time. Unless these are characters I am unaware of, this is an extremely rare example of BatYam devoting an entire Sunday strip to random anon-o characters, which doesn’t happen a lot in the Funkyverse. Ditto actual customers in Montoni’s. That certainly doesn’t happen every day either.

I assume that maybe this is an homage to something, maybe those old “Peanuts” strips or something. And it’s harmless enough, I suppose. I guess sometimes FW is just plain deeply weird as opposed to deeply weird and highly annoying like it usually is.

Snarky Answers To Stupid Questions: Holiday Edition

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“No, it’s my father’s room. He has some pretty severe developmental issues.”

“No, it was my bedroom when I DIDN’T live here, you clod!”

“Whaddya mean “when I lived here??”

Those bedroom eyes are pretty freaky, eh? I wonder if he’ll ever actually marry these two or if they’ll be perpetually engaged, like how Boy Lisa and Jessica are perpetually” young kids just starting out”? It’s uncanny how Batom always misses the most obvious story arcs. Like with these two. Cory comes home, gets engaged, gets married in a quick blow-off Sunday strip, tells everyone he’s moving away to Chattanooga or wherever and bam, out of the strip. No need for updates, forced dialog and etc. Quick and easy. I mean who would care anyway?

Merry Christmas From SoSF!

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What? This one really didn’t require any dialog at all, but that’s never stopped Batiuk before. This one is just too stupid to even bother picking apart. I think I know what he was going for here but jeepers, did he ever fail miserably. This guy can take the hoariest, moldiest, mustiest old gags ever written and botch them in ways you can’t even imagine.

As far as I know this marks the first time Funky’s house has actually spoken. Let’s hope Les’ house keeps its big mouth shut, as I don’t even wanna know. Merry Christmas to all, now let us never speak of this one again.

And Not A Creature Was Stirring, Except In Mort’s Pants

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Good old horndog Morton, fully recovered from his advanced Alzheimer’s disease and as randy as ever. Gross. I honestly forgot all about Melinda, who apparently still lives with Funky and Holly in Pizza Mahal. And Cory and Rocky…apparently they’re still characters in the strip. Who knew? Other than the fact that they’re engaged we really know very, very little about Cory and Rocky. Comic books, pizza, the army, engaged…and that’s about it. They’ve had one or two arcs at most over the last six or seven years and those were when he first came marching home.

Where do they live? Where do they work? What do they do? Why are they even in the strip in the first place? Continuity? That’s, uh, “inconsistent”, let’s say. As far as Morton is concerned I don’t want to belabor the point as I’ve ranted about it many times, but his transformation from “advanced dementia patient” to “sassy and adorable old coot” is one of the more offensive things BatYarn’s done over the course of Act III. He milked that Alzheimer’s arc for a shitload of pathos, it really takes a lot of balls to just suddenly drop it and have Mort jamming with jazz combos and hitting on elderly women.

I Think She Meant To Say “Binge Eat”

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Uh yeah, sure, Tom. The internet killed Christmas caroling, just like it killed comic book collecting and band directing and stinky old movie houses and band boxes and the virtual anonymity of comic strip authors. And “binge watching” is somehow involved too. It’s just so sad and so typical of these troubled times to see a woman in her late fifties remind her badly aging and increasingly decrepit husband to refrain from walking door to door in a raging blizzard and stay inside and be entertained instead. What IS this world coming to?

It’d have been funnier if he did a Xmas week arc where Funky calls his old pals, only to be greeted with different variations of “what are you, nuts?”. But it was “funnier” it just wouldn’t be FW, now would it?