Or you could just TELL US what Funky forgot. Geez Louise, this one is glacially-paced even by FW throwaway arc standards. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll turn out to be his tax return and the IRS will arrest him and shutter Montoni’s forever, prompting a town-wide recession and eventual riot in which Les Moore is killed by a vicious mob of unemployed pizza-starved goons. I mean I doubt it, but you gotta have hope. But alas, it’s probably just be something incomprehensibly stupid like it always is.
Fuggetaboudit
Hey now, forgetting things was Bull’s shtick. And it didn’t end well, in case you’ve already forgotten like most of FW’s readership has. Anyway, the mind reels at the possibilities here. Well, “reels” might be too strong a word, it’s really more like a disinterested creaking of sorts. Like with every FW story, he really could have condensed this a bit but that horse escaped the barn many decades ago, along with the jokes.
Coming tomorrow: Funky suddenly remembers what he forgot and the strip ends with a silent panel showing Tony’s skeletal remains in the basement storeroom, complete with fingernail claw marks on the locked door. Across the land, stunned FW readers ask in unison “who the hell is Tony?”.
Do You Believe In Life After High School?
Repeating the premise over and over always makes it funnier. Repeating the premise over and over always makes it funnier. See? There’s probably no cheaper dialog than “I can’t believe…”. “I can’t believe you knew Turtle Thompson!”…”I can’t believe how that guardrail just crumbled!”…”I can’t believe it’s been twelve years plus maybe ten more since Lisa died!”…a simple time-killing tactic courtesy of a simple time-killing man. If this was any other “writer” on the planet, the idea that he could get six full days out of this premise would really strain credulity. But here? Not so much.
Locked And Bloated
Well you definitely won’t laugh,
Or be entertained
Reading this thing is rotting my brain
Tom Batiuk is coming to town….
As always special thanks to TFH, the real brains behind this nutty operation! If you only knew what’s involved in making fun of this dopey comic strip…
It’s an extremely rare Sunday-into-Monday arc this week. He only saves those for the really groundbreaking stories. The idea well must have been running pretty dry when he dreamed this one up. I’m (sigh) roughly the same age as (sigh) Funky is supposed to be and I think about high school once a year, if that, on average. But Funky is still having gross sweaty fevered dreams about something he hasn’t done in thirty-five years, even though he has way, way, way more than enough post-high school trauma to draw nightmare fodder from. Perhaps he’ll decide enough is enough and drive his car off a cliff, although we’ve all seen his car and it seems unlikely that it’d go fast enough to do much damage. Still, though, it might be pretty amusing anyway.
In my decrepit 1980s-era high school, the first thing we did on the first day back was kick the locker door at the bottom, after which it’d just open with a kick and a pull. They weren’t exactly top-of-the-line lockers. The convenience far outweighed the lack of security. That’s what the gym lockers were for, as they were these big iron prison-issue things. People (ahem, cough cough Tom Batiuk) like to look back nostalgically and pretend everything was “better” way back then but in reality we were all surrounded by junk. Everything was really crappy and cheap and don’t let any cartoonists tell you otherwise.
Dream Academy
Being late/running late is a very common theme in dreams…Being late in a dream as an image of finding it difficult living up to your own demands or the demands of others…When we dream that we are late or that we are about to be late, it is often because we are fighting a battle to achieve more than we can actually handle.
https://michaelrolsen.com/dreams-late-mean-dream-interpretation-late
It’s a pretty common dream, all right, so give Batiuk points for being relatable for once. I know I’ve had dreams of this type. The naked-in-public kind of dreams, too. Batiuk and Ayers do a pretty good job at giving this scenario a dreamlike feeling. The hallway appears infinite, and eerily empty. And while this is almost a universal dream premise, I bet Tom Batiuk hasn’t had this dream in ages. At this stage of his career, the only demands he probably has to meet are to submit one comic strip per day. It doesn’t have to be especially well drawn, or funny, or make sense, or follow a narrative. Just a piece of content, to fill space on a newspaper comics page or on a website.
Well, my two week long nightmare of having to deconstruct FW every day is ended, and on deck is guest emcee Epicus Doomus! Take it away!
Son of Stuck Funky 