Son of Stuck Funky

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!

Talkin’ “Turtle”

Epicus Doomus
December 1, 2019 at 11:34 pm
The sad thing about this is how [Batiuk] seems to think a story about a comic book artist who’s always behind schedule is an interesting and relatable premise.

We get it. “Turtle Thompson” was a real pain in the ass to work with. Luckily for him, he was surrounded by enablers who let him get away with being lazy and unreliable. Maybe his artwork (which we’ll never see, unless tomorrow’s strip is a sideways Sunday comics cover) was so good, he was worth the aggravation. Maybe capable comics illustrators were hard to come by in those days (doubtful). At any rate, years later they are reminiscing fondly about ol’ Turtle. He, and Flash and Phil Holt and all those comics legends created entire worlds, and their work was consumed by legions of devoted fans. Though Darin and Pete imagine themselves to be in their same league, their work will never have that kind of impact. It’s no wonder that Darin’s quip, referencing a supervillian who exists nowhere outside of his and Pete’s imaginations, falls a little flat:

Flash in the Dark

comicbookharriet
December 3, 2019 at 12:55 am
…[I]f he ever wanted to vacation at Easter Island, the locals would probably worship (Flash Freeman) as a god.

Lest we forget which “Turtle Thompson” we are speaking of: it’s “The artist.” Props to commenter Scott J Lovrine, who yesterday cited Silver Age comics inker Frank Giacoia as a likely inspiration for “Turtle Thompson.” A number of readers have suggested that this arc might be a dig at the mysteriously departed Rick Burchett; I’ll give Batty a little credit here and say that he wouldn’t throw a former partner under the bus like this. We don’t know how about Burchett’s ability to meet deadlines, but his work on Funky was just terrible, and I for one was happy to see him go. But his replacement, the formerly reliable Chuck Ayers, has rendered a grotesquely misshapen head on ol’ Flash here, making him look in rear view like a Q-Tip with ears.

Deadline, Schmeadline

Like pulling teeth without any anesthetic” how, exactly? For the one pulling teeth, or for the one whose teeth are being pulled? If they’re your teeth being pulled, well, that’s literal torture. It can’t be a picnic for the tooth puller either: extracting teeth takes a fair amount of strength, especially from a flailing, un-anesthetized subject. Anyway, yesterday Flash said that “Turtle” had “gone to the well once too often,” implying that he pushed things too far and was finally let go, yet the cajoling continues.