Death Takes A Holly Day

Link To Today’s Sad Display Of Comic Ineptitude

“Hey, you know how everyone always says “gotta go, my phone’s about to die” when I call them? Well, I thought it’d be very, very funny if Funky thought his wife was dying only to discover it was her PHONE that was about to die. What do you think?”

“Oh man, you’re breaking up, my phone’s about to die, gotta run Tom.”

This would have been pretty hilarious if only he’d swapped out Funky for Les and Holly for Cayla. You know, because of the whole Lisa thing. “Oh no, mamma mia…not again!”. TomBan really seems to genuinely enjoy torturing Funky, even if it’s just for laughs. Like when he was in that crippling car accident, for example. Oh, the zaniness, it was unbridled knee-slapping from the second the EMTs lugged his broken body out of that ravine to the moment he completed his grueling and painful physical therapy. With most of his punching bags you can understand the motive. They bullied Les in high school, they were better looking and cooler than Les in high school, they wouldn’t date Les in high school and so forth. But what did Funky ever do to merit such punishment?

 

And Spending Her Time So Foolishly Too, No Doubt

Link To Today’s Demoralizing Developments

Working that goddamned f*cking decoder ring in there was like dropping a cherry-shaped wad of maggots onto a garbage sundae, it’s the kind of sickening overkill BanTom does better than any other sub-mediocre comic strip author in the business. It’s finally official, after five days of absolutely painful dilly-dallying these two horrible old snores are engaged (as are Cindy and Mason…(shudder)) and a more pathetic spectacle I cannot recall.

“Waiting a lifetime”, yeah, sixty years is indeed nearly a “lifetime” but not necessarily in the Funkyverse, where middle-aged men creak, groan and collapse regularly and couples in their nineties eat solid foods and get frisky in restaurants. Still though, it seems kind of incredible that they just completely lost touch for sixty years. No phone calls, no letters, no emails, no Classmates or HotBot or Google searches, just nothing at all until two comic book-obsessed weirdos took it upon themselves to do everything for them.

In fact when you look at them that way you realize that there’s nothing “happy” about these two imbeciles getting back together, as they’re both awful, stupid, lazy people who literally wasted their entire lives for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer sloth. They’re only together now because of outside meddling, completely happenstance impulsive meddling, by the way. What kind of human being wouldn’t be utterly destroyed by the realization that the great lost love of your life who you feebly pined over for sixty freaking years was likewise just sitting there like an idiot wondering and waiting to hear from you while you sat there doing literally nothing? It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, yet in the Funkyverse it passes for lite, cute and breezy.

Hopefully this is the last of these two until Frankie crashes the big Starbuck Jones-themed double wedding ceremony and forces Marianne to attempt suicide again. You know that when he finally gets around to re-visiting this in August or whatever he’ll spend five full days on the characters talking about that f*cking decoder ring, just to refresh everyone’s decoder ring memory.

Oyb Hsit Omcic Pstri Wsblo

Link To Today’s Dismal Experience

I’ll take a stab at decoding Cliff’s “secret message” using nothing but my extensive knowledge of the Funkyverse and nothing more. OK, here goes nothing…

THIS STORY IS GARBAGE AUTHORED BY AN UNIMAGINATIVE AND POSSIBLY DELUSIONAL HACK WITH NO DESIRE TO ENTERTAIN ANYONE BUT HIMSELF AND NO ABILITY TO DO SO EVEN IF HE WANTED TO

That’s what I came up with. I’m estimating it’s at least 125% accurate, more or less. How many times will he go back to THIS well? It was a movie prop, Tom. The guy is ninety f*cking years old, that goddamned f*cking decoder ring isn’t his whole…oh, wait. My bad, I forgot who and what I’m dealing with here. Of course that f*cking stupid decoder ring is Cliff’s whole life, as he’s a woefully one-dimensional and contrived character with all the depth of a pizza box who was conceived by a lazy shameless hack who must have been absent when they covered “plausibility” in vocabulary class. It’s only natural that Cliff’s entire life centers around some moronic old toy. Like they say, write what you know.

With This Ring I Thee Dread

Link To Today’s Atrocity

And now my disgust, rage and nausea gives way to resigned acceptance and a sad admission of defeat, as my worst fears are seemingly about to be realized. Cliff is going to ask Vera to marry him and he’s going to use that goddamned f*cking old decoder ring to do it. Not that long ago Cliff was hawking the thing on Ebay, today it’s an enduring symbol of the eternal love he feels for the woman he apparently forgot about for sixty years. Perhaps digging it out from under the bed in his sordid hovel of an apartment jogged his memory or something.

I have to admit it, while I dreaded the possibility of an unholy union between these two I never saw the f*cking decoder ring angle coming. The bastard out-hacked me yet again. Just when you thought it’d be impossible for this trash heap of a story to become any more sickening and repugnant bam, the f*cking SJ decoder ring hits you right in the face. I suppose I should have expected this but for some reason I always underestimate his ability to plumb the depths.

No

Link To Today’s Thinly-Disguised Attempt To Run Out The Clock

My God this is just repellent. The “frisky old coots” trope, some faux-ribald dialog straight from the “Three’s Company” outtake reel and that disturbing close-up, it’s a master class in classic FW hackery. Fifty year old Funky can barely tie his shoes anymore but the ninety year old Cliff and his ninety year old girlfriend Vera are flitting all over Hollywood like two kids in love, both of them sharp as tacks and full of vitality. I guess taking a six decade sabbatical from everything keeps you fresh for the homestretch. It’s all about as believable as anything else that happens in this unbelievably dumb comic strip.

Morty’s advanced Alzheimer’s disease turns him from a near vegetable to a chain smoking, trombone-playing horndog. Bull’s declining motor skills are played for laughs as he trips and spills human remains all over himself. Marianne’s wildly impulsive suicide attempt is smirked away as being no big deal. And now an agoraphobic elderly man is suddenly a full-time actor and man-about-town, sweeping his old flame off her feet. If cancer was even half as zany as mental illnesses are “Lisa’s Story” would have been optioned into a Will Ferrell flick years ago.