Headbangin’ For A Cure

Link to today’s strip.

Aaaaand once again, T-Bats pads out two panels worth of inaction to fill three days, finally getting around to telling us that Rachel and Wally are attending the concert to help him with his PTSD. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a storyteller with a worse sense of pacing.

While I’d say that I’m looking forward to seeing the concert (who would turn down a chance to see Mort ripping up Inna Godda Davida on the slidefart trombone?) there’s little chance of that. The intern who drew Mort’s dementia-induced Independence Day Sunday comic has weekdays off, and we all know how Tom hates drawing his characters doing anything but standing around talking.

School of Rock

Today’s Funky Winkerbean is an example of my least favorite  FW strip. I mean, I’m used to jokeless installments, or days at a time with no plot advancement, or bungled punchlines. But this crap just baffles me – I have no idea where T-Bats is going with this and by the time he meanders around to making a point I probably won’t even care.

So instead, I’m just going to wonder aloud why Tom can’t seem to draw his characters with any kind of consistency. Remember when Rachel was a ginger cutie? Well, I do, you philistines, and you can be reminded of it by looking at the center panel of this three-panel strip. For some reason, Rachel in panels one and three has sag lines around her eyes and an “I-forgot-to-put-my-teef-in-thiff-morning” mouth, but in panel two looks more or less like she used to a few years ago before Tom got sick of drawing her and shoved her to the back of the character rotation.

Funky’s got a new look today, too. Kind of reminds me of what it would look like if Silly Putty copulated with Mr. Potato Head and had the kid raised by Alfred Hitchcock.

Too Old To Rock & Roll, To Young To Die

In an unusual turn of events, today’s comic finds us for the second consecutive week in Westview, without a hint of comic books or Batiuk’s fanfic cesspool Star*uck Jones. And look who’s back! It’s Rachel, and she needs to leave work a half an hour early so she can go to the Monsters of Metal concert tonight.

Well.

We know that Funky’s going to say “yes.” I mean, the restaurant is so dead today that Rachel’s folding pizza boxes and Funky is noodling around PornHub on his laptop. I just can’t wait for the hilarity of a full week of T-Bats’ Get Of My Lawn ranting about loud music.

 

Running on Empty

Link to today’s strip

Good news, everybody! Funky doesn’t need to get all meth’d up before pounding the track with Les! He’s tweak free! But just look at the poor bastard. All those drugs really took a toll on him – it looks like Les is jogging with Mort.

engrishI still can’t figure out what goes through T-Bats’ head when he coins a nonsense phrase or tries to force a new meaning onto a bit of the language. Does he think he’s so influential that his imagined meanings will sweep the language and the popular imagination? Does he look at his inked words and think to himself, “Yep. That sounds just like real life”? Or does he just kind of mindlessly parrot out phonemes that he thinks sound cool? He’s like an Engrish T-Shitsu Generator. Man, that is so nordic. Truly, I stand in line.

Hmmph.

Well, I have no idea what’s going on in today’s strip. There’s no preview available, and apparently Comics Kingdom is having some problems with Advance Digital, which hosts a number of newspaper websites like nj.com (New Jersey), masslive.com (Springfield MA), the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and so on. CK just isn’t displaying any of their comics on Advance sites, though rival GO! Comics is doing just fine.

Anyway, Saturday’s strip will eventually appear on comicskingdom.com, the syndicate’s home site. We’ll catch up with the snarking in the morning, and I’ll post an edit then.

Saturday AM Edit:

Ha! Funky’s always busting Tony’s cogliones for having stupid ideas, and today he finds that payback’s a bitch. So what it it probably cost him five hundred dollars to win a hundred-dollar bet? He gets bragging rights and Funky looks like a dumbass on The You Tubes.

And lest we forget, a special award of One Thousand Internets goes to spacemanspiff85, for his prescient comment on the 24th:

That’ll be useful for flying food up to the Comix Corner.

One_thousand_internets