This post. This whole arc. Wally’s return. It’s been a struggle for me to attack. For a very long time I couldn’t really figure out why. On paper, there’s a lot to work with. Maybe too much, maybe that was part of the problem.
At first I wondered if it was because I was, once again, taking this marathon half-year of a deep dive away from John Howard. Should I save some of this stuff for a potential Wally retrospective in the future? But with the literally hundreds of stupid minutiae that the Funkyverse waves around in my face, begging me to snark and dissect, would I ever get back around to it? After all, I’ve got green pitchers and Jinx Bushka waiting for me! This is a John dive, yeah. But you can’t talk about DSH without talking about Lefty, and you can’t talk about Lefty without talking about Wally. And you can’t talk about Wally without talking about…this.
Hey, Wally, did you know that Becky is married now? I wonder how you’ll react when you learn that! Boy I can’t wait to see that gut wrenching moment.Continue reading “Unexploded Ordinance”
It’s quiet around here…TOO quiet. I was poking around on the Batom Comics interactive comic book cover spinner rack (if you haven’t checked that out yet, shame on you), and I happened across this old gem, which I do not remember at all. This is “Fantastic Voyage”, from 1966. The guy comes up with a brilliant premise, like a scuba cop, and couldn’t think of a single original thing for him to do. Rip Tide should have been busting illegal dumpers, thwarting pirates and defusing old WWII mines, not ripping off old Raquel Welch flicks. Boo.
By request: a Comic Con attendee stuns BatYam by cosplaying as long-forgotten FW Act II character Cutty McCutterson, WHS’ legendary wood shop teacher. Remember his running gag about the tourniquets?
Hey gang, just a quick Wednesday night post for the hell of it. I was visiting The Komix Thoughts blog, and learned that our old pal BatYam was, of course, attending this year’s Comic Con. So I clicked to “read more”, and discovered that Comic Con mainly consists of cosplaying weirdos and standing in (or as we sometimes say out here, on) line. And after reading his five or six gripping sentences and seeing his handful of rather mundane photographs from the event, I began to ponder the question of what it would take to get ol’ TomBan excited about anything at all, as he always seems to be all low-key and barely amused in that annoyingly dull and tedious way of his.
“Today I was rooting around in the attic, and I found a mint copy of Action Comics #1. It was exciting.”
“Today an old friend gifted me with the actual suit Adam West wore in the “Batman” TV series. It was interesting.”
“Today I was bitten by a spider, and now I seem to have developed super powers. I wonder where this will lead?”
Comic Con is like his FAVORITE THING IN THE WORLD and he describes it like a trip to the DMV. And this, in a nutshell, is why we so mercilessly mocked his “writing” abilities. We should all chip in and buy the guy a bottle of No-Doz and a Benzedrex inhaler, just to maybe wake him up a little.
“Comic-Con isn’t nicknamed “Line-Con” for nothing”. Given his rare knack for hilarious insights and witty zingers like that, it’s easy to see how FW ran for over two hundred years. I love his random, mundane vacation pics. Like when he went to Hollywood and took pics of that one building. Great stuff.
One of the other games on my arcade machine is Pac-Land. It’s a platforming game, starring the little yellow guy running and jumping and solving puzzles and doing other things that Mario is much better at. It’s a rare case where one screenshot will tell you everything that’s wrong with the game:
You see that red arrow that’s telling me to move to the right? Umm, excuse me, video game, I’m Pac-Man. Eating blue ghosts is what I do. Don’t tell me that arrow is pointing to something more important. Especially after these guys were just using their children as bombs:
Look how guilty the ghosts look.The red one is like “well, little Quinky is dead. But I guess that’s the price we have to pay. War is hell.”
As we discussed in the prior thread, Pac-Man doesn’t have much of a personality. So games like this need an Excuse Plot just to give him something to do. In this game, he’s got to rescue a fairy, or something like that. There’s 8 levels, and on Level 3 there are springboards Pac-Man has to use correctly to make a long jump over water. I can’t figure out how to do it, nor do I care enough to look it up on the Internet. Pac-Mania, an isometric version of the original game, is a much better application of the late 1980s’ improved processing power. It’s still worth a play occasionally. This, not so much.
But the second screenshot is where Pac-Land crosses the line from misguided into downright disconcerting. If you followed the Pac-Man expanded universe – and if you’re playing Pac-Land at an arcade in 1984, you absolutely did – then you know that Jr. Pac-Man is about the offspring of the the Pac-couple. And also of the ghosts. So we know they can reproduce, and that game’s main plot is a story of forbidden love. So why did this game repurposing these characters as munitions? Why couldn’t the ghosts just drop bombs on Pac-Man? They’re already in World War I vehicles, so just give them World War I weapons. It wouldn’t make any less sense.
This is also a huge problem in the Funkyverse, and one we saw repeat in the Comic-Con arc. On July 14, we got this moment:
Which they never got around to. Ten days later, on a Monday, we get this:
And right on cue:
It turns out we didn’t all know where this was going! The whole week was about NFTs, a topic perfectly outdated enough to fit Tom Batiuk’s 11-month lead time. Why the hell did he spend two strips setting up an comic book investment story, only to ignore it? The storytelling priorities of this world are just baffling. It’s bad enough that Batiuk makes everything about comic books; why does he also set up comic book stories and then not tell them? What purpose did those strips serve?
We established in the previous article that Jeff was compelled to sell his comic books by Crankshaft’s destructive behavior. Oddly, this still is the most pushback Ed’s ever gotten for his behavior, But, let’s look at what he did set up:
This story has nothing do with Jeff’s mommy issues, but look who gets blamed. Again. Batiuk is constantly re-telling this story, even though he had a whole other story cued up.
And he planned this four months in advance:
You know, Jeff, if you just now noticed your comic books are missing, maybe they weren’t that important to you. Maybe you’re not remembering correctly. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of your mother, who’s been dead for years now. Does your mom throw away your comic books from the afterlife? Is she related to Lisa? Sheesh, Jeff, get some help.
And now for something Jeff should be anxious about: the last time he went on one of these trips, he narrowly escaped burning to death.
But it’s never mentioned. These people dwell on incidents from high school and their childhood, but don’t remember the last time they went to California four years ago. On a trip where the whole Los Angeles metro area burned too.
Here are some other forgotten story points that were touched on this week:
Where is Pete and Mindy’s relationship? The engagement tiger incident was August 2019. We’ve had no update since then. They haven’t grown any closer, further apart, upgraded the ring, scheduled a date, or even told anyone other than the comatose Ed Crankshaft. But Funky Winkerbean had about 25 more weeks of comic book stories before it ended. And it spent three weeks marrying ninth-tier characters Cory and Rocky, because that loose end had to be tied, I guess. Again, just mind-boggling priorities.
Why is Mindy just now learning who Pete is? She expresses annoyance at Pete “damseling” her, because Tom Batiuk loves naming things that already have names. Even if this is before the engagement, their relationship must be pretty advanced, since they’re on a trip together and he invited her father. Comic Book Guy was being a lech, and Pete wasn’t out of line telling him to back off. If anything, it’s a big step up from his usual indifference.
Why are they cosplaying as siblings? As best as I understand it, they’re supposed to be Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who are fraternal twins. It’s a bit squicky. And it’s not the first time. Remember Les and Lisa’s Batman and Robin costumes? For their wedding? Ewww.
Why does Atomik Komix have no presence at Comic-Con? They’re supposed to be a big, important publisher in this world. But every year, they just go as fans. And nobody ever questions this. Les Moore and Lillian McKenzie can’t walk down a street without having to do a book signing for a throng of groupies. Why don’t these comic book makers, who are constantly presented as rock stars in this world, get that treatment?
Son of Stuck Funky 