My Contrivance Sense Is Tingling

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The more we see of Cindy, the older and uglier she gets. I wonder why that is? Oh, right….the hackery. Anyhoo, you can practically hear the phony canned laughter behind this trope-laden piece of crap. Old 1980’s sitcoms would have rejected this premise as being too stupid. ABC’s former longtime weekend anchor can’t score herself a hotel room in Cleveland in March? Surely there must be at least one, right? And get a load of Batom, nearly brushing up against something that could possibly be construed as an “adult situation” just like in one of them there Woodsy Allen movies they sometimes have on the cable! Why you can almost feel the cackling…I mean crackling sexual tension as these two rapidly aging former lovers engage in some playful wry banter and…..

Oh, sorry, I had to take a brief break to throw up. What was I saying? Oh yeah, the way he’s already f*cking up her hair from panel to panel…LOL. I can’t believe I’m even saying this but maybe having Cindy rent a mysterious new apartment above Montoni’s would have been a BETTER premise than this one. I mean seriously, Cindy moves in with the Winkerbeans and hilarity ensues…duh. AND another comic book reference too! Maybe Funky should try “common sense” first to see how he likes it, THEN graduate to “spidey sense”. This arc has rapidly turned into one of the biggest debacles of the year, if not the entire decade.

Hell Is Where The Home Is

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Know what would have been an even bigger surprise? If she walked in through the window or the wall or the ceiling! That is one ultra-shitty slice of dialog right there, just laughably terrible. As is Cindy’s bizarre (and awfully condescending) wordplay about ladders and her stupid NYC apartment joke. Clunkier than a big bag of hammers and twice as stupid. You’d think that the guy “authoring” this thing would at least have the common decency to wait until he’s fully awake before he starts randomly filling in the word balloons with whatever gibberish comes to mind.

Speaking of things that aren’t good, what the hell is going on with Funky’s head in panel two? What a debacle, it’s all misshapen and stuck on his body in an anatomically impossible way. If you keep staring at it it’s like an optical illusion. And why is Holly holding her hand over her heart like Cindy’s reciting the pledge? What a mess.

“Yeah, things suck for me now that I have to come back to this shitty state where you losers live but I’m still pretty well-off”. LOL wow, subtle as a punch in the face there, TomBat. Poorly drawn, terrible dialog, moronic premise…it’s the Batiukian trifecta of fail.

Change Stinks

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Well, Cindy, it might not smell so bad if you had the cab drop you off anywhere other than directly in front of that horrible pizza place, like the local dump or the fat rendering plant or the sewage treatment facility. But then again, without that hilarious Montoni’s backdrop her soul-crushing career and personal setbacks wouldn’t be quite as comical. RIGHT???

Speaking of comical, isn’t it funny how the good-looking popular girl from high school is now an old washed-up schlub who feels terrible about herself? And speaking of funny, isn’t it just SO WACKY how Cindy inexplicably visited her ex-husband’s awful pizzeria before she bothered with things like accommodations in the Cleveland area and visiting her new employer? The genius of it is that by the time whatever the premise is here finally unfolds, everyone will have forgotten that it began with a character doing something no sane, rational human being would ever do in “real life”. Welcome to the Funkyverse.

This has “bad sitcom premise” written all over it. I will tell you this: if it turns out that there’s another vacant apartment above Montoni’s that “no one’s using right now”, I am going to let the expletives fly, you can bank on that.

(Question for those of whom were paying attention at the time: what were the circumstances surrounding Funky and Cindy’s break-up? Was it Funky’s boozing or did she realize his dumb ass was holding her back or what? I believe it was semi-mutual, was it not? I sort of remember the original Funky & Cindy premise was “ordinary nobody (Funky) marries high school superstar (Cindy)” but I was ignoring huge chunks of Act II at the time so the rest of it is a blank to me. Fill us in if you remember, please.)

Shaft (Shut Your Mouth…No, Really, STFU Already)

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While I know a bit about the history of comic books, I’m far from being an expert in the field, so I’m just going to assume that somehow the Cleveland-based creators of “Superman” (REGISTERED TRADEMARK) were indeed somehow screwed over by those mean nasty impudent New Yorkers. Either that or TB is taking a shot at those “big city” folk, like how he’s always bashing “Hollywood”. Poor, poor Ohio, always getting “shafted” by those awful coastal folk and their decidedly un-Ohioian ways. But hey, at least they didn’t send her to Cincinnati, am I right?

Remarkably, Cindy’s plane landed uneventfully with no obvious fatalities, so I guess we’re to assume she is indeed Cleveland’s newest anchorwoman. One can also assume she’s going to spend the majority of the week bitching about it, too. Has there been a single arc so far in 2014 that DIDN’T feature a character or characters bitching and moaning about something? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and also assume that her first stop will be that f*cking town, although to what end is anyone’s guess at this point. But you can bet everything on this: whatever happens will be as uneventful and dull as watching paint dry (but at least with paint you can catch a cheap buzz off the fumes). No one can suck the life out of a premise like BatDrone can.

Snow Regrets

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Westview’s “nuclear winter” continues unabated today as our favorite lard-laden couple fondly reminisces about the events of last year, when Holly’s deviant punk of a son joined the Army after completing the “chin-up challenge” at the PTSD fair last summer. Batom’s attempts to get his readers to like Cory continues unabated as well as he thoughtfully included a particularly heinous floating disembodied Cory head to remind us of how snazzy he looks now that he’s military-approved. Hopefully the disembodied head is mere foreshadowing, but somehow I doubt it. His weird and sudden Holly & Funky fixation is really beginning to grate, though. How much more of these two buffoons can we possibly endure? Wait…do NOT answer that.