The Treadmill To Nowhere

Link To Today’s Strip

Obesity, rapid aging, coronary issues, weird skinny legs and crippling malasie…these are “nagging little injuries”, Funky Winkerbean style. That sounds about right. And sorry Fitness Girl, but your “meal ticket” is in fact that pizza place down the road that’s stuffing the local kids full of stale leftover glop before they even get to school in the morning. That’s what the local mortician calls Montoni’s too, by the way.

The joke doesn’t even make sense. Fitness Girl isn’t a doctor or a physical therapist, so how would a rash of tennis-related injuries possibly benefit her? And what the hell is Funky babbling about? Tennis? Oh, that one time many years ago when he stood around a tennis court with Les and complained about something? Come on, be serious.

Dream On, Funk-Man

Link To Today’s Strip

Special thanks to the SoSF Staff for the last six weeks of exceptional and hilarious snarking! And as always extra-special thanks to TFH, forever our Grand Exalted Leader!

We often give TB a hard time about the way he skips around all over the place and leaves unresolved story arcs just hanging there for years at a time, but let’s give credit where it’s due today. I was on pins and needles wondering how Lard-Butt was doing at the gym so seeing his fat sweaty shapeless form again is a real relief. Building suspense is all well and good, but when you have “reality-based storytelling” that’s as gripping as this arc is, you don’t want to wait too long between re-visits. Cindy and Cory and Holly and Les and Becky’s mom are just going to have to wait, there’s a Pulitzer (nomination) just waiting to be had here, dammit.

While it’s nice that Funky is setting goals for himself, he might want to set his sights a tad bit lower if you ask me. Perhaps looking AS good as people twice his age would be a better starting point and far more realistic too. “Look better than other people my age”…seriously, Tom? The only FW character in worse shape than Funky is Fred and at least he has an excuse. And Fred at least tries to tell jokes, too. That’s probably the most ludicrous bit of FW dialog in many years, if not ever. If he wrote that masterpiece with a straight face he’s a more stoic man than I, that’s for sure.

In any event, get ready for sweat beads, wry self-deprecating remarks, a possible coronary episode and fat jokes….a lot of fat jokes. And if you’re busy this week and just don’t have the six seconds a day to put into reading the thing, just re-read my last sentence and you’ll be covered, as the likelihood of anything interesting happening this week is almost assuredly zero.

He’s Got a Million of ’Em

In Saturday’s strip, H.R. “Baldy” McNightmare continues to regale Cindy with brilliant one-liners. “Women, am I right?” he’ll continue. “Can’t fire ’em, can’t ship ’em off to Cleveland.”

So, we’ve got the “Cleveland sucks” joke. Check. To be fair, Cleveland really sucked in 2010. A year ago, however, when this overcooked noodle of a strip was being conceived, Cleveland fell to 17th most miserable, beating out #11 Toledo by 6 positions.

Good thing Forbes doesn’t include Westview in its misery index. The #1 position would never change.

Cindy, like the downtrodden Westview woman that she is, meekly accepts her fate and a clear violation of 29 U.S.C. § 623. Naturally, she’ll pay for her own cab and air fare as she rushes to LaGuardia to get to Cleveland’s Channel 5 before air time. Because this is the way TV stations are run, ¼ inch from reality.

I admit I was among those astonished that these events were taking place in New York City, based on Cindy being the one to report on Les’s Hollywood deal. I keep forgetting that Les lies at the nexus of history. The pope himself was awakened to keep him abreast of the contract negotiations. So of course ABC’s national weekend anchor broke the news.

But who’ll break the news to Cindy that she can fight this age discrimination? I’m sure anything we come up with will be more interesting than what Batominc comes up with.

Atop Demerit Hill

Friday’s strip careens substantially more than ¼ inch from reality. There doesn’t seem to be any readily Googleable analogue to this situation here in reality prime. Using Google is all the effort I’ll put into this; it’s already more than Batominc puts into these plot lines. The Batominc plan is even simpler than that of the South Park gnomes.

  1. Draw some comics about a well-known social issue.
  2. Pulitzer!

We learned yesterday that “digital” shows Cindy’s age, in the words of her boss Dick “Baldy” McLitigationmagnet. This arc is turning out to be a perfect storm of things Batominc knows nothing about. Digital TV doesn’t have to be HD; I’m sure Cindy looks ravishing in SD 480i. Or at least vague and fuzzy. And current ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer is 68 years young.

As a member of the dominant boomer generation, Batominc’s stockholder ought to know that, as that generation ages while life expectancy increases, its attitudes about the visible signifiers of age are evolving. But that would require him to have his finger on the pulse of society. And there’s one thing about pulses: you can’t feel them from ¼ inch away. You have to actually touch the patient.

Batominc is bad at social observation, OK. Now, to be fair, he’s also bad at drawing his own characters. Or did Cindy get a sudden massive wrinkle in the milliseconds between panels 2 and 3?