Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Forty

Still with me after yesterday’s post? Thank you, reader.

Let the celebration begin. By some remarkable coincidence, both Funky Winkerbean and Montoni’s Pizzeria celebrate their fortieth anniversaries this week!

Jimmy
March 23, 2012 at 2:05 pm
So, 40th anniversary strips coming up? If Bathack brings us in the wayback machine, I get the feeling they’re going to be a reminder that Funky Winkerbean wasn’t all that good in the 1970s either.

Into the Wayback Machine we go: looks like TB’s going with a “now and then” theme, and if every day is like today’s strip, snarker Jimmy may be on to something. If panel 2 is indeed an original, and not a “reimagining” a la Lynn Johnston, there was probably an original first panel that set this up as an actual joke (Funky dashes into Fred’s office: “Mr. Fairgood! I need to use your phone! It’s an emergency!”). The absence of humor here leaves us to contemplate the young, likeable, slender Funky, whose cargo pants conceal the merest suggestion of a butt that forty years later would threaten to burst right through Montoni’s window.

An Inconvenient Douche

Unlike Tom Batiuk, I strive to keep my personal opinions out of my “writing”. But since he insists on preaching to us (through Jim the Science Guy) about climate change (I don’t call it global warming), I’m going to vent a little “greenhouse gas” here myself: I’m one of “those people” who  do not believe that the planet is irreversibly heating up, even after the just-ended record-warm winter (which I, not being a winter sportsman, enjoyed the hell out of). There is at least as much credible scientific opinion to disprove climate change as there is to prove it.

That’s my opinion, and you, dear reader, are welcome to your own. On to today’s strip. We find Cory actually awake and paying attention in class (because even Cory is concerned about Global Warming). He shares that he “heard someone on the radio” (these kids and their radios these days, am I right?) call Global Warming “a hoax”. Cory gives a sly, demure tilt of his head, as if to say “Gee, Mr. Kablichnik, that feller on the radio can’t be right…can he? Say it ain’t so, Jim.” Jim wearily throws up his hands; he’s heard the deniers (such fools!), and sets Cory, and the rest of us, straight.

For your pleasure: previous strips dealing with the “fact” of Global Warming:

May 25, 2008: Same premise as today’s strip (and how long has Rana been in this class?) But I gotta give props to Jim for mentioning a classic Randy Newman song.

December 5, 2010: “Of course Global Warming can actually mean we get more snow. That doesn’t make sense to you?”

June 23, 2011: Principal Nate is on board with the whole global warming thing, to the point of inserting it into random conversations:

How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?

The whole thing with the Lisa tapes has lost whatever warmth and sentimentality it possessed, and has finally become creepy. How much time and energy did it take this dying woman to produce tapes for every occasion, every milestone in the lives of her surviving family? And what a frigging nag she is! Did she think that Les, a teacher, wouldn’t be “on top of” his daughter’s college application process? No matter: to Les, even Lisa’s postmortem micromanagement brings him sweet, sweet bliss.

Les Not Go There

That’s some pretty tortured perspective in today’s panel 1: is Bull walking on stilts? His knees are nearly on a plane with Les’ waist. Maybe that’s why he looks like he’s ducking to get through the door. To the literal-minded Bull, “no sweat” isn’t a mere figure of speech: he has to show us his armpit to prove that there is, in fact, no sweat. Cayla persists in emasculating Les (admittedly not that hard to do) by once again bringing up the Bull-ying that (she thinks) he endured in high school.

FW’s 40th anniversary celebration kicks off next week.