Today’s panel 1: Yup, the whole Funky Winkerbean Act III worldview in a nutshell, thank ya very much.
Panel 2: Darin’s concept of how Social Security works is matched in sophistication and maturity by his understanding of marriage.
Beanie Wanker
January 25, 2013 at 7:22 am
…So what are these two idiots, 17 years old?
Impossible to tell here if Jess is being sarcastic or sincere… impossible even to tell what the hell she’s talking about.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Panel 1 sounds like every day for me.
Panel 2 is where he loses me.
Yes, Boy Lisa, we’re all going to grow old, senile, miserable and then die someday. We read FW: we’re well aware. What a ferociously awful bunch of claptrap. As predicted, “Fred had a stroke” is as far as the “Fred had a stroke” arc has managed to go so far: not a single plot development anywhere in sight but lots of sad, depressing, stupid chatter with a wry wisecrack to close things out for the week. If Batty Uck is a “writer” I’m an astronaut.
Who is this “Fred” person you all keep speaking of this week?
its official ,battack has lost his mind
I can’t read Jessica’s response in the last panel as anything but “I married an idiot.” Seriously, I’m trying to imagine that she’s flattering her dumb husband and I just can’t honestly read her remark in that fashion, not with that facial expression, and not with the specific words she uses.
But that can’t be the point, can it? I mean, that makes this strip an orphan in the middle of this story line. It doesn’t spring from anything that came before, and doubtless won’t have any effect on what comes afterward. It introduces a nonsequitur and then dismisses it as stupid.
But you know, if TB has the stereotypical dumb blonde chick suddenly become more intelligent than everyone else, it’d demonstrate more literary skill than he’s shown in the past, and it’s admittedly not very much.
I’d have to go with the “Jess calls her husband an idiot” idea, since The Husband has made the most fatuous statement I’ve heard in a while.
On the other hand, this is Funky Winkerbean, written and drawn by Tom Batiuk, so this may be the start of a major arc in which Jess campaigns to get The Husband on the board at The New Republic or The Nation or Car and Driver or some other such publication…eventually, he would become editor-in-chief…
…and when he suffers a brain aneurism and dies, Jess can have a week-long arc about how The Husband crushed her dreams of being a documentary film-maker. (Despite the fact that Les Moore, who wrote a book about John Darling’s murder, assisted in the film-making by making fatuous statements and smirking a lot.)
Full circle.
What have we learned this week? Annie hates Fred. Blondo hates Dipweed (and vice versa). Everyone hates everyone, and the best you can hope for is a wheelchair in some hellish old folks’ home where you can slowly rot to death .
The Social Security discussion? Fuck it. I don’t even want to deal with that level of stupidity tonight.
My retirement scenario involves a lot more Scotch than Jell-O. Also, I make my own damned pizza. When I write, I strive to do it honestly and with courage. The folks I know in Ohio not only rise to the occasion, they go above and beyond.
Batominc’s take on his home state and on life in general is craven. His writing is yellow with cowardice. That he’s been in print for over 40 years bespeaks the squalor that is the newspaper comics industry. How he can exist in the same Ohio as John Scalzi or in the same medium as Garry Trudeau is a mystery.
Bah! Feh! I despise this author, this strip, and all the characters therein.
From the gloomy state of FW, could we conclude Batiuk is encountering writer’s block and depression at the same time? What’s next? Summa has a burst appendix and tears her ACL, ruining her B-ball career? Kayla quits school to become a biker chick? Les…well, the possibilities are numerous.
Look on the bright side, Darryn (Daren? Darreyn?)- you might die from cancer long before you’re old enough for a nursing home. And you’re right, the government should pay Social Security to people while they’re working and paying into it. Makes about as much sense as the rest of Batiuk’s political opinions.
Maybe Jessica can go on SSDI for whatever disease is making her quiver like that in panel two.
The gummint DOES pay you to sit around and do nothing while you’re still young. It’s called “unemployment.” Mister Blondie McDownsized, MBA should know all about that.
BatDope wants da gummint to solve all your problems AND give you free goodies. (Sounds like the basis of 95% of O’Bummer’s campaign promises.)
Does this arc have a familiar structure? The “celebrated” Gay Prom arc was about gayfolk for 10 minutes, then they disappeared while watched everyone else talk about them.
Fred who? Doesn’t seem to matter at this point.
I ask you, what other newspaper comic strip is described by its readers with words such as “ferociously awful“, “craven“, and “fatuous“? Bravo, Tom Batiuk, and bravo, snarkers!
Darin: “Me Me me me…Mine me my mine.”
Jess: “….”
Darin: “My mine me me me ME.”
Jess: “You! You, you, you!”
********************************
Wow. Seriously, snarking on the strip becomes pointless and redundant when it gets this dark.
Fred has a stroke. Nobody spares even the tiniest kind thought for him, preferring instead to insult and mock the doctors.
Ann is upset. Nobody hugs or comforts her, preferring to stare off into space and sip coffee while she babbles a completely new, severely retconned account of her life that matches NO previous strips featuring her or Fred EVER.
Instead of picking up on this obvious sign of mental and emotional illness in his mother, instead of feeling shattered that his Dad might be dead tomorrow and his Mom claims to have never loved her family, Darin wanders off to the vendos to eat fatty snacks, sip more coffee, and whine to his wife that the government owes him money.
Jess, treated as an afterthought the entire arc, begins to babble about weird tangents that may or may not have to do with the entire Fairgood clan being mad as a sack of cats.
This…is grim, grim stuff.
@TFHackett: 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn comes to mind…
grim is an understatement John.
I applaud BatHack for his artwork today as he clearly paints the picture that Jess is pacing back and forth in p1 and p2. Heady stuff Tom. One small detail, why the hell is she pacing? Nervous for Fred’s health? Naah that can’t be it. Concerned that they’ve left Anne alone with her dark thoughts? Naah that would take compassion. Realizing she married a total dick and scheming a way to get out of this hellish nightmare? Check.
Guess this would be the attitude of real 35 year olds living above a pizzaria. Too bad they are married. Blondie could pop out some kids and get welfare, section 8, and food stamps, while sitting home and popping bon bons and getting as fat as the people who hang out downstairs.
That’s a “Zing” from Jessica at Durwood. Her “thought balloon” is saying something like…you dumbshit!
Durwood thinks the word “social” means like at a party. But as far as Westview is concerned I’m all in favor of his idea and then casting the oldies like Pa Winkerbean, Crankshaft and Fishstick off on an ice slab.
This place is so depressing…but after-all they have a lake that’s Erie and there’s a building that’s Terminal.
Withering Heights: You echoed my thoughts exactly. How this thing still manages to exist after decades of this hackneyed bullshit is as mysterious as the comic strip industry itself. It’s as if he started this “Fred has a stroke” arc then lost his train of thought halfway through…which seems to happen an awful lot regarding FW.
Perhaps it’s that Batiuk himself had a stroke, was unable to communicate, and this week’s strips were his cry for help, which quickly devolved into aphasia?
My retirement will involve jello….jello shots that is.
I think it would make more narrative sense if Jess and Darin’s marriage was the one that was a sham, not Mr. and Mrs. Fishstick.
If you guys are right and this is setting the stage for Frankie’s return, what are the odds he’ll be retconned (a la Bull) into a nice, compassionate guy who wanted to marry Lisa but realized he wasn’t good enough for her?
I feel like I need an emetic anyway, so why not.
Frankie will look something like this, though I say “something” since the Model Sheets had a bunch of characters that never appeared (Eddie, Matt), and those that did look slightly different (or extremely different). Not to say the model sheets aren’t horribly inconsistent themselves: Summer somehow looks even worse than she does in the actual strip, for instance.
Assuming Darren earned his MBA at Kent State, their standards must be really low.
Nah. The horrors of her bared navel and compressed face are nothing compared to the years of melting cheeks, crazed, fixed grins, and ill-conceived eyes.
Panel 1 – Um, isn’t eating and watching TV kind of what Darrin does all day anyway? I guess it’s the eating Jello part he has problems with.
Panel 2- Yes, because why squander your money then, when you can waste it now.
Panel 3 – Yeah, we all missed out on a lot Jess. We could have had a second Dennis Kucinich.
Yeah, the fact that the vaunted “MBA” would suggest something so stupid could be why he was “downsized” and has been unable to land a real job since. Every single one of his Act II characters sucked but Boy Lisa is definitely the most irritating of them all. The “Lisa is his birth mother” arc was one of the absolute worst ones this comic strip ever plopped forth.
Beckoning: If it ever happens (and given how unimaginative and lame FW is it’s a fifty-fifty shot at best), not only would Frankie be retconned into oblivion but I GUARANTEE he’d just happen to own a film company looking for a master of business administration AND a “documentary filmmaker” as well. Although a complicated plot like that might be asking way too much out of this strip.
But Frankie was already retconned in such a way as to exonerate Lisa for her teen pregnancy and to reassure Les that Lisa really only gave herself willingly to him. If it gets retconned all over, we lose these things, and there’s no way TB would do that to his favoritest couple in the whole world.
Btw, I love those model drawings of Frankie. Yes, he’s the guy who raped Lisa, so of course he looks angry and mean and slightly disheveled. That’s the way all rapists look, after all. Hey ladies! Just make sure to avoid any angry, sullen-looking guys with narrowed eyes and you’ll never have to worry about being sexually assaulted!
I was also reminded of a comment that I believe was made over at the Most Depressing FW threads, because the point is precisely correct in this case. Darin and Annie both are at the hospital because Fred has had a stroke and as his son and wife, respectively, that’s what’s expected of them. And once they’ve done that, that’s all the concern they need to dispense to Fred and his condition. They’ve done all they need to, so now go back to thinking about themselves and not even concern themselves with the fact that Fred may die or be permanently incapacitated or disabled, because they don’t have any emotional attachment to him whatsoever. They’re only his wife and son, after all.
I don’t think I’ve ever read something where the characters were… I was going to say emotionally tone-deaf, but they’re not. It’s more emotionally dead, or even better, emotionally stillborn. It’s not that they’re reacting oddly. It’s that there doesn’t seem to be any reaction at all, and there never is.
So celebrate, TB. You’ve achieved distinction! I’ve never read anything like this before!
Charles: I agree, I think any potential Frankie plot would be way, way out of Batso’s league. The “character we haven’t seen for a while” will be someone completely lame and obscure, like Khan or someone like that. Even when you try to dumb the predictions down to FW’s level, they’re STILL way more interesting than whatever he comes up with, every single time.
Less than a week to go before we get Chris Sims’ take on this month of FW! (See FW posts at Comics Alliance link.)
The Westview High School Computer will return!
Only, it’s revealed that it was actually the lone survivor of a secret government experiment in detecting and punishing people for being happy.
Since, as revealed, even people who -seemed- to be happy in Westview were actually just pretending, Darin’s mild remark on kind of, sort of enjoying his wife caused it to lurch into action like a tobacco addict after months of cold turkey.
Still not sated, it’ll track down and kill Crazy Harry, the day he dares to do his Nudie Comix Dance outdoors.
End of arc.
If you don’t mind me asking, TF, are you able to see strips ahead of time? I just noticed the banner has a shot of Darin from today’s comic. I think it’s been up before today, unless my mind is going.
TFH sez: Though King Features Syndicate made it a lot harder than it used to be, yes, there’s a little trick I use to peep the strips in advance.