Tuesday! Where we rush into a plot-line that we’ve literally already seen before. I’m not just just referring to when Darrin was born but in the 600 times his delivery was mentioned in the strip since. I mean, no wonder Darrin is having Deja-Vu about it, how many times has he had to sit through the story of his rush to the hosptial?
Odds that Fred is going to pop out of his medical drama to “help with the delivery” are looking pretty darned high from the looks of today’s strip.
Here we have Tom Batiuk doing one of the things he does best: dragging things out needlessly. There’s really no reason for those first two panels; the house and door we see aren’t anything remarkable enough that seeing them is necessary. It would be one thing if the house was unusual (scary, grandiose, or decorated in Starbuck Jones style), but that would require some imagination and a need to (for lack of a better term) amuse one’s readers.
Credit where it’s due, however: this arc seems to be one of the rare Funky Winkerbean stories in which the characters actually do something. Sure, it’s comic-book related, again, but at least Holly is taking positive steps, rather than follow the usual Westview path of quietly bemoaning one’s fate with a pun and a smirk.
“Wally says he loves you too…What’s that, Mom? Oh. Well, it’s…it’s an I.O.U., actually. But I folded it up and put it on my finger just like a ring! …Hmm? No, silly, we wouldn’t dream of having our wedding in a pizza parlor! We’re getting married in the gazebo!…No, that big white pavilion…in the park!…What? You’re breaking up…oh…Buddy. Buddy. His service dog, Buddy! Mom? What’s wrong? Mom, stop crying. Mom?”
“So she makes me come here [to Montoni’s] every day.” We know the feeling, Funkman: over the last three months, the majority of strips have been set in the pizzeria, a.k.a., the Chapel of Love, a.k.a. Center of the Funkiverse. Since today’s strip won’t be online until midnight, as a “treat” I’ve scanned the strip from my newspaper.
I looked through the rest of the funnies to see how other cartoonists use Photoshop for their Sunday strips. No doubt they all use it at least to color the panels, and a few more employ Photoshop to add small touches like background gradients. Doonesbury and Get Fuzzy are a little more judicious in their use of digital enhancement: used sparingly, it gives the panels a little extra depth. Tom Batiuk, or whoever colors his Sunday strips, pulls out all the stops, and the result is scenes that appear artificially (and dimly) stage-lit. Observe the two-tone highlighting on Funky’s big head. Where’s that blue light coming from? Have hours lapsed between the daytime first panel exterior shot and the interior shot in panel 2? Interestingly, over at Crankshaft, Chuck Ayers has a much lighter touch with the shading.
I thought “the kibosh” had been put on everything yesterday, but the stupidest story arc in FW history continues with today’s expositionfest.
It stands to reason that since Summer and Keisha arrived at KSU a month after classes began, that they’d be coming home a month after they’ve ended. Les regales the girls with a rehash of the last two months of strip “action” (oh, wait: he left out “Your half-brother Darin is going to be the birth father of his wife John Darling’s daughter Jessica’s daughter”).
I 
Son of Stuck Funky 
