Are we being led to believe that the events of this week’s FW– John’s posting the plot synopsis to the web, Pete’s discovery of same, alerting the studio and identifying and tracking down the skunk-headed culprit – have all transpired in one day of strip time? “Hard to tell” indeed! John (like fellow comics nerd Pete Rudomanski) always, always is seen wearing the same shirt. But Crazy Harry’s still rockin’ that blue shortsleeve we saw him in on Monday…and we know it ain’t a postal uniform.
Tag: Becky
Stupid Tedious Enraging Meandering
Oh, no! It’s Dinkle.
For the love of God, montresor, will no one rid me of this troublesome Dinkle? At least Les Moore allows one to feel genuine, honest rage; this clod, who should be feeding the worms, has been in three Sunday strips dispensing his “wit” and his “wisdom” in forms that contain neither, and we do not need him. He is loathsomeness made without goal, the skeletal clutching hands of ennui reaching for the throats of those asleep, in order to make their sleep seem profound upon waking. He is the stench made by a skunk run over in the road; the animal and its purpose are gone, but the foul odor remains to scorch the senses of those driving nearby. “Lingering” is the best adjective to describe Dinkle.
In case you can’t tell, I really, really, really hate Dinkle. If there’s one character who really needs to be pushed out of the strip, it’s Dinkle. At this point, it’s way too late to make him a beloved reminder of the strip’s glory days; he should just get hit by a truck (ironically, one delivering band uniforms), have Becky sniff over his coffin, and never stain the ink of this strip again.
But he won’t. Tom Batiuk loves him some Dinkle. One of the truly inexplicable aspects of this strip. Why are all the horrible characters the most favored ones?
As for the episode itself, it says in six panels what should only take two. The punchline was blindingly obvious from the get-go; I’m a little bit surprised Batiuk didn’t go and make all the STEM initials stand for musical terms. How about “Sousa,” “Trombone,” “Elgar” and “Marching”? That took me about a minute, and most of that was to think of what the “E” could stand for. (I picked Elgar because of the “Pomp and Circumstance” things that usually play at graduation ceremonies.) I imagine it took Tom Batiuk about the same amount of time to think this episode up and draw it.
Good Thing Watch: My stint in the chair is over! Yay! Ha ha, charade you are! Starting tomorrow, you wanted the best and you got it! The hottest guest host in the land, Epicus Doomus! (Cue audience cheers and power chords.)
Wrappin’ Around
Well, now that we’ve enjoyed a week of nothing at all, it looks like we’re seeing some actual hazing! But no, just turns out to be a glimpse of something that happened to that Ol’ Punching Bag Himself, Wally Winkerbean, many years ago.
Odd, isn’t it, that Becky’s example has to be something that happened twenty or thirty-odd years ago, and she’s only just this year put a stop to it. I mean, we couldn’t have used someone slightly more contemporary, like Owen, to make Becky look a little less uncaring and incompetent. But one suspects that when Owen graduated, his model sheets were thrown into the fire so that Tom Batiuk wouldn’t be tempted to take the focus away from Dinkle and Les.
The last panel does, on the face of it, constitute a “punchline” and it would ordinarily be a pretty good one. But given the slant of this strip, my first thought was “This store is going to go out of business.” Odd again that the store seems to sell nothing but plastic wrap (and lottery tickets) again indicating that this prank has been going on so long local merchants are dependent on it for economic survival–but only now is Becky addressing it. The town will probably dry up and become abandoned, and the band camp will be relocated to Camp Crystal Lake (at least Jason would be easy to draw). An interesting view of Chesterton’s Fence. I guess I’m defending hazing! Funky Winkerbean has made me a terrible person now.
I guess also that this tosses a glitch into the Batiukian Theory that men are the only ones who can act; that the sole function of a woman is to supply cookies and milk to a comic-book reading session. Turns out women can utterly destroy things. Here’s to equality!
Stay On Target
Look, Mr. Batiuk, you were talking about hazing, not bullying. They are two entirely different things. Hazing is something that a person submits to because they want to belong to a group. Bullying is something imposed on a person, because the bully feels hostile toward that person.
You can’t switch gears in the middle of, oh Hell, why did I type that? Of course he can, and he does, all the time. Nothing ever gets resolved; it just gets dropped. This strip is the epitome of uncaring laziness.
Apparently, Tom Batiuk thinks that mentioning something is the same thing as discussing it, and that’s all that needs to be done for a problem to be solved. The problem, as I’ve repeatedly said, is that mentioning means nothing. You can mention anything. All you’re doing is throwing out a name.
Watch this: world hunger.
There. I have just solved the problem of world hunger. You’re welcome.
If nothing else, this week has been a good long peek into the creative process for this strip. Fitting that it ends with “bullying,” which as we learned yesterday, we’ve replaced with “bullsh!tting.” See? They’ve got some of the same letters, which makes this hilarious!
We’ve Replaced Humor with Humidor
(Wikipedia: A humidor is any kind of box or room with constant humidity that is used to store cigars, cigarettes, or pipe tobacco. Just so you folks don’t have to look it up.)
This is definitely a “What?” strip. As in, “What kind of thought process arrives at this end?”
Is this in reference to yesterday’s strip, about freshmen in the lake? Now they use bottles for water, instead of a lake? If that’s the case, I can’t even. I mean, the lake thing was just last night, and now everything’s awesome?
Has The Odious Dinkle’s blathering on about himself actually solved the problem of band camp hazing?
Or is this another example of hazing–these girls are forced to drink bottles of water, because hazing? If that’s the case, why isn’t Becky stopping it, if she’s so goldurn concerned?
Sigh. I know the answer. Tom Batiuk saw the word “hydrating” and noticed that both it and “hazing” begin with an “h” and have a couple of vowels in common. But this isn’t a pun, or even amusing in any way. It’s not even a malapropism.
If Crankshaft thought of this, even he would not say it.
Son of Stuck Funky 