Tag Archives: Brown Derby

by | May 30, 2019 · 10:30 pm

Let Us Now Praise Famous Ninnies

Link to today’s strip.

Wow, everyone is sure full of praise for themselves!  Even waiter Barrithuh Hatchetface is smirking to beat the band.   Too bad their praise is so misplaced.

Director:  We’ll sit in chairs and chat, and I’ll only ask you questions you can preen about.  Thus, later, I’ll be surprised by very basic career information about you.

Videographer:   I’ll shoot this chair-bound set with a hand-held camera!

Subject:  I threw away over seventy years of my life so I could have a snit-fit.

BuddyBlog:  What kind of crap is this?  Damn, it’s a good thing my dad is rich…I think.

Emmy awards committee person A:  Oh my God, this is so terrible.  I think we finally have a winner for the “Most Pathetic, Pitifully Bad Production – Documentary” award someone added as a joke.

Emmy awards committee person B:  You mean the “Please Just Stop, or At Least Try Next Time” award?  Won’t that make the ceremony longer?

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by | May 29, 2019 · 10:30 pm

It was already Thursday

But his Lordship’s artificial limb had still not been found.

Therefor, having directed the servants to fill the baths,

He seized the tongs,

And set out at once for the edge of the lake

Where the Throbblefooted Spectre still loitered in a distraught manner.

He presented it with a length of string

And passed on to the statue of Corrupted Endeavor

To await the arrival of autumn.

(As you might have gathered, today’s strip was not available for preview.  So please enjoy chapter one of Edward Gorey’s “The Object Lesson,” written from memory.)

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by | May 28, 2019 · 10:30 pm

Let’s all sing along!

Link to today’s strip.

So, the last two strips were entirely superfluous–weirdly superfluous, as if Batiuk did have some purpose–“Say, no one’s mentioned Lisa lately, how can I fix that?  I know, I’ll just push Monday’s strip to Wednesday, that gives me two whole strips to shoehorn her in.   Now, where’s my thinking crap?”

Now, credit where it’s due, I guess–Batiuk just straight out has Cindy outline her entire purpose, when he could have stretched this out for days.  (“Oh, you knew someone named Lisa, too?”)  Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’ll still stretch the whole premise out for days, but at least we get the preliminary bit right out, center stage.   So we’re at least somewhat on track.

Of course, I would not put it past him to run the following script in tomorrow’s episode–

Panel One:  Cliff:  So let me get this straight–

Panel Two:  Cliff:  You want to make a documentary about Butter Brinkel, the biggest screen comedian of his day,

Panel Three:  Cliff:  And how he went to prison for the murder of actress Valerie Pond, despite protesting his innocence?

Panel Four:  Cindy:  Well, let me put it another way–

And the next day, Cindy restates it all again.  Repetition, it’s what all the cool kids are doing, and it’s a surefire way to make it to that fiftieth!  Less than three years to go!

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by | May 26, 2019 · 10:30 pm

Dine ‘n’ Slapdash

Link to today’s strip.

Many thanks to Comic Book Harriet for her recent hosting of the Ongoing Mess.  As usual, her posts were more interesting than the strip before us.

As for the strip before us, a cursory glance at today’s strip left me really puzzled.  I thought, How in the heck could Crazy Harry be close to Butter Brinkel, someone who had probably died before he was born?  Is this like his Tarzan fixation, where his obsession with the character led to said character coloring his world?  Just because he owns all the DVDs?  And how could he afford to fly out to Los Angeles?

A more careful reading then revealed that this was Cliff Anger, and not Crazy Harry.   Frankly, this strip is too worthless to inspire careful readings, so I was a bit put off.

Then there’s the word “kemosabe.”  I’m of the generation who associates the term with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, being Tonto’s term for the Ranger.  A quick search says that it means something like “faithful companion,” which is how I always took it.  The fact that it’s an odd word, not likely to used in common parlance, leads me to believe we’re going to get some kind of awful wordplay down the road.  Oh…joy.

(Unless Batiuk is going to pick up on the Urban Legend that “kemosabe” means “horse’s ass,” but I don’t see how he can get Les to Los Angeles in time….)

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by | January 13, 2017 · 10:31 pm

And Spending Her Time So Foolishly Too, No Doubt

Link To Today’s Demoralizing Developments

Working that goddamned f*cking decoder ring in there was like dropping a cherry-shaped wad of maggots onto a garbage sundae, it’s the kind of sickening overkill BanTom does better than any other sub-mediocre comic strip author in the business. It’s finally official, after five days of absolutely painful dilly-dallying these two horrible old snores are engaged (as are Cindy and Mason…(shudder)) and a more pathetic spectacle I cannot recall.

“Waiting a lifetime”, yeah, sixty years is indeed nearly a “lifetime” but not necessarily in the Funkyverse, where middle-aged men creak, groan and collapse regularly and couples in their nineties eat solid foods and get frisky in restaurants. Still though, it seems kind of incredible that they just completely lost touch for sixty years. No phone calls, no letters, no emails, no Classmates or HotBot or Google searches, just nothing at all until two comic book-obsessed weirdos took it upon themselves to do everything for them.

In fact when you look at them that way you realize that there’s nothing “happy” about these two imbeciles getting back together, as they’re both awful, stupid, lazy people who literally wasted their entire lives for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer sloth. They’re only together now because of outside meddling, completely happenstance impulsive meddling, by the way. What kind of human being wouldn’t be utterly destroyed by the realization that the great lost love of your life who you feebly pined over for sixty freaking years was likewise just sitting there like an idiot wondering and waiting to hear from you while you sat there doing literally nothing? It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, yet in the Funkyverse it passes for lite, cute and breezy.

Hopefully this is the last of these two until Frankie crashes the big Starbuck Jones-themed double wedding ceremony and forces Marianne to attempt suicide again. You know that when he finally gets around to re-visiting this in August or whatever he’ll spend five full days on the characters talking about that f*cking decoder ring, just to refresh everyone’s decoder ring memory.

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by | January 12, 2017 · 10:32 pm

Oyb Hsit Omcic Pstri Wsblo

Link To Today’s Dismal Experience

I’ll take a stab at decoding Cliff’s “secret message” using nothing but my extensive knowledge of the Funkyverse and nothing more. OK, here goes nothing…

THIS STORY IS GARBAGE AUTHORED BY AN UNIMAGINATIVE AND POSSIBLY DELUSIONAL HACK WITH NO DESIRE TO ENTERTAIN ANYONE BUT HIMSELF AND NO ABILITY TO DO SO EVEN IF HE WANTED TO

That’s what I came up with. I’m estimating it’s at least 125% accurate, more or less. How many times will he go back to THIS well? It was a movie prop, Tom. The guy is ninety f*cking years old, that goddamned f*cking decoder ring isn’t his whole…oh, wait. My bad, I forgot who and what I’m dealing with here. Of course that f*cking stupid decoder ring is Cliff’s whole life, as he’s a woefully one-dimensional and contrived character with all the depth of a pizza box who was conceived by a lazy shameless hack who must have been absent when they covered “plausibility” in vocabulary class. It’s only natural that Cliff’s entire life centers around some moronic old toy. Like they say, write what you know.

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by | January 11, 2017 · 10:31 pm

With This Ring I Thee Dread

Link To Today’s Atrocity

And now my disgust, rage and nausea gives way to resigned acceptance and a sad admission of defeat, as my worst fears are seemingly about to be realized. Cliff is going to ask Vera to marry him and he’s going to use that goddamned f*cking old decoder ring to do it. Not that long ago Cliff was hawking the thing on Ebay, today it’s an enduring symbol of the eternal love he feels for the woman he apparently forgot about for sixty years. Perhaps digging it out from under the bed in his sordid hovel of an apartment jogged his memory or something.

I have to admit it, while I dreaded the possibility of an unholy union between these two I never saw the f*cking decoder ring angle coming. The bastard out-hacked me yet again. Just when you thought it’d be impossible for this trash heap of a story to become any more sickening and repugnant bam, the f*cking SJ decoder ring hits you right in the face. I suppose I should have expected this but for some reason I always underestimate his ability to plumb the depths.

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by | January 10, 2017 · 10:31 pm

No

Link To Today’s Thinly-Disguised Attempt To Run Out The Clock

My God this is just repellent. The “frisky old coots” trope, some faux-ribald dialog straight from the “Three’s Company” outtake reel and that disturbing close-up, it’s a master class in classic FW hackery. Fifty year old Funky can barely tie his shoes anymore but the ninety year old Cliff and his ninety year old girlfriend Vera are flitting all over Hollywood like two kids in love, both of them sharp as tacks and full of vitality. I guess taking a six decade sabbatical from everything keeps you fresh for the homestretch. It’s all about as believable as anything else that happens in this unbelievably dumb comic strip.

Morty’s advanced Alzheimer’s disease turns him from a near vegetable to a chain smoking, trombone-playing horndog. Bull’s declining motor skills are played for laughs as he trips and spills human remains all over himself. Marianne’s wildly impulsive suicide attempt is smirked away as being no big deal. And now an agoraphobic elderly man is suddenly a full-time actor and man-about-town, sweeping his old flame off her feet. If cancer was even half as zany as mental illnesses are “Lisa’s Story” would have been optioned into a Will Ferrell flick years ago.

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by | January 9, 2017 · 10:32 pm

The Old Derby Got It Bad ‘Cause It’s Brown

Link To Today’s Thing

Ugh, it’s BatNard at his worst…wallowing in stupid old pop culture nostalgia via two annoying characters absolutely no one gives half a rat’s ass about. He obviously thinks this trite pandering nonsense is “cute”, but actually it’s just nauseatingly stupid…at best. The romance of the century, featuring two imbeciles who wasted six decades of their lives on…well, we have no idea. Now the two fossilized lovebirds are off to the hottest Hollywood eatery of the 1950s, the legendary Brown Derby, where perhaps they’ll catch a glimpse of Bing Crosby or Desi Arnaz while they’re gumming their tapioca and urging their waitress to please turn up the heat. Maybe tomorrow they’ll cruise the Sunset Strip in Cliff’s Edsel and catch the early-bird before heading out to see the Tommy Dorsey Band. Or barring that perhaps they’ll explain why their undying love for one another took a sixty year hiatus until two irritating busybodies brought them back together, but given how that would actually fill in the narrative gap (canyon), I seriously doubt it.

And sorry about that title but I can only work with what he gives me.

 

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