Tag Archives: Cindy

by | June 26, 2018 · 11:30 pm

Low ‘Rents

Like so much of Funky Winkerbean, today’s strip invites reasonable questions that have stupid and unsatisfying answers. Use the Q&A below to guide you as you take part in the frustrating experience that is reading today’s strip.

So when is Jessica moving back to Ohio?
I thought she had, but I was apparently wrong and she is still in California doing documentary work with Cindy. Durwood believes that she would not mind moving back to Ohio, so there’s that.

Wait… Jessica is doing documentary work for Cindy?
Well, she certainly was. If you didn’t have to blink back in November 2016 (the nerve of you!), you would have known this.

So Jessica is still working on Cindy’s Cliff Anger documentary 19 months after shooting the interview with Cliff and Vera?
Well… Cindy’s Cliff Anger documentary was nominated for an Emmy award in April 2017, so it is presumably complete. Either Jessica works so slowly that she has entered a time warp, an incomplete documentary was nominated for an Emmy award, or a certain writer forgot what he wrote 14 months back.

Why did Darin move back in with his parents in Westview instead of finding his own place in Cleveland, where he works?
Because he is a notorious freeloader who deserves to be nicknamed “Mooch” more than his old high school pal Eric Myers ever did. Recall his and Jessica’s previous residences in Act III, slumming with friends until getting kicked out (free), living with Les and Summer (free), and finally getting their first “real place” in the apartment above Montoni’s (technically not free, but Funky owned the unit and paid Durwood’s salary during this time).

Isn’t it hard on his senior-citizen mother to have him and Skyler living in the house on top of having to care for her stroke-crippled husband?
Of course it is, but Durwood is all about Durwood.

Does Darin not get along with his parents?
That seems to only be implied, but given that he has spent far more time beatifying his “bio mom” and “step dad” in Act III than spending any time at all (pleasant or otherwise) with the couple that loved and raised him from infancy, it is a very strong implication. Durwood is awful.

Why did Skyler move with Durwood, who is starting a time-intensive new job, into Ann and Fred’s cramped old house instead of staying with his mother, who is still living in a whole apartment that he was already comfortably living in?
Because Jessica is awful too.

Is Darin the worst?
No, Les is the worst… but Durwood is making a genuine effort at sinking to his depths.

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by | April 9, 2018 · 12:08 am

Femur? I barely know her…

Hey party people, billytheskink here wishing Son Of Stuck Funky a very happy 8th Birthday! Has it really been eight years? Feels like eighty reading this strip…

I was going to say I was here from the beginning, but apparently I wasn’t. Not in the comments section anyways. Nevertheless, I was a Stuck Funky regular who made my way over not too long after that first post and I’ve been here ever since. The community here has been one of my favorite things on the internet for each an every one of its eight years of existence. Big thanks to TFH, Epicus, and everyone who has taken on the duty of decency that is cutting this strip down to size.

Oh yeah, there’s today’s strip to look at. *Yawn*. Cindy is still insecure… and now she is blind, as a kissing Mason’s razor-sharp features have gouged out her eyeballs. Please add “enjoy it while it lasts” to the list of things no one has said about Funky Winkerbean in 25 years.

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by | November 15, 2017 · 10:30 pm

Life’s a Beach.

Link to today’s strip

Lisa’s Legacy Fund must really be running on empty if Jess is about to burst into tears over… (checking the actual auction prices,) seven hundred dollars. Though I suppose since there’s a couple days left, the Busty Beauties ‘Jupiter Moon’ cover by Neal Adams could go for more.

Oh Lisa, that look she’s giving Darrin isn’t exactly a doting mother. I’ve seen people give that look to their pets when they start hacking up something inedible on the rug. We know why Jess and Darrin are sitting in the back now, because they planned on shouting vapid observations at each other the entire auction.

Poor Phil. He can hardly keep his jaw from dropping to the floor like Jacob Marley’s ghost in ‘A Christmas Carol.’ All those hours and hours of scribbling out caricatures with increasingly arthritic hands for snot nosed Hollywood brats to cover the rent on a one room studio in LA, his entire penurious old age that could have been spent in comfort and accolades, all of it will haunt his ghost for eternity. His purgatory has just become Hell.

His only recourse is to pop over to Rex Morgan MD, where he can haunt Horrible Hank, who not only had a successful career after comic books that included marriage and children, but later DID get discovered again, DIDN’T immediately die, and now gets to cruise around comic conventions soaking up admiration and sweet sweet commission money. Haunt him Phil Holt, terrify him with your misshapen jowls and droopy uneven eyes! You’ve earned it.

Masone and Cindy sure care a lot about this auction; seeing as they couldn’t be bothered to get up off their beach chairs and drive a couple blocks down the street to go bid in person. How much time do they spend on the beach anyway? They’re always there! Did Masone lose their house after he blew the paychecks from his two movies on private jet rides to Westview, and now they’re living in a tent on Venice Beach?

And who wears sunglasses AND baseball caps while sunbathing?

Nice to see Cindy is enjoying her book though, “A Single Shade of Grey.” It’s what passes for kinky in Funkyverse.

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by | September 2, 2017 · 10:35 pm

Can the Living Marry the Dead?

Link to today’s strip.

Apologies first off–I don’t know how Fearless Leader embeds these sideways things into normalcy, so you’ll have to suffer with strained necks for the nonce.  Unless I reach beyond myself, and give it a try–

–hey, that worked!  I think!

And check out that cast.  Isaac The Robot (defaming Dr. Asimov’s memory), Moon Mile Meek (or whatever that bowel movement was named), the Space Cadets, the Black Ghost, the Amazing Mister Sp0nge and the (*Cough* undead) Absorbing Junior, and the latest ass-pull, the Blue Astra.  I’d love to see a follow-up strip showing what gifts they brought (“a gift certificate for $10 at Best Buy?  Who the hell–“) but follow-ups are definitely not this strip’s strong suit.

–Case in point.  So, the Starbuck Jones movie world premier has come and gone, and we are no wiser as to how it fell on the world.  Was it a hit?  Did people enjoy it?  Were the fanboys irate over how it changed canon?   Did it rescue the Valentine Theater from foreclosure, and did it spring the careers of Mason, Marianne, Cindy, Cliff, Vera, Pete and Dullard into the stratosphere?  Did it circle the drain on the way through the toilet?   Is Cable Movie Entertainment now on the level of Marvel Studios, or are they instead competing with The Asylum for most horrible crap ever?

As the Residents once sang on their album Not Available, these are “Never Known Questions.”   Because the only answer here is another question, “Who cares?”  And the answer to that is, “Not Tom Batiuk.”

My theory on this is actually quite simple, and obvious once you hear it.   The success or failure of the Starbuck Jones movie was something that–had nothing to do with Les Moore.

Think on that for a moment.  Has this strip ever featured a creative, successful idea that didn’t involve Les Moore?  I certainly can’t think of any.  For the most part, it’s been “I need help, oh thank you for helping, [blink] oh it’s the next day and everything worked.”  (I’m thinking of Pete Movement and his battles with the…sigh…Lord of the Late.)

The message of the strip has been pretty constant in Act III–Les Moore is the only person who can be allowed a creative success in the world.  Everyone else succeeds only because they betrayed their ideals and settled for hackery.   No one else has lost a wife…no one else wrote a best-selling book detailing how he suffered when losing his wife…no one else wrote about how he just damn kept on, after losing his wife…and found a woman willing to be doormat.  That last bit is a little troubling, but, you know…Les Moore was once married to a woman, who…died.

It makes me fear what comes next week.

 

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by | September 1, 2017 · 10:31 pm

Scenes from a Mirage

Link to today’s strip.

Now, I want an honest counting of hands, here.  How many of you thought we’d see something/anything of the Starbuck Jones movie during this, the arc in which the long gestating film finally had its premier?  Think of all the things riding on this film’s success–not just careers for Mason Jarre, Pete Robots, Darrin Undesireable and Cliff Anger, but the culmination of desire for a million fan-boys, the affirmation of belief for thousands of cellar-dwellars, and the salvation of the Valentine Theater (and a poorly-performing comic strip associated with same).   Surely such an expanse would provide proof of its benevolent effect.  Right?

Don’t be ashamed; after all, this was something that was fed to us for several years now as the event of the decade, as the measure by which this strip would ensure its place in the pantheon.

So, hands?  Well, there’s one.  Two.  Oh…oh…oh, dear.  That’s far too many hands than I thought I would see.

In my host duties here, I have tried to focus on the content of the strip and NOT on Tom Batiuk, the person.  I’ve never met, and don’t know Tom Batiuk; from all reports, he’s a genuinely nice guy, open and friendly, and I try to keep that foremost when I write here.  And to be honest, I wish him well.

But I’m going to violate that rule here.  Because Tom Batiuk cannot tell a story.

He must know this–aside from Les Moore, the characters he truly cares about (Starbuck Jones and The Amazing Mister Sponge) have never had a single panel dedicated to showcasing their, cough, awesomeness.  Sure, we’ve had lots and lots of covers, but nothing in the way of story.   Story being the key to why a character makes an impression.  Comic book cover?  Anyone who ever read a comic book ever knows that comic book covers are designed to lie you into buying them.  So they don’t count.

It’s much, much easier to ease back down off that plane, and shift the focus to a bunch of has-beens getting married.  Everyone likes marriages, right?  And that’s way more, like, focused than some movie thing that’ll be, like, forgotten in two years.  But marriage, man, that’s like eternal!  Until the next reboot.  But I’ve heard Les Moore has a new book!  Gotta be worth it all, man, gotta be worth it all.

And, just to be that guy,  I’ll be damned if I look it up, but I’m pretty sure Mason made this exact same joke some months back.

To paraphrase Charlie Brown, I weep for the newspaper comic-strip fans.

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by | August 30, 2017 · 10:28 pm

Minister of the Inferior

Link to today’s strip.

I have to admit, this one was just startling enough that I enjoyed it.  The strange situation, and the nonchalant way in which it is presented, made for a strip that was actually entertaining.  So, kudos to Tom Batiuk; I’d like to see more like today’s offering, and less of what he typically deposits here.

Of course, today’s strip doesn’t really bear any close looking, because the premise is kind of stupid.  I mean, I guess the local minister could see a flyer, “Wanted, People to Portray Movie Characters for Film Premier, Costume Provided” and stop darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there and think, “Say, that sounds like fun!  And I’ll bring my Bible along, just in case someone wants to get married!”  I mean, that sounds really, really contrived, even for this strip…though certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, given this strip’s history…

Okay, I’ve talked myself into it:  Tom Batiuk will take something cute like today’s strip and ruin it with tomorrow’s.

 

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by | August 29, 2017 · 10:31 pm

All the King’s Horsesh!t

Link to today’s strip.

I’d like to think that scream of terror in the last panel is someone snapping from the sheer disregard of continuity.  “This theater” was responsible for none of what you claim for it, Mason.  You, Pete and Cindy were the ones who brought Cliff out of his self-imposed hermitage.  Vera just happened to show up at the Silver Grille.  (I guess she had one of those decoder rings before she was engaged with one.)  And I know it galls you to admit it, but you met Cindy because of Les Moore.

Once again, Tom Batiuk seems to be making it up as he goes along, disregarding his own history while he expects his readers to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every minor character who appeared for a panel or two.   It’s amazing how those two contradictions don’t collide and annihilate the whole strip.

Speaking of a panel or two, it’s sure unfortunate that Cindy had to run off between panels one and two.  Because I don’t know who the Hell that’s supposed to be in the second panel; it looks very little like Cindy.  I mean, she’s not even wearing the same dress.  I guess, maybe Cindy tripped and looked foolish doing so, so the people in charge said, “Quick, we need a hot blonde who doesn’t look anything at all like she’s fifty years old!”

Either that, or the new artist is definitely getting Funkyfied–“Hey, whatever fills the panel, man.”   Gotta wonder if, when he told his fellow artists that he’d landed the Funky Winkerbean gig, there was this long, uncomfortable silence, followed by expressions of sympathy, pity, and many hands on the shoulder with the words, “We’re there for you, man,” and “You’ll get through this.”

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