Tag Archives: Claude Barlow

by | December 17, 2022 · 10:30 pm

It’s Just The Wasted Years So Close Behind

today

And here it is, my last-ever Sunday FW strip. I’ve always had mixed feelings regarding the Sunday strips. Sometimes they’re annoyingly invasive and have nothing whatsoever to do with anything, other times they’re just weird and difficult to say much about, like with those horrible comic book covers with the always-wry reality bubbles. Honestly, they mostly just kind of suck, and I’d bet that every other SoSF host agrees, too. You see that second Sunday strip of your shift and it’s almost always so demoralizing. I’m trying to recall my favorite Act III Sunday strip of all-time, but I’m totally drawing a blank. That’s the kind of impact the Sunday strips make.

Ending on a down note…yup, that’s sounds about right. Maybe he’s setting up a big “Lost”-like ending here, where everyone gathers in a gauzily-lit non-denominational church to smile and dance around all stupidly. Or maybe everyone in FW was actually dead the whole time. Except for Lisa, who imagines the whole thing in the one moment before SHE dies, again!

Or maybe everyone will just walk around aimlessly for no reason, I dunno. I guess he had to cram Dinkle in there somehow, but none of this explains anything about Harley and the helmet, which were all the rage two weeks ago. When you get right down to it, this is what BatYarn is all about…boring hackery. It’s been over a decade since he last did an arc anyone might consider “good” or even merely “OK”. And obviously that isn’t changing now.

Great Moments In FW Arc Recap History

Jan. 10-23, 2011
Wally travels to Colorado to train with and take ownership of Buddy, his new companion dog.

All this Bingo talk reminded me of FW’s most beloved character, Buddy The Dog, who debuted in what was probably the “best” Act III arc of all time. By “best” I mean the most well-received, in general. At the time I was trying too hard, and I failed to recognize that by FW standards, it was a relatively upbeat, happy and hopeful little story, featuring an adorable dog AND a combat veteran. I should have known better. You can be “edgy” and all, but not all the time and definitely not when veterans and service dogs are involved, because there’s no way you won’t come across as anything more than a real dick. It was a lesson worth taking to heart, so thanks O.B. Dan, wherever you are.

Anyhow, Buddy was a good, good boy, and deserved WAY better than what BatHack had in store for him. Torturing him on Ferris wheels and at heavy metal concerts, a thousand “he’s my Buddy” gags, then seemingly written out of the strip entirely, Buddy merited a hell of a lot more than that. Meanwhile, the strip is crawling with cats. I guess that for BatYam, dogs are like women, and he has no idea how to write for them. Zing.

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by | February 4, 2022 · 10:30 pm

Split the Dimwits

Link to today’s strip.

I really hate those smiles that split the characters’ faces. It’s supposed to imply that these people are just enjoying the heck out of Dinkle’s, uh, witticisms. But to me, it means these are people with severe brain damage. Even Larry Fine, there in the middle. They would smile this way no matter what they were looking at. But don’t worry, I’m sure their handler will be along presently to herd them back on to the correct bus. Huh, would that be “on to” or “onto”?

Their presence does have one advantage: it kept this episode from being a vertical sideways strip. The only thing that could make a Dinkle strip even more irritating.

And of course, with two days of him farting out only a word or two, the rising tide can no longer be contained, and we get an entire strip of logorrhea. Funny, I thought people excreted out the other end, but I guess Harry’s unique that way.

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by | January 28, 2020 · 10:30 pm

Bury Dinkle, Please

Cultivating: to loosen or break up the soil about (growing plants). Nothing to do with burying. Or planting. Yes, this is basically all the reaction I had to today’s lame strip. Other than noticing the weirdly non-specific sign in the background. After specifically and obviously being the Ohio MEA for years it makes me wonder if either Batiuk thinks he somehow has a global audience and needs to be non-specific or maybe he’s mad at the OMEA or what. Maybe if the strip was even slightly more interesting I wouldn’t be wondering about this.
I just love Becky’s “my soul died twenty years ago” expression in the second panel. Like, this gag is supposed to be funny, right? So shouldn’t be smiling? If not, if it’s supposed to be lame, shouldn’t she be rolling or eyes or looking exasperated? I mean the guiding philosophy behind this strip has been “I don’t care anymore” but it really doesn’t need to be seeping into the actual facial expressions of the characters.

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by | June 8, 2018 · 10:00 pm

My Myth Take

Time and again, I promise myself that I will not allow Tom Batiuk to send me down the Google hole. Usually I’m compelled to search for context for a reference he’s made to some obscure (to me) silver age comic book. Sometimes I’ll search Grandpa Google for a particularly odd or stilted expression uttered by a character, to determine whether anyone IRL has said or would say it, before committing it to the Batiuktionary. Why, just last week I spent a good part of my morning querying why anyone would bring two rackets to play tennis. Though it pains me, I feel that it’s my duty to you, the reader, to at least try and comprehend the author’s intentions before proceeding to pee all over his life’s work.

I doubt I’m the only one completely flummoxed by today’s comic. This one sent me first to Google: “…with only hope to assuage him” is such a weirdly constructed phrase that it has to be a literary quotation, right? Not as far as I can tell. Next stop was Wikipedia, to read up on Pandora: not the music streaming and automated music recommendation internet radio service; that’s just part of the gag, see? And hey, props to Batiuk: I learned something. “Pandora’s Box” was actually a jar (not Jarre): sixteenth-century Erasmus of Rotterdam, when he translated the Greek legend of Pandora into Latin, translated pithos, meaning a large storage jar, into the Latin word pyxis, meaning “box”. When naughty Pandora opened that jar and unleashed evil into the world,

Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house, she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the lid of the jar.

The Wiki includes the image you see here of “Hermes carrying Pandora down from Mount Olympus,” which I suppose is where the “downhill” part comes in. Who knows? I’ve already spent too much time thinking about and composing a long-winded post which you probably won’t read before going straight to the comments, and I don’t blame you.

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by | June 7, 2018 · 10:30 pm

Waiting for the Electrician

Epicus Doomus
June 5, 2018 at 11:11 pm
The old “deadpan” style makes the awfulness of the gags slightly more palatable than the self-satisfied smirking does.

leftalignMy esteemed colleague Epicus makes a good point. These Claude Barlow gags have been running for decades, long enough for Dinkle to transition from tip! tip! tap! typewriter to word processor to flatscreen display. Whatever humor could be derived from the earliest strips had to do with Dinkle’s serious demeanor as he churned out his lousy musical puns, because Act I Dinkle was such a humorless prick. Contrast this with the kinder, gentler Dinkle of today’s strip: so pleased is he with his latest groaner that I’m surprised he’s not leaning back in his chair, envisioning himself marching around a tiny baseball diamond.

beckoningchasm
June 6, 2018 at 12:54 pm
It should be pointed out, re: [Wednesday’s] vintage strip, that Claude Barlow died about 70 years before the piano was invented.

It’s possible that someone did point that out to TB, and inspired this strip from March 2000:


And while we’re wasting our breath complaining about anachronisms in the Funkiverse: here’s a bonus strip in which we learn that Barlow toured with Franz Lizst (born 184 years after Barlow died) and appeared on a TV show even though TV didn’t exist!

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