Today’s strip wasn’t available for preview, so I stayed up till 11:30 central time pressing refresh waiting for this to drop.
And when it did drop…oh how it dropped…It dropped like a wet turd on a soggy carpet. Disgusting, toxic, waste contaminating an already blighted background.
The only joy I’m getting from this is the anticipation of all your comments on it. Attack! Like the Furies of old! Savaging those who defile honor, oath, and the natural bonds of kinship!
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Today’s strip was not available preview, because Comics Kingdom’s strip uploading person has been taking cues from Pete and Durwood and put their duties off until the very last minute.
These two have been procrastinating for decades now. Here’s a scene from back in high school where Durwood has shirked his duties at the school paper in order to have kissy time time with Jessica. Pete, Sophomoric Sightings‘ alleged writer (and now artist) tries to lollygag by claiming he forgot how to write until Chien lights a fire under his rear end.
Chester ought to look into hiring Chien. I’ll bet there would be fewer offsite coffeshop breaks if he did.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
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.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Yesterday’s discussion of exactly just how Rip Tide: Scuba Cop goes about scuba cop-ing understandably exhausted our tedious twosome, and they take a well-earned coffee break in today’s strip.
I suppose that now that they are living the life of 1950s-ish Batom Comics writers, Pete and Durwood no longer need to daydream about being 1950s-ish Batom Comics writers. Naturally, they have channeled most of their energy into finding new ways to procrastinate… though shuffling down to the struggling coffeeshop on the corner earns them no points for creativity.
Nevertheless, today’s strip is not without educational value. I, for one, learned that the key difference between Los Angeles and Northern Ohio is that no one has dreams or ambition in Northern Ohio.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
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.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
“In Claude Barlow’s day“…that’s a good one. Because as is the case with everyone and everything in the Funkiverse, ol’ Claude’s timeline can be freely altered to suit the gag. At the top of this post is what I believe is the first Claude Barlow strip. Barlow was merely a chapter in an ostensibly larger book that Dinkle was writing about “Famous Composers.” Though here and in subsequent strips, Barlow’s D.O.B./D.O.D. are 1543-1627, but in this strip from a few months ago, he’s a contemporary of Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). I’ll throw in too that Harry this week is authoring Volume 6 and in the aforementioned strip, he’s writing Volume 7. Making Barlow’s foray into electronic music (even though it had not yet been invented) as plausible as anything else that goes on around here.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
As is customary, Sunday’s strip was not available for preview. They’re always a surprise, but rarely a good surprise, something you’d actually enjoy reading. Here are some possibilities I’ve come up with; feel free to add your own guesses in the comments.
First, we might continue with Skyler and his g’rents, though that seems to be pretty played out. Now, never underestimate this cartoonist for stretching something past its sell-by date, but I can’t really see where he could go with this to “make a greater point,” so we’ve probably seen the last of Dullard & Co for the nonce.
Second possibility is we might re-visit the premise from a week or so ago, and pick up how Chester, the wealthy comics collector wants to get in touch with the comic book writer Peeved Radish.
Third, Funky and Les jogging. I mean, we haven’t seen that in pretty much forever! Not that I miss it or anything, but the cosmos feels misaligned.
Fourth, we might find out what happened to Becky’s mom. –ha ha, just kidding. That boat’s been scuttled for, what, five years now? No, the real fourth would be some sideways kids’ book that Ann found in her Dullard shrine, something that would inspire some wry remark about how things were better Back Then.
The fifth and final guess I’m going to add is that we’ll get something completely untied to anything from the last six months.
Anyway, we’ll all find out in a little less than a couple of hours. Wow!–it’s just like Christmas Eve, right? Only this is an eve where one measures not the delights that may come once morning breaks, but the various disappointments one is certain to encounter when one reaches the bottom of the stairs, beholds the menacing tree, and hopes that the bigger boxes are not addressed to oneself.
But, well, despite the paragraph above (sorry, folks, I’ve been a guest host for quite a long time, and it does leave a mark), there is one thing certain: no matter the subject, the characters, the dialogue or the story–it will be dull beyond bearing.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
