Independence Day went as well for me as can be expected. I woke up July 5th with the same number of fingers and toes I had on July 3rd, and even managed to keep both eyebrows! With the flags and the food and the explosions and the travelling across state lines to avoid taxes, I was patriotic to the max.
Batiuk’s done his share of flag waving over the years, with his cast carrying a healthy dose of veterans and military. Whether this springs from a genuine respect for US Armed Forces personnel, or is pandering is a debate for another day.
In May 2008, Batty uses Memorial Day as an excuse to remind his readers that YES he still hasn’t explained Wally’s abscence, and YES Wally is not here. But the bumper sticker dangles the bait that he is MIA rather than absolutely confirmed KIA. Dumb, pointless, bait.
Crooked, but I guess it was hard to put on a bumper sticker with one hand…
Becky has appeared on and off just about every month of Act III so far, but the last few months her appearances were all about the band. No kids, and no John.
We’ve reached the maximum busy season for farm work here in CBHville. Where we are trying to simultaneously finish planting beans, chop rye hay, spray weeds, apply fertilizer, care for cows, AND (most daunting of all) clean my parent’s basement for my sister’s family to arrive for Memorial Day.
Hey folks, billytheskink here… I’m back for at least one more post so I can tag the ever-loving dickens out of today’s strip.
Lest we think Harley only takes agency and free will away from women, we learn today that he did the same to DSH and to the various members of the Westview High School class of ’92-’88-’78-’72 reunion committee. Since TB is looking back, let’s step into our own WABAC machine and see what exactly happened in the these two events that Harley interfered in.
First off…
Great Moments In FW Arc Recap History
November 19-December 20, 2012 An extended Crazy Harry arc begins. Harry explains to Donna his love of old comic books. The next day he walks into Montoni’s to inform Funky that USPS is shutting down the Westview Post Office and he’s out of a job. Harry decides he must sell off his beloved library, spending a week sorting and packing his books and his comics before schlepping them off to John, who offers Crazy Harry a job at the Komix Korner.
Granted, I cannot say what she was thinking, but back during this story arc, Donna never talked about leaving town. She didn’t do much of anything, really, except try to come on to Crazy while he moped about and spout off about how his political beliefs had changed with age. Also, is Harley admitting here that he “nudged” long-time Komix Korner employee Kevin out of existence to clear the way for DSH to hire Crazy? There are consequences to this time-meddling, Batiuk!
Now for the star flashback of the day…
We’re looking at August 21, 1993, when Les and Lisa reconnected at one of the incessant high school class reunions.
In the original strip, Les hung the moon for Lisa… in today’s flashback, he hung the “Westview Reunion” banner next to the moon.
Should we assume the committee back in 1993 (holding what was then a canonically a 5-year reunion) was the same cabal Les was drafted into replacing Cindy on in 2015: Cindy, Mary Sue Sweetwater, Junebug, who I think is Cindy’s frizzy-haired minion Carrie, and abdicated valedictorian Barry Balderman? Eh, why not? Barry wasn’t at this reunion, though, he had a cool job.
I’ll give Harley/TB this, his intervention into giving that crew Lisa’s Seattle address makes some level of sense as Lisa wasn’t close with ANY of those committee members (even nerdy Barry) and Les didn’t have her address until after he broke his hand punching Bull at the reunion for reasons that still defy explanation. In a rare moment of common sense, Lisa actually chided a deserving Les for still being stuck in high school. This moment passed quickly, though. Lisa was practically apologizing to Les for being upset even before dawn and the next week Bull was practically apologizing to Les for getting punched. What a time to be alive that was…
So Harley owned the time travel helmet, then Donna stole it? So her whole main FW gimmick was predicated on theft? And, as TFH pointed out yesterday, “The Eliminator” was supposedly “eleven years old” at the time, thus couldn’t have even been in high school in the first place. But complaining about FW’s lack of continuity now would be like the crew of the “Edmund Fitzgerald” complaining that the ship was too damp. This arc is slowly shaping up to be the worst idea in a lengthy history of them. Any idiot could have thrown together a month’s worth of strips featuring Les and Funky sitting at Montoni’s and saying “hey, remember when…?”, but once again, BatYam just can’t resist the urge to out-clever himself.
Great Moments In FW Arc Recap History
February 17-23, 2014 Aging weekend anchorwoman Cindy Summers is put out to pasture (AKA Cleveland) by ABC News. Sunday: Holly and Funky worry about Cory.
In 2014, FW featured an arc where national network news anchor Cindy Summers was fired for being too old and disgusting to show on HD TV. No lawsuit, no nothing. Cindy grudgingly accepted her fate and left quietly, then complained to Funky about it. I believe this arc marked her Act III return, and that was how he chose to bring her back, by pointing out how she used to be hot, but wasn’t anymore. And she’s been a vapid, anxiety-ridden airhead ever since. I guess we’ll never find out what happened at Buddyblog, or with the Emmy nomination she snagged. Another FW character forever on the receiving end of Batiuk’s perpetual high school karmic payback.
TB goes full on meta in today’s strip… could this be a preview of what we’ll see over the next few weeks? Is everything else from here on going to be bizarrely (and blandly) self-referential? Are we in for even more unnecessary acknowledgements that these characters all of a sudden know they are in a comic strip? I suppose we will have to wait and see, though the wait won’t be too long now.
Meta references can certainly work, but are not inherently interesting or funny, nor are they funny in the context of this strip and story arc, or in the context of TB’s real life partial retirement for that matter. What is funny, however, is that Ruby joined Atomik Komix over 3 years ago to much fanfare, specifically to draw Wayback Wendy I might add, and she’s peacing out after drawing the cover of issue #4! And we all thought Phil Holt was a slow worker…
And that’s a wrap for my latest and possibly last time blogging here at Son Of Stuck Funky. No goodbyes here, but I do want to thank some folks. Thank you to TFH and Epicus for running this place for the past 12 and a half years and for trusting me as a guest writer here over the past 8 years. Thanks to my fellow guest writers for keeping this site reliably humming for years and much thanks to all of you SOSFers for coming back and reading day after day in spite of my silly wonderings and regular typos. I’ve written over 500 of these things, believe it or not! But for me these posts are mostly a glorified header, the best content generally comes from you all in the comments. I can only hope that you have enjoyed reading some of my words even 1/100th as much as I have enjoyed being a part of this community.
And so, I will close this post the same way I wrote my entire first week of posts…
Son of Stuck Funky 
