Nice of Mason to let Les know that their film project has drawn an Oscar nom for its leading lady. And kinda nervy of Cayla to denigrate “Lisa’s Story: The Movie” in front of Les. And speaking of nomineeds, a note to our Comic Book Harriet: we already have our first candidate for Most Punchable Les face in panel 3.
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The waiter has fetched the…uh, red champagne, and the discussion turns to the rest of the Best Actress field. Which for some reason consists of only two other actresses, when IRL there are five Best Actress nominees. We should be grateful that Batiuk’s given the pair names which are actually plausible sounding, and not jokey or punny (before I wrote that, I had to say “Cordelia Rama” out loud, ten times fast, to be sure).
Is Mason being coy when he claims to “forget” who the other nominees are? Also, someone please come up with a tag we can use where, in the last panel, one character delivers the punchline, and another character chimes in with a gratuitous rejoinder (never mind, I just came up with a tag!) that adds nothing to the joke. In this case it’s Mason’s “Nope!” Unless he’s grown tired of Marianne’s mesh mask meanderings, and instead is excited about the upcoming horror flick from Jordan Peele.
That’s right, folks: Marianne Summers— sorry, Winters’ glamorous look doesn’t just happen! She requires a professional to style the dead grackle that sits atop her empty head. In fact, during the height of Covid, Marianne’s hair appointments were the only matter of sufficient urgency to get her to leave her Mom’s bungalow. Of course, this raises questions about where she was going to get her hair done, since the salons were all “shut down” too.
By way of some programming notes: as we head into spring, a few other notable occasions are coming up: least notably, April 11th marks the twelfth anniversary of the blog you are reading. That’s preceded by Tom Batiuk’s 75th birthday on March 14th, and on March 27th, Funky Winkerbean‘s 50th! Your friends here at SoSF will be planning…something, something fun I guess. Stay tuned and stay Funky. –TFH
Batty usually has no problem with dreaming up new premises, as the problem is typically everything that happens after that. But jeepers, this one is mighty thin, even by his lowly standards. It’s like he decided to do a “back to school” arc, then completely ran out of ideas immediately, then decided to forge ahead anyway. And in his defense, who would even know?
But anyhow, yeah, he’s already resorting to testicle gags, the lowest of all gag forms. At this rate we should be getting into the fart jokes by tomorrow at the latest. I mean what can you even say here? This isn’t merely a lifeless outing, it’s an exhumed corpse outing.
Oooo-fa. BatYam swings, BatYam misses. Just an awful, illogical, stupid gag, delivered poorly by the most detestable character in the history of fiction…what’s not to hate here? This week reads like he suddenly realized he’d better crank out a few more pandemic gags even though he had nothing prepared, which is obviously par for the FW course. But man oh man do these jokes suck wet limp tool, even by FW’s abysmally low standards.
From the BatBlog: “A question I get asked a lot, and I mean A LOT, is why I didn’t do a time-jump in my Crankshaft strip at the same time as Funky.”
Define “a lot”, as I refuse to believe that ANYONE has ever actually asked that question EVEN ONCE. If there’s someone out there that actually pondered this question (let alone asked it) please, by all means tell us about it in detail. We’ll even send you a prize of some kind. Not a good one, but nonetheless.
Son of Stuck Funky 