crappy anniversary gifts – Son of Stuck Funky

Test of Patience.

Ugh. What an anti-climax. It is the peak of Batikuian storytelling to hinge an entire week’s worth of strips on a non-existent conflict. We never had to be worried about how Donna would receive her bottle of salad dressing, because Crazy Harry always had a stock fancy restaurant in his back pocket. He didn’t mention this to Funky or Holly because he doesn’t want to ruin what’s left of his eccentric mystique by admitting he’s basically planning a cookie cutter anniversary with a bit of oil and vinegar pregaming.

Unless the entire salad dressing gift ceremony was some kind of morality test? And if Donna hadn’t sufficiently appreciated the bottle of Montoni’s finest Crazy would just have driven her to Toxic Taco.

Regardless, it’s a good thing that the salad dressing wasn’t actually a tiny bottle of champagne, because judging by the look on Donna’s face in panel two, she’s already plenty intoxicated.

It Really Is The Thought That Counts.

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Boy, that is one clunky sentence in panel one. Why didn’t Batiuk just have her read the card out loud? All so those filthy newspaper casuals that haven’t been devotedly reading all week aren’t lost.

At least Donna likes the gift. And to me this feels different than Minty loving her stupid engagement tiger. In the hands of a more trustworthy author, this could be decent character work. Everyone thought Crazy was crazy for buying his wife salad dressing, but he knew her better than anyone and knew that she’d like it.

It’s an anniversary present, not an engagement ring/tiger. It can be a sentimental pun costing less than 10 dollars, if that’s how the couple rolls. I mean, my parents never get each other anything for their anniversary. They just use it as an excuse to go out to eat. At a buffet. Because my dad doesn’t have the patience to sit at a restaurant that takes your order. So it’s a plateful of lo mein and imitation crabmeat rangoon. The peak of romance.

Gifts are funny things. The closer you are, the more strange and esoteric your presents to each other can become. I gave my aunt a rock for her birthday this year. It was her favorite present, because my aunt is bonkers for interesting looking rocks. We get my dad a bale of socks every Christmas, and every Christmas he grins unironically and goes, “Gooood. I can use these!” One year my mom taped a tiny rubber hand to a CD album of I Walk the Line because I’d asked for a fistful of cash. Inside the case was the actual money.

My mom specializes in weird, yet meaningful, presents. One year for Christmas, she got me a book on Romanian orphanages, and wrote a little note inside, “Now you can learn about your heritage.” I laughed hysterically for ten minutes. All because my family has an inside joke dating back to the 1992 Olympics, where my mom swore that one of the gymnasts looked like me, and improvised an entire story about how I’d been adopted from Romania after failing to show any athletic talent.

The best gifts come with an unspoken message. And the message is, “I know you.”

All of this to say, if Donna had any personality whatsoever, and we had some prior establishment of Donna and Harry’s marriage, this wouldn’t feel so hollow and bland and borderline insulting. As it is, Epicus put it very well in a comment on yesterday’s strip:

Every Act III marriage is exactly the same. It wasn’t always like that during Act II, but now they’re all identical. Blissfully unaware lummox husband, perpetually disappointed-yet-patient wife tolerating her moron’s idiocy with wry resignation. Cayla, Holly, Donna, Jessica, Harriet…the only one that doesn’t fit the pattern is Mason & Cindy, where the roles are sort of reversed.

The Four Loko of Comics.

Link To Today’s Strip

Poor Donna, look how excited she is in panel one. She reaches out with both hands to the bottle sitting on the weird, tiny, chest-high, table that floats in the featureless beige void. Some cheap sparkling wine. Something to take the edge off the fear gnawing at her subconscious that she’s trapped forever in this gradient colored nega-space. Locked into a bland box, where she slowly decays as the background fades, both the room and her person losing all color and detail. She’ll drink that bottle of cheap, carbonated booze and forget her horrifying existence for a while.

And then the reveal, and her face falls.

This must be payback for all the times she washed her hair with Crazy’s head cleaning solution.

But it’s okay. She can wash away her sorrows with rancidly effervescent salad dressing.

All Dressed Up, (With No Place to Hide.)

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Nice to know that the Sunday teal and salmon colors have been washed off the walls, and we’re back to horrific fleshcave known as weekday Montoni’s. I don’t know where you would buy a skin colored coffee maker, and I don’t want to know.

Did you find Sunday’s joke amusing? I sure hope so! Because today we get the same joke again, told to a different person. I can’t wait for tomorrow where Wally will enter and they can tell HIM all about Crazy Harry’s crazy salad dressing idea.

We don’t even know if the salad dressing is a bad gift, because we know almost nothing about Donna. For all we know she loves salad dressing, and will be thrilled by this present. She’s as much of a faceless cypher as any Funky Winkerbean background character at this point. The last time she was given any significant speaking role was a single week back in 2014, where she talked to Holly about how comic books ‘aren’t just for boys.’

I jumped into the archives to revisit that particular arc. Maybe it would give some insight into Donna’s personality. And WOW, there is an entire Pandora’s box of unfortunate implications to unpack here. Whatever Donna may seem on the outside, inside she is one messed up chick.

1.) Donna sees the world as men against women, with men as destructive mutants, and women as humanity.

3.) So Donna, as a girl liking video games, saw herself as ‘half-boy’ because of her interests, and identified with Hunter. Hunter was a character who straddled both worlds, half-human, half-mutant. In her analogy, half-woman, half-man.

4.) She saw video games as, ‘the boy’s turf’ and thus felt she needed to hide the female side of herself in order to participate. And saw participating in disguise as a form of battle against the fully mutant male.

5.) Now that she is a wife and mother, she expresses no nerdy interests and has become identical to every doudy Westview hausfrau.

None of this furthers the assertion that comic books are for girls too. They are still ‘boy’s turf’ and a girl must be part male if she wants to enter.

This just feels like a sad little girl’s internalized misogyny manifesting itself in unwarranted gender dysphoria.

A Dressing Down.

Link To Today’s Strip

Oh good. I was getting worried. We hadn’t seen Montoni’s in what feels like FOREVER and I was starting to wonder if Batiuk had forgotten about it, just like he forgot about Wally Jr or Crazy Harry’s children.

I said once that I thought Lisa’s Legacy was the Axis Mundi around which this entire universe turned, and while Dead St Lisa is certainly the spiritual heart, the physical center of the Funkyverse is this stupid little pizza joint. Monk’s Cafe in Seinfeld, or the Central Perk in Friends pale in comparison to this monolith.

As many of you know, Montoni’s is based off of the real restaurant Luigi’s located in Akron, Ohio. So, today’s strip instantly raises the question, does Luigi’s sell salad dressing. After a little digging using that internet Dinkle loathes so much, I found out that yes Luigi’s does offer bottled Italian salad dressing for sale in store. Seven-fifty will buy you this little number.

Really, looking at Luigi’s, they should be insulted by the Montoni’s comparison. Sure, they share a band box, and a counter with stools, but Luigi’s looks like a decent place, with a much more inviting and charming interior. By all the accounts I read, this place is almost always packed, and with a line waiting outside.

They do have weird idiosyncrasies, like not accepting credit cards, instead having an ATM in the back that doesn’t print out cash, but prints out a receipt to use up front. And the monstrosity below is their interpretation of a salad.

Weirdest of all, while scrolling through pictures of Luigi’s looking for salad dressing, I found what must be the inspiration for another old Montoni’s friend. See if you can spot it.

Do you see it yet?