Darin – Page 64 – Son of Stuck Funky

The Invisible Man Gets A Makeover

Once again, Tom Batiuk goes with “tell, don’t show” and graces us with a wall of text about a (fictional, in-universe) character we’ve never even seen and care nothing about. In a strip well-known for having stupid character names, The Amazing Mister Sponge is really up there in the top ten. Were I a super-villain (and I’m not saying I’m not), if one of my henchmen called out, “Hey boss, the Amazing Mister Sponge is after us!” why, I’d probably collapse from laughter and be unable to launch my scheme. So maybe he does have a super-power. I imagine it loses its effectiveness the second or third time, though, and starts being annoying. “Why can’t one of the good heroes try and stop me? This is embarrassing…”

It really makes me curious about how Mr. Batiuk decides on a storyline, what factors come to play that cause him to deliver…this. Don’t you love how the episode ends on a cliff-hanger, the idea being that we’re all on pins and needles to know what Pete’s scheme is? In reality, we know it’s going to be a crashing bore, except “crashing” implies something happening. If this is Tom Batiuk’s depiction of the pressures of being a cartoonist, there’s a much better solution than wasting space: retire. Sure, you can spin your wheels until the glorious 50th, but here’s a cold hard truth. No one is going to buy The Complete Funky Winkerbean: 2010-2015. No one.

I guess one thing is that Mr. Batiuk seems to have lost any enthusiasm for drawing. That Starbuck Jones face on the wall, for example, is a terrible drawing. If that’s an example of Pete’s artwork, no wonder we’ve never seen this Sponge-Head.

As for the “real” characters depicted here, Darin is a bland smiling blank–the kind of image you’d see if TV stations still used “test patterns.” And Pete has clearly been rejected from The Muppet Show for “looking too lifeless.”

Bores!

Link to today’s strip.

Well, those of you who thought we were going to get more of Les’ genius today are in for a real treat! Because we don’t.

Instead, we have two boring characters chattering in an episode where the drawing is utterly irrelevant. The only thing of note is how Pete’s happy(esque) expression immediately morphs into a weary mask when his own work is brought up. Darin must know how much Pete hates his own stuff, as he lights up a rather predatory grin when switching subjects.

I can’t imagine why Tom Batiuk thinks we care at all about The Amazing Mister Sponge. So far as I am aware, we’ve never been allowed a single peek at the character, so we know it has to be underwhelming. Instead, we’re given a scene of two minor, dull characters talking about him. Wow, talk about action-packed.

And another week of crashing boredom gets fully under way.

Take Your Kids to Work Day

While his wife confronts her father’s killer, Darin schleps Skyler down those rickety stairs to visit Holly and Funky. Naturally, the grandchild St. Lisa never knew is good at everything, which for a five-month old consists of sleeping and eating. Of course Cory (whose seems to be mentioned in every Sunday strip) was like that too as a baby; in fact, Funky opines that Cory was that way through his teens. While we know little about teenage Cory’s eating habits (surely he has nothing on Jeremy from Zits), we do know that he made quite a fuss, and in fact was a regular visitor to Principal Nate’s office:

April 2008:

Young Mr. Winkerbean would go from disrupting class to cheating on tests, vandalizing the school and stealing from a charity.

A very Happy Easter to you all! Epicus Doomus steps in
for a couple beginning tomorrow!

Moss Def

Batiuk would have us remember a character he killed off 23 years ago, yet he doesn’t trust us to recall Jessica’s name from one day to the next. “How goes the documentary, JESS?” “Who’s next on stage for the documentary, JESS?” And to the list of things about which Batiuk has no idea how they work, add documentaries. It’s one thing to have her use cheap home video equipment, but any halfway serious filmmaker would undertake a project, especially one as deeply personal as this, with some kind of outline. We’ve had a week of Jessica running around gathering unflattering anecdotes about her late father. Now she finds herself forced (“I didn’t want to have to do this…”) to finally get serious.

Grate Expectations

Today’s strip is just chock-full of dialogue, all of it loopy and stilted. At least someone uses a little tact when speaking about the late John Darling: his daughter. “A great self-appreciator” sounds much kinder that “egomaniacal jerk.” And it’s easier to accept that he used to “grate on people” versus “making their workplace a living hell.”

But…Darling’s murder “still a mystery”? Les wrote (and somehow published, despite losing the manuscript) a goddam book about it. Did he leave the last chapter out?