Tag: Darin

You Ring, We Bring

TFH here, tippin’ the ol’ SoSF chullo to Oddnoc for two weeks of killer guest posts! Tomorrow, Epicus Doomus steps in!

Bad Luck BatiukIf Batiuk had ever gone to the trouble of fleshing out the character of Funky’s dad, then maybe we could afford ourselves a chuckle at today’s strip. When he cropped up in Act III, Pa’s broken hip was just a link in a week-long chain of mishaps that befell Funky on his birthday. Since then, Dad (whom Batiuk hasn’t given a first name) is rolled out any time the author wishes to make Funky seem sympathetic: Funky has to schelp his father home to “celebrate” Christmas, or to the mall Food Court for a Father’s Day “lunch”. Dad exists merely as just one more cross for Funky to bear.

 

Moia Summer, Moia Problems

Today’s strip.

Get yer Funky Winkerbean tropes here! Let’s see how many I can list:

  • The world’s greatest videographer once again has no camera and no one documenting her big event (Roberta’s dad is a better videographer, in that he occasionally shoots some video).
  • A lame pun!
  • The falling leaves…
  • The artist suddenly forgets how to draw a character (Der-hey! He suddenly looks like Conan O’Brien in panel 1).
  • The smirking moai, usually an act of Les, is now Summer’s turf (panel 2, left).

This one’s not a trope (yet), but what has been going on with that banner? Its right side is suspended by—magic? a ginormous protrusion from Derwood’s occipital skull? writing?

Threat Level Lisa

Link to today’s strip

YouTube (registered trademark, BTW) better upgrade their servers, pronto, before Boy Lisa follows through on his “threat” and crashes them with the tens of hits that video would certainly generate. Some arch-villian Frankie turned out to be. Ditto for his doughy henchman White Lenny, who is a real wuss compared to Black Lenny, who at least knew how to lean menacingly. Derin would have probably gotten the same results by simply throwing “Lisa’s secret journal” at them. Those corners do hurt, you know.

OK, so who had “they make a video of Summer reading random pages from her dead mother’s thirty-something year old journal that just happened to be discovered exactly when it fit into the story which forces Frankie and Lenny to give up when they threaten to air it on YouTube” in the “how does this arc end?” pool? Once again TheMaster finds the least-interesting, most random, nonsensical and totally balls-out stupid way of “crafting” a story that took what seems like a hundred weeks to tell. No one can predict what he’ll do and quite frankly I don’t think he even knows until he pens it. This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender. Like every other FW story does. It’s amazing, uncanny and totally inexplicable.

Prayer For The Sneering

Link to today’s strip

I’m admittedly as beady-eyed and nit-picky as anyone here at SoSF, so maybe my opinion is somewhat skewed. That said, Lisa’s silly little “prayer” comes across as being rather selfish and short-sighted to me. After all, how did she know back then what would become of Frankie? Perhaps he would have changed his ways and become, oh I don’t know, an ordained minister or a first responder hero or a devoted family man or whatever. Typical Lisa…me me me, always self-absorbed in that annoyingly cloying way she had (and still has despite being dead). In any event, as Nelson Muntz might say, “Haw haw! Your prayer went unanswered!”.

So what did Frankie do, exactly, to merit this non-stop sneering and eyebrow-cocking? His attempt to “cash in” on one of Lisa’s many tragedies? Les did it a few times. Cayla was practically boinging off the walls when the movie check arrived. Summer even went as far as to suggest a 3-D version of “Lisa’s Story”. What makes that any different? I get the feeling that any “outsiders” who dare to enter Westview get chased to the city limits by a group of pitchfork-toting sneering fat guys wearing pizza shop smocks in an old-fashioned car as “Dueling Banjos” plays in the background. What a bunch of hostile pricks.

But forget all that nonsense, as none of it matters anyway. The big news today is that Montoni’s appears to be selling T-shirts! I simply MUST have one, although because I’m not a XXXXL I doubt they’d be carrying my size. If Batom doesn’t start hawking these on his site he’s both lazy and stupid, because he’s sitting on a gold mine with those.

I Can’t…Stop Bashing My Head Into My Desk

SoSFDavidO here, and I’m not kidding! The good news is, after seven or eight solid hits it kinda stops hurting and just feels numb.

Snarkers, Les in panel 2 is so utterly punchable with his “High Road” attitude in today’s strip after all but turning his dead wife’s cancer story into a damn *musical* that I’m just going to have to cover my eyes like a 12 year old girl watching a horror movie and focus on Lisa’s journal in Summer’s hand, which is growing at such an expodential rate that the good news is it will soon be the size of the room, crushing everyone inside within the next few days.